Wolf Season

by Helen Benedict

  When he steps back into her room, closing the door behind him for reasons he would rather not examine, he is startled to find her in nothing but a pair of pink satin underpants as narrow as a ribbon and a matching bra, its shiny cups barely covering her nipples. He remembers something Todd said to him once when they were out drinking. “Beth is a dancer, you know that, right? Flexible as hell. You ever fucked a dancer, Martin?”

  “Um, here.” Louis puts the water on her bedside table, untangles the sheet at the foot of her bed, and pulls it up to her chin, careful not to touch her. “Go to sleep now.”

  “Too hot.” She kicks it back off. “Sit.”

  He does, but only on the edge of the bed. She fixes her gaze on him. “You’ve listened to me all night about Todd,” she says then. “It’s your turn now. Tell me . . . tell me about Melody.”

  Louis recoils. “Another time.” He moves to stand up.

  “Not fair!” She grabs his arm and pulls him back down. “You can’t do all the knowing about me and not let me know about you.” She gives him a long stare. “Were you happy together?”

  He looks over at the window.

  “Well?”

  “Beth, I can’t . . .”

  “You have to. Start with how you met.” She nudges his thigh with her foot, giving him a flash of her scantily clad crotch. “Where did you find her?”

  He forces his eyes away. “College. In Albany. We married young.”

  “And?”

  He lets out a long breath. “And then OIF started, so I had to drop my classes and go. I deployed right after our wedding.”

  “Just like me and Todd.” Her voice trembles. “Go on. Please.”

  Louis looks down at his missing fingers. “Well, she got her degree in psychology. Joined a practice. And . . . and I came back . . . different. . . . You know.”

  “How different? Like Todd different?”

  He inhales. “No. Well, yes. Kind of. It got bad pretty quick.”

  “What do you mean, ‘bad’?” Beth’s voice is a whimper now. “You never hurt her, did you?”

  “No. But I . . . I didn’t help. And after . . . I felt it was my fault, just like you do about Todd.”

  “You did? Why?”

  Louis rubs his eyes. “She was asking me to save her and I . . .” He rubs his eyes harder, pressing the eyeballs in and in.

  He was only just home from Iraq when it happened. He had been in Mosul with the First Armored Division, scouting out weapon caches, unearthing insurgent strongholds, interrogating suspects with a violence he cannot face even now. It was his toughest tour yet. Three of his buddies killed in his first week, his fingers blown off, more bodies in his head than in all his previous deployments combined. He had come home as jacked up as a junkie, ghost digits throbbing. Not listening to her. Taking too many painkillers. Then he had gone out to talk war talk with his soldier buddies, the only talk that made him feel grounded, leaving her alone even though she begged him not to.

  She found his M4 in the attic—the rifle he had bought to keep her safe.

  Took it into the shower. Sat on the floor in all her clothes, muzzle in her mouth.

  Turned on the water to minimize the mess.

  And then the police.

  His wife.

  His rifle.

  His failure.

  His night on the shower floor, arms around his belly, rocking and rocking in the blood. . .

  “Hey!” Beth kicks him. “Aren’t you listening?”

  “Sorry, what did you say?”

  “I said I can’t feel that Todd’s dead!”

  “Beth, shush. It’s too soon. It’s because you’re in shock. Let’s stop talking about all this now. I don’t see how it’s going to help.”

  She looks at him a long moment. “Come,” she says in a near sob, grasping his shoulders and pulling him down. “Kiss.”

  “Oh Beth, I don’t know.”

  “Now.”

  “I don’t think this is a good idea.”

  She arches her back. Draws him nearer.

  “You sure? You really sure?” he just manages to say.

  “Shh,” she replies, raising her lips to his.

  Flanner is startled out of his nightmare by a cry. He sits up, sweat-limned and terrified, trying to work out whether what he is hearing is real or something from his dream. He hears another cry, a drawn-out moan. Is there a raccoon outside the window? They make creepy noises in the night, even snort like pigs. Or is it a fox? Foxes sometimes sound as if they’re suffering horrible wounds in the woods. Or maybe it’s Louis, who has been hanging around the house lately like a flea-bitten stray. Holding his breath, Flanner listens again. Hears a giggle and then another long moan.

  Oh.

  Sliding under his sheets, he presses both hands to his ears so he won’t have to hear any more. His mother is disgusting. Louis, too. But his mom is worse. A disgusting drunken slut, just like his dad called her. And Flanner suddenly wants his father back so badly that for the first time since Beth told him Todd died, the rage in him gives way and he weeps.

  The sobs come hard and fast, shaking his spindly shoulders, the thread of his narrow spine. And then the dream comes back to him. His sharpened stake. His father’s voice. The tears in his father’s eyes.

  26

  TONGUE

  Juney is leaning against the wolf fence, trying to smell what is wrong with Silver. Tariq isn’t here today, so she is by herself. She lifts her head and listens. For once her mother is nowhere nearby, and the knowledge makes her feel light and bold.

  Juney resents her mother for never allowing her to touch the wolves. Her mother says this is because Juney won’t be able to see if they grow agitated, but it prevents her from sensing the shape of them. It helped when Tariq told her they were like the dogs, only with bigger heads, taller ears, and longer legs, because she has cuddled the dogs enough to know their every inch. Still, she is jealous that he can pet the wolves when she can’t.

  She tries again to smell Silver, but the sugary scents of dying leaves and resin emanating from the woods are too strong. So she raises her face and calls out her wolf cry. Not loudly enough to attract her mother, but loudly enough for wolves.

  She holds herself still and waits. And then she hears it: a rhythmic panting, a snapping of leaves. And finally a new scent—the pungent, wild scent of earth and heated hair and meat-breath that makes her feel so cozy inside, along with a touch of something akin to hot chicken soup.

  “Come here, Ebony,” she coos, her fingers clasping the chain link, the side of her face pressed up to it in just the way her mother forbids. She feels the wires crisscrossing her cheek, cold and hard and right on the edge of sharp.

  The panting comes closer. The chicken scent, too. And suddenly here he is, breathing right onto her hands while a slimy thing brushes her fingers. The slimy thing is round and cool. It must be his nose. Then a hot dripping slab of something else curls over her fingers.

  “Your tongue!” she whispers. “Tickles!”

  She presses her body against the fence, hoping Ebony will press back the way Tariq says Gray does for him. But Ebony only keeps licking. First one finger, then another. She wonders if he tastes the salt on them. She hopes he doesn’t think she’s food.

  The fence rattles a little, and then he does lean into it after all. She can feel him right up against her belly. He is surprisingly dense, his body hard and his coat neither soft nor rough, but thick and springy. When she holds Betty, it is like holding a warm and throbbing pillow. Ebony’s body feels more like the head of a wild-haired giant.

  Moving one hand down the fence, she pokes her fingers through and tries to stroke him. It is difficult to reach much through the holes, so she gets at only one tiny patch. She can’t tell if it’s his back or his side. She rubs it a little, but the hairs catch in her fingernails and she accidentally tugs them. She feels his body stiffen, so pulls her hand back quickly. An instant later, he growls.

  See, Mommy? I’m fin
e. I can tell what Ebony will let me do and what he won’t just as well you can.

  Ebony runs off then and Juney returns to the task of trying to smell Silver. Her nostrils are full of Ebony’s odor now, yet she can detect something else nearby. She grows still to make herself concentrate. The scent is something like her mother’s breath when she is sick and won’t eat, and something like the dead possum Juney once found in the barn: a vomity, decaying odor that made her wrinkle her nose. Could that be Silver?

  “Please don’t be,” she whispers. “Mommy needs you. She needs you not to die.”

  27

  RABBIT

  Mike Flaherty is eating his coffee and bagel breakfast at his desk before starting on the first shift of what he suspects will be a very long day. His head feels considerably foggier than usual because he had to stay up till all hours dealing with a DUI over in Clarksville: some bozo of a teenager showing off to his girlfriend, first by driving into a ditch, then by turning belligerent. Flaherty had to cuff the kid and take him in, charging him not only with blowing a point one zero but resisting arrest, too, all of which led to late-night paperwork, more arguing than any cop needs, the calling of distraught parents, and coping with the weeping girlfriend to boot, who had to be found a ride home from the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night. He was tempted to leave the girl hanging out to dry to teach her to develop a better taste in boys.

  He sighs and bites into his bagel, the cream cheese squeezing out with an irksome plop onto his newspaper. For the past five years, he was a street cop in Albany, but he grew sick of all the gunshot victims and abused children, so switched to state trooper. Now he spends his time patrolling the back roads and little towns between Slingerlands and Cairo, dealing with wife batterers, methheads, juicers, and junkies, half of whom he’s known since kindergarten. He tugs at his duty belt, which is gripping tighter than usual, making his guts ache. This job is turning him fat, forcing him to sit in his patrol car all day, eating crap.

  Speaking of crap, his bagel is the consistency of drywall and his coffee has gone cold. He pushes them aside just as his desk phone rings. Megan Hutchins, whose job is to answer the phones, hasn’t come in yet—she is always late with one excuse or another—so he answers for her. Nobody else is around anyhow.

  “New York State Police, Huntsville.”

  “Mike? It’s Beth. I’ve got a question.”

  Flaherty flushes, his old high school butterflies starting up again. “Hey, Beth. What’s up?” And then he recalls the obit that ran in the Huntsville Bugle only last week: the usual picture of a scrubbed young face under a white cap and beneath it an article describing the deceased as a football star (a vast exaggeration of Todd McAllister’s meager abilities, as Flaherty remembers it) and a war hero (when, he’d like to know, is a dead marine not called a war hero?). “I’m so sorry. I just remembered. My condolences.”

  Beth swallows. “Can we stick to the point?”

  “Yeah. Of course.” Was there a point?

  “I want to know what you’ve done about Rin Drummond’s wolves.”

  Flaherty was expecting this. “I called like you wanted and she said she doesn’t have any. Just huskies.”

  “She’s lying. One of those wolves to tried to attack my son, and I can promise you it was no husky.”

  “You sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure!”

  “Sorry to hear that. Was he hurt?”

  “No, but he was damned scared, Mike. That woman’s a menace. I want to file charges.”

  “All right. Why don’t you come in and we’ll take care of it. Then maybe we could talk, um, over a coffee or something?”

  Beth tries to recall if Mike Flaherty is married. She believes he is. With a couple of kids—unless that’s somebody else. “Okay, I’ll be there today after work.”

  That afternoon, when she pulls up to the state police headquarters, nothing but a cube of dirty brown bricks with no windows and a chipped gray door, she sits in the car for some time, trying to master the press of misery in her chest. Finally, she climbs out, buttons up her stonewashed denim jacket, pulls her tight matching jeans down over her white high heels, and walks in.

  There, she is met by a sheet of bulletproof glass, behind which a female police officer is typing intently on a laptop. “Hello?” Beth ventures.

  The cop glances up, takes one look at Beth and puckers her mouth into an expression Beth can only interpret as disdain, which makes her wonder if her choice of powder-blue denim was wise. Perhaps she should have worn something more somber; something that would attest to her new status as a widow.

  “I’ve come to see Officer Flaherty? He’s expecting me?”

  “Sit.” The cop returns to her typing.

  Beth lingers a moment, about to suggest the cop might consider taking her name, but the woman’s implacable face drains her of courage, so she turns into the room behind her, which is blank, windowless, and grim. A vending machine full of bottled water is leaning against one end, as if recovering from a beating, and two rows of black plastic chairs are lined up against the walls, the space between them so narrow that no occupant could sit and cross her legs without kicking someone else in the knee.

  Beth sits and, being alone, crosses her legs. Opening her purse, a small white leather box with a gold chain for a handle, she takes out her cell phone and checks the messages. Nothing, just as there has been nothing all day. Nothing from Louis. Nothing from anybody. Clicking off the phone, she stuffs it with a surge of despair back into her purse, extracts a piece of paper, and unfolds it.

  “I WAS WALKING IN THE WOODS MINDING MY OWN BIZNESS WHEN I HERD A NOYZ.” (Beth thought it would be more affecting if she let Flanner write his report himself, misspellings and all.) “I SAW A HUGE FEERCE ANIMAL. IT WAS A WOLF! A GINORMUS DANGRUS WOLF WITH FANGS AND TEETH AND SLOBBER. AND WHEN IT SAW ME IT GROWLED AND JUMPED AND TRIED TO KILL ME! I THAWT I WOULD DIE!”

  Poor boy! She should have followed up on this long ago—she would have if Todd hadn’t turned her life inside out. But now she wants to make it up to Flanner, show him how much she cares about him and how determined she is to protect him, too. Folding the paper carefully, she returns it to her purse and drops her head in her hands, massaging her temples, which have been throbbing all day. She must have had more to drink with that bastard Louis last night than she thought.

  When Flaherty comes through the door, she stands and they each take a moment to absorb how the other has changed in the seventeen years since they last met. Flaherty sees the same Beth he always used to see; older, of course, but still with that mane of glorious auburn hair and delectable figure, somehow sexier than ever. She, on the other hand, sees a middle-sized pink man with a little-boy face, a balding head, and a potbelly. The sexiest thing about him is his uniform.

  “Hey, Beth, good to see you.” His voice has changed since high school—she noticed this on the phone, too. It is deeper now, crustier; the voice of a cop. “My condolences again.”

  “Thanks, I . . .” She can’t finish the sentence, silenced by a new wrench of remembering Todd—both when she loved him and when she didn’t.

  “Follow me.” Flaherty leads her down a long gray hallway into a small gray office and closes the door. Pointing her to a chair facing a cluttered desk, he plants himself behind it, folds his blond-fuzzed hands on the desktop, and leans forward. Beth notices his nails are buffed to a shine and immaculately clean. “Now, what exactly happened again?”

  “It was just like I said. Flanner was in the woods minding his own business and that wolf tried to kill him! He wrote it all down here.” She hands him Flanner’s report.

  Flaherty runs his eyes over it and slips it into a file. “Case opened.” He leans back, which makes his potbelly pot out even more. Beth can’t remember Mike Flaherty being this confident. He was always something of a rabbit in high school, his crush on her embarrassingly obvious to everyone. But then becoming a cop, anointed with a badge and a gun, presumably would give
a man confidence. As the folks in Huntsville like to say, “When a cop’s right, he’s right. And when a cop’s wrong, he’s right.”

  “I’ve done a little more investigation on Rin Drummond since you called this morning,” he says then. “Seems like she’s quite a piece of work.”

  “I told you. She’s a thug.” Beth rubs her temples again.

  “Yeah. We’ve had to go to her house at least three times, according to our files. Once when she set her dogs after a prowler. He had a record of breaking and entering and he was trespassing, though, so no charges there. Plus, she’s an Iraq vet—don’t know if you knew that.”

  “Everybody knows that. I know about the prowler, too. It was in the Bugle. She shot him, didn’t she?”

  “No, it was just the dogs. The second time she did the same, only that guy was a Jehovah’s Witness. He wasn’t hurt that bad, but he filed a complaint anyhow. Third time was when she threatened her neighbors ’cause they wanted to cut down a bunch of trees on their mutual property line. They claimed she said that if they so much as ‘murdered one tree’”—Flaherty wiggles his finger in the air to make quotation marks—“she’d shoot them. The lady’s definitely got some screws loose, know what I mean?”

  “But what about the wolf license? Does she have one?”

  “I was just getting to that. She doesn’t, no. She hasn’t proved she has huskies, either. She hasn’t done anything I told her to do.”

  Beth barely refrains from rolling her eyes. Obviously, Mike dropped the ball. Typical of a lazy local cop. A marine would never have been so irresponsible. She rubs her head once more, a new wave of pain tightening her skull.

  “You okay?” Flaherty asks. “You look kind of miserable.”