Wolf's Mouth

by John Smolens

  “To live incognito,” he said, nodding. “It’s worse when a woman looks at you like that.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I never felt this way before I was brought to the United States, years ago. Man or woman, there’s a hard assessment in the eyes. Something about the set of the mouth that makes me begin to have doubts—doubts about myself, about who I am, who I am pretending to be, what I claim to have done or not done. This happened while I was here at Camp Au Train, and it was more frequent when I became Frank Green in Detroit. Since I returned to the Upper Peninsula, it’s happened less as the years have gone by. To most people, I’m just an elderly man, with a younger wife and children, who runs a local business. But still occasionally someone will look at me in a way that suggests that I’m lying, as though everything I had said—everything I had ever claimed to have done—was a complete fabrication.”

  He stopped walking, so I did as well, and facing him I began to draw the gun out of my jacket. I felt helpless. My hand, my arm, they were separate from the rest of me. “And you had to fight the urge to tell them that you were guilty,” Anton said.

  “That’s right,” I said. “Perhaps you can begin to understand?”

  Anton looked beyond me, his eyes perplexed—no, wary.

  And then I heard it: footsteps rustling the leaves.

  I looked around. I knew I shouldn’t turn my back on Anton, but I couldn’t help it. The snow was heavier now, heavy wet flakes falling straight down. There was a pointillist quality to the air, to the woods. Beyond the cars, something was moving among the trees, but I couldn’t see what it was—all was browns and grays and blacks behind the veil of falling snow. A deer, I thought. And I had a sudden recollection of cleaning deer with Adino, digging machine-gun bullets out of their carcasses. The footsteps came closer and I saw movement beyond Anton’s sedan. I pushed the revolver deep into my jacket pocket.

  Then there was silence, except for the sound of snow on the leaves. I looked back at Anton just as his expression changed from alert curiosity to awe. His shoulders collapsed almost imperceptibly, making him smaller, and he was perfectly still.

  I turned, and thirty yards down the path, a wolf emerged from the trees, moving toward us, its gait ponderous and steady. A wolf—it was far too big for a coyote. I couldn’t tell whether it was aware of us, though I couldn’t imagine that it wasn’t. It paused next to the Ford and cautiously sniffed the rear tire, until its yellow eyes found me. I eased my forefinger around the trigger of the gun in my pocket. There was a lack of expression on the wolf’s face, making it impossible to guess at how he was reacting to the sight of us—the cars, two men, things not of these woods. Those eyes possessed a sense of comprehension that I couldn’t fathom. Perhaps this wolf had never seen human beings before, or at least at such close range. It seemed neither alarmed nor impressed.

  Nor was the wolf afraid. It was indifferent. No longer concerned with the car, it shook itself, causing the snow lining its back to be flung out into the air, pelting the leaves. And then it began to walk, not toward us, but off the path at an angle, a sauntering yet heavy stride, and it never again looked in our direction. I was disappointed. I wanted to speak to the wolf, to ask it to wait, to stay a bit longer. Foolishly, I thought that if I did say something, it would understand. But I realized that even if it could understand me, I couldn’t put my thoughts and feelings into words. The wolf left the path and disappeared into the trees. I listened to the diminishing sound of its paws, until I could only hear the snow rattling on dead leaves.

  I had been holding my breath. I began to inhale desperately and my heart was racing so that it was punching against my ribcage. When I turned around, unsteadily, because along with my respiration my balance seemed to have been affected, Anton was no longer standing behind me. He was gone. Gone, running through the woods, as I had done years ago, desperate to escape. I’d never see him again, never know if he got out, if he made it to Eastern Europe, or wherever he would assume another identity, another life, and I wished him luck, whispering Buona fortuna. I went to the sedan, opened the door, and found that he’d left the keys in the ignition. I put them in the coat pocket that wasn’t weighed down with the gun.

  As I walked back to my Jeep, the snow melting in my hair sent cold water down my face, and my skin felt washed clean. Looking about the forest, I knew the wolf was still there, would always be there, but that I’d never live to see it again. I was, for the first time, utterly free, surrounded by these woods, my prison, my salvation.