Wolf in White Van

by John Darnielle

  One of the therapists I had to go to later on tried getting me to talk about why I was angry at my parents, and I’d say I didn’t think I really was particularly angry at them except maybe at my dad for making me lie to his mother. I only had one grandma left; it felt wrong to tell her stories. “Is there anything earlier?” she’d say then, and I’d shake my head no: the main thing is having to lie to my grandmother. “So if that’s the main thing,” she said, once, “what are some of the other things?”

  It gets to the point where you almost want to make something up just to keep them happy, to keep from being the person who makes them feel like they’re wasting their time. But I try to be honest always. It’s important to me.

  “There aren’t really any other things,” I said.

  In the early days there hadn’t been anybody my parents weren’t going to sue. But they would have needed my cooperation to go after anybody besides the gun people, so that’s who they settled on: the gun people. Most lawyers would have strung them along for a while, I think. But the one they did find, in the Yellow Pages, was a good guy, and he told them point blank that nobody was ever going to get a dime from the gun people. That was the end of that idea. He told them their legal money would be better spent on somebody to negotiate with insurance companies—somebody who knew that accidents happen, and that that’s what insurance is really for, after all. Accident: this was the great gift, free and clear, that the Yellow Pages lawyer gave my parents when they called him. He did also say that they might have a case if they wanted to sue whoever’d originally sold my father the rifle, though.

  The gun shop where my father’d bought it was on Mission Avenue, down between the drive-in and a used-tires place. It was a stand-alone cinder block building on a weedy asphalt lot. The shop’s owner, Ray, was the man who’d sold it to him; Ray had served in the First World War with my grandfather. My father hadn’t yet been old enough to walk on the day his own father had introduced him to his old army buddy Ray. Ray owned the building and lived in a small room off the office. At some point before I was born his wife died; he hadn’t remarried, and when my parents talked about him—when Dad would say, at dinner, that he was thinking about going to see Ray this week—I got the feeling that some unnamed duty was being invoked. And so I knew, when Dad told me we were going to Ray’s one morning, that my father had undertaken some kind of internal strategic shift in his approach to dealing with what was left of his only son. His rage was still fresh, but he must have begun to sense the slow beginnings of its ebb.

  I remember feeling perilously light in my body. As though a sudden wind might lift me and carry me across the parking lot. I think now I’d be able to identify that feeling as fear, but at the time it was strictly physical: the heaviness of my head, which was with me most days, seemed ignorable. Though I couldn’t yet walk without help, I felt as we cruised down Monte Vista like I might have been able to go a block or two. It made me think about the future, whose actuality was very slowly coming into view for me. The days ahead, the months and years. I was seventeen, so my sense of time was still necessarily limited, but the hospital ceiling had taught me a thing or two about it. I could see it from the window of the car: even when my view hit the vanishing point, I knew there was more beyond it.

  It was warm out; when we got there Ray was set up in a folding chair in the parking lot, his back against the side of the building by the door, face tan and wrinkled, reading the PennySaver. He looked up as we got out of the car; saw my dad, saw me, looked back at my dad. “Well, William,” he said, with an audible period at the end of the salutation. Then he looked at me.

  “Well, Sean,” he said.

  “Hi, Ray,” I said.

  “I heard about all this,” he said. He didn’t point at my face; there was no need. He just looked up at me from his chair in the shade, patient like old people are patient. He wasn’t nervous; I had developed a sense for nervousness like an animal’s. It was a relief to have somebody who could look at me and not be nervous.

  “Pretty dumb,” I said. I wasn’t sure if I really meant that, but it was a thing I was trying out; it seemed to make people feel more comfortable. He looked at me like a jeweler appraising a stone.

  “Can’t argue with you there, Sean,” he said after a while. “I’m glad you didn’t manage to …” He cut off where most people cut off, and took the breath they tend to take. “I wish you hadn’t,” he said.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  My father hadn’t said anything yet, but then he said, “Ray,” and Ray got up from his chair: it was a greeting without formalities. They shook hands; Ray took a deep breath as their eyes met. Then he clapped my dad’s right shoulder with his left hand twice, and we all walked out of the morning sun and into the small tan stucco one-room shop with the signs in the window that keep the light out.

  In the Conan books I loved back then, history went Technicolor. Men’s lives ended violently and with great consequence, again and again, in glory or squalor according to their fate, and no matter how many times the exact same scene played out, it was always a huge deal; any offense was grievous, all revenge total. Conan prowled Cimmeria, in constant uproar; all Cimmerian truces were false, any tranquil scene certain to open onto vistas of blood washing over the near memories of their antecedents. Cimmeria convulsed without rest. Even in still moments, intrigue waited like gathering fog at dusk.

  Inside Ray’s the evening light had suspended itself once before sunset a long time ago, and it was never going to change again. Dust collected and massed on the counter displays: old black combs glued on yellowed cardboard mounts, thick glass jars full of dead spent bullets, a fraying L-mounted card half-stuffed with quarters for the City of Hope. There was no future there; its past was a ghostless harbor. Nothing inside would ever leave the building.

  I think Ray got that my father had come on some errand he couldn’t really talk about, something he would have been embarrassed or ashamed to bring up. My father’s errand was also partially or completely hidden from his own understanding, I think: he was improvising. Once we were inside they mainly talked grown-men talk, nothing talk: mutual friends; weather; the L.A. Rams. “Gone out to see—see the Rams yet?” my dad said, and Ray said, “No, not yet.”

  Eventually, like a wall-mounted camera sweeping the room, Ray turned his attention my way. I was loitering near a fishbowl filled with rifle casings, wanting to plunge my hand in up to my wrist, when he started in on a thing about how a gun’s not a toy. My father, his friend—guys like Ray—they seemed to have so much trouble understanding even the most obvious things.

  “A big part of being old enough to handle a weapon is respecting its power,” he said.

  “I know, sir,” I said. I called my father’s friends sir reflexively. It was hard to remember they were real people sometimes.

  “Well, I guess you do, now,” said Ray, reaching for some point. But he didn’t have a real sense of what he hoped to say; he was lost. As I became surer of this it felt like warm light gently flowing through me. It was hard not to smile.

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  Ray carried on for a minute about the power of guns, and the costs of not revering that power; after a while I stopped listening. I let the barren-void melody of his voice lilt its way through the inattentive chambers of my brain. The emotion rising in his voice, his ongoing efforts to control it: I had a brief fantasy of ratting my parents out, of explaining how they’d heard from a lawyer that Ray was the guy to go after if they were going to sue anybody and we were here to see how that idea felt with him right in front of us. But it would have hurt his feelings, and I couldn’t stand it. I wanted to stop him, to explain to him that I had already known about guns when I walked down the hall from my bedroom to the living room while everybody was asleep; that I probably knew more about guns and bullets now than him or anybody he knew. But he would have taken it the wrong way, and I felt like he was probably enjoying himself. So I stood in a state of partial focus, waiting. Look
ing for an opening, and then not looking, because I wanted to let my dad and his friend do what they felt like they had to do here. I did hope that at some point I’d be able to explain my recent theory that it isn’t really possible to kill yourself, that everybody goes on forever in multiple dimensions, which was less a theory than an attempt to do exactly what Ray’d been doing since he started talking: to draw some lesson from a place where no lessons were.

  There was a poster on the wall behind the cash register; it was a poster I’d also seen in auto repair shops and maybe some other places, I couldn’t remember exactly. It showed a bunch of little cartoon guys doubled over with laughter, their eyes shut from laughing so hard, their chubby little hands clutching their bellies. The caption underneath said: YOU WANT IT WHEN …? I get the joke now, but then it was completely meaningless to me. It could have been in some foreign alphabet, except it wasn’t: I understood all the words, but together, in that sequence, with that picture, to my mind, they were chaos. And so, in a different way, were Ray’s musings, his helpful admonishments and his stern encouragements. They tried to reach across a divide whose distance he couldn’t accurately gauge. But while the person I’d been just a few months before might have understood this and sneered, the person who’d emerged from his bandages saw the impasse and felt something soften inside. I wanted to put my hand on Ray’s shoulder and tell him that when I said I was sorry earlier, I really meant it. But instead I nodded my heavy nod as he went on, and shook his hand before we left, and drew a few connections between things in my head as the car headed east again on Mission.

  As you rappel down cascading chains of mutated ivy, you taste the air. It’s different down here. The all-pervasive dust that clots your lungs begins to clear itself out in coughing spasms whose violence subsides as you descend. The smell of the ivy restores your hope in the journey. Your feet ache to touch fresh ground below.

  The descent to the upper catwalk takes two hours, which are spent in a crisscrossing pattern among available vines. Your arms and ankles burn when you land; you tear off a handful of leaves when your feet hit the steel grating and stuff them into your mouth. They are moist and bitter. A new clarity gradually seizes your vision as you cast your gaze around and beneath.

  You’re inside a cylinder, a silo some thousand yards high; from your perch you can see that it continues down into the earth for many thousands more. It must have taken years to dig so deep. To build the broken network of platforms you must now navigate. To construct, from available scrap, sanded smooth and disinfected to keep the interior clean, the descending entryway to the kingdom beyond.

  When I got home my mom asked me what Ray’d had to say. That was how she put it: “So, Sean, did you have a good day, what did Ray have to say?”

  “He said guns are awesome,” I said. It was a mean thing to say, and I was immediately sorry, but it was too late. My mother’s shoulders stiffened, and she held her hand at her chin, two fingers pressed across her lips.

  “Sean, you don’t—” she said, and then she stopped to draw in some breath and try to keep her composure. “You don’t understand,” she said finally. Like most things she started to say about the accident, this went nowhere: there were too many places for it to go, so when it opened out onto its great vista of sad possibilities it just rested there, frozen by the view.

  “I do, I do, Mom,” I said. We were standing in the living room; Dad was in the bathroom. “Ray said I had to respect guns, is all, it was—”

  I took my mother’s hand between my hands. I felt like a very old man who had lived for a very long time; I knew I wasn’t that old man, not really. I hadn’t actually come into possession of any great wisdom, hadn’t been on a quest that had seasoned me and invested my words and actions with meaning. But the sheen of it, the reflection maybe of a wisdom I might someday still attain, was visible to me for a second, and I felt the weight of what I’d done to them press against my chest like a heavy hand. “It was a funny thing for him to say, is all.”

  Mom wanted to meet me out there in the space I was trying to clear. But she couldn’t do it, and I couldn’t blame her then, and I don’t now. There was too much wreckage in that space for her to stand.

  My father came in then and saw Mom crying, and he was mad. He must have been mad already, after taking me down to Ray’s with some uncertain hope in mind, looking for some conclusive moment and not getting it: I was pretty sure about this. Instead it had been another incident without clear lessons. “Why do you have to make your mother sad?” he said in his louder voice, the one he saved for when he wanted to be heard. “Haven’t you done enough—” he said, his stutter catching him at a crucial moment; I could see it make him even angrier. He kept his eyes firmly on mine. “Done enough already?” he said at last.

  “It was an accident,” I said, and Mom put a hand on his shoulder and said it was really OK, that there’d been a misunderstanding, and Dad’s face did that thing it had recently learned to do: where his expression skidded across a sliding drift from anger to sadness to something else that didn’t quite have a name, all in the course of a few seconds.

  “OK, Sean,” he said, “sorry, sorry to yell.” We stood in our little triangle and then the doorbell rang; Dad had ordered some pizza for dinner. He put out some plates with a knife and fork by mine, and we all sat down to eat. Mom asked him the same question she’d asked me, in the same words—”What did Ray have to say?”—and Dad tried his best to explain why he hadn’t really said much to Ray about liability and so forth, and Mom didn’t say anything back, and then after a while Dad got up from the table and turned on the evening news with the volume too high.

  Conan the Barbarian has no parents, as far as I know, but in my mind he was my model: trying to stand strong and brave, sword in hand, black hair flowing. In truth I have very little hair on my head now, and the hair I do have tends to clump in stringy clusters, but if my eyes are closed and my concentration is strong I can form a different picture of myself in my mind, so this was what I did, standing by the waist-high desk where the phone was. I closed my eyes and I concentrated. Dad was getting ready to tell me about the funeral plans, I knew. I could make it easier for him if I tried hard enough. It isn’t really much of a mystery, this occasional need I have to comfort my father. I did something terrible to his son once.

  “Grandma lived a long time,” I said. Ten-plus years since Dad took me down to Ray’s on that open-ended mission where nobody got revenge and nothing got resolved, and a whole lot of empty ground in the space from now to then. I have a theory that the less you say when someone dies, the better. Leave everything as open as you can.

  “Thanks, Sean,” he said. “For me this is hard, I—”

  “Terrible,” I said.

  “No, no,” he said, “that’s—it’s all really hard, but what I actually—I—”

  “Not—”

  “No, what—Sean, I don’t like to say this; I know you loved your grandmother, and she loved you, but we—” Pausing here. Some things you practice a few times but it doesn’t make them any easier. I could hear it now. “We don’t think you should come to the funeral. I know that’s—”

  He just left it there for a second.

  “It’s really hard to—”

  When anger rears up in me I have a trick I do where I picture it as a freshly uncoiled snake dropping down from the jungle canopy and heading for my neck. If I look at it directly it’ll disappear, but I have to do it while the snake’s still dropping or it will strike. This sounds like something they’d teach you in therapy at the hospital or something, but it’s not. It’s just a trick I found somewhere by myself. Once you’ve looked at a deadly thing and seen it disappear, what more is there to do? Walk on through the empty jungle toward the city past the clearing.

  “It’s OK, Dad,” I said, evenly. I took stock of how I really felt: found all the various threads, saw which way they all ran. “Dad, it’s OK. I get it. It’s all right.” And I do get it: I am not a welcome pres
ence at a funeral, no matter whose it is. If I let myself stay mad about that I will go insane.

  On the other end my father, now an orphan, was crying.

  “Thank you, Sean,” he said. “I don’t mean to be awful to you. It’s just—it’s hard for me to ask, it’s really hard. Your grandmother was so happy back in those early days, back when—”

  The little silence that followed wasn’t my dad’s repetitive stutter. I could hear him entering a space he usually tried to avoid, finding himself on the other side of a door he wouldn’t normally open. I followed him in.

  “When you were a baby,” he said, at last.

  He sounded like he was choking. “It’s OK, Dad,” I said. “It’ll be OK.” CLAN SCARECROW, I saw penned in neat script on a little card inside my head.

  12 I stood with the phone at my ear and tried to think of something to say. My father plays his cards close to his chest, but I felt like there was an opening here, a portal: a seam in the surface I was supposed to notice and pull open and climb through. That was why it was Dad calling, not Mom. So I took a quiet breath and put on my grown-up voice, the one I use when somebody looking for me gets ahold of my phone number.

  “Dad, I’m sorry,” I said. Nothing. “Hard to know …” I had no idea how to finish that thought.

  “It is hard,” he said. “Your grandmother … that was my mother.”

  It was a simple truth, something self-apparent. Something somebody might point out to you in kindergarten: when your dad was little, your grandmother was just his mom. Like looking at a 9 upside-down. I pictured my dad as a teenager: hair combed straight and parted on the side, head cocked at the direction of a portrait studio photographer. Big smile and a far-off gaze. “Dad, I am so, so sorry,” I said, and I could see the distance from the rim of the tower to the ground, all that wasted Kansas plain going on and on forever, soaking up daylight and cooling to an inky black at night that spreads out uninterrupted for so long that eventually you can’t see any tower at all.