Saint Peter’s Wolf

by Michael Cadnum

  Perhaps Zinser was right. They had wanted to escape.

  “I’m not worried about you, really,” he was saying. “You two look … different. You look really terrific. I mean, you both always looked fine, but now you look beautiful. Exercise, I suppose. You go out running. Take vitamins, stuff like that.”

  Yes, I allowed. We go out running.

  “I’m not worried about you,” he repeated.

  “Why ever should you be?” Johanna asked.

  He did not answer at once. “You know what else the cops told me?” He shook his head. “They predicted that you’d pay me a visit. They knew it. I’m supposed to call them the moment you show up.”

  “You should then,” said Johanna softly. “Perhaps they want to interview us about the fangs.”

  “You’re daring me to call them.” He said this with a smile, but he was challenging Johanna, both of us.

  “Why shouldn’t you?” Johanna said, but her meaning was clear: don’t call.

  He studied her, and then took a long look at me, and I saw us as he must have—two healthy, athletic people, full of life. He smiled, and I wondered at that moment what he knew, or what he believed. His eyes were thoughtful and alive, and he knew that there was something we were not telling. But he could not sense any danger in us, or any harm.

  “You two,” he said. “You two would tell me, wouldn’t you, if I should be worried?”

  “Of course we would,” said Johanna, and her voice was so soothing that I saw it clearly: worry was useless.

  He stretched a hand to the telephone on his desk, and for a moment the hand nearly picked up the receiver. Zinser trusted us, but his fingers were not so sure.

  No, I thought to him. Don’t call them. Everything is fine, and the day is peaceful, and we are as full of life as we seem to be.

  “I hate talking to cops,” he said. “It’s not that they’re stupid, exactly. It’s just that they are so interested in property damage and procedure that they seem stupid.”

  He gave the phone a pat and withdrew his hand. “I’ll call them,” he said. “Don’t worry about that. I’ll call them later, when I feel like it.”

  Forty-Seven

  The centaur was not a man joined to the body of a horse. He was a man made entire, complete, mingled with the part of himself that gave him his power, his beast part, the part that was of the earth. No wonder they were such teachers, and no wonder the storied angels arrive winged. They tell the truth because they hover halfway between human speech and something uncanny—the ever-present power in the air.

  We had to go. The streets and the buildings were dissolving around us. We had to run.

  But there was one more thing I had to do, one more place I had to be. We were almost there, the intersections and side streets passing easily under our feet.

  With every step was the thought: be quick. Be quick. Hurry, we’re running out of time. And a similar, shadow thought, the knowledge that the story that told our lives was beyond our control. The pages were turning. If we were to step into the lance of a bullet, that cartridge and that sniper’s eye were already prepared for us.

  She strode beside me, and told me something like a fable, a story which I let captivate me and yet which I knew was, perhaps, entirely make-believe. She told me the new chapters, the invisible ones that were yet to take place. She had a car in another rented garage, she said. She had money, and bank accounts in other cities, under other names. All we had to do was survive.

  She took my arm as we waited for a stream of traffic to pass, and her grip was strong. “All it takes, Benjamin,” she said, “is a little faith.”

  I knew what she was not saying: and even then we might not make it. The world in its grinding labor cared nothing for faith. That was, in a way, the beauty of our lives. This could be our last morning.

  We could not live forever. I could almost believe that we would survive for a few more days, a few more weeks, or even longer, perhaps much longer. I let the story take me in, the old story of the wolves running in the night, unhurt and free under the stars.

  An old dog, a dog so white and stiff he was tight with pain, coughed down steps to reach me. He snouted my hand, and as I knelt I looked into his eyes. One eye was milky. He touched his snout to my nose.

  He could tell. He pushed himself deeper into my hands. My touch made him tremble, and then frisk away, wanting me to chase him—wanting to play.

  My heart beat with the steadiness of a winged creature, spreading and gathering. I was not a man, now, and I was not a wolf. I was one of those other creatures, the beings of legend, who arrive with the amazing, miraculous news, and vanish.

  Each window glistened with reflected light. Each cough, each human sibilant made me sense how easy it would be to kill us, and without knowing what I was doing I found myself sensing the wind, and attempting to read the warnings it brought.

  This was danger as animals know it: not an emergency that flares, and fades, but the way life is, each heartbeat, each breath. Each tree could hide a figure, a man who could take one half step and kill us. The sunlight made us easy targets. Our shadows were black as they spilled over the roots of trees, and across the sidewalk. This was not danger. This was the truth.

  Johanna never questioned me. She followed, running beside me, and I felt that she had expected this, as she had expected the fangs to vanish. She knew, and I was still learning.

  Now, despite my desire to be where I was, I felt my lungs tighten. Each passing car seemed to slow, its interior dark with too many figures. Engines made a brazen chuckle. Too many machines. Too many faraway male voices, radios and delivery men, and those other men, the ones we would never see, the ones with rifles, snipers closing one eye to draw a bead. We were without cover, exposed on the sidewalk in the wind.

  Yet what continued to amaze me was not my fear, but how little fear there really was. Perhaps I had as much faith as I needed, as much faith as a seed needs, fallen upon dirt.

  “I’ll wait here,” she said.

  It was a bottlebrush plant. It shielded her from the street, and the plant carried a few meager remains of its blossoms. I had, though, the worst feeling, standing there, that I would never speak to her again.

  The plant was not enough cover. Surely the police, the government agents, whoever they were, would stake out this school, thinking that Carliss was one of several people I would want to see.

  Come with me, I thought to her. We can both see Carliss.

  “Go on, Benjamin.”

  We both knew. This was something I needed to do alone, a farewell I had to make to this child who had been, for a time, my son.

  Guard her, stems and leaves. Protect her, empty air, I prayed. Keep her safe.

  Even the sparrows paused in my shadow, as though that dark, spilled figure gave them shelter, and gave them warmth. I stood with one hand on a chain-link fence. Beyond this steel netting, children played on a green field. They kicked a black and white ball, a ball spinning so rapidly as they thumped into it that the black spots were blurs.

  If they were watching, where would they be hiding, I asked myself. The answer was easy. They could be anywhere. Far off, across the playing field, was a street empty of traffic. At the edge of the field to my right was a tangle of eucalyptus, and to my left, far away enough to look half-submerged, were the stucco buildings of the academy.

  I glanced back, and Johanna was waiting, and for a moment I forgot to register her as human, or wolf, but simply: there she was.

  She smiled. Go on. Go on, and don’t worry about me, don’t worry about anything.

  The wet grass squeaked under my shoes. There was no feeling of being constricted by my human form, and no sense of being a diminished, daylight cipher. The smell of the grass was so rich it was like food, the ferment of the old grass in the earth, the freshness of the new. It was good to be what I was. It was good to be a man.

  The children who saw me fell silent. There was something about me that stunned them. Their mouths
fell open, and they did not move.

  He was the last to see me. I called to him, and he turned. Time ceased for him, and for both of us. He stayed as he was, with one hand on his shirt front. He blinked, and took a step forward.

  “I had to see you,” I said, panting up to where he stood.

  When he could move, he took my hand. He had never done such an easy, innocent thing with me before. He sought me to steady himself, and to make sure that I was real.

  For a moment I was unable to speak.

  “We’re moving soon,” Carliss said, his voice strange and small.

  “I know,” I responded. Talk was difficult, and futile, but what else did we have? “Your mother told me.”

  We did not have to tell each other how heavy this news felt.

  “I didn’t know if it was you.” He eyed me, tilting his head to one side. “You look so different.”

  I tried to make a joke of it. “Who else could I be?”

  “You have strange clothes,” he said.

  But that wasn’t what he meant. He meant that I was at once a stranger, and someone he would never forget. I was not the sort of human being he had once known. He had missed me, and now that we were together he did not want to continue his life without me. I had intended to ask after his therapy, and ask how Cherry was doing. But all conversation seemed fake, artificial and unnecessary. I was impatient with this empty talk.

  He meant: stay here. Stay with me.

  It was like the night before, with the porpoises. The other children had gathered around, and I saw myself as they saw me. The sweatshirt was too big, the sweatpants baggy, and yet I sensed their eyes: awe, and delight in me, as though each one felt that they had seen me before, and known me, on television, or even better, in a dream. I was that father, that friend, that hero they had forgotten they had met. And here I was, come back to pay a visit.

  Johanna waited, watching, and I sensed her thought: play with them. Play with them like you played last night. We have time for that, Benjamin.

  One of the children gave me the ball, and I looked down at it, this plump orb stained with grass. I don’t know why I tossed the ball a few times, and then let it fall. It was the only thing to do, the only right thing, and I could sense the children’s wonderment. What is this visitor, this man so full of life, about to do?

  The ball fell, and I kicked it. I did not simply propel it with my foot. I kicked it straight up into the air, so high it shrank to a dot, and then to a mere thought. When it was a grain of pollen, a speck that might not be there at all, we all sensed it slowing down, gradually slowing its climb, and then we could sense, like wondering if a distant cry is a word, that the ball was about to return.

  Return: that one thing we pray for more than any other. That breath return to the lungs, and the worker to his home at night.

  None of us moved. None of us could do anything but watch, and yet I had a moment in which I could gaze at Carliss, and what I saw there was more than joy. He seemed to see the sky for the first time.

  It did not take long. The ball came into focus, spinning slowly, whistling airily, a noise like a long sigh. I caught it in my arms.

  “Do it again,” the children cried. “Kick it again!”

  “Shall I?” I asked Carliss. “Shall I kick it again?”

  He blinked.

  “One more time,” I added. “And then.…” I could barely complete the thought. “And then I have to go.”

  They had been waiting and now they were here. A gray car swerved to a stop in the distance. Another car joined it, and doors jerked open, spilling gray-suited figures. One of the distant men spoke into a radio, like a man talking to his fist. Another felt toward his hip to reassure himself that his pistol was still there. The children could not see them, these men spreading out, stepping deliberately, hoping that I had not seen them.

  Then their path was deflected. They began to trot, running like men afraid to make a mistake. They were scattering off to my right, hunters intent on something else which had caught their eyes.

  Johanna. She was no longer standing in the safety of the bottlebrush plant. She was standing far off, where a copse of eucalyptus bordered the playing field. Her sole, blond human figure was a beacon.

  Here I am, she said. Come and get me.

  Carliss touched my hand, a touch so much like Johanna’s that I could not move or even speak for a moment. “Yes,” he said.

  He jumped up, high, and cried, “Kick it again,” and all the children cheered.

  And so I kicked it, so far into the sky that it vanished.

  As I ran, I could hear them cheering it. And then I began to really run, covering ground in that stride no human could imagine. My paws barely touched earth as I streaked so fast no merely human vision would see anything but a blur, a half-thought, a creature too quick to be real.

  I bounded the chain-link fence, and was among the eucalyptus when I turned. The ball had gone beyond human sight, and now it was coming back again. They cheered it as it punched the ground, and they hurried to kick the ball themselves, running through the sunlight in the perfect spheres of their lives.

  The men in gray stumbled, groping for their weapons, gasped, out of breath.

  And we ran.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1991 by Michael Cadnum

  Cover design by Kat JK Lee; photograph courtesy of the author

  ISBN: 978-1-5040-2365-8

  Distributed in 2015 by Open Road Distribution

  345 Hudson Street

  New York, NY 10014

  www.openroadmedia.com