Sometime after dawn he dreamed again of the wolves, but this time the dream was fragmentary and detached. He viewed the wolves from very far away. From atop a high bluff, perhaps, or hidden behind some bushes like Jane Goodall. The wolves moved down into the gully and paused before a small stream, drinking. Two cubs splashed and chased one another through the puddles. The other wolves observed them dispassionately. The sun was going down. Larry woke up. It was just past six a.m.
He stayed indoors throughout the day. In the evening he might walk to the corner Liquor Mart to cash a check and purchase milk, Scotch, Stouffer’s frozen dinners. Sometimes, remembering Sherryl and Caroline, he turned the television up louder. It wasn’t their physical presence he missed (he could hardly recall their faces any more) but rather their noise: the clatter of dishes, the inconstant whir and jingle of mechanical toys. Soundless, the air seemed thinner, staler, more oppressive, as if he were sealed inside an air-tight crystal vault. The silence invested everything – the walls, the furniture, the diminishing vial of Seconal, the large empty bedrooms, even the mindless chatter of the Flintstones on television. He drank his beer beside the front window and watched the dust swirl soundlessly in the soundless shafts of light, recalling the wolves and the soundless expanse of white ice where not only the noise but even the aromas and textures of the landscape seemed to be leaking from the dreamlike atmosphere from the cracks in some domed underwater city. In the mornings, now, he hardly recalled his dreams at all any more. Sporadic glimpses of wolf, prey, sky, moon, interspliced meaninglessly like the frames of some surrealist montage. He smoked three packs of cigarettes a day, just to give his hands something to do. The Scotch and Seconal compelled him to take so many naps during the day that he couldn’t sleep at night. Wolves, he thought. Wolves in Utah, Baffin Island, Tibet, even Hollywood. Wolves secretly everywhere . . . Eventually the dreams disappeared entirely. Sleep became a dark visionless place where nothing ever happened.
The Seconal, he thought one morning, and departed for the library. He squinted at the sunlight, staggered occasionally. People looked at him. A book entitled Sleep by Gay Gaer Luce and Julius Siegal confirmed his suspicions. Alcohol and barbiturates suppressed the dream stage of sleep. He returned home and poured the Scotch down the sink, the remaining Seconal down the toilet. He lay in bed throughout the afternoon, night and following morning. He tossed and turned. He couldn’t keep his eyes closed more than a minute. His heart palpitated disconcertingly. He tried to remember the wolf’s image, and remembered only pictures in books. He tried to recall the prey’s hot steaming blood, and tasted only yesterday’s Chicken McNuggets. He wanted the map of the sky, and found only the close humid rectangle of the bedroom. He got up and went into the living-room. It was night again. In order to dream, he must sleep. In order to regain the real, he must dispel the illusion: newspapers, furniture, unswept carpets, Sherryl’s letter, Caroline’s toys, easy liquidity, magazines and books. He realized then that evil was not the wolf, but rather the wolf’s disavowal. Violence wasn’t something in nature, but rather something in nature’s systematic repression. Madness isn’t the dream, but rather the world deprived of the dream, he thought, selected a stale pretzel from the bowl, chewed, and gazed out the window at the dim, empty streets below where occasional streetlamps illuminated silent, unoccupied cars parked along the curbs. The moon made a faint impression against the high screen of fog. A distant siren wailed, a dog barked, and in their homes the population slept fitfully, often aided by Seconal and Dilantin, descending through soft penetrable stages of sleep, seeking that fugitive half-world in which they struggled to dream beneath the repressive shadows of the real.
A few weeks after signing Larry Chambers’ termination notice, Marty Cabrillo took his wife to Shasta. “Two weeks alone,” he promised her. “We’ll leave the kids with your mother. Just the two of us, the trees, candlelight dinners again, just like I always said it would be.” But Marty said nothing during the long drive. Beatrice put her arm around him and he shrugged at her. “Please,” he said. “I can’t get comfortable.” At the cabin they sat out on the sundeck. Marty held paperbacks and turned the pages. Beatrice read People Magazine. After only a few days they returned home. “I’m sorry, honey,” Marty said to her. “I’ll make it up to you. I promise.”
“What’s the matter with you lately?”
“Nothing. Just things on my mind.”
“Work?”
“Sort of.”
After a while Beatrice said, “Larry,” folded her arms, and gazed out the window at Ventura car-lots.
The following Sunday Marty drove to Ralph’s in Fairfax, loaded four bags of groceries into his Toyota station wagon, and drove to Larry’s house on Clifton Boulevard. The front yard was brown and overgrown. Aluminum garbage cans, streaked with rust, lay overturned in the alley. Dormant snails studded the front of the house, their slick intricate trails glistening in the sunlight. Marty knocked, rang the bell a few times. The door was ajar and he pushed it open. A pyramid of bundled newspapers blocked the door, permitting him just to squeeze through. In the living-room, torn magazines and mouldy dishes lay strewn across the sofa, chairs and floor. The telephone receiver was off the hook, wailing faintly like a distant, premonitory siren. At first the room seemed oddly disproportionate, as if the furniture had all been rearranged. Then he noticed Larry asleep on the middle of the floor, his head propped by a sofa cushion, his arm wrapped around a leg of the coffee table. “He must’ve lost eighty, ninety pounds,” Marty told Beatrice later that night. “His clothes stank, he hadn’t shaved or washed in I don’t know how long. And all I could think looking at him there was it’s all my fault. I was responsible. Me, Marty Cabrillo.”
Marty followed the ambulance to St John’s, wishing they would run the siren. “Dehydration,” the doctor told him, while Marty paid the deposit on a private room. Larry lay in a stiff, geometric white bed, a glucose bottle hanging beside him, a white tube connected to his arm by white adhesive tape. Every so often the glucose bubbled. “We’ll bring him along slow, have him eating solid food in a couple days. I think he’ll be all right,” the doctor said, and handed Marty another form to sign.
“It’s all my fault,” Marty said when Larry regained consciousness the following morning. “Look, I brought you some books to read. And the flowers – they’re from Sherryl. Beatrice got in touch with her last night and she’s on her way here right now. The worst is over, pal. The worst is all behind you.”
Later Sherryl told him, “We missed you. Caroline missed you. I missed you. Oh, Larry. You just look so awful.” Sherryl laid her head in Larry’s lap and cried, hugging him. Silently Larry stroked her long blonde hair. Sherryl had been staying with her sister in Burbank, working as a secretary at one of the studios. Her boss was a flushed, obese little man who put his hand on her knee while she took dictation, or snuck up behind her every once in a while and gave her a sharp pinch. “Loosen up, relax. Life’s short,” he told her. Caroline hated her new nursery school and cried nearly every day. Sherryl’s sister had begun bringing the Classified Pages home, pointing out to her the best bets on her own apartment. Andy had promised to help out, but every time she called his office his secretary said he was still out of town on business. And then one of the Volvo’s tyres went flat, and in all the rush of moving she realized she had misplaced her triple-A card, and so she just started crying, right there on the side of the freeway, because it seemed as if nothing, nothing ever went right for her any more.
“We need you, Larry,” Sherryl said. “You need us. I’m sorry what happened, but I always loved you. It wasn’t because I didn’t love you. And Marty thinks he can get your old job back—”
Marty leaned forward, whispered something.
“He says he’s certain. He’s certain he can get it back. Did you hear, honey? Everything’s going to be all right. We’re all going to be happy again, just like before.”
Sherryl brought Caroline home a month later.
“Is Daddy home?” Ca
roline asked.
“He’s at work now, honey. But he’ll be back soon. He’s missed you.”
Caroline waited to be unbuckled, climbed out of the car. The front yard was green and delicate, the house repainted yellow. The place seemed only dimly familiar, like the photograph Mommy showed her of where she lived when she was born.
“All your toys are in your room, sweetheart. Be good and play for a while. Mommy’ll fix dinner.”
Caroline’s room had been repainted, too. Over her bed hung a bright new Yosemite Sam poster. She opened the oak toy-chest. The toys were boxed and neatly arranged, just like on shelves at the store. She went into the bedroom and looked at Daddy’s bookcase. The large picture books were gone, along with their photographs of wolves and deer and rabbits and forests and men with rifles and hairy, mis-shapen primitive men. Bent paperbacks had replaced them. The covers depicted beautiful men and women, Nazi insignia, secret dossiers, demonic children, cowboys on horses, murder weapons.
She heard the front door open. “Hi, honey. Sorry I’m late. I ran into Andy Prytowsky on the bus – remember him? I introduced you at a party last year. Anyway, I told him I’d drop by his office tomorrow. I figure it’s time we started some sort of college fund for Caroline. I’m pretty excited about it. Andy says he can work us a nice little tax break, too. Oh, and look what else. I bought us some wine. For later.”
Caroline walked halfway down the hall. Mummy and Daddy stood at the door, kissing.
“There she is. There’s my little girl.”
Daddy picked her up high in the air. His face seemed strange and unfamiliar, like the front of the house.
“So how have you been, sweetheart?” Daddy put her down.
“I’ll finish dinner,” Sherryl said.
“Come and sit down.” Daddy led her to the sofa. “Tell me what you’ve been up to. Did you have fun at Aunt Judy’s?”
Caroline picked at a scab on her knee. “I guess.”
“What do you want to do? I thought we’d go to a movie later. Would you like that?”
Caroline clasped her hands in her lap. Here is the church, and here is the steeple. When you open the doors you see all the people.
“What should we do right now? Do you want to play a game? Do you want me to read you one of your Dr Seuss books?”
Caroline thought for a while. Daddy’s large rough hand ran through her hair, snagging it. Delicately, she pushed his hand away.
“I want to watch television,” she said after a while.
Three nights each week Larry went to the YMCA with Marty. Sherryl began subscribing to Sunset Magazine, and over dinner they discussed a new home, or at least improvements on their present one. Finally Marty suggested they buy into his Shasta property. “Betty and I don’t make it up there more than three or four times a year. The rest of the time it’d be all yours.” Larry took out a second mortgage, paid Marty a lump sum, and began sharing the monthly payments. The first few months they drove up nearly every weekend. Then Larry received a promotion which required him to make weekly trips to the Bakersfield office. “I’m really bushed from all this driving,” he told Sherryl. “We’ll try and make Shasta next weekend.” Caroline started grade school in the fall. Sherryl joined an ERA support group and was gone two nights a week. Occasionally Larry spent the night in Bakersfield, and drove from there directly to work the next morning.
“All I told Conklin was I’ve got a merchandise deficit from his store three months in a row. It wasn’t like I called him a thief or anything. I just wanted an explanation. I’m entitled to that much, don’t you think? It’s my job, right?”
“I’m sure he didn’t mean it, Larry. He was probably just upset.” Sherryl sat on the sofa, smoking a cigarette.
“I’m sure he was upset. I’m sure he was.” Larry sat at the dining-room table. The table was covered with inventories, company billing statements, and large gray Acco-Grip binders. His briefcase sat open on the chair beside him. “And now I’m a little upset, all right? Is that all right with you?”
“I’m sure you are, Larry. I was just saying maybe he didn’t mean it, that’s all. That’s all I said.”
Larry put down his pencil. “No. I don’t think that’s all you said.”
Sherryl looked at the TV Guide on the coffee table, considered picking it up. Then she thought she heard Caroline’s bedroom door squeak open down the hall.
“What you said was I’m imagining things. Isn’t that what you said?”
Sherryl crushed out her cigarette. “Larry, I really wish you’d stop snapping at me every time you’re mad at somebody.” She got up and went to the end of the hall. “Caroline? Aren’t you supposed to be in bed?”
Caroline’s door squeaked shut. Sherryl watched the parallelogram of light on the hall floor diminish to a fine yellow line. “And turn off those lights, young lady. You heard me. Right now,” Sherryl said. In high school Billy Mason had a crush on me, she thought, but I wouldn’t give him the time of day. That morning she had seen Billy’s picture on the cover of Software World at the supermarket.
“What I mean is, Larry, is that you’re not the only person who’s had a bad day sometimes—”
Sherryl was turning to face him when the telephone rang.
“Sometimes my day hasn’t been that hot either,” she said, and retreated to the telephone, picked up the receiver. “Hello?”
“Hi. Hello,” the voice said. “I was hoping, well, I mean I didn’t want to disturb anybody, but I wondered if Mr Chambers was in. Mr Larry Chambers, I think? Have I got that right?”
“This is his wife. Who’s this?”
“Who is it?” Larry asked, picking up his pencil and jotting a number on his note pad.
Sherryl gazed expressionlessly over Larry’s head at the dining-room window and, beyond, the 7-11 marquee. The voice on the phone filled her ears like radio static. “—I mean, I just had the article here a moment ago, let me see . . . Look, tell him Hungry Bear called, and by the time he calls back I’ll find the article – wait, in fact here it is right here – no, sorry, that’s not it. But still, tell him Jim called. Jim Prideux—” Sherryl looked around the kitchen. She had forgotten to clean up after dinner. The sink was filled with dirty dishes, the counter top littered with bread crumbs. Stray Cheerios from that morning’s breakfast had attached themselves like barnacles to the formica table. She pulled up a chair and sat down, feeling suddenly tired. There was a television movie she had been looking forward to all week, and now, by the time she finished her cleaning, the show would practically be half over. She felt like saying to hell with it, to hell with all of it. She just wanted to go to bed. To hell with Larry, Caroline, the dishes, the vacuuming – every damn bit of it. The voice buzzed inconstantly in her ear like a mosquito, something about wolves, Navajo deities, sacred totems, irrepressible dreams of wolves, he wasn’t exactly sure . . . Wolves wolves wolves, wolves everywhere, she thought, and strengthened her grip on the receiver. “Listen to me,” she said. “Listen to me, Mr Bear, or Mr Prideux, or Mr Whoever You Are. Listen to me for just one minute, and I’ll say this as nicely as I can. Please don’t call here any more. Larry’s not interested, I’m not interested. Frankly, Mr Bear, I don’t think anybody’s interested. I don’t think anybody’s really interested at all.”
In Sherryl’s dream the men and wolves loped together across the white plain. Larry was there, and Caroline, and Andy and Evelyn and Marty and Beatrice. Sherryl recognised the mailman, the newspaper boy, supermarket employees, former boyfriends and lovers. Even her parents were there, keeping pace with wolves under the cold moonlight. Everybody was dressed as usual: the men wore slacks, ties, cufflinks and starched shirts, the women skirts, blouses, jewelry and high heels. Caroline carried one of her toys, Andy his briefcase, Marty his racquetball racquet, and Larry one of his largest gray Acco-Grip binders. Sherryl raised a greasy spatula in her right hand, a tarnished coffee pot in her left. We forgot to schedule Caroline’s dental appointment, she told Larry. When
I was a child you treated me as if I was stupid, she told her father, but I wasn’t stupid. The sky is filled with stars, she told Davey Stewart, her high school sweetheart. The Milky Way: the Wolf’s Trail. But nobody responded, nobody even seemed to notice her. The bright air was laced with the spoor of caribou. She felt a sudden elbow in her back, she turned and awoke in a dark room, a stiff bed. I forgot the shopping today, she thought. There isn’t any milk in the house, or any coffee.
Beside her in bed, the man slowly moved.
Sherryl sat up, her pupils gradually dilating. Eventually she discerned the motel room’s clean uncluttered angles. The thin and fragile dressing table, the water glasses wrapped in wax paper, the hot-plate, the aluminum hot cocoa packets.
“What’s the matter, baby?” Andrew sat up beside her, his arm encircling her waist. “Nightmare? Tell me, sweetheart. You can tell lover.” He kissed her neck, stroked her warm stomach.
“Please, Andy. Not now. Please.” Sherryl climbed out of bed. Her clothes lay folded on a wooden chair.
“Sorry. Forget it.” Andrew rolled over, adjusted his pillow, and listened to the rustle of Sherryl’s clothing.
Sherryl stood at the window, gazing out through the blinds. Stars and moon were occluded by a high haze of lamplight. She heard the distant hissing of streetsweepers, and pulled on her blouse. Then she heard the rain begin, drumming hollowly against the cheap plywood door.
Andrew took his watch from the end table. The luminous dial said almost two a.m. “I’ll call you,” he said.
“No,” she said. “I’ll call you this time. I need a few days to think.” She opened the door and stepped out into the rain. They always do that, she thought. They have to be the ones who call, they have to be the ones who say when you’ll meet or where you’ll go. She pulled her coat-collar up over her new perm, gripped the iron bannister, and descended one step at a time on darkling high heels. Puddles were already gathering on the warped cement stairs. “It’s as if we don’t have any brains of our own,” she imagined herself telling Evelyn. “And I’m sure that’s just what they think. That we haven’t got the brains we were born with. That we have to be told everything.” By the time she climbed into the Volvo the rain had ceased, as abruptly as if someone had just thrown a switch. Her coat was soaked through, and she laid it out on the back seat to dry.
The Mammoth Book of Wolf Men Page 8
