Annie and the Wolves

by Andromeda Romano-Lax

  Ruth tried to keep her voice level. “It went beyond that.”

  “Okay, and the parts that ‘went beyond.’ I’m sorry. Men take advantage. They always have. Isn’t that common as well?”

  “It is. That’s the point, I think. The ‘common’ thing that Annie suffered made her who she was: an uncommon woman fueled by . . .”

  Ruth was about to say “rage,” but she stopped herself. She had no proof of rage. She was projecting, letting Boyd’s loose standards erode her own scholarly self-respect.

  “Okay,” Boyd said. “We’re getting somewhere. The woman she became. Annie Oakley was abused—maybe. But it doesn’t matter who did it. I’m rethinking my earlier suggestion. You’re not sure, so let’s not name him at all. It’s a little late for justice, don’t you think?”

  The conversation ended in a series of banalities that dribbled off into the discussion of photo research, marketing and publicity, Instagram and Twitter.

  By the time Laura Boyd hung up, Ruth’s phone was hot against her cheek. Whether or not Annie was angry, Ruth certainly was.

  Why did she have to know—and name—the Wolf? Why did she have to understand why Annie herself hadn’t named him? Why did we have to know anything at all?

  Ruth shouldn’t have been surprised that people were losing interest in history. They didn’t even care about truth in the present.

  She had to stop herself before this internal rant and its rhetorical questions soured her on research altogether. Ruth cared. Maybe she hadn’t cared doggedly enough about other things in her life, but she cared about this.

  For the moment, Ruth pressed forward, digging into the middle years, for which documentation was more plentiful. The challenge here was making the familiar fresh. The public liked the Annie they already knew. Ruth felt she was gently renovating a house with historically sourced materials. It was more a form of carpentry than construction. And it was certainly not demolition. No one—certainly not Ruth’s editor or publisher—had begun this project intending to surprise or upset any reader.

  In graduate school, Ruth had enjoyed brainstorming with like-minded colleagues. When she’d gotten a call in November from her old friend and doctorate peer Joe Grandlouis, now a visiting professor at the University of Washington, his voice brought back the memory of not only the two months they’d dated —a poor match, though not one she regretted—but also the pleasure of academic camaraderie.

  Joe, as it turned out, was calling with news. His wife, Christine, had given birth to their daughter Reka: healthy, six pounds two ounces, “as ugly as her father.”

  “Oh, come on,” Ruth said.

  “Well, only for the first day. Then we saw some improvements.”

  Joe knew he was good looking. A bear of a man, tall and broad-chested, who wore his shiny black hair in a long braid down his back.

  As Joe told her, he was finishing an article on Chief Sitting Bull’s role in the Wild West show, a performance allowed by government authorities after the leader and medicine man surrendered to US forces almost a decade after defeating Custer at the Battle of Little Bighorn—or Battle of the Greasy Grass, as Joe and other Plains Indians preferred to call it.

  Joe wanted Ruth’s perspective on the closeness of Sitting Bull’s relationship with his fellow performer Annie Oakley. A minor point that affected no more than a paragraph, but something he didn’t want to get wrong. He was on the fence between two interpretations: one, that Oakley and Sitting Bull had been genuinely close. Or two, that the acquaintanceship was struck up on a whim and deepened, but only slightly, by circumstance.

  “Theory one,” Ruth said, “Sitting Bull chose Annie as a replacement for the daughter he had lost, according to the Lakota tradition of adopting to replace lost family, gave her the moccasins supposedly made by his daughter, was truly and deeply impressed with Annie’s shooting skill. Relationship of mutual respect. ‘My dear, old, faithful friend,’ Annie called him later in life. You know all that.”

  “I think I already know theory two,” Joe said. “Same meet-cute start—the chief was impressed by her shooting the first time he saw it—but the rest was mostly marketing, for both of them. Watanya Cicilla.”

  Ruth had to agree. “The ‘Little Sure Shot’ honorific—if that’s even the proper translation—couldn’t have been bad for her image, and maybe the benefit ran both ways.”

  “So that’s what you’re saying in your own book. You’re going for door number two. Colleagues of convenience, nothing more.”

  “Lacking better evidence. Even if it’s not as good a story.”

  “You’re right. It’s not a good story. Well, maybe this call was just me procrastinating. But there’s always the sense that you’re missing something that would turn things upside down and bring these old dead guys to life.”

  “Don’t I know it.”

  “Maybe that’s just authorial self-sabotage. And dirty diaper avoidance.”

  “Exactly,” she said. “So, tell me about new babies. Do they really never sleep?”

  “Better than I do.”

  She understood that, as well.

  The deadline loomed as Ruth wrote about Annie in her forties, beginning with the famous train accident in 1901, after which—anecdotally—Annie Oakley’s hair turned bright white.

  Ruth had a dream one night of the forty-one-year-old Annie standing alongside a train track next to a toppled, derailed car. She had aged overnight. She was ashen-faced, thin-lipped, haunted. Staring. Trying to tell Ruth something.

  You can’t go forward without going back.

  Or was it, You can’t go back without going forward?

  Maybe she had said both. It was all a blur, suffused with the smell of smoke and something sour, like urine, the product of animal panic. As far as Ruth could recall, she had never remembered a smell from a dream before.

  In the dream, Ruth felt she was doing something wrong, that she was disappointing Annie somehow, and that very disappointment seemed to make Annie fade, her outline blending with the rising smoke, even as she continued muttering something that Ruth couldn’t hear. She tried to go toward her, stepping over the railroad tracks with great effort and the sense of being held back, the motions syrupy and slow.

  She heard Annie speak again, even more faintly, from behind a veil of smoke or fog or simply time: Open the cabin door.

  Ruth woke up, heart pounding, trying to hold on to her memory of the dream, the feeling of frustrated movement and also guilt that she wasn’t doing what Annie had begged her to do. Ruth didn’t believe in ghosts, but she did believe that time itself, like many a historical script, bore faint traces and echoes of what had come before and been effaced.

  All our stories were like that: our passing joys and sorrows just the latest scratch marks on the Möbius strip of time and space that must of necessity be endlessly recycled.

  9

  Ruth

  2016

  That fall, as her deadline loomed, Ruth felt sure her biggest error had been in not understanding young Annie, of having been too afraid to understand. It explained her sense of remorse but not her anger, a physical heat in her belly. At times, driving home from the college after classes she’d once enjoyed teaching, her hands on the steering wheel began to shake. She had to clench the wheel more tightly to make them stop, even when she wasn’t thinking about the book—even when she wasn’t thinking about anything at all. Where had those sudden surges of anger come from?

  Ruth had been dating Scott for eight months. He kept several changes of clothes at her house; he’d brought over his guitar, an electric wok, his own vacuum cleaner after hers broke. He’d nursed her through the flu. He’d dedicated multiple weekends to emptying her late mother’s basement of junk—a job that even now was far from done, but at least they’d made a dent in the piles. He was undoubtedly a good guy. And far from stupid.

  “I h
ave to ask,” he said one night after they’d cleared the dinner dishes and opened a second bottle of wine, when Ruth confessed that she was starting to feel the vise grip of writer’s block and didn’t understand why this book was giving her so much trouble. “Were you sexually abused as a child? Or later? Anything like that?”

  She paused. There was no reason to pause.

  What Ruth had experienced as a teen—one of her mother’s drunk boyfriends aggressively flirting with her, another exposing himself from the bedroom doorway—hadn’t seemed like assault or anything close at the time. It was just gross. Ruth had been in high school when those incidents occurred. She had her own escape route planned by then: college, dorm living and no plan to come back to this town, ever.

  Ruth hadn’t thought about Kennidy then. She tried not to think of her little sister, rest in peace, now. Scott hadn’t asked about what could have happened to either of them, given their mother’s oblivious, neglectful parenting. He’d only asked if she’d been abused or assaulted.

  The answer was simple.

  “No.”

  “Okay.” He smiled and reached across the table for her hand. “I just thought I should ask.”

  It was a cold Wednesday night in October when they made the decision. They’d fallen asleep on the couch together watching a movie, and after they woke up and looked at the clock, Scott slumped toward the door, where he struggled into his shoes and coat.

  “You can just stay,” Ruth had said.

  “Would love to. But I left my laptop and my grade book at the apartment.”

  “It’s so cold out.”

  “Only getting colder.”

  “You should always bring all your work stuff here. Just in case.”

  “But there’s always something.”

  “Bring it all over, then,” she said, zipping up his coat for him, standing on tiptoe to kiss his neck and tug the collar up around his ears. “Every last book and poster and extension cord and lemon zester.”

  “I don’t have a lemon zester,” he said, giving her one last return kiss. “I might have a garlic press, though. So, I empty the apartment, and then?”

  “And then stop paying rent, obviously.”

  Three days later, he moved his final belongings: half into her house, half into the garage until they sorted things out. When Ruth saw Scott unload the gun from the trunk of his car, she started.

  “You have a gun?”

  “Two. Something I do with my brother. More target practice than real hunting, just because we’re getting lazy.” He tried to hand the rifle over to Ruth so he could unload the weightlifting set he’d brought on his final trip.

  When she took a step back, he tilted his head, curious, but he didn’t withdraw his extended arms.

  “This make you nervous?”

  “A little,” she said, though she didn’t know why. She wasn’t against shooting. She wasn’t even against killing animals.

  “Wait a minute,” Scott said as a smile spread across his face. “You’re telling me you’re writing a book about the nation’s most famous sharpshooter and you don’t know how to shoot?”

  “When I was writing papers about Edward Curtis, I didn’t know how to take great photographs, either.”

  “But that’s different. You studied him for . . . a year? Maybe two? You’ve been into Annie Oakley ever since.”

  Scott’s smile kept getting bigger, which annoyed her. She didn’t want to be annoyed. He was moving in. It was a special day they’d experience only once.

  “I grew up in a family of women. Then I went off to college and grad school.”

  “In Iowa. People in Iowa hunt.”

  “My friends weren’t weekend hunters. All right?”

  He walked the gun over to a corner of the garage where he’d been stacking tools and sports equipment. “Hey—sorry. I was just surprised. I didn’t mean to push your buttons.”

  “You didn’t,” she snapped.

  “Let me rephrase that. I didn’t mean to be a jackass. Better?”

  “Much better. And maybe you did push my buttons.”

  Inside the house, they emptied several boxes. But Ruth still couldn’t get the exchange out of her mind.

  “So actually,” she said as they stood side by side, unwrapping drinking glasses, wads of newspaper accumulating at their feet, “my mom dated a guy who had a gun. And I didn’t like him. She was always bringing home guys like him. This one lived with us for a couple months. He was a creep.”

  Gwen had been a phlebotomist at a blood-plasma donation facility, drawn to hard-luck cases, which in her line of work, walked through the door on a daily basis.

  “What kind?” Scott asked.

  “What kind of creep?”

  “No, what type of gun did he have. Rifle? Shotgun?”

  “I don’t remember. It just made me uncomfortable having the gun in the house, given the regular bouts of chaos. He kept it locked up. I was grateful for that.”

  It wasn’t like she’d never told Scott about her mom’s spells of depression, which meant days sleeping in a dark room. The guys who came and went. And her half-sister Kennidy, a full ten years younger than Ruth, a bit of an attention-seeker, prone to trouble—all of it worse when alcohol or other substances were involved.

  The unpacking had slowed. The small dining table was cluttered with dishes and duplicates—the extra blender, the extra toaster—that they would have to donate or sell. The inherited house was bigger than Scott’s bachelor studio, but it was still modest. There wasn’t room for all the stuff he’d taken the trouble to haul over. Maybe this would be more complicated: making space, sharing everything.

  “My sister always managed to get into things,” Ruth tried again. “If there was leftover beer in the garage from some big holiday stock-up, Kennidy got into it.”

  “What teenager wouldn’t?”

  “Not just that. If my mom had leftover Vicodin from the dentist, Kennidy found it. If a guy Mom was dating had a new bag of golf clubs—”

  “Golf clubs?”

  “Yeah. If a guy had golf clubs we weren’t supposed to touch, next thing you knew, one was in the back of my car and we were going for a drive.”

  “This sounds like a story.”

  Scott had mentioned ordering pizza. They were both hungry and eager to pick out a movie.

  “Just . . .” she started to say, and then thought better of it. It wouldn’t sound like much. “She attacked a garden gnome with it. Raised a ruckus, as our mom would have said. That’s all.”

  Even as she tried to laugh it off, the smell and the sounds came back to her: Marlboro Lights, Foo Fighters blasting from the only speaker that worked, the headlights bouncing through the dust as they followed the old gravel road.

  Ruth was home from Iowa City, just for the weekend. Kennidy was seventeen. They went driving with the music and the smokes and red plastic cups of whiskey between their legs. And the golf club, which Ruth didn’t know about until they reached their destination: a cabin in the woods, close to an hour away. Ruth knew Kennidy was angry with whoever lived there, but no more than that.

  Lukewarm 7 and 7s. Country roads past hayfields, and a mystery destination. Bad idea, obviously. But Ruth was trying to make up for the gulf that had always existed between them. She’d hoped her little sister would open up, ask for advice, promise to lay off their mom—anything.

  Kennidy directed Ruth along the drive with little explanation and, on arrival, told her where to park, under a tree away from the cabin, partly hidden. Kennidy got out, grabbed the club from the back seat and started swinging at the ceramic gnome on the stoop, which toppled and crashed, then at a drainpipe that dented on impact. A little light was on inside. Ruth saw the figure move behind a curtain—a man, no question about it. Slow-moving and slightly stooped. Not a young guy. Through the window, she could see the b
lue flicker of a TV set. Tacked next to the door were two team pennants: the Twins, whose logo was everywhere in their town, and another Ruth didn’t recognize, because she was bored by spectator sports, baseball especially: a blue jay.

  Now, ankle-deep in piles of packing material, holding a casserole dish she didn’t know where to store, Ruth had fallen silent. She hadn’t said anything about the cabin or the man inside. She’d left off at the silliest part on purpose: the lawn ornament, the swinging golf club.

  “That’s all?” Scott asked.

  “I was just glad she never got her hands on a gun. Because she didn’t exactly know how to deal with her emotions.”

  “Well, I think I should take you to a range once and let you fire a few rounds, just so you know that it’s not something to be scared of. That’s number one.”

  She nodded. Surely with Scott, it wouldn’t be scary. It would just be normal. Safety-conscious, even.

  “And number two, just so you know. Golf clubs don’t kill garden gnomes. People do.”

  “Yes. Exactly.”

  Ruth’s love life that fall was fine—great, even. Her work life wasn’t.

  She got an extension. Ruth estimated that she still had a quarter of the work to go. Oakley was born in 1860 and died in 1926. Ruth got bogged down at 1901.

  Boyd finally told her over the phone, six weeks before the extended deadline. “New isn’t really what we need, here, Ruth. Frankly, if you gave us an updated version of the Riley book, we wouldn’t be unhappy.”

  The problem, once Laura Boyd read the partial manuscript of Ruth’s slim Annie Oakley biography, wasn’t that she thought it was an unacceptable mess. The problem was that she thought it was fine. To Ruth’s surprise, the editor sent the manuscript out for preliminary review by a handful of experts, with a fuller review to follow. In the meanwhile, Boyd simply wanted Ruth to fast-forward to a polished conclusion.

  “I can’t,” Ruth told Scott on a winter night a week before Christmas. They’d planned to fly to his parents’ house in Chicago on the twenty-fourth and stay just past New Year’s. “I can’t pretend to be enjoying the holidays when I’m supposed to be finishing this thing.”