by Unknown
The intimacy slowed, the kisses ended, the gentle caresses were fewer, the smiles were gone. In the end we treated each other as bulletin boards to which we would affix our messages: I'll be home at 7. Lasagna in the freezer or I'm traveling to Pittsburgh. Be home Tuesday. When we both realized – she realized it first – that we were simply two people living under the same roof with nothing in common but our son, the marriage just dissolved.
There were no accusations, no screaming and really no ugliness at all. Instead, a steady rain of apathy just wore the marriage down and then one day it was gone. I was a little sad that the marriage was over, but it was the loss of regular contact with my son that hurt most. Before I moved to Birmingham, I had him on alternate weekends, but it wasn't the same thing.
Michael's eyes would turn hollow as the hour of our separation came around. Then he would start crying. After a few months, he became better at holding back the tears. That was the hardest thing.
These days I try to fly back to Pennsylvania every couple of months, but I probably won't see him again until May. It hurts my heart to think how he'll change, even during our short separation, and how I'll miss it. I hope he remembers me.
Susan flourished after our divorce. She started teaching exercise classes at the Y, spent more time with her girlfriends and joined some kind of New Age church that advertised itself as “dogma-free.” There were no men in her life. She never said anything, but I believe she didn't want to confuse Michael. I appreciated her choice but didn't have any lingering jealous notions about a new relationship, if she wanted one.
I went in the other direction. I spent less time with people and even stopped going to the movies, which I always loved. I used to attend church for the sake of Susan and Michael, but now I don't even do that. I don't know what I expected in terms of a social life once I was single again, but I learned pretty quickly that nothing was going to happen by itself. I could go to bars, but I'm not much of a drinker. I know how to dance (admit it, you're surprised at that) but singles dances seem kind of sad to me. Computer and technology club membership is usually pretty light in female enthusiasts.
The truth is having a social life requires work, acceptance of rejection, disappointment and an investment in time. None of those things appeal to me.
Don't get me wrong. I’m not a monk. I mean, I live like one, sure, but I have a normal man's needs and desires. That’s the only reason I attended that recently-divorced singles meeting. A slightly chubby brunette with beautiful skin was a regular and I hoped we might be able to get together after a meeting and commiserate about our failed marriages. But after I went to my one and only meeting, she stopped attending.
I know. I wondered what was so wrong with me that women ran in the other direction when I happened by. Later, however, I learned the brunette was in a long term relationship with a physician's assistant and I didn't see much of her again.
That's probably why I approached the therapist instead and maybe why I ended up buying the mountain cabin. Just lookin' for love . . . and solitude. Now you understand why I’m such a mess.
“Jesus lives in our hearts,” Michael announced during the last Sunday of our final weekend together. He said the words with the absolute certainty of a true believer or a six-year-old boy. He was sticking a spoon into a half grapefruit and enjoying the ensuing spray that peppered a nearby Wheaties box. Since it was Sunday and we weren't going to church, I thought a discussion of religion was appropriate.
“What does that mean exactly?” I asked him.
He gave one of those exaggerated shrugs of young children and I thought that would be the end of it, but he said. “It means all of us are connected because Jesus is inside everyone.”
“How do you know that?”
Another shrug, then Michael dug out a respectable grapefruit chunk and shoveled it into his mouth, smiled. “I just hear things,” he said.
***
I find an expensive trail camera at a sporting goods store in Birmingham. I want to take some photos around my mountain cabin. Mountain cabin. I like saying that. It makes me feel privileged and reclusive at the same time.
If there is anything crawling on or around my porch, this little camouflaged beauty able to record photos day and night ought to catch it. I’m on my way to the checkout and passing the store’s rifle displays when I recognize someone and stop. The therapist I met at the meeting a few weeks ago is sighting down the barrel of a Remington 597 rifle as though preparing to dispatch the recessed lighting fixtures in the ceiling.
“Hi, Doc,” I say. “Having trouble with some of your patients?”
She lowers the weapon and looks at me blankly for a moment then recognizes me. She smiles a little sheepishly. “I don't know. Think it would help?”
“It could result in your becoming socially isolated,” I say, throwing the words she used on me right back at her. I’m good at that.
She returns her gaze to the rifle and lifts it up slightly. “I did some shooting growing up – cans and bottles mostly – but not in a long time. My boyfriend is big into target shooting, though, and I bragged about how good I was . . .” She glances sadly at the weapon. I can tell she wishes she'd kept her mouth shut.
“Enjoying your cabin?” she asks, looking genuinely interested.
“I am.”
She nods. “And your boy?”
“Just got a Valentine’s Day card from him.”
She nods again. “You should take him there. To your cabin.”
“I might do that. I've already met some of the folks in the community,” I say, eager to prove I’m doing just fine, thank you. “Some people think wolves still live up there. I've been working with the librarian researching the subject.”
“Do tell?”
“Maybe I can catch a picture with this.” I grin and hold up the trail camera.
“I'm glad to see you're trying to connect with somebody else.” I assume she means the librarian. She looks a little uncomfortable broaching the subject. “Because sometimes when people feel isolated already, they work even harder at trying to remain alone.”
Although I’m standing in the wide open aisle of the store’s guns and ammo section, that last word echoes in my head long afterward, like the clanging of a great bell in an empty room.
***
I arrive at my cabin late Friday night. Being winter, the evenings come early, especially in the mountains. As my Toyota tires crunch through the driveway gravel, it’s startling to see only a suggestion of a structure against the tall pines, oaks and hickory trees. The darkness makes my little cabin look like a black apparition and it’s not until I unlock the door and flick on lights that the fir trim, the lattice and the rock chimney became benign once again. I glance at the rocker on the porch. Its aspect has not changed since I was here before.
Just before 9 on Saturday morning, I head over to the library, pause at the door to remember the librarian’s name – “my name’s Edith, by the way. Everyone calls me Edie” – and walk in. The place is empty. And cold.
“Oh?” Edie’s features slide into a smile. “I didn’t expect to see anyone here so early. But come on in, come on in. I just turned the heat up.”
“Last time we spoke, you said I needed to talk with someone,” I say. Actually, she’d whispered the words, as if the citizens of Turkion would tsk-tsk and scold anyone who suggested there was something to the very idea of wolves wandering through these happy woods.
“Rodney,” Edie says and looks at her watch. “He’ll be in at . . . well, he’s supposed to be in now.” She chuckles. “We’ll have to dock his pay. Of course, we’re all volunteers.” She laughs heartier this time.
“He knows about the wolves?”
Edie chokes off her ladylike laughter, probably disappointed I don’t appreciate the joke.
“He has stories,” she says, punching up the last word in emphasis. “Mostly they’re about people and some of them are real stretchers.”
“So why should I b
elieve what he has to say about wolves around here?”
“Only one reason,” she says, dropping her voice conspiratorially again, even though no one is around. “He doesn’t talk about them much and only when someone asks. That’s why I think there may be something to it.”
I wander through the fiction section waiting for Rodney. About eighty percent of the books on the shelves are historical romances, what my wife used to call bodice rippers, and she read a lot of them. It seems everyone in Turkion, at least everyone who read books at this library, fantasizes about being somewhere else. Someplace warm and populated with husky men who never button their shirts.
It’s almost ten when a short man with a Quasimodo kind of hunch shuffles into the library and cocks his head to give me the once over. Then he sits in a chair next to Edie behind the checkout desk. I now recognize him as one of the two “suitors” who bookended Edie on my last visit.
“Rodney, this gentleman had a question about the sighting of wolves around the area. I told him you were the person to talk to.”
He peers at me, eyes narrowing, like he’s staring directly into the sun. Then he whispers something into Edie’s ear. Her expression suggests she does not enjoy this intimacy. She seems uncertain.
“He wonders why you’re interested,” she says, a pained expression crossing her face.
This annoys me. I’m annoyed at him for talking through an intermediary, and I’m pissed at her for being complicit in it.
I lean over and whisper in her other ear, catching just a whiff of perfume. “Tell him something’s on my porch and I’m trying to figure out what it is.”
Edie quickly slides her chair back, stands and walks into the sorting room behind us. Rodney and I are left to look into each other’s eyes like a pair of love-struck teenagers trying to decide who is going to make the first move. He sits up.
“Why do you think something on your porch is a wolf? Most likely it’s a raccoon,” Rodney says, his voice gravely and dismissive. The hump on his back looks really uncomfortable.
“Footprints are too big for a raccoon,” I say, leaving out the important matter of how I knew that. Rodney doesn’t seem to care. He turns around awkwardly and looks into the sorting room where Edie is . . . sorting, I guess. He jabs a thumb in her direction.
“You got designs on her?” he asks me.
“What? No.”
“Cause you wouldn’t be the first young man who tried to get a little of that honey on his stinger.” Rodney smiles, but his eyes remain hard.
“It moved the chair,” I say.
“Who did? “ Rodney says. “What chair.”
“The thing on the goddamn porch.” I’ve got a short fuse. Susan used to say I objectify people. If that means I don’t give a damn about their feelings, she’s right.
“Watch your language,” Rodney says, eyes still hard. “I better not hear you talkin’ that way around Edie either.”
“It turns my porch rocker around. It does it practically every night.”
This gets old Rodney’s attention. “Does it happen when you’re not there?”
“Not that I can tell.”
The hardness leaves him. He gets up and withdraws the 1973 edition of the Journal of Mammalogy and tosses it down in front of me.
“Already seen it,” I say, pushing it away.
Rodney pushes it back. “Look at it again. Then we’ll talk.”
He muscles himself out of the chair with great difficulty and hobbles into the sorting room, apparently in an effort to make nice with Edie. I start leafing through the article again. Nothing new. Just pinched type, clinical descriptions and four grainy photos that could have been taken almost anywhere. Except for one photo shot near the cave entrance. One man in the picture looks familiar, but it takes me a moment to sort out who it is. He’s younger, straighter and a whole lot thinner, but it’s definitely Rodney.
The caption identifies Rodney Clawson as one of the men who made the discovery of the wolf bones. It says he had been to the cave many times.
***
Rodney says we’ll talk, but apparently it’s not going to happen this weekend.
I depart the library and return to the cabin where I spend the rest of the weekend learning about my new trail cam. Just before I leave on Sunday, I lash it to a porch post aimed at my rocker.
When I get back to Birmingham, I make myself an omelet sandwich and some tomato soup then watch a PBS special on the wolves of Yellowstone. That night I dream about wolves. One of them has Rodney’s face.
I can’t wait to get back to the cabin next weekend. It’s dark when I arrive. Really dark. And cloudy with no stars, no moon and no streetlights. As I unlock the security gate, my car’s headlights catch movement on the porch and my heart starts pounding really hard. As I push the gate doors open I can hear the motion of the rocker moving back and forth over the uneven porch floor. I return to my car and hesitate a moment, unsure whether to flee or press on. I drive the car slowly up the drive and can see a dark figure on the rocking chair.
It’s Rodney.
I step from the car and snatch a bag containing remnants of the Reuben sandwich I had for lunch. I do it slowly without once looking at the figure rocking on the porch, as if this whole scenario is the most natural thing in the world.
“You’re late,” Rodney says. “Edie told me you came up on Friday night but I figured a city boy like you would be here by five or six at the latest. You surprised me.”
“Where’s your car, Rodney?”
“I don’t drive any more. My son dropped me off.”
I unlock the front door and flick the inside lights on. Then the porch lights. Rodney winces and cups a hand over his eyes. Good. He scared the hell out of me.
“I’d offer you something to eat but all I’ve got is this sandwich and that’s my dinner. How about a Coke?”
“I’d rather have a beer.” He doesn’t smile, just cocks his head like he did at the library. He continues to hold a sheltering hand over his eyes.
“You can have a Coke. That’s all I got.”
Rodney shrugs, nods.
“Wanna come in?”
He struggles to his feet and plops down inside on the small loveseat by the fireplace. I give him a drink, then microwave the sandwich. I pop open a Coke for me then sit in the only other chair, sandwich in my lap, a hundred questions in my head.
“Did you read the magazine?” he asks.
“I told you, I read it before.”
He giggles. “Yeah, but did you look at the pictures?”
I take a bite of the sandwich. A Reuben is one of the few sandwiches that can survive a hard microwaving. “I saw your face in the photo,” I say. “Are you a spelunker?”
“A what?”
“A cave explorer,” I say. “Is that how you came upon those remains? You were exploring a cave?”
“I wasn’t looking for a cave,” Rodney says. “I was looking for wolves.”
My Coke is warm. The icemaker is just starting to make ice. “Why are you here, Rodney?”
He sips hesitantly from the Coke. I gave him the only cold can in the refrigerator. “Been lookin’ for wolves a long time,” he says. “It started when I was just a pup in school. Kids used to call me the Wolfman, like that DJ out west.”
I nodded. Weirdo.
“I was in high school and one night when I carried the trash to our burn barrel I saw a wolf squatting down at the edge of the brush line, just watchin’ me.”
“You sure it was a wolf?”
Rodney looks offended at the question. “I spent a lot of time reading about wolves and I had seen lots of coyotes. I know the difference. This wasn’t no coyote.”
“A big dog can look like a wolf,” I say.
“It was a wolf,” Rodney’s look is dismissive, as though I’m a spittoon and he has a gob of tobacco juice in his cheek. “There was nothing domesticated about that animal. He had fire in his eyes. That’s how you know.”
“Did you te
ll anybody?”
“There was nobody I could tell. Didn’t have any friends – except for Silas Russell and he was dumb as a box of hair – and my Momma was gone by that time. My diddy didn’t care much about what I saw and that’s all I’m going to say about that.”
“What happened?” I ask.
Rodney shrugs, his hump heaving like a backpack. “One night he followed me back to the house, crawled underneath and began sleeping under my bedroom.”
“Did you ever . . . you know, pet him?”
“And train him to get my slippers? What’s wrong with you, boy? This is a wild animal I’m talking about.”
“So what happened?” I ask again.
“He stayed around just about every night. I could hear him settling down beneath the floor when I went to bed. He never ate anything, least not so I was aware of it. Sometimes I could smell him through the floor, but not always.”
“I thought wolves were pack animals.”
“They are, they are,” Rodney says, seemingly pleased with me for once. “But there are lone wolves that are forced out of packs for one reason or another. They may wander hundreds of miles looking for a new territory. I figured this one was solitary and he probably figured the same thing about me. He was right, too.”
“You must have approached him at some point.”
“As a matter of fact, I did once,” he says. “I took some food scraps along with the trash out to the burn barrel one night. He was there – he wasn’t always, but he was this night – and I tossed the stuff on the ground near him. After a few weeks, we both grew more comfortable and I reached out to him with an old ham bone that all the soup had been wrung out of. He slunk forward, sorta low and shy, but he backed away before actually reaching for the bone. That’s the closest I ever got to him.”
“Did he just stop coming finally?”
“No, it was me who moved. I took a job at the wood mill over in Baker and I never did see that animal again. I never came back until many years later. By then, Silas Russell was long gone and so was my diddy. I got married. Had a son. Did some construction work for a long time before the back became a problem. Doctors made it worse.”
