The Way of the Wolf

by David Archer

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  Details can be found at the end of THE WAY OF THE WOLF

  Table of Contents

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

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  AUTHOR

  ONE

  IT WAS NIKITA Khrushchev who said, “If you live among wolves, you have to act like a wolf.” I probably understand that better than any other human being alive today. However, in contrast to Khrushchev's comment, I'm not a man living among wolves, trying to pass myself off as a wolf. On the contrary: I seem to be a wolf trying to pass himself off as a man.

  I've been asked to provide this memoir as part of my acceptance of a deal to let me continue living in this crazy old world. It seems that I have talents and characteristics that make me very well suited to the purposes of a certain highly secret organization, and in the course of learning everything they possibly can about me, I have been asked—no, let's be honest, I have been ordered—to provide as detailed a narrative as possible of my early years. As always, however, the question in any memoir is where to begin. I guess the best place to start is with the basics, the purely statistical information that belongs in any such memoir.

  My life began for the very first time on July 30, 1990, in the city of St. Louis, Missouri. I understand just how unusual the start of that sentence must sound, but I believe you'll come to understand it before long.

  My father was William Edward Foster; my mother was Julia Marie Davidson Foster. I was their first and only child, and they named me Noah. I've often wondered if there was any significance to the fact that they didn't even bother to give me a middle name, but by the time I was old enough to wonder about it, it was too late to ask.

  From that information, you can deduce that I'm a Leo, but not much else. We didn't actually live in St. Louis, and I'm not sure why it is that I was born there, because we lived at the time in a moderately sized town in Illinois, one that I'm sure would be happy to forget that I ever lived there at all. With all of the press coverage that I got during my court-martial, there's very little doubt in my mind that my original hometown has done all it can to bury its connection to me somewhere in the misty recesses of history.

  Unfortunately, some things are a matter of public record. Considering that no less than three separate books have been written about my supposed crimes, including one (by my former military defense attorney) that even tried to prove my innocence, I'm sure the town has had more than its share of people asking questions about me.

  Of course, there are several people there who would be happy to talk about me. It's amazing how often people will open their mouths and talk about someone else in an attempt to get their own fleeting few minutes of fame. Those writers probably ran into dozens of such people, all of whom claimed to be my former best friend or next-door neighbor, but in reality, I can think of only three or four people in that town who could have any real claim to knowing anything about me. Ironically, they would be the ones who probably wouldn't talk.

  Writers would be looking for something to build their story around, something that would either explain my actions, or somehow mitigate and justify what happened to me. For some of them, the tragedy of my parents would be a foundation they would happily build upon, using it to show that what happened wasn't my fault. Others might try to say that it simply predicted the kind of violence I would eventually commit. Who is to say which of them might actually be on the right track?

  My defense attorney, Lieutenant Mathers, once told me that despite the fact that I was considered by the military to be one of the most efficient killers they had ever seen, she herself believed that I was probably the least violent man there could be. This was because, she said, violence is nothing but a tool to me, something I use to get a job done. To be truly violent, she believed, one must have violence within their soul, and she did not believe that there was any in mine.

  She may be right. As for me, I'm not even certain that I have a soul, unless it's one that was intended for a wolf.

  As for what happened to my parents, the tragedy that set me on this path, I still remember perfectly the day it happened. I was in the second grade, and I had just come home from school. It was less than a week before Christmas break was scheduled to begin, and I was undoubtedly excited about the upcoming holidays.

  Mother called to me as I stepped off the school bus. The bus stopped about three blocks from our house, and I usually had to walk home alone, so I was quite surprised to see her there.

  “Mommy,” I said. “Are we going somewhere?”

  She looked at me funny. “No, Noah,” she said. “Why would you ask that?”

  I shrugged my shoulders. “I don't know. I just don't usually see you at the bus stop, so I thought maybe we were going somewhere and you just wanted to meet me here so we could go quicker.”

  She kind of smiled, as she narrowed her eyes at me and took my hand. “I just wanted to come see my big boy,” she said. “Is that okay?”

  “Sure, Mommy.” I smiled up at her as we began walking toward the house. “Is Daddy home yet?”

  Once again, she looked at me funny, because it was an unusual question for me to ask. Normally, my father would not be home until nearly dinner time, so I had no reason to think he might be home early. I never did figure out why I asked that question on that particular day.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, he is. He got off early from work today, and came on home. I don't think he's feeling very good, though, so let's not bother him, okay?”

  My father hadn't been feeling good a lot lately. Back then, I thought that he was just sick, and it didn't occur to me that it might be anything more serious than that. On the other hand, I was just a child. I couldn't be expected to recognize the symptoms of meth addiction. I thought all the little sores, the nervousness, the irritability—I thought they just meant he was sick, the way I got sick when I got the flu.

  “Okay, Mommy,” I said.

  “That's my good boy,” she said in reply. “Do you have any homework tonight?”

  “I got a bunch of stuff to do in math, and I gotta read a story from my reading class. That's all.”

  Mother nodded. “Okay, then, you just go straight up to your room and get started on it when we get home. Okay?”

  “Okay, Mommy.” My room was up on the second floor of the house, one of three bedrooms up there. My parents' room was down on the first floor, so the other two rooms upstairs by mine were empty. Sometimes I would go into them, just to look at all the junk that my father would store up there. There were lots of things, lots of electronic stuff, musical instruments, and even some guns, but I knew better than to touch any of them. I had picked one up once, a pistol that was fortunately unloaded, but the whipping I had gotten for touching it was something I was never likely to forget.

  We got to the house a few minutes later, and as promised, I went straight upstairs to my room. I had a small desk up there where I could do homework and such, so I got out the math papers Mrs. Riley had given us and started doing the problems. Being in the second grade, I was still doing a lot of addition and subtraction, but we were also getting into some multiplication, division and fractions. I liked math, because it was simple for me. Math had rules, logical rules, that made sense. Even then, I liked something that had rules I could understand.

  I was about halfway through the third worksheet when I heard my father. He
would get loud sometimes, yelling and shouting at my mother or at me, and I was fairly used to it. On that evening, I could hear him yelling at my mother, asking her where something was, and I could hear her saying that she didn't know.

  Normally, when the shouting and yelling started, my father would reach a point of frustration and go storming out the door. In my own experience with him, I knew that he often got upset over things that made no sense whatsoever to me, but I assumed that that was because I was just a child. After all, that's what they kept telling me, that I would understand things better when I grew up. If growing up meant that you had to be upset and angry all the time like my dad, or crying and scared like my mom often was, I didn't think I wanted to grow up at all.

  When the yelling had gone on for more than ten minutes, I began to get worried. Maybe this was going to be one of those times when he would get even meaner than usual, which usually led to Mother having bruises. He rarely laid a hand on me, and I can admit that the times he did, I almost certainly deserved it. Mother, on the other hand, probably never deserved anything he did to her.

  “Where the hell is my money? You put it somewhere, where is it?” I heard him scream at her, and I could hear my mother weeping as she answered.

  “Bill, I swear, I don't know,” she said, sobbing. “You took it, you took all the money we had with you this morning. You said you had to pick something up today, so you took it all with you.”

  I heard the smacking sound of my father's fist hitting my mother's cheek. Looking back, I think it's probably pretty sad that a seven-year-old boy would be able to determine which part of his mother was being hit, simply by the sound of the blow. She screamed, and I heard her fall to the floor.

  “You lying bitch! If I took it, I'd know where it was! Now, where did you hide it?”

  Mother kept crying, insisting she had no idea where any money might be. I vaguely remembered a conversation from that morning, something my father had said about needing to pick some things up while he was out that day, and so my mother had to give him the grocery money, and the thought ran through my mind that if I could remind him of that, then he might quit hitting her. I got up from my desk and started down the stairs.

  “Bill, I swear,” Mother said. “I gave you all the money we had this morning, baby, don't you remember? You said you needed it, so I gave it to you, the grocery money, everything.”

  “Then where is it? It's not in my pocket, it's not in my wallet. If you gave it to me, then where is it, what did I do with it? I didn't have it when I went to get—when I went to get what I needed.”

  I came off the stairs, and turned toward the kitchen, which was where all the noise was coming from.

  “Bill, please,” Mother said, “please calm down, baby. Did you look in the car? Maybe it fell out of your pocket in the car.”

  I came up to the door of the kitchen, but instead of walking on into the room, I leaned against the wall and peeked around the door frame. I was scared, scared that my dad would get mad at me if I tried to tell him that Mother was right, and I froze up there at the door. Mother was still on the floor, sitting up and leaning on one arm. Her nose and lips were bleeding, and I felt the fear build up inside me as I hid there behind the doorframe.

  “It's not in the damned car! I looked in the car, I almost tore the car apart. It's not there.”

  My father was pacing back and forth, and it suddenly dawned on me that he had a pistol in his hand. It was similar to the one I had gotten a beating over, and I felt another shiver of fear run down my spine.

  “Bill,” Mother said, sobbing again, “Bill, you know I wouldn't hold it back from you. If I had any money here, I would give it to you, but I don't. Baby, you took it all this morning. I swear you did.”

  “Then where the hell is it?” I had never heard my father so angry, so frantic, and I didn't understand what was wrong. I watched as he leaned down and put his face almost up against my mother's face. “Where the hell is it, Julia?”

  “I don't know,” Mother said, bawling like a baby. “I just don't know. But, but baby, we'll—we'll get some more, we'll get more money for you.” She took off her rings, and held them up to him. “Here, baby, take these...”

  He slapped the rings out of her hand, and they went skittering across the floor. “What's wrong with you? You think those are worth anything? They're worthless!”

  Mother looked at the rings, her eyes wide and confused. “They're—they're not worthless, Bill, they're worth a couple hundred dollars, at least. That'd be enough to get you through, wouldn't it?”

  It must've been the wrong thing to say, because my father suddenly stood back away from her, and began to scream. He wasn't screaming at her, he wasn't saying anything, he was just screaming, as if something was eating him alive.

  “Bill? Oh, Bill, baby, what's wrong?”

  As quickly as the screaming began, it stopped, but that was almost worse. The silence was absolutely deafening, and the look in my father's eyes, as he stared at my mother, could only be described as completely insane. He stared at her for a long moment as I stood there peeking around the corner, and then suddenly he leaned down close to her again.

  “What's wrong?” I heard him ask. “What's wrong is I need almost a thousand dollars, right now, and you don't know where it's at.”

  My mother's eyes went wide. “A thousand dollars? Bill, we only had about three hundred this morning, and you took all of that. Why do you need...”

  “Because I do!” he screamed, and then he put the gun to his head, as if he were going to shoot himself. I almost cried out, but my mother beat me to it, with the last words I would ever hear her say.

  “Bill, no, don't...”

  My father's eyes had been closed as he held the gun to his head, but they suddenly came open. They focused on my mother, and he began to scream again, drowning out whatever she was trying to say and then, for no reason I could understand, he pulled the pistol down from his own head, pointed it between my mother's eyes and squeezed the trigger.

  The explosion of the bullet was so loud that it scared me half to death, but the vision of my mother's head exploding as the slug passed through her brain threw me into some kind of silent shock. I felt as though something had struck me, impacted my entire body at once. A vibration began in the center of my chest and radiated outward, a vibration so intense that for a split second I thought I was going to explode, but then it vanished as quickly as it had come. Something had snapped inside me, and I was suddenly as calm and controlled as I had ever been in my short life.

  The shock was gone, replaced by a clarity of thinking that I had never known before. I stayed where I was, peeking around the door at my father. He stood there for a moment, staring with his eyes wide at what he had just done, and then he looked at the pistol in his hand, whispered something I couldn't hear, and shoved the barrel up under his chin.

  His eyes whipped around as he held the gun there, poised and ready to blow out his own brains, just as he had blown out my mother's. They fell on me, where I stood peeking around the door, my eyes locked on his, confirming to him that I had just witnessed what he’d done. He stared at me for a moment, and then he said, quite clearly, “I'm sorry.” A second later, he closed his eyes and pulled the trigger.

  Watching him blow out his own brains didn't have the same impact for me that I had felt when he killed my mother. At that moment, I had no idea what had really happened, and only knew that I was suddenly all alone. At that time, I didn't know that we had any other family, so, for a split second, I wondered what was to become of me, but that thought was gone as quickly as it came. Something inside me knew that I could survive, no matter what happened. My parents were gone, and I would have to rely on myself.

  That was when my life began, for the second time.

  I stepped out from behind the door and walked into the room, my feet stepping right into the puddle of my mother's blood as I stared down at what was left of her face. Her eyes were gone, and the top of her h
ead, and all I could see was her mouth and part of her nose.

  For most people, such a visage would be horrifying, and would probably leave them nauseated, physically sick at what they’ve seen. That day, however, I felt no sense of revulsion, no sense of shock or horror as I looked at her ruined face. I knew what I was seeing, but I felt no emotional impact. I stared at what was left of my mother, and felt nothing whatsoever, inside. The only thought that went through my mind was that if I had not been afraid, she might still have been alive.

  I'm not sure how long I stood there. A neighbor had heard the gunshots, and called the police. Apparently, they didn't know which house to go to, at first, so they were knocking on all the doors. When I heard the knock on our door, I turned automatically to go and answer it.

  A policeman stood there, and he smiled at me. “Hey, son,” he said. “We got a call that said somebody was shooting a gun around here. Have you heard anybody shooting a gun?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “It was my daddy. He shot my mommy, and then he shot himself, too. They're in the kitchen.”

  I think, for just a second, the officer thought I was joking. He sort of pulled back a bit, and looked at me with a grin, but then he glanced down toward my feet and I think he saw the bloody footprints I had left in the hall as I came to answer the door. “Oh, my dear God,” he said, as he yanked open the screen door and stepped inside. He drew his own pistol, then looked down at me. “Just stay here, son, okay? You just stay right there, okay?”

  I nodded, and he reached up to the microphone that sat on his shoulder. “Dispatch, this is seven,” he said. “I'm at 502 North Ward Street, and I got a child here reporting multiple gunshots and fatalities. I'm investigating, but please send backup now.”

  Somebody said something back to him through his radio, but I couldn't make it out. He walked into the kitchen, and I could see him standing in the same doorway I had peeked around. He stood there for just a moment, and then he stepped inside the kitchen. A second later, I heard voices behind me and turned to look out the door as two other officers came running toward the house.