Wolf Season

by Helen Benedict

  “What? Oh, home. Me and my mom are from Iraq.”

  “Is that where you were in the war?”

  “Yeah.” His eyes drift toward the woods and the wolves.

  “That’s the war my daddy died in.” She raises her head to listen again. “Can you see my mom anywhere?”

  He glances around. “Nope. I think she’s over by the barn.”

  “Good.” And as if Juney can hear his thoughts after all, she adds, “You want to see our wolves?”

  “Yes! Oh yes.” He doesn’t even say it; he breathes it, his yearning is so intense.

  “Okay. But don’t tell Mommy or anyone else. She wants us to keep the wolves a secret. Promise?”

  “I promise.”

  “Really and truly? It’s a super-important promise.”

  Tariq wishes now he had never said anything to Louis. “I really and truly promise.”

  “Good. Hold my hand so I don’t trip. I don’t have my cane and there’s a lot of storm mess still in the way.”

  He wraps his fingers around her hand; a tiny, light hand, as soft as a kitten paw. “Your hand feels like Hiccup,” he says, because with Juney he knows he can say what he wants.

  And that makes her laugh.

  Rin has no heart left to tackle the trees for now, the oak’s spin-bad memories having drained her of it, so she turns away from the barn to look for Juney. But then another carcass waylays her, this one of a hen. Once a pretty cinnamon, she is black and bloody now, smashed by a branch, feathers mud-soaked and torn. She stinks, too, so Rin can’t cook her for soup or even feed her to the wolves. Wolves don’t eat carrion—in the wild, they leave that to the ravens that accompany them like camp followers, bold enough to perch on their backs, heedless of snapping jaws. This is the fifth dead hen Rin’s found since the storm, leaving only six. She raised each of those ladies herself, right out of their mother’s warm, enfolding eggs, all fluff and beak and pinprick blinking eyes.

  Rin grabs the hen by her scaly legs, pinching up her face at the stench, and carries her over to the compost bin, stuffing her in with a little incantation against foraging bears. She doesn’t want Juney finding the hen; it’s been bad enough with Hiccup and—Rin finally told her—Twigs the goat.

  As she’s scrubbing off the hen’s death ooze under the outdoor faucet, she catches sight of Juney and Tariq strolling hand in hand across the yard with all the blitheness of Babes in the Woods. She stares at them. Stares a long time. Then she tells herself to quit being paranoid. The boy is only ten, for god’s sake, whatever his origins, and she should let her daughter have a moment with a friend without “hovering,” as Juney so kindly put it. So, she forces herself to turn away and head back to the barn after all.

  There, she takes a closer look at her trees. The storm snapped the poor willow into three pieces, the main trunk falling just clear of the back wall, the rest of it closer to the stream. At least it’s done no harm. But the oak has inflicted serious damage. The wind split it clean in two from top to bottom and threw half of it against the barn wall, badly mangling the roof. Now the trunk is lying pressed up against the barn like the corpse of a giant. Rin will need chains to get it out of here, and a truck. Or better still, a BFV. Otherwise known as a tank.

  Inside the barn, she pulls down her chain saw from its hook and up-armors in readiness to attack: gloves, eye goggles, her old Kevlar helmet. Rubber boots to her knees, despite the heat. (Last thing she wants is more shrapnel in her body, even wooden shrapnel, having taken plenty from that IED in Tikrit.) Carrying the saw back around, she starts it up with a roar, spreads her legs strong and steady, and prepares to buzz the old oak and all its history into ineffectual lumps.

  Maybe, she thinks as the blade bites into the oak’s flesh, rattling her body with the vibration—maybe she should chainsaw her way out of her sinkhole of a past, too. Her parents and their suitcases. Her brother. The shitpit of war. Maybe she should chainsaw them all out of her bones, her brain, her womb. Chainsaw Jay out of the oak as well, carve him out like a life-size voodoo doll and bury him for good—it’s long past time she did.

  She met Jay down at Fort Dix in New Jersey, right after Shock and Awe, when their unit was set to mobilize any minute, although which minute or to where, the army hadn’t cared to say. All the two of them knew was that they were twenty years old and wanted to drink and fuck as much as they could before they got blown to the everafter. So that’s exactly what they did.

  She and Jay had been jammed-up stuck in their lives until then. That was the year his family farm had failed, leaving him with nothing to do but sell the cows and watch his father’s eyes turn dark and lost. She was spinning in place in the industrial North, her parents having died driving drunk when she was nineteen, big bro rotting his teeth out on meth, no idea what to do with herself, aside from trying and failing to save him and hanging out in bars getting trashed and laid.

  Then President Shrub declared war on Iraq and they were saved. The rest of the world might have been slapping its cheeks in horror, but America was still giddy over 9/11, intoxicated with patriotism spiced with a nice little pepper of fear, and she and Jay were no different. They were both ready to go blow up some bad guys and do their bit for American Democracy in the hope American Democracy would do her bit for them.

  Instead, the army turned them into a delivery service. Attached them to a transportation unit, Jay a driver up front, Rin a gunner in the rear, and sent them to spend the war in long, roaring convoys barreling back and forth across the Kuwait-Iraq border, carrying everything from ammo to poop paper. They would deliver to bases in Baghdad and way up north to Mosul, and then drive south again for refills, down the whole IED-salted spine of Iraq. Up and down, up and down. Humvees, gun trucks, and two-tons nose-to-nose, long, deadly dragons hurtling along the wrong side of highways in a cloud of diesel stink and dust. Gray sand all the way to the horizon, pocked with rusting military vehicles, plastic bags, animal ribs, charred cars. Vultures pulling out strings of guts. Children fighting over food. Dogs under their wheels. Nothing to think about but thirst and needing to piss and how much you hated the guy on your right and how all you wanted was to shoot some motherfucker down so you could feel like a soldier instead of a sitting duck.

  But those war years were the best of her life anyway, thanks to Jay. The two of them glued together from that very first night they fell into bed at Fort Dix. They married before they left, and she never appreciated how much that protected her until he was gone and it didn’t.

  Jay and his long stretch of a body, breath warm as a wolf’s. He would lie beside her talking for hours those rare times they had a whole night together, trying to convince her that her shitty behavior before she’d enlisted hadn’t been so shitty after all. And when her methhead brother, who had at least tried to look out for her after their parents died, joined them in the Great Beyond, leaving her with no relatives at all, Jay said, “Don’t blame yourself, Rin. I know you will, but don’t. Your brother was beyond saving by anyone, even you.”

  Nothing went for them the way a deployment marriage was predicted to go. They were supposed to split up after that one pie-eyed night at Fort Dix. They didn’t. They were supposed to cheat on each other when their deployments mismatched. They didn’t. They were supposed to grow apart as war made them grow up. They didn’t. Only one thing could separate them, and that it did.

  Did you know an RPG was what killed you, Jay? Did you see it fly into the window of your Humvee and explode right there, a little black bird of death? Did you have a moment—maybe holding it in your hand, maybe watching it smoke on the Humvee floor—a split second when you looked that death skull right in the eye sockets and knew? Did you think of me then, Jay? Or of our child, already listening inside my womb?

  The Ghoul Squad found him in teeny-tiny shreds, like a Dear John letter. They put as much of him back together as they could: the fingers and toes, the jagged squares of his head. But they never could piece together his lovely long legs. Rin had seen
him leap over a fissure as deep as a canyon on those legs, whistling with his hands in his pockets, easy as if he were crossing his own kitchen. Still, those were brave women and men, those Ghouls, dropping him shred by bloody shred into a bag so they could reassemble him on a mortuary table: a man-sized, three-dimensional puzzle missing oh so many pieces. They worked hard to give her something to bury.

  And all the while those others, her so-called comrades in arms, brothers in battle, were waiting.

  They didn’t wait long. Three of them, over and over. Held her down and took their turns with their dicks and the barrel of a rifle, too, knife to her throat, pistol to her head. As she left her body, watched it lying there splayed and bleeding, the body that had once been hers but was now the property of others, all she could do was pour every shred of her will into praying her baby would stay alive.

  Nobody lifted a finger to stop them. Not one of the women she thought were her friends. Not one of Jay’s self-proclaimed buddies, either. So much for Band-of-Brothers-and-Sisters. For Battle-Buddy. For Bear-True-Faith-and-Allegiance-to-Your-Unit-and-Other-Soldiers.

  And then the consequences. Leaving the war as a medevac case because of what those men had done to her. Nearly miscarrying. Juney born blind as a cavefish, both the VA and the military refusing to help or even to research what took her sight and how. The months of trying to find a cure for her, of latenight weeping over all she would never see. Missing and needing Jay, the dark space his death left inside of her burning black as an oilfield. Both his parents dying of cancer, one after the other, neither having the will or the desire to outlive their only child.

  Coping. Not coping. Scared every second that those men, each one of whom is alive and free, are going to come back to get her. Or to get Juney.

  Tariq leads Juney around the fallen branches and clumps of mud still littering the yard, watching the ground to ensure she doesn’t trip. He takes her past the apple orchard, the trees as gnarled and hunched as fairy-tale witches; under the generous spread of a copper beech glinting red and blue in the luminous afternoon light; and finally over the dandelion-studded grass to the fence.

  There they wait in silence, Juney’s soft hand curled in his. He peers into the thick stand of trees before him, their trunks speckled with verdigris lichen, leaves heavy with summer dust. Then, without any warning, she lifts her face and calls, “Grayeee! Silverrrr! Eboneeee!”

  The call is high and eerie and not at all loud, yet he is sure it carries all the way through the woods—he can almost see it weaving between the tree trunks like a trail of silver dust. His skin tingles.

  “No talking,” she whispers, and grips one of his fingers.

  They stand as still as they can, listening so hard Tariq can hear the hum of blood in his head. Now that Rin’s chain saw has fallen silent, no other sounds are audible, not even the timorous peep of a titmouse.

  But then a slight breeze kicks up and with it a faint rattle. The rasp of bark against bark. The scrape of dried leaves shifting over the ground. And finally, as quiet as snow, the wolves appear, trotting up on their wide, webbed paws, all three openmouthed and panting. Legs long and shaggy, heads enormous, eyes aglow, ears pricked forward—the most magnificent creatures Tariq has ever seen.

  He knows not to move; only to stand and look, as he did before. And then he remembers Juney can’t see them, and, for the first time, he pities her. Not to be able to see the luxuriant thickness of their coats, the sheen in their eyes, the wildness of their beauty! But she can smell them, and so she raises her head and sways, inhaling in a kind of rapture—a rapture Tariq is close to feeling himself.

  He looks at them as though he can never look enough. Silver, the smallest and only female, her coat bushy and white, eyes the yellow silk of honey. Ebony, as black as his name, his jade green irises darkening to onyx in the shadows. And Gray, the biggest and most majestic, his neck ringed with fur as thick as a bear’s. His cheeks and muzzle are white, his face framed by a line of charcoal, his arched eyebrows bold and black. His eyes are much brighter than those of the others; a gleaming, eloquent, burnished gold. When Tariq looks into those eyes, he feels as if he isn’t looking into a wolf’s eyes at all but a man’s. And before he even realizes it, he is whispering, “Al-salaam Alakum Ayoha al The’b al’deem.” Peace be with you, oh mighty wolf.

  In a breath, the wolves turn and run away so fast and soundlessly it is as if they were never there at all.

  “I told you not to talk. They need to get to know you better first,” Juney says, but she doesn’t sound angry. She lifts her face to the sky, her water-blue eyes drifting. “Tariq, Mommy will never tell me, but what do they look like?”

  He can hardly bring himself to answer. His heart is too filled with the certainty that before Gray vanished, the wolf murmured directly into his head, Wa Alaykum al salaam ayoha al-insan al-sagheir. And may peace be with you, too, little human.

  “They’re beautiful,” he finally whispers. “Their fur is so deep and thick you want to bury your face in it. They’re like your dogs, but with bigger heads and ears and longer legs and . . . they’re the most beautiful creatures in the world!”

  “I know,” she replies with no surprise at all but clearly pleased. “They smell like the earth and the sun and whatever they eat. And when they howl, they sound like the moon.”

  8

  DEVOTION

  Up the hill from the flattened clinic and sodden Main Street of Huntsville, on the fat-housed, lush-lawned side of town, Beth is sitting in a lotus position on her couch in front of the television, dressed in a black leotard from work and drinking her fourth glass of white wine. She gazes absently at the screen, filled with tiny figures scuttling about looking fraught, and recrosses her legs to stretch the other side. What is she watching anyhow? The figures are in some kind of uniform and a long red lump is lying on a table in the background. The camera zooms in to show a woman with a slit throat.

  “Oh for Christ’s sake!” She grabs the remote. “My husband’s fighting real people who bleed real blood and you serve me up this crap as entertainment? You’re sick, you know that? We’re sick. . . . We are a sick frigging country!” She clicks to another channel.

  “Mom? What’s the matter?” Flanner is peering at her from the top of the staircase, bending forward to see her around the wall. The rest of his body is hidden, so he looks strangely distorted: a neck sprouting directly from a pelvis.

  “Sorry, honey. It’s just me yelling at the TV again.”

  “If you hate it that much, don’t watch it.”

  “Good point.” She nods, not only with her head but her entire torso. “I was hoping for more news about the storm.” For a few feverish days after the hurricane, Huntsville, Slingerlands, and even little Potterstown were all over the local news, along with the other upstate villages devastated by winds and floods. Videos showing raging red waves slamming up against barns and tearing down bridges. Cars turned upside down. Whole trees floating through fields, dragging their roots like squid. Reporters sounding urgent and important. Windswept politicians bellowing earnest promises into cameras. And now, a mere ten days later? Not a peep from any of them.

  “Go to bed, honey.” She takes in her son’s anxious face. “You’re not worried about those wolves, are you?”

  “Shit, Mom, I’m not a baby.” He heads back upstairs. She fails to chase after him and scold him, as she once would have done. She fails because she doesn’t want to move. She wants to stay right here, drink and dream.

  Falling back against her creamy velvet cushions, she tunes out whichever show the TV is blaring at her now and lets the wine float her back to her favorite year of her life when she was seventeen—no, eighteen—and the queen of Huntsville High. Long hair swinging, figure sleek, a face the envy of all the other girls. It was 1998, Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky were in the headlines, the economy was strong, and America was feeling good about itself, unless you were a Republican, which Beth wasn’t. A sexy time with a sexy president. T
odd was sexy, too. Rich brown hair flopped over his brow. A wide, boyish face. Big chocolate eyes, vague but tender. He had the build of a football player, but he didn’t like football; he liked Nirvana, to whom he listened endlessly, sitting earphoned in front of his Kurt Cobain shrine, which was why he was picked on by the popular jocks at school. And so Beth, with the same instinct that made her rescue sparrows from cats and pluck frogs out of roads, was drawn to tall, shy, musical Todd McAllister.

  What she had not foreseen was that by dating Todd, she would grace him with the very status that had eluded him before. Thus, in only a few weeks, he was invited to play football with those jocks after all, taking on their swaggers, their tattoos, their lingo, and, above all, their aspirations to join the Marine Corps. “Why do you want to learn to kill people?” she asked. But she knew why. Todd wanted to be an American Man; the kind of man people admired in Huntsville, New York.

  He married her before he went off to boot camp, giving her an excuse to avoid college, much to her parents’ disgust. And soon it wasn’t 1998 anymore or even the nineties at all. It was 2001; the towers had been brought down and the Afghanistan War had started. And then she wasn’t waiting for Todd to get back from Parris Island or any other home base anymore—then it was real and concrete and terrifying and she was waiting for him to return from those godforsaken rock piles, where he was being shot at by ruthless warlords with AK-47’s and a history older than the Bible of warfare, torture, and revenge.

  Todd, syrup-eyed, Nirvana-loving Todd. Each time he comes home now, he is deeper inside his armor than the time before. Edging around the streets, darting looks over his shoulders. Making her close the window shades even on the prettiest of days. Throwing her off the bed in the midst of a dream. Sobbing his apologies, begging her not to leave him.

  “Don’t worry,” she always says. “It’s not you hurting me like this; it’s the war. I won’t leave you, I won’t.”