Embrace the Wolf

by Benjamin M. Schutz

  “No. Go ahead. I’m listening.”

  “I mean, look at me. I’m six feet tall. I weigh almost a hundred and fifty pounds. When I was thirteen, other girls got breasts, I got shoulders.

  “You know when it all happened I kept asking myself why? Why? I’m not even pretty. I’m too big. I’ve got muscles, not curves. I mean I like myself. I guess I mean I like being what I am, you know, strong and everything. I mean I guess I’ve tried to learn to like that, but, you know, dammit, I really always wanted to be pretty. Oh shit. This is crazy. Forget it.”

  “I don’t know. Something like this turns your world upside down. Lots of dusty unused thoughts come tumbling out. What happened there had nothing to do with sex or attractiveness, lust or desirability. They wanted to hurt you, hurt someone. When it comes to hurting a woman, rape is the most hurtful kind of beating.”

  I turned back to my fish. I got it while it was crisp outside, but still moist. Then I took the hush puppies off the oil and spooned out the coleslaw. The wine was as bad as I feared—what I’d expect if Mogan David went varietal. We ate silently. I snuck a couple of looks at her. She was as Elroy so foully put it, a lot of woman. An imposing presence. I wondered what she’d look like without bruises and bandages. I thought I knew.

  “For what it’s worth, I think you’re pretty.”

  “Thanks, I guess.”

  As we ate, she looked at me. “You know I owe you a lot. My life maybe and, I don’t know, it’s kind of strange having that between us and I don’t know you at all.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “I don’t know. I guess everything or anything will do. Who are you, Mr. Haggerty?”

  “Who am I? I’m a private detective from Washington, D.C. I’m thirty-five years old, six feet tall, two hundred pounds, brown eyes and hair, left-handed. I know which forks to use and I’m not impressed with that. I like Italian food and Irish whiskey, Bruce Springsteen and Jackson Browne, fast cars and funny women. My body tells me that I’m no kid anymore, and my knees can tell the weather. I’ve got folks like everybody else and two brothers. I had a sister, but she died when I was too young to know the difference.”

  “Are you married?”

  “No. Never. I’d like to, I guess. Everytime I think I’m putting down roots though, they turn out to be landing gear.”

  I went on. “At least three times a year I wonder what the fuck I’m doin’ with my life. This is one of those times. I’m a registered pessimist. Everything’s either black or gray.”

  “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “A pessimist.”

  “When I was eighteen I wanted to save the world. At thirty I knew I wasn’t up to it. Now I’m not sure I can save myself. I’d settle for a good woman, my health, and enough money so I won’t have to pawn my dignity when I’m old. So far I’m zero for three.

  “I’m less optimistic than Miss DuBois about the ‘kindness of strangers.’ Outside of family and a small circle of friends, we’re all of us strangers to each other, and if humanity is judged by how we treat a stranger we’re all in trouble. Evil doesn’t surprise me anymore, and goodness looks queerer by the day. I expect nothing from my fellow man and am enchanted by decency. Its mere appearance is heroic.”

  “That doesn’t sound like the man who dragged me out of that bar.”

  “That’s probably true,” I conceded. “I try to keep my expectations low. That way all my surprises are good ones. I guess I sound bitter. People still disappoint me. I just don’t want me to disappoint me. There’s nothing else that matters. Nothing lasts. If you leave without regrets, you’ve done okay.”

  “You don’t mean that. That’s too simple. I mean, those men don’t regret what they did to me, but it was wrong.”

  “Okay, okay. You’re right.” I thought a moment about what she’d said. “All right. This is how I see it: We all accrue pain in our lives. Most of it’s unfair. And when we want to dish it out we do the same damn thing. The ones we hurt are just handy, not deserving. I’m just trying to get off that not-so-merry-go-round. Hurt me at your own risk; otherwise, live and let live.”

  “But you’d have hurt those men for me?”

  “You step in when you see that happening to someone who can’t defend themselves.”

  “Were you in Vietnam?”

  “No.”

  Wendy was slowly assembling me from the scraps her questions had purchased. I had no idea what, if any, floor plan she had.

  “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “Yes it does. There used to be a poster ‘What if they gave a war and nobody came?’ If everyone just took care of their own hurt, we’d do okay.”

  “But you helped me.”

  “Look, I don’t join groups real well and I take orders worse. That’s why I wasn’t in Vietnam and it’s why I’m not married.”

  Damn. Vietnam. The moral litmus paper of my generation. Imperialism then is patriotism now; and conscience becomes cowardice. What the fuck am I doing explaining myself to a twenty-year-old? Remembering that that’s what they said to me fifteen years ago.

  “Vietnam was a bad war. We had no business being there. Just like Lebanon or El Salvador now. I believed that then and I do now. Most of the misery in this world is done in the name of good—we’re going to do this for your own good. The bigger the cause the more the nitty-gritty reality of people gets sandpapered away. All that bullshit aside, I wasn’t going to die for something I didn’t believe in. It’s as simple as that. But I sure as hell believed you were hurting kid. Lying on that floor, sobbing. You were real to me, anyway.”

  “But …”

  “That’s it. Class dismissed. Case closed. I don’t know how we got off on this shit, but I’ve had it.” I pushed back my chair, stood up, and went out on the deck. I didn’t need this shit. She could fend for herself. I’d get a room and get on with business. In the morning she could get another man out here. She had money. There had to be an agency around here. New Bern, maybe.

  She was standing behind me in the doorway. “Mr. Haggerty, listen, I’m sorry I was so—I don’t know—picky. I think I was looking for a fight. Maybe I was trying to get you to leave. I don’t know. Maybe that’s what you were talking about: I was hurt and angry and you were handy. It’s not just that, though.”

  Her pause drew me back around to face her.

  “I feel real dependent on you, real vulnerable, and that feeling just makes me sick to my stomach. And I know it’s because you’re a man. I mean, I look at your hands and I feel their hands on me. I trust you. I mean I want to. Hell, I have to, and I know you haven’t hurt me. But what if you turned on me? And I’m angry, angry at all of you, and I’m also grateful to you, and I can’t seem to tolerate those two feelings. It has to be one or the other. No, that’s not right. It goes back and forth from one to the other. That’s all. I just want you to know I’d feel a lot better if you stayed.”

  I was going to stay, I knew it.

  “I’m here for the duration, Wendy. Don’t try to sort it all out at once. This is very artificial. There’s a lot of instant dependency, intimacy, trust. You have it because of the situation, not by choice. A lot of feelings got stirred up, and we don’t know each other at all. Hell, after this is all over you’ll probably find that you can’t stand me. On a day-today basis I can be a real pill. If there’s anything enduring to any of these feelings, they’ll be there after the dust settles. All right, kid?”

  “Yeah. And don’t call me kid anymore. I haven’t felt like a kid in quite a while.”

  “Fair enough. I’m sorry. Call me Leo. Mr. Haggerty is my father.”

  “Okay. Are we friends? I’d like to be.”

  “Who knows? Maybe we could be. I don’t know what we are. We’re in deep shit together; and if we make it through, it’ll be because we helped each other. Friends do that. So maybe, after this is all over, we’ll find out. If need gets replaced by choice we’ll be friends. Right now we’re allies. I’d like
to be friends, too. So put that thought in some place safe until this is over.”

  We went in and put away our dishes. I poured out the rest of the wine. “Listen, we need to discuss security here for a moment. I wish it wasn’t that way, but we’re just out of jail, not out of the woods. Part of my attention is going to be diverted into looking for this guy, so you’ll need to contract a case of instant paranoia, at least until I can get some help. I’ve looked around and this place isn’t terribly bad. Use the peephole whenever you go the the door. You don’t go anywhere without me and vice versa. There’s good exterior lights on this project and a dead bolt on the front door. I want you to sleep upstairs. Keep the phone by your bed. You hear any noise from me, get on the phone. If the lines are cut, go out on your deck and yell like hell. Yell ‘fire.’ People’ll wake up for that. I also want you to take a kitchen knife up with you. I’ll sleep down here. The glass doors have charley bars and they’re pinned nicely, but if Godzilla’s as subtle as Hungerford promised, he’d rather come through the door than open it. Okay?”

  “Yeah. Okay.” Wendy dumped her dishes and went up the spiral staircase. Halfway up she stopped. “Good night, Leo, and thank you … for everything. It really doesn’t feel like enough for what you’ve done.”

  “Listen, I know how you feel and I appreciate you don’t take lightly what I did. But in some ways, just like those guys, it had nothing to do with you. I didn’t know you when I stepped into that bathroom. You were a stranger to me. I did it for all the unearned kindness I’ve had in my life. Hold on to that feeling. Someday, somewhere, you’ll be in a position to help a stranger who needed it like you did. It’ll be your chance to put something back in the pot. Don’t be in such a hurry to pay off that debt. If it’s important, do it right. Anyway, go to bed and try to sleep.”

  She waved a small good night and went up the staircase so slowly it looked as if she were pulling herself and not climbing up the stairs.

  I pulled the Bushmills out of the bar, poured a jigger full, and went out and balanced it on the deck railing. Then I opened up my suitcase and there and then began to contravene Chief Maxwell Hungerford’s cherished wishes. I unwrapped my sawed-off Remington 870 pump gun and stroked and oiled it to the ocean’s roll. Cool sea breezes braced me. The Bushmills stoked my furnace. In the distance the freighters waiting their turn to unload at the Morehead City port lay at anchor on a careful line through the Shackleford Straits. Closer at hand the sea oats waved, and beyond them the lights on the city fishing pier went on. The beach was deserted. I looked over the railing at the scrub pines, then up to the deck of Wendy’s bedroom. I was afraid they’d bypass the first floor and just go up to her deck. A smart man would.

  I slipped the magazine extender on the pump gun. It hung out like a Hapsburg’s lip. I went through my shot shells. I didn’t intend to fuck around with these assholes. I counted out my fléchette rounds. Two hundred fiberglass needles per. One of these upclose and personal and you look like the cover on a Whitman Sampler. They’re X-ray opaque to boot. I thought they were fitting. If you don’t die right off, you get to lie around for a couple of months waiting, hoping they’ll migrate to the surface. Once they’re in you, there’s nothing you can do about it, but just wait until they come out on their own accord. Kind of like rape. I loaded three rounds of fléchette and filled the extender with double-ought buckshot loads. I hoped they didn’t have grappling hooks and would just climb up. I’d give a lot for a good vibration sensor. I put the TV on while I rigged a homemade alarm.

  I went into the kitchen and got a bunch of soda cans, some clothesline, and loose change. After emptying the cans, I punched holes in them, tossed some coins in each one, and threaded the clothesline through.

  Late night TV was getting pretty strange. I rolled past the reruns of Celebrity Paternity Suit. Something called Meet Your Maker was on. It looked like a necrophile’s fantasy island. Boy George was singing “do you really want to hurt me” to Mike Hammer. I don’t think George liked the answer. Then again, maybe he did. I couldn’t handle anything that subtle anymore.

  The telephone went off like a shot. I killed the TV, picked up the phone, and said nothing.

  “You Haggerty?” I didn’t say anything.

  “Listen good. I’ll only say this once. You don’t forget this foolishness you’ve stirred the chief up with, I’m gonna see that DuWayne gets to finish what he started. And you’ll get to watch. That is I’m gonna make sure you do soon’s I finish cuttin’ off your eyelids.”

  The line went dead, and I hung up the phone. Bubba was an occidental fool. The obligatory warning. The western way of war. The “rules” of war. The idea of war was to win. No matter how. Never threaten, just deliver. If we’d understood that Pearl Harbor never would have happened. If they’d understood us, they never would have done it.

  I wanted to go right out after him and just shoot the bastard in an alley, but I couldn’t. I’d have to wait until he came to me and then counterpunch him to death. I didn’t foresee reasoning with Bubba.

  Anxiety numbed my fingers, and it took ten minutes to finish stringing the soda can line. I went out on the deck and found hooks already in the corners. The clothesline would be for drying bathing suits. The cans sat just below the railing grip. Anyone or anything hooking over it would rattle them and awaken me. So I hoped.

  I picked up the pump gun and turned into the house. A figure moved. I lifted the gun.

  “Jesus, don’t shoot! It’s me,” Wendy shrieked.

  “Goddamn. I thought you were asleep.”

  “I couldn’t. I heard the phone. I picked up the extension. I just couldn’t go back to bed.”

  “Come on down then.” I lowered the gun.

  “What are you gonna do? I can’t take this. My god, when is it going to end?” She was starting to twitch. Reflexively she hugged herself to stop the shaking.

  “Good question. I don’t know. But until it does I’m gonna keep a close watch on you. Hope for backup. Pray for rain. Keep a high profile in town and hope like hell I find Bubba first. I’ll take him out if I can, then do the job I’m here for.”

  “I could just forget it, leave town. I’m a nervous wreck. I can’t sleep. I see them in my mind, out there somewhere, watching me, waiting for me. I was trying to tell myself it wasn’t true, that it was over, I was safe. Then this.” She curled up in the chair and began to rock back and forth. “I can end it, just give up. Goddamn.” She began to cry, retching gasps.

  “No, you can’t. That’s what they want. Then you’d really feel like you gave yourself up. That’s what hurt most, you said. Hold on. Hungerford’s a decent man. He’ll help us if he can. I’m not superman, but I’m no slouch at this business. I can’t give you a guarantee, but if you give them what they want there’s no guarantee they’ll stop there. You take your chances either way.”

  She’d continued rocking and crying as I spoke. I had no idea if she’d even heard me. Gradually she stopped moving. She squeezed her eyes shut, a grimace to stop the tears. Suddenly she banged her fist on the table. Through clenched teeth, she said, “Damn. I hate being scared. Shit.”

  I put my hands on her shoulders. “The best thing for being scared is fighting back. Now get upstairs. Sleep if you can.” She turned away. My palms burned from touching her, and when I swallowed I thought a bow tie had been stapled to my throat. An allergic reaction to my guilty pleasure in the contact. She went into the kitchen and came back with the biggest knife in the house.

  I watched her climb the stairs and picked up the pump gun. I pulled a chair around toward the deck and dragged it far enough back to still be in the shadows at dawn. The twelve gauge lay across me like a lap dog. This one’s bite was a lot worse than its bark. I slept waiting for a tin can rattle and hoping for the sun.

  Chapter 18

  I awoke to the sun and Wendy’s gentle tapping on my shoulder. “Easy, it’s just me,” she said.

  “Good morning.” I shitted the gun off my lap and stood up
.

  “How’d you sleep?” she asked.

  “I slept. That’s all I was hoping for. How about you?”

  “I guess like you said, I made it through the night. I dozed off and on. I know I must have dreamt and I’m sure they were bad, but I don’t remember them.”

  I edged around her and went into the bathroom and splashed warm water into my gritty eyes and brushed my teeth.

  “Do you want any breakfast?”

  “Sure.”

  “I’ll make it. You did dinner.”

  “Fine.” I walked back into the kitchen and slid into a chair. Coffee was on, and Wendy opened the refrigerator, poured me some orange juice, and handed it to me. “Thanks.” Our eyes met for a moment, and we both broke off the contact. I wasn’t sure why. I was faintly sad and didn’t understand that either.

  I sipped the juice and looked out at the ocean. As the waves moved to shore, they gathered up the sun’s glare, and for an instant it was all one piece, a mirrored sea. Then it fell apart into metallic freckles for a while and finally a flat blue-green finish. As my eye followed each swell to shore the next was already on its way. The seamless sea. The location of the mirror moment changed throughout the day as the sun heaved itself across the sky.

  “How do you like your eggs?” Wendy asked, her back still to me, hand poised above the carton.

  “Scrambled softly.”

  “Ham?”

  “Yes.”

  “Grits?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll do my best with those. I’ve never made them before.”

  “Don’t worry. I think they’re instant grits or quick grits. All the mystery has been processed out of them.”

  “Whew.” She bustled around and in a few minutes I had a plate of scrambled eggs, country ham and grits, and a mug of coffee. Wendy had a glass of orange juice.

  “Aren’t you going to eat?” I was some detective.

  “No. I don’t eat breakfast. Usually I go work out first when I get up. Then I come back and eat.”