Kristen Chandler

by Boys; Other Things That Might Kill Me (v5) Wolves

  Dennis is already sitting there. “Made you editor, didn’t she?” he says. He looks like he’s going to cry.

  “I guess so.”

  Dennis says, “You can’t even spell.”

  He stomps to his feet and strides away before I can think of what to say. Apparently my wolf stare isn’t useful for everything.

  WOLF NOTES

  The Cinderella Wolf

  Here’s a story for you, a Cinderella story. But in this story, Cinderella is a wolf.

  The story of wolf Number Forty-Two, or Cinderella as her fans like to call her, began when she was wolf-napped from Canada, along with her mother and two sisters. They were plunked down in Yellowstone as part of the Wolf Reintroduction Project. Once they settled in, Cinderella’s mean and nasty sister, Number Forty, chased off Cindy’s mother and third sister. Cinderella stayed with the pack, but you guessed it, she was forced to be the lowest-Ranking wolf. Let’s just say her sister liked to chew her out.

  But did that get her down? Wolf no.

  Of course things got a whole lot worse when a guy got involved. Usually the king and queen (aka alpha) wolves, are the only ones that get to make more wolves. But the king wolf has a thing for Cinderella. Last year it looked like Cinderella had pups in her den but then the queen came to call. Sure enough, Cinderella got a Royal thrashing and none of her pups survived.

  But did Cinderella turn tail and Run? Wolf no.

  Instead she hunts for the pack like a champion. She pampers the pups and howls up a storm. She’s even been seen dropping sticks at a buffalo’s feet as if she wants to play. Some say she’s got to stand up for herself or leave the pack. We’ll have to wait and see.

  Maybe it’s not happily ever after, but we humans could learn a thing or two about life from a wolf like Cinderella.

  11

  ONE IN EVERY FAMILY

  I LOPE THROUGH the sidewalks of town. I know Dad’s taking some California moneybags for a weekend bow hunt as soon as I get to the store. Talking to Mrs. Baby has made me late.

  “Dad,” I gasp as I run through the door. Three men are standing around him. They’re all camo’d out, and they have that look on their faces. They’re ready to shoot something.

  “Hey,” Dad says nonchalantly.

  I know it’s unprofessional but I can’t help it. “Guess what?”

  Dad and his buddies all kind of lean back and watch me do this, act young and female and stupid as sticks. “I’m going to be the editor. Mrs. Brady loved my wolf article.”

  It takes Dad a minute to register my words since they broke the sound barrier. “Good for you, honey. That’s great.”

  “Uh-oh,” says the man with the fanciest bow. “Samuel, you got a storyteller in your family?”

  The man next to him says, “Your dad tells stories, too, but they’re about the buck he got last year.” They share a man laugh.

  “What kind of wolf story? Is it a fairy tale?” says Fancy Bow. He must make a lot of money. He thinks he’s hilarious.

  “Well, kind of,” I say, trying to play along. “I wrote a story this week about the Cinderella wolf.”

  Dad purses his lips. He wants me to do the same.

  Fancy Bow is having none of it. “Does she get the prince or eat him?”

  “There’s not really a prince in this story. It’s about a real wolf.”

  A short man with a red complexion says, “You got a wolf lover for a daughter?” His voice tilts up like he’s kidding, but he isn’t as cheerful as Fancy Bow.

  Dad gathers up a small pack filled with drinks and snacks for the front seat. “We’ll be back Sunday night, KJ. You know how to get a hold of me.”

  The short man says sympathetically, “Well, there’s one in every family these days.”

  Fancy Bow smiles over at Dad, “Just as long as there aren’t two, right, Samuel?”

  Dad gives back an easy smile, “Let’s go get some elk, gentlemen. See you Sunday, KJ.”

  “Good luck,” I say.

  He nods to me and heads out the door. His face gives nothing away. If this were a fairy tale Dad would settle this conversation with these men. But he won’t. In a fairy tale he wouldn’t even have to go with them, if he didn’t want to. I wouldn’t have to sit in this dumb store alone all weekend, waiting for a handful of people to come in and not buy anything. But in the real world, we’re heading into the slow season, and we need every dollar we can get. So we both do what we have to.

  Wolves and people aren’t so different, I think. In the real world, they both have to eat.

  The only way I can get through a beautiful October day caged inside the store is to spend the early morning hours outside. I pull on my jeans at six and walk through the dark to a stream that flanks the south of town. I take my fishing gear and an orange hunting vest—so no one will shoot me.

  The mist is still heavy on the stream when I get there, but there is enough dawn to tie on a fly. The meadow grass is bent with dew. Mud clings to my boots. I watch the water for a minute to see what to fish with, but I’m not thinking very hard about fish. I have the feeling I’m being watched.

  I could be wrong. But I still listen for twigs snapping or hunter’s voices. I look into the trees for the shadow of movement. I sing a little in case it’s a bear.

  An osprey startles me with its cry. It circles twice and heads off toward the lake. I hear a branch swish. I hold my steel rod case across me like a quarter staff. I’m going to feel ridiculous if this turns out to be deer.

  Then the silence is broken by a high-pitched sound and a crash. I drop to a crouch, then lose my footing. I tip halfway to the ground, just in time to see a brown blur, and roll to the left in the mud. A young moose bolts past me into the trees.

  I lurch up from the freezing-wet ground and shake myself. Thankfully my case and rod aren’t broken, but I am covered in mud.

  “What are you doing here?”

  I nearly jump out of my wet skin at the sound of a human voice, especially Virgil’s human voice.

  “What are you doing here?” I say.

  “Taking a picture of that moose, at least I was trying to, before you showed up.”

  “That moose nearly killed me,” I say.

  He eyeballs my orange jacket and my rod case. He says, “He must have thought you had it coming.”

  “Geez, Virgil,” I sputter. “I’m not hunting. I’m fishing.”

  Virgil says, “Mud looks good on you.” He takes a picture.

  I lift up a muddy boot and flick it. “You, too.”

  He caps his lens. “Dennis said Baby put you in charge of the paper.”

  “Is he still mad?”

  “Let’s just say we watched every episode of Star Wars last night.”

  “He’s right. I can’t even spell.”

  Virgil shrugs and steps closer to me. “Sometimes greatness is thrust upon you.”

  I feel a shiver. “And sometimes it’s just mud.”

  We stand in awkward silence. I hear another branch snap. “What’s that?”

  Virgil says, “The moose?”

  I resist the urge to make fun of Virgil for being a city kid. A moose breaks a lot more than twigs when it’s on the move, but I’m the one wearing the puddle.

  “Maybe it’s the mud in your ears,” he says.

  I scan the trees one more time. “Or maybe it’s the sound of the birds falling out of their trees laughing at me.”

  Virgil smiles. “Or that.”

  We walk back to my house together, almost like we’re friends. I smell like the creek bed. Virgil doesn’t seem to mind. He tells me about how they filmed the first Star Wars using tiny models and paper with pinholes. He offers to hold my gear. Nobody has ever offered to hold my gear.

  I refold the T-shirts to keep from losing my mind. There are no customers. My homework is done, mostly. Through the front windows of the shop I see occasional cars pass on Geyser. I couldn’t care less about what’s going on in town today. The town is nothing. I know flecks of
slanted light are shimmering off the rivers. Elk are rutting. Bears are eating everything not nailed to the forest floor. The air is cool. The meadow grasses have dried the color of bone and the willows on the river’s edge have deepened to burgundy. Virgil is out there somewhere, taking pictures. And here I stand, folding.

  At noon I eat a bacon, tomato, and onion sandwich.

  At twelve twenty I regret the onion.

  At twelve fifty I open the medicine cabinet and discover my dad buys antacids in bulk. For all my dad’s silence, I know he worries about stuff even more than I do.

  At two o’clock in the afternoon I have dusted everything in the shop including the inside of my own eyelids. We have had exactly nine customers all day and two of them were twin toddlers that destroyed my water bottle pyramid and then wiped their ice-cream-covered paws on the glass case at the register. Of course their mom was “just looking,” and didn’t buy a thing.

  At five ten I discover a Louis L’Amour in the back room. Dark Canyon. It could be worse.

  When the store door opens at five twenty I have started reading the part where the perky girl lets down her guard. The door sucks the air from the store and Mr. Martin, Kenner’s dad, walks in. Mr. Martin isn’t a fisherman, but he comes into the store every so often to swap pheasant and grouse information. Dad says he’s a crack shot with anything long and loaded.

  Mr. Martin is built to last, like Kenner, plus forty pounds. I can’t say I’m happy to see him amble through the store door; he looks like he’s in a bad mood, and he’s carrying a skinny gray paper in his hand that looks a lot like the school newspaper.

  “Hello, KJ,” he says in his barbwire baritone. “Your father around?”

  “He’s hunting,” I say. “May I help you, Mr. Martin?”

  He nods. “I’d like to think so.”

  A little nerve in my neck tightens, but I keep my trap closed. He drops the strangled school newspaper on the counter. “I’m afraid I don’t appreciate this.”

  “The paper?” I’ve only been editor for one day, and there are already complaints?

  “Cinderella wolf. Did you write that?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What is the point of this garbage?”

  “Excuse me, sir?”

  “Do you know what a wolf does to a calf or a lamb? You ever seen a dog that’s been attacked by a wolf?”

  “No, sir.” I am scared, for sure, but more than a little freaked out that Mr. Martin cares, or even reads, what’s in our paper. My dad hasn’t read it and I’m the editor.

  “No need to make this more than it is. I’d like to ask you to rethink the way you’re depicting these animals. They aren’t pets, and they sure aren’t fairy princesses. They hurt people.”

  “People?” I say.

  “They most certainly do, young lady.”

  I just stand there.

  “I suggest you do your homework a little better.”

  “Uh-huh,” I murmur.

  He looks around the store. “So you’re dad’s off hunting, eh? Good man. No reason for him to get messed up in this, is there?”

  Mr. Martin walks out before I can reply.

  When my dad gets home on Sunday he is dirty, hairy, and ebullient. They got a six-point bull. The men tipped him double what he was expecting.

  I have a good dinner waiting because I know my dad hardly eats when he’s working. After his third biscuit he asks me, “How was business?”

  I say, “Not much.” I don’t want to talk about business, or Kenner’s dad, or Virgil, but I’ve sure been thinking about them.

  “A few more hunts like today and we’ll be in good shape.”

  I nod and clear the dishes. My dad turns on the TV to a legal show. My dad says he didn’t like being a lawyer, but he must have liked part of it because he loves to figure out the killer by the first commercial, which used to annoy me but doesn’t anymore because I do it, too.

  The other thing he loves to do is bust the shows that get their legal facts wrong. Tonight I’m sure he’s going to start griping about the guy who gets off after he robs someone’s safe, just because he confesses. “That’s so stupid,” I say, trying to beat Dad to the punch. “It’s not like you can just confess and it all goes away.”

  “If you’ve got a good lawyer you can sometimes plead down nonviolent felonies to fines and probation.”

  “That doesn’t seem fair.”

  “Fair is someplace you go to see prize-winning pigs, KJ. In the real world it doesn’t exist.”

  When I go to bed that night I think about what my dad said. I think about Mr. Martin. Maybe I haven’t been fair about the wolves because in the real world fair doesn’t exist. On the other hand, maybe it should.

  I am glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in. Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?

  Aldo Leopold, “The Green Lagoons”

  12

  DEAR ADDIE

  WE PUT THE paper out every other Thursday. For the first time in the paper’s history, kids actually seem interested in what they’re reading. They come to the classroom and ask for more. But the paper’s popularity has nothing to do with me being editor, or a writer . . . it’s all about Addie. Dear Addie.

  For the last two weeks I have been coming in early to work. Mrs. Brady isn’t doing so well with this pregnancy, so she hardly ever makes it to school before the first bell. Barney, the janitor, lets me in. I like being the first one to work on the paper each day.

  This morning, I’m supposed to work on format. I start with Kenner’s “anonymous” article about the football team.

  The five-man football team only has two subs this year, but the kids on the team make up for it. Team captain, Kenner Martin, says, “Even if we lose, we make the other team sorry they came.”

  We lost to Mountain Ridge last Friday, seven to three.

  Clint took pictures at the game, but they’re so blurry it looks like it was raining. I’ll have to use one anyway. I wonder if it’s my job to ask Clint to wait to get drunk until after he’s taken his pictures.

  Sondra wrote a companion piece to Kenner’s. It’s an editorial poem on using a skin-free football.

  The tradition of a ball of skin Is just another Redneck sin.

  Let’s use a ball that is synthetic.

  Animal cruelty is not genetic.

  I have to give it to Sondra—she has consistency.

  I lean my head on my desk to rest for a minute and listen to my stomach growl. I forgot breakfast again. I need my cheat sheet for layout, so I turn to the first edition of Addison’s advice column:

  Dear Addie,

  My best friend started a Rumor about me. What should I do? Stabbed in the Back

  Dear Stabbed,

  If people can’t say something nice they shouldn’t say anything at all. You should share your true feelings with your friend. Friends love that.

  Addie

  My stomach makes another noise. I’m not sure it’s hunger or nausea from Addie’s letter. I read the second letter.

  Dear Addie,

  My teachers are always giving me homework. I never have time to hang out with my friends and play video games.

  School Suxs

  Dear School Suxs,

  Homework is kinda part of school. But if you feel that your teachers are being unfair, you should talk to them and tell them your true feelings. Teachers love that.

  Addie

  Dear Addie,

  There’s this guy that I totally like, but he doesn’t seem to know I exist. What should I do?

  Got the Hots

  Dear Hots,

  Sometimes boys are sorta shy. If you Really want him to notice you, you should try flirting with him when you see him around. Also, it might help to wear more makeup and call him at surprising times. That Really gets guys’ attention.

  Addie

  I didn’t understand why Mrs. Baby assigned Addie to write an advice column, but it’s a hit. I hear kid
s talking about it in the halls. She gets more letters every week. I love Addie, but I mean, what if people really take her advice?

  I reread my article on the volleyball team and Dennis’s article on the fund-raiser for the senior trip. I insert Virgil’s amazing picture of a moose standing in the mist at Duck Creek. I try not to think about how he looked at me when he walked me back from the stream, because it turns me into a well-cooked marshmallow.

  Virgil walks through the door of the classroom. Our eyes do that crash thing where you try not to look at someone, so you have to.

  Mrs. Baby actually shows up before the bell rings. Her clothes are hanging the right way, and her hair is held down in militant barrettes. “Today we are going to discuss the W’s of journalism. Can anyone guess what they might be?”

  “Who cares?” says Stewie.

  “Very good, Stewie,” says Mrs. Baby, and writes who on the board. Stewie looks shocked.

  I’m a little shocked that Mrs. Baby is trying to actually teach us something.

  She says, “Who is involved and who reads about the story?” She keeps writing on the board as if we might take notes. “The magic W’s. Who, what, when, where, why, and how.”

  “How starts with an h,” says Dennis.