The Wolf Path

by Judith Van GIeson

  We traipsed through the living room on our way back out. An Indian throw rug lay in the middle of the floor precisely aligned with the edges of the sofa. It was blood red and pitch black with lightning bolts and swastikas woven into the geometric pattern, and was the only thing that resembled decoration in the spartan cabin. I stopped to look for the black line that leads out of the pattern, the error that Indian weavers put in their rugs so as not to anger the gods by aiming for perfection. The precision with which the rug had been placed, the lack of anything out of place and the total absence of evidence in Norm’s house annoyed me. I felt I’d been put in my sloppy place by his aggressive, scientific neatness. It gave me a powerful desire to light a cigarette and drop some ashes on the floor. I didn’t, but just for the hell of it I gave the rug a kick. It bunched up and slid across the polished floor, revealing the handle to a trapdoor tucked into the floorboards.

  “All right,” said Charlie. He yanked the trapdoor up. I peered over the edge and saw a crawlspace with a dirt floor. I didn’t see anything down there that would trap or bite so I jumped in. It wasn’t quite tall enough to stand up in. I had to hunch over into an old lady hump. A chain dangled from the ceiling and I pulled it, lighting a bare bulb. There wasn’t much down here: dirt floor, wooden beams, a hot water heater and a few boxes in the corner. I looked through the boxes. The first three contained books, charts and graphs. In the fourth I found a motorcycle helmet and a black leather jacket but no rifle. By now Charlie had joined me in the crawlspace.

  “Look at that,” said Charlie, holding up the leather jacket. “Not a bad disguise. Norm can’t drive a motorcycle, so who ever would have suspected it was him in motorcycle gear?”

  The jacket was severely distressed leather, very chic or very old. Old, I decided, knowing Norm, a remnant of the days when he could still handle a motorcycle, the days before he got bit by the wolf.

  “How much time do we have?” I asked Charlie.

  He looked at his watch. “Not much. We should get going. I want to get inside the wolf barn before we go.”

  “Okay, I’m gonna check out the other fence.”

  I put the motorcycle jacket in its box and turned out the light, and we climbed out of the crawlspace. I pushed the rug back in place, struggling mightily to get it as straight as Norm would. We went outside, closed the cabin door, put our running shoes on.

  “I’ll meet you back here,” said to Charlie. “Soon.”

  “You got it,” Charlie replied.

  He went back to the wolf barn. I climbed the hill next to the churning diversion channel. Whitewater rapids today, tomorrow the water would be gone, leaving an empty, ugly ditch. As I climbed up to the fence I left footprints all over the place but there was no choice. With the evidence we’d found our presence couldn’t be kept a secret for long anyway. The chain-link fence made a pen tucked behind the boulder, a long narrow one that led up toward the peaks. There was another lobo in it, but this one hadn’t been so imprinted with the people look and smell. It turned and ran when it saw me. I thought it was a female, but it darted away so quickly I couldn’t be sure. It had dug itself a den between two boulders and it disappeared inside. Before it vanished I saw that it had a radio collar attached to its neck. There was a trapdoor into the pen like one a house-trained pet uses to let itself in and out. I gave it a push. The door swung in but it couldn’t swing back out. It made me wonder if there weren’t leg-hold traps around here too.

  The rain had stopped, the clouds were blowing away, the peaks reappearing. I started walking downhill slipping and sliding in the mud, steadying myself with a hand against a boulder. Suddenly there was a loud crack behind me and then another, the sound of gunshots and more intimidating even than thunder. Damn Anna, was my first thought, she’d kept her lunch date after all. While she was eating hers I’d become target practice. My second thought was to run. Like a wolf, I can look back and run if I have to. I slid down the slippery slope as I looked up and saw the person standing on a boulder above and behind me aiming a high-powered rifle at my head. I couldn’t look long, but long enough to see a medium-sized person, wearing jeans, a black leather jacket and a Darth Vader visor. Could it be Charlie Clark? For a terrifying moment I wondered if he hadn’t been what he was pretending to be. But how had he gotten into the uniform and up there? Crack, another shot rang out and my right foot slid out from under me. I grabbed a boulder to regain my balance and started running again, focusing all my energy on staying upright.

  “Neil,” Charlie yelled from down below. “Over here.” I looked down and saw his blue shirt sprinting away from the wolf barn. “Someone’s shooting at us.”

  “No shit.”

  Another crack, another shot and my adrenaline was pumping too hard for me to know whether I’d been hit or not. “There’s one way out of here,” Charlie yelled, running toward the diversion channel.

  I ran after him. The shots were getting closer. The next one hit the ground and splattered mud on my jeans.

  Charlie had reached the ditch and was teetering on the edge looking in.

  “Don’t be crazy,” I yelled. “People drown in those things all the time.”

  “I’ll take my chances.” Charlie held his nose and jumped.

  I looked back, saw the rifle, looked forward and saw Charlie’s head bobbing rapidly down the ditch. It’s hard to hit a target moving as fast as he was, harder still to hit a target submerged in water. And if you hit one that has already drowned, what difference would it make? You can’t get any deader than dead. The next shot nicked the edge of the ditch and broke loose a piece of concrete that landed on my running shoe. I jumped, too.

  The water was only knee deep but traveling so fast that it pulled me down and knocked me flat. It was a Class Ten rapid, at least—unnavigable by even the most experienced or insane navigator. The fact that it was shallow didn’t make it any slower or less dangerous. You can drown as easily in six inches as you can in the ocean if your face goes under. Fortunately I had fallen backwards so I was bouncing off the concrete walls on my butt instead of my face. It was like riding an Olympic luge course without the sled. There was no telling what had happened to Charlie. I couldn’t see him. I couldn’t see anything but water and concrete. If more shots rang out, I didn’t hear them. All I heard was runoff rush. Considering the two options that had been available to me I began to wish I’d taken the bullet. At least it was neat, dry and quick. Death by drowning and pummeling is a torturous way to go. Water is an elemental, unstoppable force. It’s got all the power and it lets you know it. It teases, sucks you down, squishes your breath out, pops you up for another gulp, knocks you down again. I was gasping for breath and traveling a lot faster than the body is meant to move without a vehicle. I fought to keep my feet forward, my face out of the water. At this speed it was impossible to stand. If my feet even touched bottom they were knocked loose immediately. There’s only one way for water to go—downhill—and that’s where I went, bouncing off the side walls, grateful for every bit of padding I had, lucky this wasn’t the Duke City where the diversion channels go on for fifteen miles. This diversion channel’s objective was getting the water off the mountain and away from Norm Alexander’s buildings. Once it reached a flat place it stopped and dumped the water and me out. I shot through the air and came down with a splat in a pool of mud.

  Once I stopped sliding I crawled out of the water’s way, sat up, caught my breath, made sure everything was still in place and movable and looked around. Charlie was sitting in front of me happy as a pig in mud. His hair was matted to his head, his glasses were long gone. He squinted at me. “That you, Neil?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Is this heaven or hell?”

  “It’s mud,” I said.

  “What a ride,” he grinned. “You all right?”

  “I think so.”

  “You look like a drowned rat.”

  “I feel like one.”

  “Well, it beats the Albuquerque water slide.” Charlie s
tarted to laugh and I did, too. What else was there to do? We laughed so hard we shook like dogs and the water sprayed off us. We laughed so hard we could hardly stand up, but we could hardly stand up anyway. We laughed so hard we cried and when we were finished we staggered and helped each other to our feet. There were a lot of places that would hurt like hell tomorrow but for the moment at least were numb to pain. We hiked down to Route 30 and waited for someone to come along so we could hitch a ride. It was 100 degrees. Our muddy clothes began to dry and then to itch.

  We looked like Zuni mudheads, clowns and demons at the same time. A rancher came along in a pickup truck, took pity on us and stopped.

  “And what have you folks been up to?” he asked before he would let us in.

  “We took a ride down Norm Alexander’s diversion channel,” Charlie said and he started laughing all over again.

  The rancher pushed his cowboy hat back on his head and looked at us like we’d been chewing locoweed. He gave us a ride, but he made us sit in the back of the truck.

  ******

  The rancher dropped us off at the Motel 6 where I had a change of clothes waiting, but Charlie didn’t. I showered, changed and left him in the shower while I went out and tried to find someone to wash and dry our clothes. It wasn’t just that they looked grungy, they were getting too stiff to sit down in. The Mexican maid, who was pushing around a cart full of dirty linen, agreed to throw our clothes in for a five-dollar tip.

  “Que pasó, Señorita?” she giggled when I handed her the mud-soaked clothes.

  “Don’t ask,” said I.

  When I got back to the room Charlie was in the bed, and, unless he’d gotten into my underwear, naked under the sheet. He patted the space next to him, but I sat down across the room in one of those fake wood chairs that Motel 6 thoughtfully provides. With his skinny chest and nearsighted eyes, Charlie didn’t exactly look like a warrior. He squinted in my direction. “I can’t see that far without my glasses,” he said.

  I moved my chair in a little closer. “The maid thought your clothes were pretty amusing but she agreed to wash them.”

  “Good,” he said, “because until I get them back I’m at your mercy. What did you tell her happened?”

  “That we were mud wrestling.”

  “Really?”

  “No, I couldn’t say it in Spanish.”

  “What should I do about my motorcycle?”

  “Leave it there for the time being and hope Norm doesn’t notice. It’s too risky to go back there, and besides you can’t drive it without your glasses and I don’t want to.”

  “Yeah, you’re right.” Charlie wanted to rehash the action and keep the adrenaline flowing. “What did you find in the other pen?” he asked.

  “A lobo, a female I think, with a radio collar on and much shyer than the others. She hid when I approached.”

  “Why do you suppose he collared her?”

  “Wanted to watch her without being seen himself. What did you find in the barn?”

  “Another female and four pups. The pups were getting big, but they were still playful and not shy at all. One of them came up and untied my shoelace. Norm hadn’t cut their vocal cords, they barked and growled. I guess that’s why he’s keeping them inside. He was giving them most of the barn to play in, anyway.”

  “Did you see any more lobos?”

  “Only the ones we saw before.”

  I did some quick calculations. If Norm had stolen the lobos in ’87, by ’89 they’d be mature enough to breed. That gave him three breeding years: ’89, ’90, ’91. He should have had a lot more than five adults and four pups by now.

  “What do you think he’s up to?” Charlie asked.

  “Trying to improve the heterozygosity of the breeding population, breeding and selling them,” I said.

  “To who?”

  “Rich people, the kind of people who’d get off on having an endangered species for a pet.”

  “What do they do with them? Keep them hidden all the time?”

  “What do people do with stolen artwork? Look at it themselves? Show it to people who don’t know what it’s worth? If you said the lobos were wolf hybrids, most people wouldn’t know the difference. It’s got to be an international market and the kind of people who would buy one probably have enough property that they don’t have to worry, anyway.” In the heat of discovery I’d moved my chair in closer and placed my hand on the bedside table. Charlie reached out, grabbed hold of it and brought it down to the bed, wanting to prolong the rush of the action, I guessed. It was an awkward gesture, but that didn’t make it totally unappealing. I could see through the sheet that the adrenaline was still flowing and he wasn’t wearing any underwear either. It would be one way to finish off the adventure. After all, we’d just shared one near-death experience, why not investigate another? I looked into Charlie’s myopic eyes, could see he was nervous like a student, not bold like a warrior. I could also tell that I hadn’t gotten close enough for him to read my expression. And what was the expression that he couldn’t read? Businesslike. There was a time when I would have thrown off my clothes and jumped in, I’ll admit it. So what if he was younger, that never stopped me before. For the adventure, I would have said. But that time had gone. There were too many other things to think about: disease, contraception, the Kid, the lobos. Was that maturity? I took my hand back.

  Charlie sighed, but continued reliving the action, hoping maybe to bring me back to a fever pitch. “Good thing Norm is such a lousy shot,” he said, “or we’d have been long dead by now.”

  “You may be an eco-warrior,” I replied, “but your investigatory skills suck.”

  Charlie blinked his eyes, which were red and naked as rabbits without the glasses. “What do you mean?”

  “That wasn’t Norm Alexander."

  “How do you know?”

  “Because the hand on the trigger was the right hand and Norm is left-handed. His right hand is a club with a useless thumb. He can’t even pick up a fork with it. He’d never use it to pull a trigger.”

  “Who was it then?”

  “That’s what we’re going to find out.” I began outlining for him a more carefully planned action. From the way his eyes lit up and the sheet went down I could see this action was at least as exciting as sex, maybe more. We schemed and planned. Charlie sat up in bed, I moved the chair in close. Eventually there was a knock at the door. The Mexican maid came in giggling at the sight of Charlie naked in my bed. She handed me the clothes pressed and folded in a neat little pile. I can’t speak for Charlie but my jeans had never looked so immaculate.

  “Mil gracias,” I said.

  “De nada,” she replied.

  19

  IF THE NIGHT had been any quieter I would have heard my heart beating and the blood rushing through my veins. It was quiet enough that when I stood still I heard myself breathing—shallower and faster than I like to be. When I moved, my footsteps crunched on the gravel. I was visible, too. There’s no place to hide in the desert when there’s a full moon, not unless you’ve got your belly to the ground. Every small step for me was a giant step for my shadow and anybody who happened to be watching. It was two in the morning, however, an hour when everyone ought to be sound asleep. I’d soon find out whether anyone was. The door wasn’t locked, the house being lonely enough that locks were irrelevant. Anybody who came that far to break in was not going to be kept out by a lock. I turned the knob quietly and let myself in. I followed the moon’s beacon down the hallway, through the door, into the living room where it beamed in the open window. I had a flashlight in my hand and a tape recorder in my pocket, but I hadn’t needed to use either yet. I walked up to the pool of moonlight, stepped into the middle of it, spun around on the floor.

  I stepped out of the moonlight, turned on the flashlight, walked over to the wall and shone some light on Frida and her monkey, the painting that Jayne hadn’t sold because she was attached to it or because it was hot. “Tree of hope, keep firm,” Frida said
. She was fierce as ever, facing down all comers with her barbed-wire eyebrows. Would she approve of what I was about to do? Disapprove? Give a shit? What did it matter? Bob Bartel had been murdered; Charlie and I had almost been. I had to know by whom and one way to find out about the present is to look into the past, Jayne Brown and Bill Wiley’s past to be more precise, and their brushes with the law. I expected to find that information in the legal folders filed in the conquistador credenza, the folders Jayne got through the Freedom of Information Act, which meant that whatever Juan had been involved in, she had been involved in, too.

  I opened the credenza and flashed my light across the labels on the stack of manila folders. About what you’d expect to find in any modern woman’s valuable papers: a divorce file, a real estate file, a tax file, a car file. Almost everybody has those, but not many have a bulging government file. There it was illuminated by my flashlight’s beam, U.S.A. v. William Wiley, Betty Jo Burnett, et al. Not quite a foot thick as March had said, but fat enough. I could see why Jayne had changed her name. Who’d want to go through life as Betty Jo Burnett? On the other hand, who’d want to go through life as plain old Jayne Brown, even if she had added a y? Why hadn’t she chosen something a little more flamboyant? I wondered. She was tough, maybe she thought flamboyancy would get in the way, or maybe after seeing Betty Jo Burnett all over the newspapers, she craved anonymity.

  William Wiley and Betty Jo Burnett had been an item in their day, the late ’60s, not big enough to go network or national, but big enough to get their names and faces in all the California papers. The articles were in the file. I couldn’t tell if the government had clipped them or if someone had added them later. He had put on flab since those days and gotten gray. She had put on silicone and gotten blond. But they were still recognizably Juan and Jayne. Her hair was about as long then as it was now. His was considerably longer then. In fact, he had been another mophead.