Hunger of the Wolf

by Stephen Marche

  “Poppy knocked down half of Connecticut,” Leo told me. “Did you hear about that?”

  I hadn’t. How had he?

  “I should say she tried. She’s just left half of Connecticut to rot. Bought three houses in the Golden Triangle and tried to knock them all down so she could live in the middle of a field.”

  “I thought they had North Lake for that,” I said.

  “She wanted a more convenient wilderness, I guess. It’s not that unusual anyway. Bill Gates did the same thing on Lake Washington. Bought out all his neighbors. Larry Ellison bought five houses along the beach in Malibu.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “The same reason they buy yachts that can cross oceans. So they can forget about the existence of other people. In the end, the only livable places will be the ones where nobody lives.” His mind fluttered like an alert sparrow between winter-black magnolia branches. “What do you think she would be like in bed?”

  “I’ve never met her.”

  “How would that matter?”

  Leo began to explain how lovemaking—its techniques, it visual modality, its intensity, and its frequency—varies according to income level; from the garrulous mamacitas in their air-conditioned track-rattled ghetto bedrooms to the ultramontane upper-crust sodomites in Bora Bora executive suites. The lesson was interrupted by the heralded arrival of Colin Farrell, glistening with testosterone and greased-back hair and sunglasses—an attempt, I realized in the flesh, to look like an actorly version of Bono. When he removed the glasses, he had the scared look of a teenage boy who has wandered into a strip club. I remembered the period when he had haunted the stripper bars of Southern California in a wool watch cap and torn jeans. He was a historical figure in a way: The word douche bag would not have become nearly so widespread without him.

  In the flurry of star arrival, Poppy was suddenly at our side—the woman herself. I couldn’t tell: Was the delicate, hidden ravage of her face evidence of hard living, of ruin by luxury, or was she just suffused with my various memories, of the magazine spreads, the rolled-down window of the limousine in Alberta, my conversation with her brother over a Paul Klee painting? Leo leaned in and whispered an ingratiating welcome. She obviously had no idea who he was, which bothered him not at all.

  “And this is James C. Cabot, my journalist friend who wants to meet you,” he said, turning to me. She offered her hand. I touched a Wylie.

  “Who do you work for?” Poppy asked, the way you might ask a plumber if he was certified and insured.

  “I used to work for The New York Standard,” I tried. The name of the Standard somehow displeased her.

  “And now?”

  “Vice,” Leo answered for me.

  “That’s for young people, right?” she asked before I could correct Leo.

  “It’s for youth.” The distinction seemed relevant, at least to me. Already Poppy was scanning the room for whomever was more interesting, more of the moment. I had to catch her. All I needed to do was make sure she would respond to an e-mail. “I remember I had a very interesting conversation about a Paul Klee painting with your brother once,” I said. “It was called The Wolf.” Her eyes hitched to mine, a reaction. “It was a small painting, red squares, set with scarlet squares.”

  “It doesn’t sound much like a wolf,” she said cautiously.

  “No, but it feels like one.”

  The center of her eyes flickered in a spectral, indecipherable breeze. I had done what I needed to do. “You knew my brother?”

  “I only met him once. It’s Leo here who knew him.”

  “An interesting man,” Leo added. “He had amazing taste.”

  “He did, didn’t he? My brother”—her voice became flatter, more expansive, more removed, like she was describing a bathroom in a real estate tour—“possessed the most wonderful gift for finding masterpieces and buying them. He never knew how to display them. They were always stacked in a basement or in one of the houses on the floor.” She snapped out of her reverie, smiled coldly, mildly embarrassed.

  “He was good at buying and not so much at owning,” Leo concluded.

  “That’s it precisely,” she said.

  “Owning is always harder than buying.”

  The moment of recognition, however paltry, however petty its surroundings, was real. I watched it blossom between the two of them with some unnameable black sap rising in my veins, some animal defense that I swallowed down.

  “You seem to know me much better than I know you,” Poppy said to me. “I used to know everyone in magazines.”

  “I remember your photo shoots.”

  “You do?”

  “Everybody does.” She seemed genuinely touched, so I pushed. “I was wondering if you might want to talk about it.”

  “About what? With whom?”

  “With me. About your journey.”

  Leo could sense the disgust that threatened to overwhelm her and headed it off: “This boy’s from your ancestral homeland.”

  “China?” she asked.

  “That’s typical Leo,” I answered. “Not China. North Lake.”

  “North Lake,” she said. Her eyes fizzed like soda dolloped into dark milk. “The Wylies all have such happy memories of North Lake. The water there is so clean and the air is so pure. Heaven can’t be much cleaner or purer than that. A place like North Lake makes you wonder how much better the world would have been without us. I wanted to shoot a movie up there with Bobby”—there is a way of saying the name Bobby that instantly implies De Niro—“but it never happened.”

  “I have an uncle Bobby there,” I said stupidly.

  “Do you?”

  Leo looked down at his five-hundred-dollar Prada shoes and at the shiftable ground.

  “I just realized that I can’t stand to be in North Lake one instant longer.”

  She wandered away. The abruptness of her abandonment made Leo laugh. “Surprisingly human, isn’t she?”

  “Surprisingly,” I agreed.

  “That stuff about her journey was inspired,” he said with a sneer. “I think you nabbed her.”

  *

  I had embarrassed myself but Poppy would talk to me, I was sure. She would respond to an e-mail. The Wolf was too shiny a lure. A trip to the mountaintop almost certainly awaited me: In a coffee shop or a restaurant or, if I was lucky, her apartment, I would have a chance to ask the remaining sister about Ben, about the body in the snow, about the frozen corpse whose meaning would answer all questions of my own and whose wealthy luridness would fit so neatly into the five-dollar-a-word story well of Vanity Fair. Why did the man who had everything strip himself naked in the middle of nowhere? How did all the money in the world fail him? Did his secret life overwhelm him? Meanwhile Leo was heading to a gun club on the Upper East Side, a luxurious cellar where you could fire an Uzi and knock back a Heineken at the same time. I passed. I wanted clean air. The rich kids were cloying my sense of the purpose of humanity. Soon I would have to go back to the basement, where I was running out of money, out of work, out of time, out of justifications for staying in New York. Even the journeyman fare of quarterly reports for corporations was drying up, going online, fading into nickel-a-word territory. The situation had deteriorated to the point where I was making coffee at home and writing in bed.

  Poppy had joined Colin Farrell on the sectional and never looked again in my direction but I knew we were stretching to the same wilderness, the wilderness that will have to do for a home.

  Everything that happens in life means that you need to make more money. For Dale, in the winter of 1931, the expectation of a child was like the presentation of a bill.

  He married Kitty just as he was supposed to. The brief ceremony at the desolate town hall; the wedding breakfast that followed, with orange juice rather than champagne, at the second-least-expensive hotel in Champlain; the stroll through town back to Flora Avenue instead of a honeymoon—he saved as much as he could. The Depression had shattered all romantic expectations anywa
y. In faraway cities, the financiers had conjured for themselves the great skyscraping towers so they could leap to their deaths from the window ledges, and therefore the steelworkers in Champlain all had to be fired. The timing of the globally logical conclusion couldn’t have been worse for Dale’s side businesses in Atkinson, the auto parts, the radio sets, but the creeds he inherited had been designed for plague and famine and whatever other catastrophes his hardscrabble ancestors had reckoned with. Always find a way to get along. No matter what, keep going. Foot-in-front-of-foot-in-front-of-foot rustles away any wonder at origins or destinations. We’re all wind-up toys sent into the world, stumbling across the table until we fall off.

  A fresh catastrophe was waiting for him one morning after his transformation. In the parlor, among the shimmering surface of clocks ticking on mantelpieces and leather-bound books beside silver-framed family photographs and side tables pooled by brandy snifters filled with odorless potpourri, a clipping from The Dominion rested like a fallen leaf on the doilied trunk of a comfortable armrest.

  January 21, 1931—Champlain’s first murder of the year took place yesterday afternoon at the confluence of Church and Main Streets, in a dispute over a husky dog.

  According to horrified onlookers, the victim, one Myron Belluomini, was striking the animal forcibly with a broom handle, after the creature had leapt on his wife while in Miller’s Hardware, the dry goods supplier. He continued to hit the animal after it had skulked into a corner.

  At this point the murderer, a large dark fellow in workman’s clothes, arrived and remonstrated with the victim, who ignored him. Their subsequent argument escalated into blows, the killer landing a swift right to the temple which dispatched the unfortunate Mr. Belluomini instanter. Seeing his victim fallen, the murderer fled north along Church.

  The bystanders, coming to Mr. Belluomini’s aid, failed to detain the suspect. No arrests have been made. The police are in the midst of enquiries and assure this reporter that they will soon have the suspect in custody, the man being a well-known criminal figure in the neighborhood.

  *

  Dale sat blankly listening to the silence of the women’s mournful shame from the upper floor. They should have known. They all should have known after the black girl with her throat ripped out. No police would catch Max, but Dale knew he would never see his brother again. Who could be better at disappearing into the wilderness? He would miss knowing what happens next. Where was Max going? What was his fate? Max was gone. Dale was on his own. With a child on the way.

  He needed money. Dale remembered that he had an appointment in Atkinson with Ron Ritchie, the owner of the Gasman Mechanics chain of garages in and around Atkinson, who owed him for nearly a year’s worth of supplies. If Ritchie paid him, Dale might be able to finagle things. If Ritchie didn’t pay him, he would go bankrupt. Whether his brother was a murderer or not, he just had time to race for the train.

  *

  The bar in the Late Spring Hotel in Atkinson was a mean, low room that smelled of mistakes. Dale liked to conduct business at the bar of the Late Spring because the booze was cheap and the only food on offer was pickled eggs for a nickel. If he was going to be bankrupted, it may as well be on the cheap.

  Ritchie showed up late, while the radio behind the bar scratched out the latest disastrous agricultural news. He strolled in with a roly-poly air of unconcern that informed Dale, more than anything the fat man could ever say, that Ritchie was about to screw him.

  “Looks like we’re all going to the slaughterhouse together,” Ritchie noted, nodding at the radio. “Last man out.”

  Dale mused over his beer. “Doesn’t seem like much togetherness to me.”

  “You’re right there.” Even the way he tucked his belly under the rail was maddeningly indifferent.

  “Seems like everybody’s alone.”

  “Now, Dale, don’t bring me down.” Ritchie was restraining a grin, gauging within himself just how much of a bastard he was, which turned out to be quite a bastard, more of a bastard than he would have thought, more than his mother would have thought anyway.

  Dale hiccupped and sighed at once. “All right, Ronnie, I won’t bring you down but how about you don’t bring me down either? How about we fight against all this destruction, all this collapse, and learn to be human beings to each other.”

  “That sounds good,” Ritchie said warily.

  “Now, don’t get nervous. I’m not asking you for what you owe me.”

  “No?”

  “I wouldn’t expect that of you now, at this moment.”

  “That’s good. Fine. Swell. What do you want then, Dale?”

  “What I want is a debt guarantee, just a sheet of paper saying that you owe me, that you know you owe me, that I know that you know that you owe me, and that you plan to pay me.” That would be something he could show to MacCormack when the heavenly books swung open.

  Ritchie frowned solemnly as he took his first sip of beer. “Not really going to be able to do that.”

  “What part of what I said is untrue?”

  Ritchie licked the luxurious foam from his primitive lips. “You want to be human beings about this?” he asked.

  “That’s what I said.”

  Ritchie’s eyes glassed over, the sign of a man recusing his meaning from whatever he was about to say. “I can smell the death on you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’ll be back, don’t misunderstand. But even if I paid you all that debt, it would keep you alive for, what, six months? Another season in hell.”

  “So you’re not going to pay what you’re telling me you owe.”

  “What I’m saying to you is that I’m a businessman, and I know that if you go bankrupt, I’ll only have to pay a fraction of the debt.” Ritchie paused for a slug of beer. “That’s what I meant when I said I can smell the death on you.”

  “So you’re going to kill me,” Dale said. A bored telegram boy was standing by Dale’s side.

  “No, nothing so grand. I’m telling you that you’re already dead.”

  Dale fingered open the message from the telegram boy. Ritchie reached over the green-gray tub to finger-filch a five-cent egg from the reeky waters. The telegram read: SON BORN STOP.

  *

  Dale left Ritchie to pay for the drinks and walked to Atkinson Station, considering the fate of men. He was near middle age, had worked hard and smart for twenty years without pause, and now owed far more than he possessed. His child was born to an absent beggar, a drifter. He had nothing to show but two hundred Interceptor radios in a sufferance storage center on the outskirts of a two-bit gold-mining town. If he could sell the radios, he might be able to blanch over the auto parts losses to MacCormack. He might be able to keep his job. He couldn’t go back to Champlain without a job.

  He had to sell those radios. He had to. Dale Wylie started to make his fortune for the simplest reason there is: He had to.

  *

  The patter for radios in 1930 was elaborate, a full-fledged opera of a sale with enforced intermezzi between multiple acts. Approach was key. The houses of potential buyers had to be solid. Never bother walking up to a door if the lawn’s not trimmed, if the steps aren’t swept. Never bother with bachelors or the poor. Never bother with a busted roof. Dale mostly tried farms on the edge of town, which could at least sustain themselves, despite depressed food prices, with their own produce. Their remoteness, too, was an advantage. The radio was the latest cure for loneliness.

  Never admit you’re a salesman. To arrive at a farm in 1931 and to admit salesman status meant guaranteed rejection. Dale informed whoever answered, suspicious housewife or shirtsleeved proprietor rustled from his newspaper or dreamily uninterested teenager, that he was from a government office performing transmission tests in the area. Dale would then set up a radio transmitter in their parlor, or their dining room if they didn’t have a parlor, completely free of charge, and return in a week to find out if they had received any signal.

 
; In the salesman’s fantasy, what played out a week later was a short scene. “So did you snag a signal?” The man of the house, bragging a bit, replied that he even managed some stations in Washington State, and then the salesman proposed, “Well, if you want to keep it, I can do a deal for you,” and the man of the house replied, “Now, what would that cost?” and the salesman mused, “Well, seeing as you’ve done us such a big favor by allowing it to be installed for the test …”

  The scenes we write for ourselves are the dramas that never get produced. The sparse territories around Atkinson huddled in a subcutaneous bowl of nickel, which screened out radio signals, so the installed receivers generated mostly a howling ruff of static. Even when Dale managed to slip through the suspicious door, set up the transmitter, pry his way out of pointed questions, and bait the sale, he received a curt “Get that bloody machine the hell out of my house” rather than “Where can I buy one?” when he returned.

  After the tenth rejection, in the futility of February, Dale sat nursing a sudsy beer, tracing figure eights in the sawdust floor of the Late Spring Inn, ruminating on the day’s nastiest sales calls, the dooming screech of the hectically oblivious static. How can you sell radio sets when there’s no radio to pick up? He wondered: Why didn’t Atkinson have its own station? It would give a radio salesman a chance. Then he wondered: Well? Why didn’t Atkinson have a radio station?

  Dale helped himself to the bar’s phone and connected to a clerk at the Radio Commission in Minneapolis. The license for the town belonged to Atkinson Lumber, he was informed. They communicated with crews who were working outside the town line by radio. Or rather they used to, the clerk said. Why weren’t they using them anymore? Dale enquired. Oh, new regulations. The camps had to be connected by telephone if they employed more than two hundred men.

  The next morning, Dale admitted himself to the frantic offices of Rich Julian, owner of Atkinson Lumber. Drunk, lecherous, always in the middle of labor conflicts, mostly because he hated to pay men who did nothing more than work for a living, Rich Julian was permanently screaming into a phone or thinking about screaming into a phone. In the pause to light a cigarette, Dale piped up: Did Mr. Julian know that he was still paying property tax on the value of the radio license? Did Mr. Julian know that he could write off the sale as a depreciated asset with a simple transfer of ownership? Fine. Other fish to fry. What was the deal?