Wolf's Mouth

by John Smolens

  On the slip, Henry had listed everything: gas, oil, taillight replacement, dinner, breakfast, the cabin, with the total underlined at the bottom: $18.37.

  Claire turned the slip toward her, and her lips moved slightly as she added up the figures, and then she got out her purse and gave me a twenty-dollar bill. We went up to the cash register. I handed the bill to Phyllis, who pressed several keys, which caused a bell to ring and the drawer to slide open. When she started to count out change, I raised a hand and waved it off.

  “Why thank you, honey,” she said. “You two have a safe drive, and you be careful. I ain’t never been there, but I hear Detroit can be one nasty place.”

  Henry was hunched over his coffee mug and he wouldn’t even look at us.

  Claire said, “Thank you for your hospitality.”

  And then we were out the door and climbing into the car. I pulled into the road, heading south, and said, “What’s ‘elope’ mean?” I nearly shouted because I had such a need to speak.

  “That’s what they thought? We had eloped?”

  “What’s it mean?”

  “Run off to get married.”

  I laughed. “And I thought they were really on to us.”

  “Oh, they were on to us,” Claire said. There was no humor in her voice, and I stopped laughing. “You know what it means to be taken?”

  “Taken?”

  “For a ride.”

  “What?”

  “They saw us coming and took us for a ride.”

  I looked at Claire. She was furious. “They charged too much?” I asked.

  “I wonder what the cop’s cut was.”

  “Cut? What is cut?”

  “Straits. Cut. Eloped.” The joy in Claire’s laughter was tinged with dread. “God help us, Frank Green.”

  12.

  We were rounding a bend in the road, doing about forty miles per hour, when I put my foot on the brake and the pedal went straight to the floor. The tires squealed as we drifted into the other lane, where a pickup truck was coming toward us, its horn blaring. I couldn’t get the car back on our side of the road, so I swerved left and rolled the car off the pavement, bumping along rutted dirt, as the truck sped close by us on the right. The car descended down the shoulder of the road, plowed through a large puddle of water, and stopped at the edge of a pasture. Water hissed on the exhaust pipes, while beyond a barbed-wire fence, cows grazed as though nothing had happened.

  I depressed the brake pedal twice again. “Non funzione.”

  As we got out of the car, someone behind us called down from the road, “Everybody all right?”

  It was the man in the pickup, with a dog. He was wearing bib overalls, and though he was at least in his forties, he had thick, strong hands gripping the steering wheel.

  “No brakes,” Claire said.

  He stared at us through the open passenger-side window for a moment, his jaw working slowly. Turning his head, he spit out his window, and then looked back down at us. “My place is just up the road.”

  Claire had already begun to get her handbag from the front seat of the car. I whispered, “I don’t want to be the mute anymore.”

  “Okay,” she said, clearly disappointed with my decision, and as she started walking up toward the truck, “It’s a free country.”

  I had heard Americans say this before, but while I was in prison it had never had any meaning for me. I looked back at the pasture, where one cow had wandered over to the fence, her head hanging over the barbed wire, not ten feet from me. “I’m free,” I said, and she stared back at me as only a cow can.

  I got our suitcase from the back seat, locked the car, and walked up to the truck. Claire was already seated in the cab with the door closed. She held the small dog out the window and said, “There’s not enough room. Ride in the back with Barney.” I put the suitcase in the truck bed, then took the dog and climbed up over the rail, where I sat on the wheel well, holding the dog on my thighs. In the cab, Claire and the farmer were talking, though I couldn’t hear what they were saying. The farmer drove slowly, periodically leaning over his window and spitting out a stream of dark juice, while long strands of hair drifted out of Claire’s window.

  Soon we could see the farm we had just passed: a white clapboard house, barn, and several outbuildings. The truck pulled into the yard, causing chickens to scatter, and stopped in the shade of the one large tree that loomed over the house. The farmer got out and came around to the back of the truck. He let down the tailgate and the dog jumped to the ground. The farmer’s teeth were stained with tobacco juice, and he considered me with less interest than the cow in the field, then followed the dog up to the porch door.

  Claire climbed down out of the cab, and I said, “Is this all right?”

  She stared at the house a moment. “Sure.”

  “What’d you talk about?”

  “Chickens.”

  “Chickens. What about the car?”

  “He says there’s a repair shop in the next town south.”

  I got out of the truck bed with our suitcase, and we walked toward the house. “How come I feel like you’re not telling me everything?”

  “All I know is his name is Shelby and he lives with Vera. At first I thought she was his wife, but I think she’s his sister. I’m not sure. She calls the shots, it seems.”

  “The shots?”

  “The decisions.”

  “Ah. So maybe that means wife?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Now that you’re my wife, Mrs. Green, you call the shots.”

  A woman came out onto the porch. She seemed younger than Shelby, perhaps thirty-five, and she wore an apron over a print dress. She raised an arm to pull strawlike blond hair back off her broad face, and her forearm was powdered with what appeared to be flour. Unlike Shelby, she had a gaze that was hard but weary, and it seemed to know everything all at once. “Broke down, huh? Shelby’ll have to tow you in to Moose’s.”

  “Moose’s?” Claire asked.

  “Moose Van Voorst. Runs the garage in town. He’s also the mayor and dog catcher.” She smiled, revealing the fact that she was missing several teeth, as she turned to go back into the house. “Well, come on in then.”

  Under my breath, I mimicked her. “Well, come on in then.”

  We followed her into a kitchen, where she was making bread, the loaves in two rows of tin pans lined up on a large table that had a white enameled top. She opened the oven door, releasing heat into the room. Claire and I immediately began to assist her: I picked up each tin, handed it to Claire, who handed it to Vera, who put it in the oven. Twelve loaves, six on each wire rack. Once while leaning over, Vera’s dress fell open, revealing her breasts, which swayed freely, smooth and pale as the loaves she was placing in the oven. When our task was finished, she closed the door and straightened up, her hands on her hips. “People come from miles around for our bread, milk, chickens, and meat.” I was tempted to tell her the same was true of my family, that we sold primarily cheese and sausage, but would never think of baking bread—that was what other families did. She watched me expectantly, and when I didn’t speak she swept her hair off her forehead again, leaving a streak of flour above her eyebrow. “Didn’t catch your names.”

  We both hesitated, and then I cleared my throat. “Frank and Claire Green.”

  “We were headed for Detroit,” Claire said.

  Vera smiled as if that were the most absurd notion she’d ever heard. “Well, don’t plan on getting there tonight.” Then Shelby came into the kitchen, ducking to get through the door, and she said to him, “Best that you get that car into town before this weather comes. South wind,” she said, looking at me. “Gunna rain. Or maybe sleet. Or snow. It’ll do something.”

  Shelby got a coil of chain from the barn, and he and I drove back to the car. He didn’t talk much, only to give me instructions on how to help as he hooked the car to the truck. Before he got back in the cab, he said, “The one thing you don’t want to do is r
un into the back of me.”

  I got in the car and steered as he pulled me down the road. We rarely exceeded fifteen miles an hour, and it took almost an hour to reach a small town that seemed to rise right up off the flat pastureland, stands of trees, two church steeples, and a row of silos. We rolled down the main street, past old brick buildings, until we pulled into Moose’s Texaco station. Shelby came to such a slow, easy stop that the car ceased to roll yards from the rear fender of the truck.

  Moose Van Voorst was bigger than Shelby, and they appeared to be about the same age. His mechanic’s jumpsuit was heavily stained with oil and grease. “Can’t look at her today,” he nearly shouted. “Thirty-six Ford, you’re lucky she got you this far. Call tomorrow and I’ll tell you what’s what.” He sat at a desk that was cluttered with boxes of auto parts. The office smelled of rubber; tires were stacked in the corners, and dozens of fan belts hung on the wall behind him, along with a calendar with Rita Hayworth kneeling on a bed in her slip. He began to fill out a form and said, “Name?”

  “Frank Green,” I said.

  “Address?” When I didn’t answer immediately, he looked up at me. His large nose was crooked and he hadn’t shaved in several days. I was trying to understand how this man could be the mayor of any town. “Got an address, Mr. Green?”

  “We are going to Detroit,” I said. “We are . . . we have eloped.”

  “Hear that, Shelby?” he shouted. “Young love! Hot damn!”

  For the first time, Shelby showed some emotion, grinning broadly.

  “I guess that means you ain’t got no phone neither.” Out in the garage, someone began pounding on metal, the sound reverberating through the building. As he got up out of his swivel chair, Moose shouted, “You just give us a call in the morning then.”

  Shelby and I drove back to the farm. He didn’t speak until he said, “She’ll put you out in the bunkhouse. Hard to find hands now, with the war and all.” I turned and stared at him, not knowing what he meant by hands. “You can earn your keep by helping out with chores.”

  “I’ll be happy to.” But as I said this, I saw that he was grinning because I didn’t get the joke. “What would you like me to do?”

  “Young love! Hot damn!” He laughed until he gasped for breath, then he leaned out his window and spit into the wind. When he stared back out the windshield he had a long, dark strand of saliva running down his chin, which he didn’t seem to notice or to mind.

  The bunkhouse was a one-room shed next to the barn, with two cots, a table and chairs, and a pot-belly stove. The window in the back wall looked out on a stack of firewood next to an outhouse and the pastures running to the north. Vera was right about the weather; a storm came through during the night, and there were gusts that caused the wood structure to creak and shudder, reminding me of the barracks at Camp Au Train. But Claire and I had taken the two mattresses and put them together on the floor. We opened the vents in the front of the stove, and the soft glow of the fire flickered through the room, its amber light touching her skin. Her dark hair seemed to have lights of its own, tumbling down her back, swinging across her face. There were moments that I would try to lock in my mind, because I knew that this could not last, that our odyssey was destined to end, sooner rather than later, and that whatever followed, whatever sorrows awaited us, the result would be that we would be separated, and that I would only have this, these few images of her, illuminated by the glow of the fire. This realization filled me with fear, which I did not want to show her. I knew she felt the same, and that this shared knowledge, tacit, too vile to mention, fueled our need for each other.

  Our lovemaking exhausted us eventually, so we were startled awake when Shelby pounded on the door before dawn. Morning chores involved milking the cows, driving the milk to another farm, where it was bottled, and returning to feed the hogs. Shelby gave me a pair of high rubber boots, which caused my feet to sweat. Claire worked in the house with Vera, and I didn’t see her until after eight o’clock when we went in for breakfast that included ham, eggs, and biscuits. Vera tilted her head and chewed on the side of her mouth with the most teeth. Once Shelby leaned sideways in his chair and passed gas loudly. I was so tired and full I just wanted to go to sleep; in fact, I dozed off while sitting in the outhouse. The boots were causing a blister to develop on my right heel, and the rest of the morning I limped, really limped. Vera noticed this at lunch and made me take off the boots. The top layer of skin had peeled off, leaving the heel raw and bloody. She rinsed it and dried it with a towel, and then got out a tin that contained gauze pads and ointments. After she loosely taped a pad over the blister, she smeared ointment on another pad and taped that over the first one. She built up four layers in this fashion, and then gave me a heavy pair of wool socks to wear over my own. When I pulled the boots on again, the gauze pads slid against each other, reducing the friction on my heel, and I could walk almost normally.

  After lunch—large bowls of pea soup with homemade bread—Vera called Moose’s garage. As Moose shouted into his end of the line, she listened and said, “Uh-huh,” repeatedly, and after she hung up she said, “Your slave cylinders are shot.” She watched me carefully.

  “Shot,” I said, not knowing how to react, and I looked at Claire.

  “That bad?” she said.

  “Moose says they’re going to have to be replaced. Parts probably won’t get in from Grayling for at least three days, and it’s going to cost you about eighty dollars.” Vera’s blond hair was tied back today, and her face seemed extraordinarily wide, her jaw broad and her cheek bones smooth ridges beneath enormous blue eyes. After studying both of us a moment, she said, “Don’t have it, do ya?”

  Claire, who also had her hair tied back (they had been cleaning all morning and the kitchen smelled of pine trees), shook her head. “We don’t have much money at all.”

  Vera looked like she’d just won a hand of poker. “I guess you’ll be working for us for a while. We can’t pay much, but we won’t charge you for food and board. We’ll give you,” she said, nodding at me, “four dollars a day. And you, honey, you get two, though you’re so skinny you ain’t worth more ’n two bits.” She laughed, and after a moment Claire did, too. “Now, girl, you ever kill a chicken?” Vera started for the kitchen door. Before Claire could answer, she said, “Nothing to it. Their necks are kind of like you know what in your hand.” She laughed again as she led Claire out across the yard to the barn. Claire was wearing a man’s wool shirt that hung almost down to her knees. Viewed from the back, she might have been twelve years old, but I knew otherwise.

  Shelby and I drove about a half mile out into the pasture, where we worked on a tractor that had a flat tire. Occasionally, a car or truck would turn in off the road and stop in the yard, setting Barney to fits of barking. Though he hardly looked toward the house, Shelby would tell me who it was: neighbors, shopkeepers from surrounding towns, the Lutheran minister, all coming out to buy eggs, milk, bread, or meat. When we had the tire fixed, Shelby stared toward the house as a black sedan pulled into the yard.

  “Who’s that?” I asked.

  “Forty-two Dodge,” he said. “Dunno.”

  We watched a man wearing a fedora and a gray topcoat get out of the car. There was something on the door, an emblem or insignia. Vera came out from the barn alone and spoke to the man for a couple of minutes. She kept her arms folded because of the cold, but it also seemed intended to fend off the man’s inquiries as he leaned toward her in what seemed a familiar yet threatening manner. When he left, he drove south, toward Grayling. Shelby watched until the car was out of sight, and then he climbed up in the cab of the tractor. “Didn’t come to buy food,” was all he said before he started up the tractor.

  I got in the pickup and followed him across the rutted fields to the house.

  Vera and Claire were at the kitchen table, peeling potatoes. The windows were steamed up, and I could smell chicken roasting in the oven. Claire truly looked like a child now, one who had been chastise
d and was now determined to be on her best behavior, and Vera stared at me as if she were seeing me for the first time. “Where exactly you say you two eloped from, Frank?” When I glanced at Claire, she said, “The way you look to her for the answers, you’ll make one fine husband.”

  Claire wouldn’t raise her head up from her work, and her cheeks were flushed.

  I turned to Vera. “I didn’t say.”

  “I noticed,” Vera said. “And I thought, ‘They’re just two kids running away from home.’ Well, this agent tells me something very interesting.”

  “What agent?” I asked.

  Before Vera could answer, Shelby said, “I knew it was a gov’ment man.”

  She cut him a look that might shut him up for a week. “The federal government,” she said. “He says they’re looking for an escaped prisoner—a war prisoner. A Nazi. And they believe he’s traveling with a girl. A dark-haired American girl.”

  I looked at Claire again, but she still wouldn’t raise her eyes. “All right,” I said, turning back to Vera. “I’m not a Nazi. I was in the Italian army and was captured in Africa. I ran from the camp because the Nazis were running the prison and they were going to kill me.”

  Vera lowered her head and continued peeling the potato in her hand. Shelby remained where he was, leaning against the sink with an empty glass in his hand. Vera took her time with the potato, and then she dropped it in the porcelain bowl that was full of potatoes in murky water.

  Finally, Shelby said quietly, “Remember what they done to us.”

  “I’m thinking about all that,” Vera said without looking up. There was a potato peel clinging to the back of her wet hand; its pale side was facing up, and it almost looked like her own skin. She peeled it off her hand, much like the layer of skin that had come off the blister on my heel, and dropped it in the pile on the table. I realized that tears were streaming down her cheeks, and she didn’t bother wiping them away.

  Shelby turned at the sink, held the glass beneath the spout of the water pump, and began working the handle up and down. After a few strokes there came a gurgling sound deep in the pipe, and soon after, water splashed out and into the glass. When it was full he stopped pumping. He drank the entire glass down without stopping, and then stared out the window above the sink. Though it was late afternoon and the sky was overcast, the light made his blue eyes seem to radiate from within. At the table Vera had lowered her head further, and she was releasing soft sighs as she cried.