Hunger of the Wolf

by Stephen Marche

  Tenderly confounded, he picked the boy from her arms. To hold a son, to have another of your name, is to know how many fates worse than death there are, how many numbers less than zero. How are you supposed to live, to breathe air and eat food and drink water, with your heart wandering out there in the wild world?

  Dale Wylie

  Kensington Palace Gardens

  May 4, 1965

  Dear George,

  A boy. Terrific. But you know what a boy means. We must prepare for what he has in him.

  Some notes on inheritance. Now that we have the Record the English will love us. I assume they’ll give me a title, and it will be hereditary, and the nature of the agreement means that you will take over the company and the lordship and all the rest of it. That’s the will I made. I could tell you that it was for death duties or I could say it was to avoid taxes or I could say that I bound your future and Ben’s future and Ben’s grandson’s future to my own little moment in time in some purely financial logic, but we both know it would be a lie. I made the contract because of the wolf. I have gambled with all of us, I recognize that.

  Where you live is up to you, but I advise you to stay in America. I can’t tell if it’s the war that has made the English so contemptible but I’ve met the queen now and I’ve been to Buckingham Palace, and the palace is a prison and the queen has the sadness of the prisoner-in-chief. I’ve met whores in Atkinson who are more fully human than her. I miss lumberjacks. The last lumberjack I met must have been a decade ago. That was a man. He asked for nothing and he gave nothing.

  The British are waiting here to be bought and sold. No wonder the colonies are shrugging them off.

  I admire so much your ability to listen to people who know. So few rich kids can.

  Love,

  Dale

  In May of 1968, Dale abandoned his American citizenship in order to be knighted the First Lord Wylie of Abermarley.

  The celebration that followed the ceremony was at the Dorchester hotel, which then possessed the largest ballroom of any luxury hotel in London. Seven hundred and twenty-three guests passed an honor guard of Beefeaters. On the Park Lane side of the hotel, a wall-sized photograph of 17 Flora Avenue filled forty-five feet by nine and a half feet. On the other side, a similarly sized photograph of the house in Kensington Palace Gardens. And in between, the room had been filled with spruces, the trees from which newsprint is made, imported from the American West. The opulence was literally wild.

  Prime Minister Harold Wilson arrived early, pausing to discuss the unrest in France, youth in London, the history of revolution and its causes, the possibility of having to foot De Gaulle’s bills again. Jack Taggart showed up. His tuxedo looked rented, cheap, borrowed off a prom kid. Bedraggled in his age by never-slowing fits of lust and losses, he must have been out of money again.

  “How much is all this costing us?” Jack asked, looking around, shaking Dale’s hand.

  “Business expense,” Dale offered.

  “Champagne and claret are business expenses in England? How many waiters did you hire for this affair? These look like professionals, too. We should have brought in the reporters from the Record, had them scrounge around. Make ’em work for their checks.”

  “The day I take advice on expenditures from Jack Taggart is the day they come to take me away.”

  “I don’t know,” Jack said, inspecting the rafts of canapés circulating among the spruces, and the ruffled, gilded tables, each a travesty of lavishness. “I’m starting to worry. This looks like exactly the sort of thing I’d do.”

  “The bar’s free,” Dale added, gladhanding his old buddy forward. Rita Hayworth was next in line, and after her the shadow minister of defense, and after the shadow minister of defense, the Earl of Duquesne. Far down the long line of beauties and powers, terrestrial deities of celebrity and the marketplace, he noticed a couple waiting their turn, the man smiling mildly, the woman draped in an extravagant scarlet dress that, even within the glittering of London society, rose like lipsticked lips pressed against train station glass. Between them stood a small, confused boy in a gray flannel suit, a lost pup among the knees of the grand old world. Dale recognized his own in the boy: his first glimpse of Ben Wylie.

  “Dad, I have some introductions. My wife and son.”

  The woman was beautiful, eager to meet him but slightly afraid, too. Ben looked so much like Max, Dale tried to pick him up. The boy struggled in the stranger’s arms, moaning and howling, and Dale quickly returned him to the earth. “Poor kid, I’m sorry he had to meet me among all these people.”

  “We thought we’d bring him to see you in all your glory,” George said.

  “At least there are trees,” Dale said.

  Lavinia smiled. “We’ll all feel right at home.”

  Then Prince Charles, at the time a young, awkward guardsman, strolled up and Dale automatically extended a hand. “Hello, Charles. I’m Dale.” By the time he turned back, his son and grandson had slipped away into the crowd.

  After the meal—maple-glazed duck with orange rice and Christmas salad—Dale gave himself a brief toast, from under an arbor of expensively imported evergreen:

  Ladies and gentlemen,

  If I may speak a few brief words.

  I came to England after my sixty-fifth birthday, because I didn’t want to be bored in my old age. I have lived among you for only a brief time, though I hope indeed that the master of ceremonies allows me a little longer. I can say, in all honesty, that you have never bored me.

  My first newspaper I bought in Atkinson, on the border between Minnesota and North Dakota. I am still, I fear, an Atkinson man. But I hope that I have managed at least to coat myself with a good London veneer. The lessons from those early days remain. I remember once, in the province of Alberta, I was caught in a hailstorm. Hailstorms in Alberta can be a serious business and a neighboring field of dairy cattle were murdered where they stood. I survived with my brother by hiding under thick newspapers. Then after the storm, we went through the field gathering the stones into our rolled-up newspapers. I can still recall the taste of those hailstones. Life has no more savory delicacy. If only I could order for all of you here a rolled-up newspaper full of hailstones from Alberta. But I’m afraid even the Dorchester lacks that chain of supply.

  I tell this story because it encapsulates what I believe about newspapers. Many of you have asked me why I don’t use the paper or NWM to espouse the perspective on affairs that I share with many of you, although I’m afraid not you, Prime Minister. I have lost friendships because of my refusal but I keep my nose out of my editors’ business because I believe that newspapers are not for politics even though they must be political. Newspapers are to keep the hail off your head and to gather up the hail once it’s fallen.

  I think, if I do say so myself, that my papers make good hats and good cones.

  It’s funny, the older I become, the more I think about the future. The less future you have, the more you cherish it, I suppose. I won’t trouble you with my plans for the Wylie Corporation, which are mostly my son’s plans anyway, but I will tell you a little story, which I heard about Lord Fallis, if he’ll pardon the mention of his name. When I was very new to town and making impertinent inquiries even then, he asked one of his subordinates, “Who is this Wylie? Where is he from?” And the subordinate answered, “Well, he began in a town called Atkinson, which was too small for him so he moved to Pittsburgh. It was too small as well so he moved to New York. New York was too small so he moved to London, which looks like it will be too small for him as well.” “Where will he move next then?” Lord Fallis asked. The subordinate considered. “I suppose, sir, to hell.”

  Friends, I am not ready yet to make that move.

  George sent Lavinia home with the boy after the speech. No point forcing them to endure the infinite vanity of old men. The frail bodies of the London elite lounged in glitter. All the hectic business of the flesh had ached away from the river of the old people’s souls, e
xposing the grime-soaked shipwrecks of their fundamental desires: for more money, for more power. A stray policeman, needling a way through the whirling gears of the silvery tables, appeared at George’s side. George was needed, the bobby whispered, about a matter pertaining to his father.

  In the Presidential Suite, the most sumptuous room in the world at that time, on the edge of the unmade bed, sat a woman who, despite her state of shock, wore the most perfect mist-gray silk ball gown, matching the ephemeral pearls of her eyes. She was Lady Fallis, née Marguerite La Montée. On the bed, Dale Wylie’s naked corpse sprawled. The first Lord Wylie of Abermarley, worth nine hundred million dollars, had lived less than twenty-four hours with his title.

  *

  Dale’s death would be Ben’s first memory. Little Ben worried that his eyes had killed his grandfather, which made sense: He had seen him and then he had died. The rest of the business of death was a spontaneous grand adventure. In London, the disappointment of the hotel room with its weird dream of a mustard paisley-patterned carpet, mother distraught and annoyed and worried about father, who was missing. After the dreary roar between airports, the regular house filled with kind, distracted women dressed like crows and the sadness that weighed down the house like perfume-soggy drapes was the opposite of the hotel: He could run out on the new-minted spring lawns. Out to the abandoned house with its jangled locks, to the fringe of the trees. He could run wherever he liked except on the stairs. The house was so playful with shadows that the knock of a ghost on the door hardly surprised the boy.

  This ghost had matted and grizzled gray hair and his raggedy clothes were worse than the men who helped the gardeners, a yellow belt pulled crossways across his narrow waist, and a stuffed blanket under his arm. The ghost hugged Ben’s father. Nobody ever hugged Father.

  “You look just like Dale,” he said.

  “Uncle Max,” George said.

  *

  George and Max flew Dale’s body to Alberta, then drove him together to North Lake, so he could be buried, as he requested, “somewhere in the middle of nowhere.” Ben and Lavinia were following in a town car. George drove. The man beside him was all stooped, gray rags of beard and open-air eyes and hands curled on his lap like claws. Max was unused to sitting still, his eyes wary, almost tauntingly alive. They had nothing in common except their natures.

  “Do you have any children?” George asked, for something to ask.

  “None ever seemed to come along,” Max answered. “Not for lack of trying.”

  George began again. “So where have you been all this time?” He knew it was the question he wanted to ask his dead father.

  “I’ve been in paradise,” the gnarled man said with a smile.

  “Alberta?” George guessed.

  “You’ve only ever been a wolf in a cage, haven’t you? I can see that. Dale was that way, too. I’ve nearly starved, I’m not saying I haven’t. You haven’t had anything to eat, the cold, the death. But then that ripped-up field mouse, his little guts that didn’t want to die. Jesus himself never had a greater feast in heaven. That’s the paradise I’ve been in.”

  A little while later, after he had tried to understand and failed, George asked, “Isn’t that hell?”

  “After I killed that wop, I was out west, you know? I went to work in this valley, Turner Valley, where they had discovered gas, and they weren’t very good at it. They flared off about thirty percent. Just burned it up. The whole place smelled like rotten eggs, and not a little, I’m saying, not a nosebleed Sunday whiff, but the real stench of the stuff. And let me tell you, among the men there I wasn’t the roughest. I wasn’t near the worst guy. And I was a murderer. And why I’m telling you is that the place was heaven.”

  “Alberta in winter was heaven?”

  “The gas kept the valley warm all winter and the deer and the antelope would come to graze off the wildflowers. A cougar came down from the mountains. Work for the asking. Hunting wherever you looked. Perpetual summer in the heat of flared-off stink. And no questions. That’s heaven.”

  They drove in silence for a while, leaving behind the cottage country, where people play at the wilderness, for the starker country. “I need to know one more thing,” George said. “Have you ever met anyone like us?”

  “I’d leave that.” George waited for another bleary rant, another smoky-voiced gush from the rusty pump.

  “I’ve always wanted to meet another wolf,” George continued.

  “You’re meeting one now.”

  “But there were rumors of others, wherever you’ve been?”

  “There are werewolf stories all over. Because there are men and there are wolves, that’s why. And dogs, and dogs who are like men, and men who are like dogs. Men who are men and wolves who are wolves.”

  George turned his face away. “I have this sensation sometimes that I’m already dead, that I’m seeing the world frozen, or that I’ve just died, and everything flashing up is the past, the dead past.”

  Max laughed. “You need one of those headshrinkers.”

  “Already tried.”

  A guffaw scraped its way out of Max’s inhuman throat. “Then maybe a good run in the woods. Although, in a way, I know what you’re talking about. In a way. After Turner Valley, I stole a truck and ran to the bush after trading in Edmonton for three ponies and a kit. I launched out. And about two days later, I bought Mags. My wife. Fourteen-year-old Indian girl and I bought her for one of my ponies, a Winchester rifle, and a box of cartridges. I’ll tell you something else. That’s the best bargain any of us will ever make, even Dale. She sure was ready to leave her old man, too, so I’m pretty sure it was a good deal for her. Anyway, we lit out and she’d been learning to read from this old English Bible that the missionaries were handing out, and the first thing I did was rip out all the pages and tie them up for kindling. How she roared. Laughed her ass silly.”

  Something moving beyond the window startled him. He was not used to cars, maybe not used to windows either.

  “So we went into ranching country and built a little cabin and a day’s ride away was a ranch and another day’s ride the other way was a hotel for rich American sportsmen, and I would go to work for the ranchers and steal ’em blind and Mags would go down to the hotel and guide ’em and rob ’em blind, and pretty soon we had a pretty good thing going. She set up our little cabin in the bush. We had geraniums all year round and good beef too, ’cause I would tail a few away at the end of the year, you see, and she would kill them. The way she slid a knife into a bullcalf heart, swift, painless, on the down breath, so it never even knew it was dead. That’s a woman. And I remember she took the pictures of the dresses out of the magazines and put ’em all over our walls and it looked good, like a real home. And I lay with her, man and wolf.”

  He closed his eyes, squeezed them shut, as if he were trying to relive the scenes of his memories. They opened full of naked tears.

  “Why did you come back, Max?” George asked.

  “I want to know how my brother died.”

  “There’s good news there,” George said. “He died fucking a British lady in the most expensive hotel room in the greatest city in the world the day he was knighted by the queen.”

  Max shuffled the tears off as laughter. “That wouldn’t have upset him too much, I think.”

  “A proper British lady, too. The wife of an eighth earl of somewhere.”

  “Good for Dalie boy.”

  They drove into increasing wilderness.

  “So why did you come back now, Max? Why not sooner?”

  Max mused for a while, coughing, as they cut through a valley of pointless barren stone. “I suppose I couldn’t ask him for money anymore.”

  *

  In a town car with his mother, after driving to the end of an infinity of snow and boredom, as they pulled into the driveway of a stone cottage on the edge of a frozen lake, Ben saw his father with the grizzled man, the ghost from the doorway. They were shaking hands. They seemed happy and sad at
the same time. Then the man began to run. Though he was a very old man, he ran fast across the snow toward the forest, and passed into the snowy trees leaping, and as he leaped he turned, midair, into a wolf. A black wolf. Ben’s father kept waving as the wolf vanished into a cover of aspens. Ben looked back to his mother, whose smile was calm and understanding, the magical transformation a matter of everyday unconcern to her. She had seen the miracle but said nothing.

  FOUR

  *

  The cab throbbed on the curb outside Kate and Leo’s as I waited for them to finish screwing. The driver wasn’t bothered by the wait. He could see the meter ticking over fatalistically, the New York Post related the city’s various degradations to him in four-hundred-word nuggets, and a Starbucks venti pumpkin spice latte brightened his intermittent banter in Ibo over the Bluetooth. His life was rich with things. I had only my thoughts. My thoughts were still commercially viable then. Eight thousand words on the Wylies—enough to be cut down to four thousand—waited on my MacBook in the apartment, begging to have fresh detail, to be scoured by my anxieties and then, most gloriously of all, to be sold.

  Fifteen dollars and forty-five cents later, the Stathapolouses sauntered out, Kate in postcoital lululemon, with her hair satisfyingly moist, Leo in aviator sunglasses and a padded green vest under a heavy brown wool suit jacket, like an English count strolling to shoot pheasants in a soggy Norfolk field or, rather, like some Guy Ritchie purchaseable version of same. He might have looked all right, too, if not for the deerstalker cap with the flaps buttoned up.

  “I’m not letting you in the car with that hat on,” I said. Kate and I shared guffaws, hers as light and truculent as marshmallow foam.

  Leo popped the trunk and put his suitcase inside. Kate swiped the hat from his head. Leo frowned poutingly. How much of his attention must be invested in navigating the shipping lanes and coastal shoals of these class oceans. “I guess I should have worn my Beaver Patrol trucker hat instead,” he said.