The Wolf Path

by Judith Van GIeson

  “Killing?”

  “I didn’t say that. If you have any more questions about this matter, you should talk to them.” The no action alternative in government is always a viable choice. And if that doesn’t work, pass the buck. “Where are they?”

  “They’re in the north-south building on the other side of the U. You know where that is?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Thanks for your time.”

  “You bet,” he answered.

  I wasn’t in the mood to face more bureaucracy or go looking for north-south buildings either so I borrowed Lynette’s phone book, turned to the yellow pages and looked up wrecking yards. Bartel’s truck had to go somewhere and Mickey’s Salvage was obviously the biggest and the best. He had a half-page ad that said, “Cash for wrecked 4 x 4’s and pick-ups. We tow. We also buy junk appliances and water heaters.” It was on Green Street, four blocks down Pomona, three blocks left, two blocks right. I knew that because I looked it up in the map in front of the phone book.

  “You have a nice day,” Lynette said as I handed her back the book.

  “You bet,” I said.

  Mickey’s was on the seedy side of town where the cheap motels and the X-rated bookstores hang out. It was surrounded by a chain-link fence so high that even a wolf wouldn’t try to leap over it, but what Mickey was trying to protect was a mystery to me. If he had anything worth stealing I didn’t see it. Mickey inhabited a shack in the middle of a field that sprouted 4 x 4s, pickups, junked appliances and broken water heaters, the detritus of home life, road life and Saturday night drunks. A German shepherd snarled and flashed its fangs at me from the end of a chain which I hoped was more dependable than Juan Sololobo’s had been. It put on a fierce display of vicious, neurotic, inbred, human-trained canine behavior. Dogs ought to have better things to do than growl at people and guard junk, but that’s exactly what this one seemed to enjoy.

  “Woof,” I said.

  The shepherd barked back, bringing Mickey to the door with a can of Coors in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Here was a man who had the courage to be upfront about his bad habits in a health-obsessed world, but maybe that part of the world hadn’t made its way to Mickey’s shack yet. He wore jeans and a T-shirt with the sleeves rolled up. The beers had gone to his belly and the cigarettes to his fuzzy nicotine-yellowed teeth, the sight of which made me run my tongue quickly over my own. He gave me a what are you doing here stare. I don’t suppose a whole lot of women showed up at Mickey’s door alone. The ones that did probably weren’t looking for information.

  “Shut up, Willie,” he said, sipping from the Coors.

  “I’m looking for Bob Bartel’s truck,” said I.

  “Why’s that?”

  Even if you’ve rehearsed beforehand you never know for sure what you’re going to say until you say it. Everybody has to lie now and then, if only to stay in touch with their fellow man, but it’s not the kind of thing you’d want to think about beforehand. I used the old sister routine. Sisters take the heat for a lot in this world. “I’m Erin Bartel’s sister from Albuquerque,” I said. “She asked me to stop by and take a look at the truck, see if there were any personal belongings the sheriff might have missed.”

  “That’s not a truck you’re gonna want to be looking at.”

  “I know but she asked me.” I did my best to get into pleading, miserable woman voice.

  Mickey drew on his cigarette, thought it over. You can still get a conditioned response if you’re willing to take the pathetic female road. The trouble is you can never tell whether that response will be pity or attack. I’d found a soft spot in Mickey’s plugged-artery heart, however. “Okay. You walk down that aisle there to the left and when you get to the end you’ll see it, but you can’t take anything out without asking me. So if you see anything you want, you come back here and I’ll see what I can do about it.”

  “All right,” I said.

  He went back into his shack, shut the door and turned the country music up. Willie’s vicious stare told me that he wished it was midnight and it was just him and me alone in the junk.

  “Tough break, doggie,” I said, circling around the end of his chain. He lifted his lip and bared a fang, one of his favorite expressions. Willie had come a long way from his species-wary wolf beginnings, had become exactly what man had trained him to be—a weapon, no more afraid of me than a speeding bullet would be.

  I walked down the junker road past the demolished pickups and 4 x 4s, piles of broken dreams and twisted metal. The broken dream home appliances were at the far end of the lot. Wrecked vehicles had to go somewhere and get dismantled, too, but why would anybody want to use a part from a car that somebody else had died or been maimed in? But if people are willing to put somebody else’s heart or lung in their body, you couldn’t get too worked up about a used fuel pump. I passed a Blazer whose engine had gotten pushed into the front seat, a Ford pickup that had rolled over, squashed the roof and flattened the metal to the steering wheel. Anyone stuck in that cab would have been dog food. I saw a windshield with a neat hole where a head had poked through. For my next car I planned to buy a tank.

  Eventually I found Bob Bartel’s truck. It was the only vehicle in the lot with two crushed Yagi antennas on top and a government seal on the door of the cab. The front end was flattened as if it had landed on a boulder and bounced off. The shatterproof glass in the windows was cracked and webbed like the floor of Death Valley in summer. I told myself that Bartel was dead hours before the truck left the road, but it didn’t help. I avoided the cab; I wouldn’t even want to imagine what it smelled like after days in the sun. What I was looking for wasn’t there anyway. I checked the bed of the truck. If Bartel had put the calf remains in here, there should have been blood, hair, bones, something left, even if the carcass had fallen out when the truck went over the embankment. The bed was dented but empty and clean. I looked at the wheels next, noticing the chevron pattern of the tread. Dried mud stuck deep in the cleats of the tires and hung thickly on the casings in grotesque lumps like elephantiasis tumors.

  Willie started hyperventilating again as I neared the only way out, the shed. Mickey came to the door, put his fingers to his fuzzy teeth and whistled him quiet. “Find anything?” he asked.

  “Maybe,” I said.

  13

  AS I HEADED back to Roaring Falls Ranch on I-10 I passed a car doing the speed limit and then another and one after that. In fact there was a whole series of cars, trucks and motorcycles ahead of me evenly spaced like stepping-stones of GM, Chrysler and Harley. No one goes 65 miles an hour in a 65-m.p.h. zone, not for long anyway, unless a cop is watching or they’re in a funeral procession. I took a look at my rearview mirror; the heat made the headlights behind me shimmer like the eyes of a herd. I saw enough vehicles I knew in the procession—Jayne’s truck, Ohweiler’s police-mobile—to convince me that this was Bob Bartel’s funeral. I cut into line, turned my lights on, too, and followed the others to the cemetery, which was at the end of a dirt road on top of a windswept hill planted with white wooden crosses and cement tree-trunk gravestones whose arms had been cut off. It was a desolate place where only plastic flowers bloomed, brighter than real in the August sun.

  I parked the Nissan, turned off the lights and followed everybody else up the hill. A sheltering tent had been put up near the grave site with rows of metal chairs facing the coffin. I hadn’t been invited but that’s never stopped me from going anywhere before. Besides, as this was a religious occasion, I recalled what the sign in the Santa Fe Unitarian Church parking lot says: TRESPASSERS WILL BE FORGIVEN. My instinctive curiosity aside, I had a legitimate reason to be there—to mourn Bob Bartel.

  The shade under the tent felt cool as water when I walked into it. As I sat down on one of the metal chairs I thanked God it hadn’t been waiting in the hot sun. That was about all I had to say to Him.

  I’ve been to enough funerals where the minister didn’t know the deceased well enough to pronounce his or her name so
I listened to make sure this one got it right. You’d expect that much in Soledad, where everybody knew everything there was to know about everybody else. After I heard it—Robert Evan Bartel—I tuned out while the minister said the rest of his piece. Was he Baptist? Presbyterian? Congregationalist? Mattered not to me. I thought my own animistic thoughts about Bob Bartel, wondered if his soul was wandering around the Sierra Oscura, whether it was alone or not. Who knows what souls do or whether they communicate with each other? Whenever you think of the dead as having a presence they’re always watching over what’s left behind, but if they can see, why can’t they smell, hear, touch, taste? That’s how I thought of Bob Bartel’s soul, anyway, following the sensory path, hearing clouds as they passed in the sky, touching stones with the pads of his feet, sniffing scent markers, drinking the taste of fresh, hot blood; following the path with heart, the wary path, the wolf path. Although it’s more likely souls—if there are souls—would follow the extrasensory path, using powers about which we haven’t a clue. It was something you might ponder if you had a poet’s mind, study if you had a scientific mind, dismiss if you had a legal mind.

  The service was short and my reverie was interrupted by the clattering of chairs as everybody stood up. The time had come to put the body in the ground. If it had been up to me I would have scattered the ashes to the Sierra Oscura. The family stepped to the grave and Bartel’s daughter, a long-legged antelope of a girl, dropped a flower on top of the coffin. His son held onto his mother and tried not to cry. It was an ashes to ashes, dust to dust burial and some might find it comforting but it’s not how a child would like to think of a father, in a box in the ground. They’d like even less to think that a murderer had put him there. Most people would want to know, would have to know, who did it, if only so they could have the dubious satisfaction of seeing justice administered.

  What I knew, but the children most likely did not, is that in the majority of cases the victim knows the murderer, especially in rural areas. It was a detail well known to law enforcement.

  I also knew that if Bartel, a federal employee, had been out in the field doing his job when he was shot, his murder would be a federal crime. If he wasn’t doing his job and wasn’t on federal land, it would be a state crime. It might cause some quibbling over jurisdiction if the FBI chose to get involved. On the other hand they might just leave it up to local law enforcement. There were probably more than enough federal crimes to keep the feds occupied this close to the border.

  In any case, the first suspect everyone always looks to is the spouse. Bartel’s wife was a pale, grief-shattered woman who hugged her children and, even to my suspicious eye, didn’t look like she’d be capable of murder. Besides, this crime didn’t have a domestic MO. Domestic violence is angry and messy and occurs in or near the house. The neighbors hear screaming; there’s blood all over the place. A crime of passion is usually a spontaneous gesture and wives tend not to have accomplices. Bartel’s murder had been neater and more calculated and Erin Bartel couldn’t have called Ohweiler at 8 and gotten the truck off the road at 1:30 without an accomplice. Once she called Ohweiler everybody in Soledad would be on her doorstep wanting to know what was going on. For the moment, anyway, I ruled her out. That only left everyone else I knew in Soledad and a lot of people I didn’t.

  The ones I knew were all here: Norman Alexander, Buddy Ohles, Frank Boyd, Sheriff Ohweiler, Don and Perla Phillips, Jayne Brown, Charlie Clark. After the ceremony they all hung around comforting each other and talking over what had happened. I started walking down the hill alone but Charlie Clark caught up to me. His unruly mop flopped with every move he made, the gold frames of his granny glasses glittered in the sun. He was wearing jeans, running shoes and a blue T-shirt with piercing yellow eyes that said SAVE THE LOBO. It wasn’t exactly funeral attire, but it made the point. “Nice shirt,” I said.

  “Thanks,” Charlie replied. “You know what they’re saying around Soledad?”

  “Probably.”

  “Juan Sololobo shot Bob Bartel.”

  “Talk is cheap,” said I.

  “Not when lawyers are doing the talking.”

  “That depends on the lawyer. Life seems cheap in Soledad too.”

  “Especially when it’s animal life,” Charlie said. He nodded toward Buddy Ohles trotting down the hill behind us in hot pursuit of someone. Buddy was wearing a black polyester Western suit with embroidered arrows and silver tips on the collar from Miller’s Outpost I’d say, or his big brother. He was scrawny, there was no doubt about it, and the suit sagged on him like skin on a fruit that had had all the juice squeezed out. Maybe he’d been spending too much time in the sun with his cowboy hat off.

  “Is that Buddy?” Charlie peered up close when he reached us. “You were camouflaged so good I didn’t know it was you.”

  “You keep out of this, wolf boy, she’s the one I want to talk to.”

  “Shoot,” I said.

  “You got no right accusing me of killing nobody. I heard you told Frank Boyd that Bob Bartel caught me tracking a mountain lion and that I killed him.” News traveled fast in Soledad. In a couple of hours it had flushed Buddy Ohles out of the trees faster than a helicopter spraying malathion.

  “I didn’t tell Frank Boyd anything.”

  “That’s the kind of fool idea a city dweller and a wolf lover would come up with. You know if wolves ate rubber and you got up and found the tires eaten off of your cars in the morning you can bet you city dwellers wouldn’t be mouthin’ off about bringing ’em back. And there wouldn’t be no goddamn lawyers getting paid to represent the wolf lovers either.”

  “That’s the kind of thinking that’s made America great,” Charlie said. “And just about what I’d expect from the ADC. In addition to the coyotes you guys slaughtered last year, you killed 1,200 bobcats, 7,000 red foxes, 200 black bears, 237 cougars, 80 timber wolves and 4.6 million birds and you spent 38 million of our tax dollars doing it. You know it would only cost half a million dollars a year to reintroduce the lobo, less than one and a half percent of what the ADC spends on killing.”

  “That critter ain’t worth one wooden nickel of my money,” said Buddy. “A wolf ain’t nothing but a dog on steroids anyway. Who else but you gives a damn if it becomes distinct?”

  “You mean extinct?” asked Charlie.

  “Extinct, distinct, it all stinks if you ask me.” Buddy spat a brown goober at the ground. Having gotten rid of the excess tobacco he went back to expectorating words. “And if you think I killed Bob Bartel, you’d better think again,” he barked at me. “I’ve known him ever since grammar school. I never agreed with him about anything, and if I’da wanted to kill him I woulda done it a long time ago. Your boy Juan whatsits killed Bartel. He’s got the antihunt, antikill, anti-American ethnic that’s ruining this country and he did it because Bartel took his wolf. Sometimes you have to get down off your horse and tell the people how the cow ate the cabbage so I’m gonna lay it out for ya. A wolf is an outlaw, see, and wolf lovers got no respect for the law either. We don’t need wolves down here no more than we needed the dinosaurs or you goddamn lawyers. We spent a lot of money getting rid of lawlessness in this country and now you think you’re gonna bring it back. Well, it ain’t gonna happen in Soledad County.”

  “I’ll remember that,” I said.

  “You’d better.”

  He walked to the bottom of the hill, got into a pickup with a rifle balanced across the back window, put his foot to the pedal, the rubber to the road and drove away. “Asshole,” Charlie said. He squinted in the sun, poked the dirt with his running shoe. “What are you doing this afternoon? I’d like to show you some of my Soledad County.”

  “Could that include the falls?”

  “Sure. I used to go up there all the time when I was a kid.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  Nobody got on Jayne’s property without her permission, or so she’d said. I was a house guest, which entitled me to permission. As for Charlie, well, he�
��d be my guest. Jayne was leaning on her truck deep in conversation with Norm Alexander when we left, me in the Nissan, Charlie on his motorcycle, no helmet. Either Charlie would be choking on my road dust or I’d be choking on his. I let him go first; he was unprotected. I’d never wondered why (or even if) Charlie rode a motorcycle but it didn’t take me long to find out once he roared his engine and took off. The bike was loud and fast. Charlie liked the troublemaker image or maybe he just liked the trouble.

  Juan had set up a workbench under the portal and was measuring something when we pulled up. His arms were bare and sweaty and he was wearing one of those belts with hammers hanging out. The carpenter image suited him; it was a more productive way for him to spend his time. There was a plastic gallon jug on the table next to him whose label read OZARKA SPRING WATER.

  “Howdy,” he said.

  “Hi,” said I. “You remember Charlie Clark?”

  “You’re the guy with Wolf Alliance, right?”

  “Right,” Charlie said. “That was a fine speech you gave for the wolf the other night. Really fine.”

  “I’m glad somebody dug it. You guys have got your work cut out for you down here. I’ve never seen such pigheaded opposition.”

  “Yeah, we’ve got our John Waynes and our landed aristocracy. The rest of the environmentalists got stalled out, going round and round ordering T-shirts, but we took the initiative, started a lawsuit against the Interior Department and cut through the bullshit. We’re going for it with all the gusto we can muster. The lobo will be back.”

  I’ve seen a lot of lawsuits get mired in bullshit; I hadn’t seen one cut through it yet. But who was I, a cynical lawyer, to disillusion Charlie Clark, who might even be the bright-eyed young environmentalist he pretended to be. I lit a cigarette for the trail and helped myself to a sip of Juan’s water, which was not exactly what it pretended to be, although it was water. OZARKA, the label advertised over a picture of a blue mountain stream. The fine print, however, read, “From Ft. Worth Municipal Water Supply, Ft. Worth, Texas.”