Saint Peter’s Wolf

by Michael Cadnum

  My man-strength was almost equal to his, but we grappled, grunting, and I could not throw him down. And so I squeezed. I hugged him, squeezing the air from his lungs. I squeezed the blood from his arms, and then, when his breath was a choking rasp, I hurled him down, hard.

  I brandished the weapon high over his head.

  My shadow fell over him, my man-shape. I panted so hard I could not speak, but I wanted to command him to stay still, to do nothing, to lie down and let the struggle end here.

  But he felt into his dark blue, grass-flecked clothing and brought forth a bright, silvery automatic, grimacing and panting all the while.

  It was a gun so gleaming that I knew it could do no harm at all. Except that he held it steady, his hand trembling not at all as he aimed it up into my eyes. I saw it too clearly—the little hole, the exact shape of my death.

  And so I killed him. I slammed his skull with the rifle stock as he grunted and grinned, as though the fragmenting of his skull were a joke. He coughed, someone laughing too hard to breathe.

  The rifle stock splintered, and I hammered him with what was left until the automatic danced from his hand, and he fell sideways, smiling still, but making no sound. Black blood snaked from his nose.

  I fell to the lawn, too numb to weep.

  Perhaps I was there for a long time. Perhaps for only a few moments. All I knew was that something terrible had ended, and that something even more terrible, my life without Johanna, was about to begin.

  But I had no time to grieve.

  She was there, as simply and quietly as though she were, in truth, a delusion. I climbed to my knees, and then to my feet. I put my hand out to touch her. She was human, and her hair and skin the same gold as the evening around her.

  Just then I had that insight which had been kept from me, there beside the shattered body of the man I had just killed. We are wondrous, not just the human beings—all of us, even to the least ant on the thorn.

  Wondrous, and everything we know is tinged with ignorance. We know nothing.

  “Rest, now,” she said.

  I was panting too hard to speak.

  “You still don’t know, do you?” she said. “You still have no idea how powerful we really are.”

  The sirens had been descending upon us, and now they were on the street outside, beyond the garden walls.

  Forty-One

  When I was a boy my father would take me to the Academy of Sciences where I would gaze upward at the great, dark skeleton of an allosaurus. At the sight of the dinosaur’s bones I’d be silenced by a mixture of boyish disappointment and awe.

  The disappointment arose from the dinosaur’s size—he was only a little over three meters high. Not a giant at all, I used to think. The awe was at the color of the bones, a burnished blue-black, and the artful way in which they were held together by man-made bolts and wires. The creature poised above us, looking off to its right, mouth agape, ready to lunge for its meat.

  It was a creature made almost entirely of space, with black bones like the girders of an unfinished building, and capacious sockets gazing out at the world it could not abandon with eyes made of nothing.

  In my adolescence such a sight illuminated my own cynicism. This is reality, I would smirk to myself. Short giants, monsters made of bone, reality reduced to its ebony lie.

  But I was wrong. This was not a lie at all; it was a kind of truth. The structure of the dinosaur was both elegant and magnificent, and yet what was most magnificent was what I could only imagine—what was gone. A skeleton is not the essence of a creature, any more than death is the essence of life. Something else is, something fleeting, and ungraspable. Something made of light and water.

  I had come to see that the giants of life are as big as they have to be, and as deadly. My life with Johanna had become a skeleton that was fleshing even as I watched, growing muscles and blood red eyes. I had that sense I sometimes have when confronted with disaster, that all of my everyday concerns and passions are the whimsies of an adult child.

  What is not shared is gone. Unless I used my new compassion I would continue to be incomplete. I would remain that self-satisfied boy, refusing to be impressed by something wonderful.

  I would share my life with Johanna. She could have whatever she wanted of me. Everything else was the foolishness of a child, an ugly ignorance that dismissed monsters that were all too real.

  I think this must have been what Johanna had known all along, the insight that had made her seem a creature of magic. She had been capable of love, and I, despite what I thought, had not been.

  Until now.

  The sirens stopped, and then there was the squawk and sputter of radios, and the sound of running feet, heavy feet, running as men run when they carry guns. Doors thudded shut, and the sound of a gathering force of armed men surrounded us, beyond the walls of the garden.

  There were muttered commands and the rasp and click of weapons being loaded and cocked. The armed men around us were in no hurry. Speed was dangerous. They took their time, preparing their assault.

  Destroyed. The thought was like a blow to the head: you will be destroyed like animals.

  The thought made me urge her to run, but even as I spoke I knew that we had to face what was about to happen together. She put a finger on my lips to silence me.

  Shot dead, here on the lawn. Like anyone, I had wondered when I would die, and how. This lawn was the place. Was there, I wondered, a better place?

  But I wrestled with this fear in myself. Surely there was some hope, even now. Surely there would be some way to survive, if not escape.

  And so we crouched on the lawn, feeling as animals must feel, except that we knew exactly how easily we could be killed, while animals can only guess.

  “Every place turns into a trap for me,” said Johanna. Her voice was steady, her eyes clear. “I wanted to free you of the burden of my life. They know I am dangerous. But they don’t know about you yet. But I heard the last shot. And then, Benjamin, how could I stay away?”

  Then she said the only thing in the world that mattered to me: “Please, let’s stay together forever, Benjamin.”

  We stood together, and I held her.

  They’ll kill you, said the voice in me.

  They know all about you, and they’ll blow you up. Look at you, holding her with blood all over your clothes.

  “You were right,” I whispered. “You should run.” The front door rattled. A heavy hand hurled it open. Heavy feet crunched through the house.

  Die die you’re about to die.

  “You want them to catch you,” she said, sadly. “You want to confess. You think that will free you. You want to give yourself up to them. You want to write books, and go to conferences, and tell the entire world the whole truth. Benjamin, you don’t understand anything yet. You still don’t. You think they’ll believe you.”

  Her words were true. That was exactly what I wanted, and her words dazzled me as much as anything that had happened. There had been too much blood. Too much flight. I couldn’t think any longer.

  “They have to believe me,” I said.

  She smiled. “I’ll stay with you,” she said. “While you learn the truth.”

  The leather, the guns, the uniforms all had a smell, a dark, life-stilling aura. Radios spat. We were circled by armed men. Strangely, they did not put cuffs on us. They seemed to want to avoid our touch.

  Whatever they believed, they knew that we were trouble. “Stand back,” they told each other. “Not too close.”

  Johanna smiled at them. These were the men who always came for creatures like us, out-of-breath hunters, afraid, confused. They kept their shotguns leveled at us, and left us standing, not even ordering us to put our hands to our heads. It was my first sample of their uncertainty. They did not want us dead, they did not want us alive.

  A shotgun is a cold, heavy thing to have leveled at one’s head. Something deep within me, something both beast and human, turned to ice. I hated the guns more than
anything I had ever hated in my life.

  Later, we sat in my living room. I was a man foreign to his own house, his own life, except for the woman he loved. I had asked for a change of clothes; I could not endure sitting here with drying blood on my shirt. But the cops, men in dark green jumpsuits labeled “Police,” did not answer me.

  It all began to make sense when Solano arrived, in sweat pants, chewing gum furiously.

  “Don’t even take any pictures,” he commanded his men. “Whatever you’ve started doing, stop. This isn’t our problem.”

  He looked at me with his hard, dark eyes. “This is a Washington problem.” He spent fifteen minutes on my kitchen telephone, and then stepped into my living room. He stood in front of us and said, in a low voice, “I don’t want to hear about whatever happened here. Don’t tell me anything.”

  “I killed him,” I said.

  “Shut your mouth, Doctor. You didn’t do anything like that, and if you did I don’t know anything about it.”

  “Are we under arrest?” I meant: are you going to shoot us now, or later?

  “I mean it, Doctor. Don’t tell me a single thing. I don’t want to know any of it, and don’t tell any of my men anything. Just sit there. Don’t move and don’t talk.”

  “Ever?” I asked.

  He pointed at me, a warning more definite than any speech could have been: Shut up.

  Page arrived, and was allowed in only after insisting that he was my personal physician, and even then he had to raise his voice and insist that he had important information. It was this last statement, I was to later realize, that forced them to let him in.

  “This is your doctor?” asked Solano.

  I nodded.

  Solano took him into the wrecked study, and they talked for several minutes. Page was shaken when he emerged, and speechless when he gazed at the splattered blood on my clothes. Yet he rallied, as perhaps as an intern he had rallied at the sight of a dying patient.

  He sat slowly, and leaned forward, having trouble choosing his words. “You didn’t show up,” he said. “For our appointment. I got worried.”

  He has come to watch them take our lives, I thought.

  How would they do it? Would they empty our cranial vaults with a blast each from one of those shotguns, or would they deliver a cleaner death of some sort?

  Perhaps a death Page himself was equipped to deliver. He was, after all, a medical doctor.

  He read the fear in my eyes.

  “The police have the most unusual attitude,” he began. “They would be delighted if I admitted both of you for observation.”

  “Into a hospital.”

  “Yes,” said Page, but he looked away, and then looked back again. “They don’t want anything to do with you. It’s as if—”

  “As if they believe the story I told you. The story of the mountains, and the lake, and the helicopter. The story you didn’t want to hear.”

  He nodded. “As if they have heard some of it. And don’t like it, but—” He was hoping I would conclude his thought for him, but when I remained silent he added, “They don’t want anything to do with you.”

  He’s a friend, I told myself. A friend, as Dr. Ashby was a friend. You can trust him.

  “I’ll help you, Byrd,” he was saying. “I’ll help both of you. I promise you that.”

  “What are they going to do with us?” I asked.

  “What can they do, the poor men?” said Johanna. “They are afraid of us.”

  She was right. It was bright in the air, like a color, silver and glistening.

  Brittle, unyielding fear.

  “We’ll get you through this,” said Page.

  A cop in a green jumpsuit stepped into the living room to eye us for a moment. The “Police” across his chest was stenciled in festive red.

  Page slipped into the kitchen to make some telephone calls, and police kept looking in at us, as though they believed that we could vanish in an instant.

  Page returned to say, “They don’t even know where to put you.”

  “Don’t you see?” said Johanna. “This kind man is going to help us. The police will be happy to see us in what they will consider a mental ward. They are awaiting word from Washington. No one knows what to do.”

  “You knew this would happen, didn’t you?”

  “The government will disown its hunters. The government is embarrassed by them, and at the same time tries to deny our existence.”

  “You’ve been through this before.”

  “Don’t think for a moment that we are safe,” she said, with an amazing calm. “We are still in the greatest danger.”

  Page put on his glasses and looked at me, and then looked down. He was hoarse when he said, “I’ve asked them to send an ambulance.”

  “Dr. Page,” said Johanna, as though the name tasted sweet. “Dr. Page is afraid of us, too. Aren’t you, Doctor?”

  Page smiled at her, weakly, but plainly captivated by her. He did not answer.

  “They can’t kill us, Benjamin,” said Johanna. “Because Dr. Page is going to put us into an institution. Kind Doctor—the solution to everything. Call it a sickness, and lock it away. He is going to save our lives.”

  Another siren wove from far away. She stood. “Let’s go with this man. Let’s go now, before someone decides to see what a gun can do to two creatures who do not exist.”

  Forty-Two

  “This is the sort of place they plan for us, Benjamin.”

  It was a non-place. The ceiling was high, and the room was, essentially, a container. It smelled of wax, and air that had been processed into a lifeless gas. It could be a room anywhere in the world where they wanted to keep people confined and harmless. “It could be worse,” I said, trying to be hopeful.

  But the thought throbbed: trap.

  Johanna eyed the walls. “You see the colors they paint such places?” she said. “That practical green, that efficient gray.”

  Dead green, dead gray. “At least we’re alive.”

  “I know you still dream of a life like the other people you have known,” she said, softly. “I know you still don’t understand, and that you have to go through this before you know what we are to them—and to ourselves.”

  “Page is a good man,” I said.

  She laughed quietly. “I’m sure he is,” she said.

  A metal door, high windows with a metal mesh within the glass—it was a prison, a cell at the University of California Medical Center, a room fit for someone enormously strong and completely beyond control. I began to sense the approach of night, like a passenger on a train reaching a broad valley where, long ago, he had been free.

  Johanna sat quietly, her hands folded in her lap. “You’ve been in places like this before,” I said, not asking a question. I was discovering yet again how little I knew about her.

  She did not have to answer. She smiled, and looked upward, indicating that every sound we made was overheard.

  There was still a pretense, as though to keep us calm, that we were patients, people about to receive all the help medicine and civilization could give us. We were not separated, and comfortable black vinyl chairs had been placed in the room. Soon, I thought ironically, they will bring in potted plants. A male nurse with broad shoulders and a thick neck had asked us if we wanted some 7-Up, and had promised us “a hot meal.”

  It was easy to see why they’d left us alone. Cameras followed our moves from two perches near the ceiling. Johanna was very still, gathered into herself, like someone waiting for long-expected news.

  I paced. The ride in the ambulance had shaken me more than I had expected, making me feel trapped, and now the sensation was even worse. There was not enough air, and the walls were inching inward, closing in with each pulse of my heart. I had tried to sound hopeful, but it was only an act, and I had fooled no one, not even myself.

  The feeling I had was beyond any human sense of being penned in. It was beyond the suffocation imprisonment would cause a human captive.
This was a cringing deep within me, a seething in my blood. We had been there less than an hour, and already I felt as though I had never seen another room, except in long-past dreams.

  I recognized the way Johanna was waiting, her stillness. I had seen it in airports, in the attitude of a dog in a traveling cage, and at the zoo, animals condemned to an endless, if imperial, drowse.

  I struck the wall with my fist. Solid, impervious plaster met me. I should have run away when I was still free, under the sky. Remember sky? I mocked myself. Remember grass? Look at this place—this is where I had brought us. “Is this,” I asked, “how we’re going to spend the rest of our lives?” It was my fault. Johanna would still be running, if not for me.

  Her voice quieted me. “We know how to wait,” she said. It was a simple statement, but she made it to remind me that our kind was patient, our kind knew how to flee by staying still.

  We could wait. We could do anything. I drew a deep breath, and made the room mine. I could not run. I would wait. It was simple.

  But Johanna also meant that she and I were still special creatures. I was not so sure. Would I be able, when the need came, to become my night self, or had I forgotten how to do that, mislaid that ability, a man stricken with a profound sort of impotence?

  A faraway step sounded through the heavy door. A key chimed, a bolt snapped. I held my breath, ready to fight for my life. The nurse wrestled the door open. Dr. Page entered, carrying a tape recorder, holding it in his hand like a prison chaplain’s Bible.

  He was thinner than he had been earlier, with that sudden lean look of someone who has had bad news. His voice had a forced confidence. “I thought,” he said, “that we might feel more comfortable in another room.”

  Page snapped off the tape recorder.

  For three hours I had been talking, and Johanna had by far the most enjoyable time, laughing when I talked about the coyotes, clapping her hands when I described the cougar’s claws. Page often closed his eyes, and seemed relieved when it was time to change tapes.

  Through it all Johanna was patient and kind, and at last I found myself telling it all over, all the things she already knew, for her pleasure, Page nearly forgotten.