“They see the tracks of a very large dog,” said Johanna. “Just outside the window. I honestly don’t know why they are bothering themselves so.”
“We were told to take anything like this very seriously,” said the policeman with the clipboard. “So we take it seriously.”
“A burglary is a serious matter,” Johanna began. “But I really don’t see why there is this additional worry—”
“It’s the tracks that bother us,” said the policeman.
“I want to see them,” I said. But, in truth, I did not.
I did not want to see them at all.
There they were in her back garden, among the roses with their late autumn blossoms shedding petals, and one huge, distinct print in the spill of humus from a plastic sack. I recognized them from my own garden, and if I had any delusion that it was all a dream that last thread snapped.
I wanted to vomit, puke out all the days I had lived, all the hopes I had ever harbored, and every dream. I wanted to empty my life and start over. It’s not true, a voice shrieked in me. It can’t be true!
But this paw print sank into my mind. It was real, and if there was any fiction at all here it was me, Benjamin, human, liar, even to himself.
Had I then, I dared to ask myself, raped a woman? Surely not. No, that was not possible. I was sweating icily within my tweed jacket, but I managed to speak. I even commented that it had been quite a large animal indeed. I could not disguise my strong feelings, but he misread them as great concern when I looked up at the weary face of the policeman and asked, “What could it have been?”
He stared down at the print, and it was clear that he was sorry it was there.
I could easily stretch forth my hand and destroy this single, clearest print. I nearly did—my hand felt along the stepping stone, and touched the very edge of the humus.
“They’ll have to get a mold of it,” he said. “Detectives, photographers, the whole business.”
“Just because it’s a big dog?” I said. “The leash laws in San Francisco are so badly enforced. You see any number of hounds, mongrels, of all sizes.” Then I silenced myself, straightened, brushed my knees. Say nothing, I told myself. Say absolutely nothing. But I could not stop myself. “You’re calling in detectives because there’s a mastiff snouting around at night?”
And then I heard the voice, and saw the gray eyes blinking in the garden sunlight. He paused to consult with one of the policemen who had done the tracking, and then he bore down upon us.
Karl Gneiss knelt beside the print and grunted with satisfaction. “Ah, yes. Ah, yes, we have one indeed.” He was like a man seeing at last a long desired Rembrandt. “What a wonderful sight. A big one, too.”
Stowe stood in the distance, watchful and still. The sun ignited his blond hair and his pale skin, and yet he was a shadow figure, a sentinel. He held himself in a way that made me think: he’s wearing a gun.
Gneiss looked up at me with a boy’s pleasure in a wonderful discovery. “I’ve never seen a bigger one in my life.”
Then he stood and read the policeman’s eyes, turned back and gave Stowe a nod. Stowe hurried forward and gave me one of his non-smiles. Then he gazed at the print, and I caught myself expecting him to pray.
Gniess dusted his hands, one against the other. “No, it was not a burglar. And wasn’t a dog, and wasn’t a human being.” He looked at me when he said, “It was like nothing you have ever seen.”
Sixteen
For two days I believed it was all true. I was a sick, dangerous human being. If I could rape a woman, then I could hurt Johanna. I had killed a cat somehow. I could not understand it, but it certainly seemed true. I should warn Johanna. I wanted to confess everything to her in any case. I needed to tell her, but I could not bring myself to do that. Perhaps I should turn myself in. I could harm no one from inside a jail.
I would have to stop seeing Johanna. I was too dangerous. This thought seared me because I loved Johanna, and needed her. I could think only that I might hurt her.
It is surprising how someone nearly crushed by feeling can still go through the day like a normal person. I have seen it in my patients. A man so overwrought he will weep for ten minutes at the first attempt to discuss his feelings will, nonetheless, drive to work, stand in line at the supermarket, and even laugh at his boss’s jokes.
Dr. Ashby could have been able to help me, I believed, but he was so stricken that I could not begin to trouble him with my problems. When I called there his sister reported that he was gradually getting stronger, although she would not allow me to actually hear his voice.
I was taking on a few new clients, and began new files, but through every moment ran the thread: what was I, and what might I do next? I even glanced through a calendar, trying to recall when I had suffered my dreams, matching them with the phases of the moon. I could discern no relationship with the full moon, nor with the new moon. No cliché or myth seemed to fit the pattern of my dreams—if, in truth, they were dreams at all.
And then, as I came home one afternoon, the telephone was ringing.
She told me the news quickly, and as she spoke my knees went weak, and I had to sit.
“The entire neighborhood’s been very nervous about the big dog,” she said. That seemed like a good way to put it: the big dog. She added, “It was on the news.”
I confessed that I had been avoiding the news, and did not explain why.
“Well, last night they shot it.”
I gripped the phone, unable to speak.
“A neighbor, with his handgun. Terrible things, those guns. I’ve always hated them. But he saw a very big dog, bigger than Belinda, and he shot it. They are looking for the body now. They haven’t found it, but they think it might be up by Sutro Tower on the peaks themselves. Everyone is so relieved.”
“He wounded it?”
“Twice, with a small pistol, I think a twenty-two. They haven’t found the body yet.”
I had to picture it in my mind: the furtive hound, the crack of the gun, twice.
I found myself sitting, wanting to laugh, and dance, but unable, for the moment, to move. I agreed that it was good news, and must have surprised her with the force of my relief. It was the best news I had ever heard.
She seemed relieved, too. It seemed that she had been worried, just as everyone else had been worried, and was relieved now that this dangerous beast had been wounded.
To celebrate, I invited her to Tahoe. We would have, I promised her, a delightful weekend.
And I felt sure that my night self was nothing more than a very vivid illusion. Certainly there had been a paw print, but it had been the paw print of a dog. I had been like a child, frightened of his own dreams.
“It’s lovely, Ben,” she said, getting out of the car so carefully it was as though she thought the cabin, and the view of the lake to either side of it, might shiver and dissolve, like a reflection. She looked back as if to ask: “Can we really spend the weekend here?”
It was days before winter, and yet there was only enough snow to have killed the grass, and enough cold to freeze the birdbath so that it looked like an urn full of green-flecked agate. The caretaker, a man who lived in a distant cabin—a real cabin, one of the original log-and-speedboat cottages—kept the place so much as it had been when I was a child that it hurt me to unlock the front door and step inside.
Our steps made that hushed sound which means that the refuge one has sought is big and yet not empty. Nothing echoed. There was a rich silence. This was a stage set, and the actor had returned.
It was a mistake to come here, I thought. Then at once I told myself that anything I could do with Johanna could not be a mistake. She was a woman who made no misstep. And yet all this nostalgia troubled me, radiated by cool rooms and empty bathrooms, with a tube of Prell where Cherry had left it months before.
I was reminded of my collapsed marriage, and if Johanna had not been there I would have turned and left at once. But I would not have come there at all
without Johanna. She was becoming, moment by moment, my refuge, my hope. She was with me now, and all would be well.
“It troubles you,” she said. It was so cool that I could see her words flicker at her lips as she spoke. I touched her lips, and then kissed them. Articulate and knowing as I knew her to be, she was still in important ways a stranger. Already I wanted more from her than I had ever wanted from a human being.
“No,” I said. “I’m glad we came.” A touch on the thermostat and the distant furnace stirred, a faint rumble like a great sea chest shifting beneath our feet. I had not called Mr. Laurel to let him know we were coming. I knew I should do that now, so that the caretaker, all conscience and toolbox, would not disturb us later.
I had not visited the cabin at Tahoe since the summer. It was hardly a cabin. My father had enjoyed a taste in the expensive rustic, and had purchased this multistoried lodge that overlooked the Tahoe sunrises with the promise that we would all chop wood. He meant it as a cheerful alternate to our life in San Francisco, but despite the massive sugar pine logs and the redwood timbers still sheathed in bark, the cabin was a city dweller’s fantasy, a view of the lake, and the chance to hear pine cones thud and roll on the roof and watch chipmunks attack the morning cinnamon toast. It was better that way—the cabin meant a martini before a fire in the great, granite fireplace, and a spare set of slippers and hiking boots like the wardrobes of a separate marriage, in a different climate, but in the same economic comfort range as the first.
There were several bedrooms, all decorated with a vaguely twenties flavor, as though Greta Garbo might drop in and require her cigarettes from a silver box like the one I held in my hands just then, feeling the mountain chill in the precious metal, still just able, after all these years, to breathe the spice of the Virginia blend my father had craved. Craved and lived for, as though the gin and tobacco had formed a deadly toxin that had, at the same time, nourished him.
His laugh had been wonderful, manly and beautiful. They killed him, all those late nights smoking and having another “bare of vermouth,” but he had touched everyone who met him with a greater hope. He and my mother had both been victims of the way they took their pleasure, cigarettes and alcohol, and yet I had outgrown my hatred of their favorite ashtrays, and had long since resigned myself to the memory of my father’s smoke-cured laugh and my mother’s gin-softened alto. They had lived. I prized their memory.
I had hoped that Belinda would be coming, but Johanna had arranged for a kennel at the hospital, “which she has come to trust, actually.” I asked, feeling the words in my mouth like the lead syllables of a foreign tongue, how Belinda was feeling these days.
She was well, Johanna answered, but then she folded her arms against the late autumn cold and said, “She is excited, I think, but not happy. You know, sometimes I wonder what animals are able to sense. Maybe she knows that her friend, the big dog, is dead.”
The way Johanna spoke, with a slightly foreign syntax, and the trace of German in her words, made her statements seem the result of deep thought. When Johanna said “The sky is quite clear,” you believed that it was not only bright and blue, but you pictured it: you knew you could see the horizon all the way around, a crisp, black edge to the world.
“Every time I see it I am surprised,” I said. We stood on the deck overlooking the blue lake, a lake so huge the distant shore took on the look of an amateurish painting, half real, half dissolved. “I forget how big it is, although I’ve seen it several times a year since I was a boy.”
“But you seem so peaceful now,” she said, surprising me. “All the way up, as you drove, you seemed to be thinking about something that made you happy.”
“You, of course.”
She even blushed. “Sometimes I think you were too unhappy when we first met. I think Cherry was very unkind to you.”
“Cherry meant well.” What a damning thing to say about somebody, that they “meant well.”
“I am working on Rilke again,” she said. Changing the subject wisely, I thought. She doesn’t want to begin our weekend together with me blathering about my ex-wife.
I said that I had read him, in translation, from time to time.
“I really am not doing it for any publisher, although I think I will have no problem seeing it into print. I do it not as a labor of love either, exactly. Unless love and work are more close than people think. I do it to make something better, more correct. To polish off the frost, so an English reader can read the poem as though no language at all stood between the reader and the poet, is a great desire of mine.”
The sun was warm. Clouds gave the sky a surface like the rough texture of a stone, a tremendous blue granite. There had been no clouds an hour before, and yet the sky showed no movement. All was still. There was no wind.
For some reason my mother had put a stone deer in the lawn, and preferred the view away from the lake, of the grass and the stone doe. I had moved the deer—I had to call it that—off to the side, where some aspens shivered over it all summer. Now the stalks of the trees were naked, and the smaller-than-life deer looked up and toward me, and I knew that it had just moved.
That was impossible. And yet it was frozen as a real deer will freeze, ready to leap but transfixed with doubt—perhaps I wasn’t real. Perhaps I was not a man at all.
Gravel crackled, and a blue pickup rolled toward me. Mr. Laurel extended his hand in the usual demonstration of his agonizing grip. He was one of those men who make you wonder how handshaking ever became a popular tradition.
“I have a sixth sense when it comes to this place.” He grinned. He wore a gray billed cap, and a sheepskin jacket with fluffy wool lapels. His red-laced work boots crunched ice and gravel. “You can’t hide much from me. I had a feeling you were here. I tried to call you in San Francisco and got your answering machine. I was just heading over to check the heating.”
This was a gush of volubility from Laurel, caused by Johanna’s presence. Johanna was without question both attractive and not my wife. Mr. Laurel took off his cap for a moment at the sight of her, and then looked away like a peasant before a czarina.
“It is so beautiful here,” said Johanna, her accent seeming suddenly exotic. She meant to compliment Mr. Laurel, whom I had introduced as “the man in charge here,” but it must have sounded to him as though she were pretending that the sugar pines and the black lake were all his doing. He grinned, but looked away both charmed and embarrassed, although I knew that in a few minutes his embarrassment would turn to injured dignity. He would assume, quite incorrectly, that she was making fun of him. I had to think of some way to ease him, and so I asked him, “Do we still have that problem with mice?”
“No more,” he said. “I put out poison.”
I felt the pleasant expression freeze on my face. I cleared my throat. “Mr. Laurel is a master of such matters. Mice, raccoons, snakes. He fished a bat out of the water tank here when I was a boy.”
Mr. Laurel liked this—a man who could kill. Yes, he allowed, we had this old disused cistern. “Kept it full in the summers against fire danger, don’t you know. And one day little Ben came running all the way to my cabin—it’s four miles—to say a huge bat was drowning in the water.”
I chuckled, too, and Johanna wore just the right expression, smiling, curious, polite, her cheeks flushed with the chill. I had discovered the bat the day before, and had reported it at my leisure the next day, at my father’s suggestion. Bats did not interest my father. I had ridden my bicycle, and if I had seemed out of breath it was the same high altitude that now made my pulse hammer and made Mr. Laurel, friendly, avuncular, hard-working man that he was, seem like a yellow-toothed killer.
“Come on inside,” I said. “Have a cup of coffee.”
I wanted to think that it was like old times, having Mr. Laurel here drinking out of a big mug, stirring yet another spoonful of sugar into his coffee. Stored sugar turned to stone here, and required stirring before its pebbles dissolved. But Mr. Laurel, who had al
ways seemed sure-handed and gentle, looked evil to me now. He was not a different man, I told myself. I was the one who had changed. Surely Johanna was enjoying her conversation with him.
“They found it in the midst of Desolation Wilderness, a hike of an hour or two from Fallen Leaf Lake. A bloody mountain of skin and guts.” He laughed. “Alive with flies.”
I had not been listening. I dug a gravel of sugar from the bowl.
“A bear.” Mr. Laurel smiled. “A rogue male black bear.”
“I feel so sorry for a bear like that. They have a right to live here,” said Johanna. “We are the trespassers. Listen to me. I sound so shrill. But I believe this. We have too much contempt for animals.”
She had that way of being serious, tremendously serious, and yet so gentle it was like music. Even Laurel, who would have fried a squashed squirrel from the road, had to agree. “You got that right. We sure are the trespassers,” he said.
When he was gone she took my hand and asked me if the lake was too cold for swimming even in the summer. I acknowledged that it was always cold. “You can feel your bones ache after five minutes,” I said.
Only later did I begin to consider that she was creating small talk, idle conversation, to avoid sharing something she felt she had to tell me. It was a secret, I sensed. Something about her past. At last I was going to begin to know her well.
That night, before the fire, a fire so bright and hot we had to lie down in a distant part of the room, we made love, and I saw how all art was nothing compared with this sort of beauty. Her pubic hair was soft, and so fair it was like spun silk, pale, nearly colorless, her labia so pink I could see how she was all one creature, tongue, palate, and her other, nether lips, all interconnected, a person more entire and self-possessed than any I had ever known.
When she spoke my name it was like being blessed, praised, forgiven.
Seventeen
Saint Peter’s Wolf Page 11
