After breakfast Olivia rose to take Shelley to school. Lynda took the other woman by the hand. “Your kitchen is really a dream,” she said.
Olivia was demure. “One does one’s best.”
When Peter and Lynda were alone, Lynda rummaged for the liquor cabinet. She removed a bottle of whiskey and doctored their coffee.
“It’s less than a day’s drive to Toma and Crystal’s farm,” she said. “We can be there before you turn.”
There was a hairline crack in his mug and he traced it with his fingernail.
“What if she’s next?” he said.
They looked at each other and there was nothing more to say.
Peter sipped from the mug. When he swallowed, his throat was the eye of a needle. Lynda got up and came over to him and he wrapped his arms around her and buried his face into the folds of her belly and he wept and wept.
“Fuck all this killing,” he said.
Someone came into the dining room and Lynda looked over. It was Roman. He did not display surprise at walking in on the Rumanceks in his dining room as much as the faint befuddlement of the overslept.
“What time is it?” he said.
PART III
THE FOREVER HOWL
The Fence
Peter and Roman sat on the hood of Roman’s car and the sun was pink through the trees and the shadow of the electrical substation came at them like a slow attack of elbows.
“Will I be able to keep up?” said Roman.
“No,” said Peter.
Roman threw his cigarette butt to their growing pile and lit another.
“I’m sorry I was a pain in your balls,” he said.
“Don’t worry about it,” said Peter.
Roman looked at the crisscrossing tracks at the rail yard and straightened his arm, considering the intersection of veins at his elbow. Means of transporting iron.
“Do you love her?” said Roman.
Peter hunched forward, resting his forearms on his knees. “Yeah,” he said. “Or whatever.”
“Shee-it,” said Roman.
“Shee-it,” said Peter.
They were quiet. Peter reached into his pocket and pulled out the fragment of Goblin Market and handed it to Roman.
“What is this?” said Roman.
“I found it here last time,” said Peter.
“What do you think it means?” said Roman.
Peter didn’t answer. He was through trying to solve a wolf problem with people skills.
“Why are you giving me this?” said Roman.
Peter didn’t say it. But if tonight went all to shit it would be on Roman to stay on the trail. God help us. He changed the subject.
“Do you remember anything from when you were out?” said Peter.
“No,” said Roman. “Well, a feeling. I have a feeling. It’s sort of like déjà vu but not. Like … something that’s gonna happen but I forget what it is. I guess I’ll know it when I see it.”
He looked at the Dragon and knew now what if only he had known sooner. That it stood for something that was more powerful and more important than anything with the name Godfrey on it, and making fun of it had been a boner move.
They were quiet.
“Shee-it,” said Peter.
“Shee-it,” said Roman.
And then Peter felt it. Heard, that is. It starts when you hear it, in the rocks and trees and sky. Calling out your secret name. He slid off the roof of the car and undressed. He pulled his ponytail free and got on all fours. When the wise wolf stopped shaking and the red mist settled, it looked at Roman. It had the appearance of being stouter than at the previous moon; its winter coat was coming in.
“Peter?” said Roman.
The wolf looked at him but not in recognition, and then it looked away. It walked to the entrance of the mill with its head lowered and scratched at the door for entry. Roman went and pushed it open and stood back as the wolf trotted inside, nose to the ground. Roman waited outside; he accepted finally that the better part of valor was knowing when you were getting in the way. After a minute or two the wolf returned and nosed its way out and turned toward the rail yard.
“Is there a scent?” said Roman.
The wolf lifted its nose into the air.
“Do you have him?” said Roman.
The wolf shot through the rail yard for the trees. It was immediately apparent nothing on two legs could keep pace. Roman watched the wolf race over the muddy outskirts of the yard and leap over the fence. The hairs on Roman’s arms prickled as he watched the wolf leap: clearing the razor wire with a brute and unsurpassable grace, its coat rippled like a breeze over a wheat field and if its paws never touched ground again Roman would have been just as happy, he would have been just as happy to watch his friend fly forever.
Then, faster than Roman could keep track, things went all to shit. A pained yelp issued from the wolf and it went all cockeyed in the air, body tumbling over legs and skidding into the brush. With whimpering pants it rose, stumbling, and attempted to push forward into the woods, but its shaking legs sent it into a drunken carom, walking into the trunk of a birch.
“Peter!” Roman cried, and he ran to the fence.
The wolf shook its head and attempted a few more steps before its legs gave out and it splayed to the ground.
“What is it!” said Roman, the panic in his chest so overpowering that it didn’t occur to him he was talking to a dog.
A convulsion passed through the wolf and it was still. Roman cried out Peter’s name again but the wolf just lay there. Its tongue lolled. The rise and fall of its ribs. A long, thin tube, Roman now saw, sticking from the ribs. That was the thing, whatever it was, the thing that was hurting his friend. Roman seized the fence and started to climb. There was razor wire along the top but he wasn’t thinking that far ahead. He just saw his friend lying there helpless with a thing sticking out, and that was as far as he’d gotten.
“Get down.”
There was a rustling in the brush and a person emerged from a few yards down, on the other side of the fence. It was Chasseur. She was camouflaged in dark khaki that was rank with deer piss to mask her own scent and she carried a rifle with a scope and there was a pack around her shoulders, and Roman realized what was sticking from the wolf: a dart.
“You don’t understand,” he said, still hanging on to the fence.
She stopped and shouldered the rifle and sited him.
“Get down,” she said.
Roman dropped to his feet. “Listen to me,” he said.
“Do not attempt eye contact,” she said. “Stay ten paces back. Keep your hands visible. Do not attempt eye contact.”
Roman averted his look. “It’s not him.”
Chasseur set her rifle and her pack on the ground by Peter. She did not show that she heard what he had said.
“I said it’s not him!”
“How do you know that?” she said. Less to entertain the discussion than keep him amused while she did what she had to. She was willing to tranquilize him if pushed, but didn’t want it to come to that. To the eye a shot is only geometry and yardage and wind, but to a still-beating heart pulling a trigger on another living body and watching it fall is to be avoided, it does not give you a good feeling. If you aren’t a psychopath or a male.
“Because—” said Roman. How did he know that? “I was with him last time. The whole night.”
“You’re lying,” she said. She undid the clasps of the pack.
“If you hurt him, you are dead,” said Roman. “Do you hear me? Dead,” he stressed pathetically.
“He’s fine,” said Chasseur. “And if you threaten me again I’ll come over there and break your fucking teeth in.”
She pulled a thin plastic loop from the bag and fitted it around Peter’s hind legs and tightened it. Roman mashed his knuckles into his face, chastened and desperate.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “But … I’m telling you, you don’t know what you’re doing right now.”
/> She fastened another ZipCuff around his forelegs and pulled a conical steel and leather apparatus from the pack.
“It’s not Peter,” said Roman. “We were tracking him. That’s why we came here. To get the scent.”
She tucked Peter’s tongue in his mouth and closed his jaws and fitted the apparatus around his snout. A muzzle.
“Just how much of what you think you know is what he told you?”
Roman looked up helpless at the spreading inkblot night. His foot sank into the ground with a mud belch. Abruptly he snapped his fingers and jabbed emphatically at the fresh paw prints.
“The vargulf doesn’t leave tracks!” he said.
She did not deviate from fitting the straps of the muzzle.
“Didn’t you hear me?” he said. “Peter leaves tracks, the killer doesn’t.”
“No tracks were found,” she said.
Roman came forward to the fence and she put a warning hand on the rifle butt.
“It’s going to be your fault,” he said. “If there’s another one tonight, it will be your fault.”
She tightened the straps. “Roman,” she said, “what can be done with fewer assumptions is done in vain with more. This is not your friend. This is not a person. I know it’s hard for you to accept and I believe it’s hard for him too. I believe that you wanted to find the monster, and so did he. Because he couldn’t know that about himself. You can’t know that about yourself and continue being a person.”
Roman shook his head. “That’s bullshit,” he said. “That’s just bullshit.”
She gave Peter’s restraints a once-over and stood. “This is an animal,” she said. “That’s what it is.”
Roman looked pleadingly at her. She repeated her admonition about eye contact.
“If you’re wrong, someone is going to die tonight,” said Roman. “Can’t you see I’m just trying to help? Why won’t you let me help?”
“Because you don’t believe in God,” she said.
She pulled the dart from Peter. “Please go to your car and leave of your own volition. I’m going to be really pissed off if you make me shoot you.”
For a moment Roman was still except for the play of shadow on the hollows of his clenching jaw. Then he turned his back to the fence and walked away.
“God doesn’t want you to be happy, He wants you to be strong,” she said.
She looked down at the truly marvelous specimen at her feet breathing the last of its free air. Questions of right and justness aside, the wolf would surely die in a cage. Its kind didn’t know how to live in one. She knelt and placed her palms flat on its chest and belly and felt its breathing and permitted herself this one moment of pity before what had to be done was done. The death of freedom was always something to be mourned.
* * *
The van was parked along the train tracks a half mile away. Chasseur sat for a few moments on the back bumper and caught her breath, folding forward and pulling her lower back into a long stretch. It hurt more than it used to, humping a load that far. She didn’t know whether it was her or this case, but it used to be that being in the field made her feel younger. She got up to close the rear doors but stopped, glancing a moment at the mud-caked paws. Doubt gnawed, but the method prevailed: replicable observation and measurement of material phenomena. The sanity of science of apostolic necessity in trafficking with mystery, God the most necessary hypothesis. She shut the wise wolf in.
“Take this sword: its brightness stands for faith, its point for hope, its guard for charity,” she said.
She looked out at the river. On the other bank several streetlamps dotted their reflections on the water, making a series of stuttering exclamation points !!! She took out her phone. Holding her fingertips to the crucifix around her neck but not quite touching. She dialed.
“He’s in bracelets,” she said. “Make a bed.”
She hung up and watched the light of her LCD screen slowly fade, then walked around to the driver’s side of the van and came face-to-face with Olivia Godfrey.
“Hello again,” said Olivia. She wore a satin evening gown as white as a grin and Chasseur could not account for how so glaringly absurd a thing could have gotten the drop on her, but it wasn’t a priority.
Chasseur unholstered her .38 and aimed it at Olivia. Pulling a trigger on another body has its exceptions.
Olivia regarded her with a cocked head. “The cross you wear,” she said, “it’s not of your order.”
“Mrs. Godfrey,” said Chasseur, “I am going to give you one opportunity to slowly place your hands on the vehicle, and if you take one step toward me I will kill you.”
Olivia’s head cocked the other way. “Saint Jude. Oh, Little Mouse: What makes you feel so lost?”
She stepped forward. Her gown shimmered like the risen moon in the river.
* * *
And Peter woke.
He didn’t know what had happened or where he was. He didn’t know shit about shit. This is no way to go through life, he thought. He focused. He was nude and in a strange room—but he had been here before, the night before—he was in the guest bed at Godfrey House. And someone was standing over him. Roman. Roman was waiting for him to wake up. It was in his posture and his eyes. Roman had bad news.
Peter tried to sit up, but this was ambitious. There was a heavy groan and he realized it was coming from him. He tried to pinpoint the last thing he could remember but it was like looking at shapes underwater: nothing resolved into actual thingness and anything might eat you.
My heart really breaks for Peter here. He didn’t deserve any of this, and it is with great melancholy that I picture him peeing on a tree, a lattice of diamonds imprinted on his bare back from the hammock, or pulling his hair fully around his face to become Cousin Itt, or chasing a squirrel—too slow!—up a gully. All in all, Peter’s love of being Peter was so great that like an overfilled bucket of paint it slopped over even in the smallest moments of his day. No, Peter didn’t deserve any of this. Though it could be said it was his fault.
“What happened?” Peter said. It was like sandbags were tied to his words.
“Alexa and Alyssa Sworn,” said Roman. “The vargulf got the sheriff’s daughters.”
Peter looked at the ceiling. He had no idea what to do with this information; this was not a respectable way to go through life. Then he snapped upright and seized Roman’s arm.
“Lynda,” he said.
God Doesn’t Want You to Be Happy, He Wants You to Be Strong
As Roman passed Kilderry Park he saw the black pillar of smoke issuing from down the hill and his stomach sank. He hurried, but when he reached the Rumanceks’ plot there was nothing waiting but the scorched husk of the trailer. He got out and stood for a while as close to the black and buckled metal as the heat would allow. On the ground there was a carpeting of ash and debris and something fluttered into his jacket. He took it in his hands; it was the singed fragment of a Peanuts cartoon he recognized from the refrigerator. Roman released it and turned from the trailer. A broken compact mirror lay on the ground, open like a clam. It was cracked and reflected the wash of black smoke in the sky’s white.
His phone rang. Peter. Destiny had had a dream in her Third Eye and retrieved Lynda in the night. They were in the city.
“How’s it look?” said Peter.
“Like the last time Shelley made toast,” said Roman. “Molotov cocktail, maybe. Or grenade.”
Peter was quiet. Then he said, “What happened last night?”
“I don’t know,” said Roman. “Last I saw you were down and Chasseur was going to take you and there was nothing I could do about it. So I’m driving, just driving up and down the river until, you know, a better idea comes along, when Mom calls and says to come back and keep an eye on you. I go home, there you are. She isn’t. Is she back yet?”
“No,” said Peter.
“Well, looks like I won’t be bringing you a change of socks.” He rubbed his face and his hand came off blackened with
soot.
“I watched you change back,” he said. “This morning.”
There was another pause. “Yeah?” said Peter.
“Yeah. It’s actually … it’s … beautiful.”
“Okay,” said Peter.
“I’m not a homo,” said Roman. He hung up, noticing a black shape reflected in the driver’s window, and turned to find the cat sitting a few paces off. It looked at him, flames licked the menisci of its eyes. Roman looked at the cat. It peered into his face hieratic and unknowable as the night. Roman stepped forward, scooped a hand under its belly, and tossed it into the car.
* * *
Peter hung up and regarded himself in the same mirror in which he had done the other night, pondering what it would reflect on this morning after the Snow Moon. It was equally useless, showing nothing but a face as grim and gray but one day older. A face without options. He had one option. Whose son was he? He slapped his bare stomach hard with both hands and went downstairs to the kitchen and rooted through the refrigerator. On the bottom shelf there was a twenty-two-ounce rib eye bulging red and wet against the wrapper. He put a cast-iron skillet on the stove and turned the burner on high and tore the meat from the package. He gave the skillet another minute to get hot before dropping the steak into a searing scream, that scream like it is just now dying. He let it sit for only a few seconds before pinching it between his fingers and flipping it. He extinguished the flame and lifted the skillet and slid the steak into his hand. The surface was brown but red juice welled in the striations and the trim of fat was still pink, and when he bit into it the center was an almost iridescent purple. Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes. He hardly chewed and swallowed before tearing another bite, and the next. The juice ran down his hands and his chin and the hair of his torso. He held it greedily with both hands and snapped his head back to tear the gristle. He saw Letha standing in the entryway.
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