Wolf Season

by Helen Benedict

  “Hi, Mrs. Drummond.” Tariq has popped out of nowhere in his usual gopherish way. “Is Juney home?”

  “Shh. Don’t talk.” Rin has her hand in a wolf’s mouth. Not the time to deal with a half-pint Hajji and all he might trigger in her.

  He falls silent. And while he stands there, quiet as grass, Rin feels his presence soothe Silver, just as Juney’s does. Silver was tense and shivering a moment ago, probably afraid Rin would hurt her, but under his gaze she lets out a little whimpery-whine, exactly the sound she used to make as a pup, and releases her muscles. Gray ambles over to the fence to let Tariq scratch him.

  Rin finishes the exam, rubs some ointment onto Silver’s gums, whispers, “Good girl,” and wipes the saliva off on her pants. Keeping an eye on Gray, she slides through the double door of the fence and locks it behind her.

  “She’s sick, isn’t she?” Tariq says after Gray has trotted off to sniff Silver. “Do you think she’s got worms? She looks so skinny.”

  “What do you know about worms?”

  “I read about them in a book.”

  “My wolves don’t get worms. It does look like she has gum disease, though. If she were human, she’d be fitted with dentures. I need to give her a softer diet.”

  “I’ve been reading a lot about wolves. I read that famous book White Fang.”

  Rin looks down at him. His earnest little face. “What did you think?”

  “I think it’s stupid! He makes it sound like wolves are all savage and cruel.”

  “They are. That why I like ’em.”

  “They are not! They are loyal and wise and beautiful!”

  Rin raises an eyebrow at that. “Why are you reading so much about wolves?” She packs up the medical kit and moves toward the house, trying not to let Tariq see her anxiety. Betty moves up beside her leg. Gives her knee another lick.

  Tariq hurries to catch up. “I’m doing a school project on them.”

  Rin looks at him sharply. “What kind of project?” Last thing she needs is Tariq blabbing to his flibbertigibbet teachers about her wolves—that would really bring the cops here in a hurry.

  “It’s for biology. We’re doing animal behavior. Don’t worry, Mrs. Drummond. I won’t say anything about your wolves. Or you or Juney, either. I know you like to be left alone.”

  Rin reaches out and pats his back, although she is not normally given to touching any humans aside from Juney. “Someday I’ll teach you how to doctor wolves. Would you like that?”

  “Yes please!” He looks up her, his face suffused with pleasure.

  “Are you feeling any better?” she asks then. “I see your stitches are out at last.”

  He drops his eyes. “Yeah.”

  “How did it happen?”

  “Just some kid.”

  “Was it bad?”

  “Doesn’t matter. I’m fine now.”

  Rin figures Tariq must get pulled into quite a few fights. He has to be a target with his one leg and his name. He has Outsider stamped all over him, just like Juney. He is quieter than he used to be, though—has been ever since he showed up with that ugly gash across the front of his scalp, bruises like a black bandanna over his brow. There is a new solemnity about him, too, an aura of melancholy he didn’t have before. Juney senses it, as well. On the occasions he sits in long hushes, drawn into himself, she tries to offer comfort, either with words or by running her hand over his face, as if searching for a smile. It touches Rin that her daughter so wants the people she loves to be happy.

  Jay would have liked this friendship, perhaps more than she does. She can just see him in her living room, a benign ghost, maybe sprawled in an armchair, maybe lounging against a windowsill, smiling at the children while they sit chatting on the floor. She wonders if he would find their friendship as ironic as she does. Their daughter, the only kid in town born of two OIF parents, and her best buddy is Iraqi. God’s joke? Or perhaps she should say Allah’s.

  “I bet you can stand up for yourself though, huh?” she says to Tariq now. She is trying to be kind, but he doesn’t answer, so she leaves the subject alone. She does ask something else, though, something she has been wondering about for a while, even though most of her doesn’t want to know.

  “Juney tells me your dad was a soldier. That true?” She hopes he’s not going to say his father was one of Saddam’s goons.

  “Yes,” he replies easily. “He worked for the U.S. Army. He was an interpreter.”

  Rin stops and looks at him. The son of a terp! That changes everything. If, that is, his dad was one of the terps the army could trust and not a two-timing slimebag of a spy.

  “And your mom? What’s she do?”

  “She’s a pediatrician. She used to work at the VA clinic till the storm wrecked it.” And then he runs off because the dogs have started up the welcoming barks that mean Juney is home.

  Rin stares after him, her veins filling with sand.

  Once Tariq has helped Juney take off her backpack in the kitchen and the two of them have finished the snack of apples and milk Rin gives them without a word, they snuggle beside each other on the woolly brown rug in the living room to start their homework. The walls of the room are paneled in dark, rough-hewn wood, as is the ceiling, so it always reminds Tariq of the forts he and Flanner used to build out of branches and bark in the woods; cozy triangular spaces filled with green light and the musky scents of earth and birch. He loved those forts, just as he loves this room, so different from the minimal decor of his mother’s house. The jury-rigged lamps beaming from unexpected corners. The blankets and sweaters dangling fuzzily from hooks. The snoring dogs, buzzing cats, hair-matted armchairs, and mutt-brown couch. The books lining the shelves on either side of the fieldstone fireplace, promising long evenings of stories and dreams. The room feels like the safest, most settled place he has ever been; a place of history and family, of everything he and his mother have lost.

  “What’ve you got for homework?” Juney asks, opening a book and running her fingers across it. “Mine’s braille practice.”

  “Math.” He watches her hands a moment, the nimble way her fingertips spider over the page. “Can I try reading that?”

  “You mean my book?”

  “Yes. Show me how.” He leans forward and puts his right hand in hers.

  “Okay. But make your hand floppy.” She shakes his wrist. “It won’t work if you’re stiff like that. Good. Now here.” Taking his forefinger, she feels the page with her other hand, then guides his finger to a spot. “Feel that?”

  He concentrates. “That’s one dot, right?”

  “Yes. That’s an a.” She moves his finger over. “How many is this one?”

  He closes his eyes. “Three?”

  “Right. And what shape are they making?”

  “Uh.” His finger seems big and unwieldy now, as clumsy as the elbow he tried to see out of. “A triangle?”

  “Don’t press so hard. Try again.”

  He circles his finger slightly. “Oh, I get it. They’re the shape of an l.”

  “Good! You just read the letter h.”

  “H? Why isn’t it l?”

  “Just isn’t.” She lifts her head, listening. “It’s raining.”

  Tariq listens, too, but he can’t hear it yet. “I hope it stops or I’m going to get soaked walking home.”

  Juney is still listening, although not to the rain anymore. “You sound sad again,” she says after a time. “Are you?”

  Withdrawing his hand, he looks down at the book on his lap, picking at its binding. He is sad, but he doesn’t want to talk about it, even to Juney. He doesn’t want to give shape to his fear that Flanner will tell people about the wolves, to the violent way Flanner smashed him with that stick and yanked off his prosthetic leg, or to how that leg hasn’t felt the same since. It has never bothered him before and he’s had it for four years, but it drags on him now; a hard, unfleshed thing clinging to his body. Instead of feeling like a mere extension of himself the way it used t
o, like a glove on a hand or a sock on a foot, it feels like a parasite, a weight that persists in reminding him that he is neither whole nor like other people . . . that, like Juney, he is damaged.

  There is more he cannot speak aloud, too. The way, when Flanner pulled off his leg and left him helpless on the ground, it spun him back to the years he had spent on crutches, always precarious, vulnerable to being kicked over, knocked down; to being made to look like a scrabbling, mutilated bug. The day his leg was fitted when he was six years old and new to America, he stood up and simply ran. The very first time. He ran up and down the clinic, ran and ran, laughing and laughing. It was as if he had sprouted wings—as if he were flying just like the wolves when they jumped for the apples. It was the most wonderful day of his life.

  Flanner took that wonderful day away. And now, at school, he is trying to make everything even worse by turning the other boys against Tariq, calling him an enemy and a traitor, only in much uglier words. And Tariq can’t even hate him for it because Flanner’s dad just died.

  “I don’t like fifth grade,” is all Tariq says to Juney. “Everybody’s turned mean.”

  She rocks back and forth. “Yes, Mommy told me that happens. That’s why she wants to put me in a special school for the blind next year. But I don’t want to be in a special school. It’ll make people think I’m different.”

  Tariq unfastens his newly onerous prosthesis and puts it aside, almost angry now. “But you are different. Me, too. And it sucks.”

  She stops rocking. “I don’t think so.” Her voice is grave.

  But Tariq does. How many times, even before Flanner attacked him, has he wished he were like the other boys at school: American, whole-bodied, tough? How many times has he wanted to tell his mother to stop talking about war and death and staying strong, about being a refugee and being Iraqi and being Muslim and being and being and being . . . How many times has he squeezed his eyes tight and hoped that when he opened them, he would find himself like everyone else?

  Rin strides into the room just then, looking upset. She walks about, straightening a pile of dusty books here, tucking away a bunch of cat toys there, not really paying attention to what she is doing. She is just fiddling, Tariq can tell, and she keeps giving him the strangest looks.

  She comes and stands over them.

  “Mommy,” Juney says, her voice a warning, “we’re doing our homework.”

  “You two warm enough? Want me to light a fire?” Rin’s voice sounds strained. “There’s a chill in the air tonight.”

  “Ooh, yes! Our first fire of fall!” Juney loves fires, their caramel scent, their pops and fizzes, the warm pulses of heat they send along her limbs. But Tariq feels otherwise. Fires make him uneasy, stir something sinister at the periphery of his memory. He and his mother never light one at home.

  Rin bustles about, snapping twigs and crumpling newspaper into balls. “Noisy!” Juney cries, clapping her hands over her ears. Certain sounds are unbearable to her—crackling paper like this, the squeak of a sponge in a glass—whereas other, more obviously disturbing sounds, such as the shrieking of brakes or wailing of sirens, hardly bother her at all.

  “Sorry, bean, I’ll be done in a minute.” Rin lays the kindling, then the logs: two fat ones across, two slim ones upright, a little breathing space in between. She strikes a match and Tariq flinches. But when the logs catch, flaring neon orange, turquoise, and tangerine, he gazes into the fire, so mesmerized by the pictures forming in the flames he forgets his fears. A tiny soldier runs up a hill, bursts into sparks and flies away. A tree grows and spreads, then splits into an explosion of yellow and red. A woman holds up a baby, twists, convulses, and collapses into a glowing eye. . . .

  “Tell me what it looks like.” Juney edges over to him. “Tell me what you see.”

  He leans closer to her. “It looks like a little world in a sun.” He stares intently into the fire, searching for images that aren’t as bleak as the ones he saw just now. “There are trees and houses and soldiers and families. People are born and they dance and they disappear. I see a deer. And a lion and . . . a tiny elephant.” He glances at Juney. “I see a wolf dancing with a girl just like you.” She smiles. “Now they’re twirling and turning and spinning and flying into tiny sparkly dots, floating up and up and up. . . . Gone.”

  She raises her face, the flames reflecting on her pale throat and the pink tip of her chin. “The fire feels white.” She is swaying again now, and Tariq sways with her. “The fire feels white like the sun feels green.” And then she adds, “It feels a little scary, too.”

  They sway gently together, the heat of the flames and smoke pulling them each into a heady, vertiginous dream.

  Rin watches the children for a long time, her tongue lying like a stone in her mouth. The pair of them are rocking in front of the fire as if they’ve been bewitched, Tariq with his prosthesis cast aside and the leg of his pants rolled up, Juney with a dreamy smile on her lips. Neither with the faintest idea of how dangerous Rin is.

  “Tariq?” she finally makes herself say. “It’s getting late and it’s raining.” She swallows, her mouth as sticky as paste. “Your mother, is she . . .” She swallows again. “She must be worried about you.”

  He gazes up at her with no comprehension whatsoever, still swaying along with Juney. The kids are downright stoned.

  “Won’t your mom be worried that you’re out this late?” Rin repeats.

  “My mom?” he says as if he’s never heard the word. “Oh. What time is it?”

  “Nearly seven.”

  That wakes him up. “Seven? Whoa. Yeah, I better go.” He reaches for his leg, which is lying beside him in its sock and sneaker, and pulls it on, rolling his pants over it. He has taken to leaving that leg lying around a lot these days, along with the silicone lining he wears under it, which looks like a stocking made of discarded skin. Rin can’t get used to it. It gives her a shock every time, stumbling across a dismembered limb and a puddle of skin in the middle of her living room floor.

  She walks to the window, raises the shade and peers out, trying to collect herself. Interesting phrase that, collect herself. Little pieces of her lying about like dropped thumbtacks.

  It’s not raining; it’s pouring.

  “Listen, sweetheart . . .” (Did she just call him sweetheart? How mealy-mouthed is the voice of guilt.) “You can’t walk home in this.” She turns back to him and her spaced-out daughter, who is still rocking and smiling at the fire. “Can someone come pick you up? Your uncle, perhaps?”

  “Oh no, Mrs. Drummond, I can’t bother Louis now. His friend just got killed in a war.”

  Rin is knocked silent by that.

  “I’ll call my mom to come get me.” And before she knows what’s happening, he pulls a cell phone out of his pocket.

  “Wait, don’t.” She can’t have that woman here. Seeing her, recognizing her. “I’ll drive you.”

  Juney returns to earth at that. “You’ll drive?” Her mother never drives into town after dark. Never.

  Rin clears the paste from her throat. “Yes.”

  Juney stands up. “Then I’m coming, too.”

  “Fine.” Rin will need her, as Juney knows. Driving at night is bad enough, as that’s when the hallucinations hit thick and fast, but driving to this particular house on top of it . . .

  “Come on,” Rin says, trying not to sound as stun-gunned as she feels. “Pack up your homework. Let’s go.”

  Venturing out of her compound this late calls for her invisible wolves again, along with Betty in the backseat. “Just don’t pet her,” Rin reminds Tariq as he gets in beside the dog. “She isn’t made for petting.”

  Juney wants to sit back there with them, of course, but knowing her mother needs her, she stays up front, her hand on Rin’s knee. Still, by the time Rin has bounced her chunky old Buick over all the potholes to the end of her driveway, her heart is already lurching. Sure enough, hard as she strives against it, up it begins again. That little girl sitting on
top of her PRIVATE KEEP OUT I MEAN IT sign, blood running from her eyes. Rin starts and looks away, sweat springing out of her every pore, drenching her lower back. . . . Jay, where are you?

  Betty whimpers. The invisible wolves prick their ears. Juney strokes her knee, the acrid smell of her mother’s alarm filling the car. “It’s okay, Mommy, it’s okay.”

  Rin turns right to head down the hill to Huntsville. A donkey carcass is lying beside the road, its body bloated. She scans for trip wires, shakes herself, drives on. Something white looms up out of the rain and she swerves, swearing.

  Betty barks. A short, sharp bark. Wake up, Drummond! Get back to reality.

  “Mommy?”

  “Sorry, sorry. Hey, talk, will you? Just talk.”

  “Do you know where I live, Mrs. Drummond?” Tariq asks, leaning forward to poke his head between the front seats.

  “Put your seat belt on. No, I don’t.”

  “We’re at Two Ninety-Five Softpatch Road. It’s the green house on the corner of Babcock, the one with a wrecked-up roof.”

  “Storm damage?” Rin’s voice sounds as though somebody’s strangling her.

  “Yes. Louis fixed most of it, but it still looks pretty crumpled.”

  Then she has to ask. “And your mom? Didn’t you say she worked in the VA clinic? The one the hurricane destroyed? Is she . . . is she all right?” Wincing, wincing, her innards tangling like fighting snakes. Knuckles white on the steering wheel.

  “Yes, she’s fine. She wasn’t for a long time, though.”

  Why, of all the doctors in the area, did his mother have to be this one? “So what—” Jay, are you here yet? Can you help me out? “What happened to her, exactly?”

  “She nearly drowned. She was in the hospital for ages and ages.” He turns quiet a moment. “She was the only one that happened to.”

  Rin’s skull is shrinking. “Sorry to hear that.”

  “Mommy? You don’t sound so good. You want to pull over a moment? The car feels kind of swingy.”