The Wolf Path

by Judith Van GIeson

  “Okay. What time should we leave here?”

  “About 10:30. What’s old Norm been up to anyway?”

  “That’s what we’re going to find out.”

  My next call—one I didn’t want to make—was to the Kid. My glass was empty; I filled it. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to talk to him, I just didn’t like the feeling that I had to check in every time I left town. It was setting a bad precedent. I didn’t like checking in and I didn’t want to know what was going on at his house either. Besides, since we didn’t exactly have a verbal relationship, calling long distance was a waste of money.

  “It’s me,” I said when he answered the phone.

  “Bueno. Where are you, Chiquita?”

  “Singing Arrow.”

  “Where in Singing Arrow?”

  “Motel 6. You want the room number?” The snideness in my voice went right by him.

  “Yeah.”

  “201.”

  “What did you find out today?”

  “That someone was lying.”

  “Who?”

  “Norm Alexander. “

  “The wolf biólogo?”

  “Right.”

  “What was he lying about?”

  “How he got his 5,000 acres in Singing Arrow. He said he inherited it, but I found out he bought it.”

  “When?”

  “March 1987.”

  “Where is it?”

  “The other side of the peaks from Jayne.”

  “What are you doing tomorrow?”

  “Going over to his place to find out why he lied.”

  “Did you call the police?”

  “No.” The Kid didn’t ask but I knew my reasons: Ohweiler wouldn’t believe me, he couldn’t keep his mouth shut, I didn’t trust him, I could do it better myself.

  “Be careful, Chiquita, and call me tomorrow. Okay?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  I finished my tequila and went out to look for something to eat. A squashed tarantula was waiting for me on the concrete landing, a life of searching, crawling, looking for something to screw and eat brought to an early end and it could well have been the heel of my running shoe that did it. “Now how could somebody kill something as beautiful as that?” I heard Bob Bartel say.

  “By not looking where they’re going,” I replied.

  18

  IN THE MORNING I called Anna. “Hamel and Harrison,” she answered, popping her gum in my ear.

  “Hamel,” I said.

  “She’s out of town. You wanna leave a message?”

  “This is Hamel.”

  “Oh,” she replied, “what’s up?”

  “I’m going to give you the number of Hardee’s in Soledad. Call them at noon, ask to speak to Norman Alexander, tell him I had car trouble on the way down and I am going to be around forty-five minutes late.” I was wondering how long Norm would be willing to wait, at least forty-five minutes, I thought. He’d want to eat anyway while he was there. “And then at quarter to one call again and tell him I’m on my way.” I gave her the number.

  “But I’ll be out to lunch then.”

  “No, you won’t.”

  “But…”

  “Time is of the essence, Anna. This has to be done exactly when I say.”

  “Oh, all right,” she answered. “What’ll I say is wrong with your car?”

  “Vapor lock.”

  ******

  I had a cup of coffee and a doughnut compliments of Motel 6 in their office while I waited for Charlie Clark. Clarice was as solid, middle-aged, middle American and comfortable in the morning as she’d been at night. No need to ask if she’d slept well. I watched the big sky from her window. It wasn’t blue today, it was watercolor gray. There were paintbrush streaks where the clouds met and ran together. In the Soledads it was already raining, closing over the peaks like a gray curtain. It didn’t bode well for Charlie’s motorcycle. He pulled in promptly at 10:30 by the office clock, giving this the illusion of being a well-planned action and stirring up the gravel in the parking lot. I finished up my coffee and went outside to meet him. He was wearing a black leather jacket, jeans, black motorcycle boots. His helmet kept his blond mop pressed close to his head and the visor hid his face. He could have been any old motorcycle rider on any old motorcycle until he opened the jacket (it was at least 95 degrees) and exposed the yellow eyes of his SAVE THE LOBO T.

  “You didn’t pass Norm Alexander coming over the mountain, I hope,” I said.

  “Nope,” he replied. “What do you think you’re going to find at his place anyway?”

  My eyes met the yellow eyes on his T. “You’ll see.” He handed me the extra helmet. I fit it over my head and pulled down the visor, which made it look like five o’clock in the morning or nine at night. “How do people see in these things anyway?” I asked. “You’d have to want to hide pretty badly to wear a visor at night.”

  “You get used to it,” he said. “Just like Ray-Bans.”

  Not exactly. Ray-Bans made me feel mysterious; the Darth Vader visor made me feel invisible. I could understand how people might be tempted to commit felonies under the cover of the black plastic. The invisibility was just an illusion, however. In fact, you were probably more striking and more visible in this getup, but you weren’t you. A raindrop landed splat on my visor.

  “Uh oh,” said Charlie. “It wasn’t supposed to rain until afternoon.”

  “Blame Granddaddy Phillips. He’s been hanging in there and praying for rain.”

  “Well, let’s get over there before it gets any worse.”

  I climbed on the back of the motorcycle, put my arms around Charlie’s waist and hung on. It seemed to me he gunned the engine and spun gravel more than was absolutely necessary, enough to make Clarice come to the window and grimace. We weren’t invisible to her. In fact, we looked like the kind of people she wouldn’t wish a nice day. The rain held its breath for a while and Route 30 stayed dry. We sped down the road, two black specks camouflaged on the black macadam like a mantis shaking on a leaf. Charlie pulled off at a dirt road that headed straight as an arrow for the backside of the peaks. There was a rocky streambed with a couple of inches of water in it that paralleled the road down the mountain. Cottonwoods grew in a level spot near the intersection. Charlie drove into the grove and we got off and concealed the motorcycle behind a large trunk. I took off the helmet and looked for daylight, but the day had gotten even darker.

  “This is a pristine riparian area,” Charlie said. “Look how clear the stream is. I bet you could drink from it. I’ll tell you one thing you’re not going to find at Norm’s—cows. If there were cattle grazing up there this little stream would be full of mud and giardia. If the storm continues it’ll really get cranked up.”

  “I hear a car.” I said, ducking behind a cottonwood.

  Charlie ducked behind another tree and looked at his watch. “Right on time,” he said.

  “You were expecting Norm Alexander to be late?” I asked.

  Norm’s brown truck with the covered bed sped down the bumpy dirt road, stopped, flashed a directional signal and turned left on Route 30.

  “Let’s go,” said Charlie, his eyes bright with the rush of a semiplanned action.

  “His place is about five miles from here,” I said. I’d looked at the map.

  “Yeah.”

  “If it rains hard the road will turn to mud.”

  “I can make it,” Charlie said, “but we’ll leave tracks.”

  “I know.”

  “How long do we have?”

  “Around two hours.”

  “If we walk, we’re gonna leave tracks, too, two of them, and it will cut deep into our time.”

  By the time Norm got back here he’d probably have figured out what I was up to anyway. I just didn’t want him to catch me doing it. “Okay,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  About a mile down the road the stream was replaced by a concrete diversion channel that directed the mountain runoff. Several bumpy mile
s later we came to a fence with a chain-link gate tightly padlocked shut.

  “The bike stops here,” Charlie said. “I can get us over the fence, but not the Harley.” He pulled it off the road and laid it down on the ground, half-hiding it in a ditch behind a large yucca. We left our helmets and Charlie’s jacket with the bike.

  “What now?” I asked.

  “We climb over.”

  “Huh?”

  “Trust me.” He showed me how to stick one toe then the other into the links and when I got stalled out near the top he gave me a push. Thunder grumbled and lightning danced where the peaks had been before the clouds dropped and covered them up. The wind picked up like it always does when there’s a storm coming. Charlie jumped from the top of the gate to the ground, I followed. The rain started to fall, not heavy, but steady and determined.

  “Shit,” I said.

  “Hang in there and pray for sun,” said Charlie. He took off his glasses and wiped away the rain. His eyes were bright, his curls were getting plastered to his head. Charlie was in his element, breaking the law and trespassing in what I hoped would be a meaningful action. It only takes a few minutes for dust to turn to mud and before long it was clinging to our treads and we were leaving two sets of running-shoe tracks in the road.

  The thunder and lightning skittered along the Soledads’ backbone and the rain kept up a steady pace, enough to keep us wet, but not enough to keep us from going where we were headed. The water babbled as it bounced through the diversion channel. Charlie was as alert as a commando, watching, listening. I kept my attention focused on putting one foot ahead of the other, conserving energy. It was a steep, four-wheel-drive, breath-robbing climb. There wasn’t much to see but Charlie’s bright blue SAVE THE LOBO shirt, the mud at my feet, flashes of lightning and an occasional yucca standing like a wary sentinel beside the road.

  As the rain dripped down my neck, I hung in there and prayed for sun: hot sun, dry sun, silent sun, burning sun, the fire around which we dance. I thought about the sun that follows the storm, turns puddles to steam and steam to mist, sun that comes in through the gap in my drapes, plays across the wall and the Kid’s skin. Sun that makes the geranium bloom in its pot, that turns your smiles to old leather. Sun that tans your thighs and warms your back, that makes the day Ray-Ban bright and the shadows velvet dark, that turns the sky to peach and mauve and lavender. Sun that warms, burns, sizzles, melts. Sun that ripens corn, grass, tomatoes. Sun that turns red chiles red and green chiles green.

  Charlie, who had gotten about fifty feet ahead of me, stopped suddenly at a bend in the road, motioned me forward with one hand and sshhed me with the other. It seemed overly dramatic to me, but if you can’t be dramatic in an electrical storm when you’re on an eco-mission, when can you? I hurried up to him, but what was the point in being quiet? The runoff rushed through the diversion channel gossiping and bitching all the while. The rain pattered against the rocks and the cactus, the thunder grumbled. We were immersed in a rushing, whooshing environment of water that, no matter what, says what it wants to say and gets where it wants to go. Just as I reached Charlie, I saw a flash of extraterrestrial brilliance and a lightning bolt plunged into the ground not fifty feet away, leaving behind it the spine-tingling smell of ozone. A fraction of a second later—too close to measure—I heard an enormous crack of thunder that jolted us off the ground. There’s nothing like the adrenaline rush of a thunder and lightning storm. I started to run—it was an automatic reflex—but Charlie grabbed me by the elbow.

  “Wait,” he said, “look.” Around the bend Norm’s house was visible nestled into the rocky foothills. The house wasn’t much, a small, dark cabin with a phone line that connected it to the rest of the world. It must have cost a bundle to run a phone line up here and I had to wonder why a man who liked to be alone so much would bother. The house looked buttoned tight. There were no vehicles visible and no sign that anyone was around. Behind the cabin was a medium-sized barn with miles of chain-link fence connected to the far side of it. About a quarter of a mile past the barn, deeper into the foothills, I saw more chain-link fence tucked between some boulders. The diversion channel came off the peaks in a straight line. We climbed up to the barn and saw that the chain-link fence made long runways, fenced over the top so even the most agile animal couldn’t leap out or in. The runways led like a kennel into the barn. Paths had been worn from one end of the runways to the other by steady, relentless pacing.

  Charlie stopped and the yellow eyes on his T-shirt peered through the chain-link fence. I wondered what the smell of ozone and the sound of thunder would do to a wolf’s highly acute sense of smell and hearing. Send it running to its den for shelter? We stood still for a few minutes listening to the rain pouring off the mountain, smelling a ripe animal smell, looking into the dark hole where the runway entered the barn. Yellow eyes appeared at the door, hesitated and were followed by a wolf, a lobo to be exact. I recognized him, having recently seen his compadres at the Rio Grande Zoo. He was coyote brown with white on his face and feet and was shedding his thick fur in large clumps. His neck fur did not piloerect in fear or threat. His ears were alert and pointed. His eyes drew mine like a magnet and bore straight into them in a way that dog or human eyes never did. They were smart, intense, wild animal eyes, but this animal had been imprinted by humans. He was cautious and curious but not frightened. He stepped out of the dark doorway a few feet into the pen and stared at us.

  “Holy shit,” said Charlie. “That’s a lobo. Where the hell did Norm Alexander get a lobo?”

  “Stole it from the Rio Grande Zoo,” I said.

  “It was Norm Alexander?” Charlie was incredulous. “And everybody wanted to blame me. They said I stole the lobos to make a statement, that I took them to Mexico and set them free. Straight-arrow scientist Norm Alexander. Who would have suspected him?” He shook his head, but his curls remained plastered in place.

  “It had to be Norm,” I said. “The wolves were stolen soon after he bought this property, when they were old enough to take from the mother. Who else outside the government knows how to care for and raise young wolves?” It wasn’t entirely a rhetorical question, but Charlie didn’t answer it.

  “He’s keeping this one alive, but I wouldn’t say he was caring for it,” Charlie said. “What kind of an environment is this for a wolf, chained up in a pen all alone all day? It’s an existence, not a life. It can’t hunt, it can’t run, it can’t get close to other wolves.” Charlie was looking for an argument, but I wasn’t the one to give it to him.

  “If we look around here we’ll probably find a radio collar with the signal that Bob Bartel followed over the mountain,” I said.

  Charlie’s imagination led him quickly to the next likely step. “Norm killed Bartel? Jesus.” The caution of scientists makes people think they’re incapable of rash acts. The rashness of radical environmentalists like Charlie makes people think they’re incapable of cautious acts. But any lawyer learns quickly how contradictory human nature is. “At least no one tried to blame that on me yet. You know wolves howl and make a lot of noise,” Charlie said. “It’s funny nobody caught on to what he was doing before now.”

  “Ernesto Sandoval heard something.”

  “Wait a minute, look at that. See where the fur’s been cut away beneath that lobo’s neck?” Charlie stepped forward a few feet toward the lobo, the lobo stepped a few feet back. “I bet Norm cut the vocal cords so it couldn’t howl. Just another scientific experiment to him.” Charlie began making wolf sounds, barking and howling. The wolf stared back and kept his silence. Suddenly Charlie took a pen from his pocket, stuck it between his fingers and jabbed his hand toward the wolf, which quickly jumped away. “See that? He thinks I’m going to hit him with a needle. Norm’s probably tranquilized that lobo so often he’s turned its brain to mush.”

  “He claims tranquilizing doesn’t hurt them.”

  “The fuck it doesn’t. Would you like to be knocked down and knocked out and come to in a
different place not knowing what hit you? That’s what I hate about science and technology—it’s so intrusive and arrogant. It makes me wish I was studying something else. All the scientist cares about is doing his studies, he doesn’t give a damn about the animal. The trouble with scientists is that they can never leave anything alone.”

  “It’s the trouble with humans,” I said.

  The noise brought two more curious lobos out of the barn. All of them were silent, none of them wore radio collars.

  “I bet he’s running a breeding farm here, a breeding farm for lobos,” Charlie said. “You know what I’d like to do? I’d like to set these guys free.”

  “Don’t,” I said. “He’s imprinted these wolves to tolerate humans. What do you think their lives will be worth in Soledad County?”

  “What do you think their lives are worth now?”

  “At least they’re alive and they have the possibility of getting a better arrangement. Release them here and they’re dead meat. Come on, we’ve got more things to look at.”

  “Like what?”

  “The other chain-link fence, the cabin.” The thunder and lightning were heading south, the rain letting up. Charlie followed me to the cabin. We climbed the steps onto a small, dark porch and tried the door. It wasn’t locked. Norm, apparently, hadn’t figured anyone would get this far or if anyone did a lock wouldn’t do any good. I took one look at the spotless floors and decided we’d better leave our shoes on the doorstep. The tiny cabin consisted of a living room, a kitchen, a bedroom, a bath and another room which appeared to be control central. Five rooms and all of them would have fit into a good-sized one-bedroom apartment. The whole place was anal compulsive, white glove neat, so neat that it made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Every object in the living room was squared off and free of dust. The books on the shelves were alphabetically arranged by author. There were no overflowing ashtrays or half-full glasses lying around this house. Every dish was put away in the kitchen, the bath towels were folded on their rack, the bed was made up so tight you could have bounced a quarter on the bedspread. Norm’s white Jockeys were folded carefully in his bureau, his socks arranged by color: blue, black, brown. In the closet I found jeans, shirts, one suit, hiking boots with no mud in the cleats, a down parka, but no black leather jacket, helmet or high-powered rifle either. In a place as tidy and minimalist as this, hiding places were few. We checked them all, ending up in control central, which had a wall of dials, tapes, graphs. On the worktable we saw an Apple computer, a receiver and a pair of headphones. The unanswered questions were, where was the transmitter and where was the physical evidence?