Wolf Season

by Helen Benedict

  “Flanner?” She opens his door. It is ten-thirty A.M. in Afghanistan, two in the morning in New York, an absurd hour for him to be up, but he would never forgive her if she let him miss this. “Honey?” She shakes him until he blinks. “Time to talk to your dad.”

  Pushing himself out of bed, he follows her groggily, his hair mussed and his favorite NASCAR pajamas drooping down his whippet-thin hips. He squeezes in beside her on the wooden chair at her bedroom desk, his body as sharp against hers as a bundle of bones.

  “Flan, remember now, we don’t want to upset Dad, so not a word about the car or what happened to you in the woods today. Deal?”

  He nods. She connects to Skype and the two of them wait, staring at the screen in silence.

  Soon they hear an electronic whoosh and the sound of popping bubbles. The screen flickers and, after an excruciating moment, reveals a face so gaunt and worn that for a second Beth has no idea whose it is.

  “Jesus, are you all right?” she blurts.

  “I’m fine, babe. Chill out.” His voice sounds hoarse, as if he’s been shouting all day.

  Beth knows Todd is training Afghan troops at Camp Leatherneck in Helmand Province, the last U.S. Marine base still operating in this thirteenth year of the Afghanistan War. She also knows he is barracked with dozens of other men in a giant, tunnel-shaped tube, no privacy, no solitude, in what appears to be a sprawling complex of airplane hangars at the bottom of a giant dust bowl—she’s seen the pictures. But that is all she knows; Todd having been forbidden to tell her more.

  “Is that Flanner I see there?” he says.

  “Hi, Dad!” Wide-awake now, Flanner pushes his face closer to the camera. Beth looks down at him: the coppery flop of hair, the pale skin behind his freckles.

  “How you doin’, sport? Still playing baseball?” Todd rubs his eyes with the heels of his hands. Beth can just make out a white wall behind him, the backs of shaven heads, the occasional face whose youth still startles her.

  “Yeah, at camp. The kids suck, though.”

  “You getting to catch at all? You were always good at that.” Todd leans closer, filling the screen with his new face.

  “Some. Coach says he might make me catcher next season.”

  “Cool. Wish I was there to practice with you. Get your mom to play. She pitches pretty good.”

  Flanner is of the opposite opinion but keeps this to himself.

  Todd squints. “What else are you up to? Any new music you like?”

  “Nah, not really.” Flanner rarely listens to music, even though he knows his dad wants him to. He squirms on the chair, poking Beth with his elbow. “We had this humungous hurricane a couple weeks ago. They’re calling it Hurricane Meg, like it’s a girl. You hear about it?”

  “Nope. What’s the damage?” A sunburned hand claps on his shoulder and moves away.

  Beth intervenes. “Nothing we haven’t been able to take care of. But are you all right, honey, really and truly all right?”

  “I still got both legs and arms, don’t I? Balls and a cock, too.”

  “Flanner’s still here,” she reminds him, slipping an arm around her son’s narrow back.

  “I know he’s here.” Todd’s eyes move to a spot just above Flanner’s head. “Built any more forts with Tariq this summer? I remember that last one you showed me. Awesome.”

  Flanner looks at his mother. “Uh . . . not really. Things got kind of messed up after the storm.”

  “Like what?”

  “Oh, people’s homes,” she interjects again, eager to avoid any questions about the boys’ friendship or the end of it. Todd took long enough to come around to Flanner’s having an Iraqi amputee as a friend, grumbling about returning home from one war only to be reminded of another. “Everybody’s busy cleaning up. Some houses got so wrecked the families had to move out.”

  “Sounds rough.” Todd rubs his face again.

  “Sure was. It still looks like a war zone around here.”

  “Babe, you got no fucking idea what a war zone looks like.”

  Silence.

  “Dad?” Flanner says then. “I’m starting fifth grade soon. It’s in a different building and everything.”

  Todd drops his hands. “Shit, you’re growing up fast. I should be there. Fuck.”

  “You can’t help it,” Beth says quickly. “It’s so great to see you. We miss you so much, you know that?”

  Todd glances over his shoulder, lowers his voice. “That’s good to hear, babe. I think about you every day, every minute. You and Flanner both. Miss you so bad.” He pauses, and she hopes he might say something nice now about the way she looks. “Listen,” he says, “I got news. I’m coming home. They finally granted me that leave I’m owed. Haven’t given me a date yet, but it’ll be within the next couple weeks or so. Two weeks R&R, babe! Flan, we can play ball, and you and me, Beth, can have us a fucking good time.”

  “That’s fantastic, honey!” A chill slithers through her. “I’ll tell Louis. He’ll be pleased to see you again, too.”

  “He looking after you like he promised?”

  “Some. He helped me haul a bunch of branches out of the yard.”

  “Huh.” Todd’s hollow-cheeked face stares at her from the screen.

  “What?”

  “I don’t want you hanging around that dude too much. Understand?”

  “But you—oh. Oh! Don’t worry. He creeps me out. It’s you I love. We both do, don’t we, Flan?”

  “Uh-huh.” Flanner isn’t listening. He is busy trying to memorize every inch of his father’s faraway face. The deep-set eyes. The thin nose. The crisp jaw jutting out to a big chin. The new lines curved around his mouth like parentheses. Flanner doesn’t remember this face. He doesn’t remember it at all.

  “Flanner, did you say ‘uh-huh’ to your mom? What kind of an answer is that?” Todd’s voice is rising but then he seems to catch himself. “Guess you’re used to me being gone, huh?”

  Flanner shrugs.

  Beth looks into Todd’s pixilated eyes. “He’s just a kid, Todd. Of course he loves you.”

  But Todd’s face, already so visibly filled with tension, tightens further. “Fuck this. Call the FRO for the ETA.” And he pulls away, stretching into a broken streak of pink and brown until the screen blinks into black.

  Part Two

  SEPTEMBER

  12

  FENCE

  Juney keeps telling Rin not to worry about Tariq and the wolves. “He loves them just like we do, Mommy, so he’s not going to give away our secret.” She says, too, that the wolves have taken a shine to him in return, Gray in particular, who even goes so far as to lick him. But Rin worries anyhow. Children have loose lips when it comes to secrets, and although wolves have their likes and dislikes as much as anyone else, they are also capricious and excitable and rough, which is why she has never allowed Juney to so much as touch them. Even if Gray doesn’t lose his temper for wolfish reasons of his own, what he may intend as a friendly frolic—a playful nip here, a nuzzle there—can be like taking a cheese grater to human skin. Not to mention a wolf’s ability to snap through an arm with one bite. No, if Tariq is going to insist on playing licking games with Gray, Rin needs to teach him a lesson.

  The children are in school now that it’s September, so Tariq doesn’t come by until after three. But when Rin hears him yakking it up again with her increasingly unknowable daughter, she closes the chicken coop, stows her basket of warm, freshly laid eggs high on a kitchen shelf, out of reach of her greedy mutts and wantonly destructive cats, and goes out to collar him.

  She finds him sitting in the vegetable patch with Juney, helping her weed, his prosthesis lying on its side beside him. As he seems to like doing chores and is surprisingly strong for a stringy smartass with one leg, Rin has been putting him to work lately, figuring she might as well find some use for him other than letting him bewitch her daughter. She’s had him repair the deer netting, mulch the compost, haul the remains of the flood wood out
of her yard, even help her fix some of the dangling shutters on her house. She also has him regularly check the perimeter of her wolf fence to make sure none of it is uprooted.

  To hold wolves securely, a fence must extend two feet below the earth as well as eight feet into the sky because wolves can not only jump as high as flagpoles; they are spectacular diggers. They dig lairs, after all, to have and hide their pups in—to die in, as well—and they can root out a rabbit even when the hapless furball is cowering deep underground. If Rin weren’t careful, her wolves would dig a nice little tunnel under the fence and take off, only to be shot as coyotes or run down on roads, like all those dim, maladapted deer.

  She built her fence out of a nine-gauge chain link she bought from a military-supply outlet, along with a series of olive drab stakes to hold it up. Around the base, she laid sharp, paw-piercing gravel to further discourage her wolves from digging, and at regular intervals installed two-foot-high lean-in arms so they can’t knock the whole thing down, no matter how high and hard they hurl themselves against it. She also uses padlocks for the doors, wolves being highly adept at undoing latches—they would only have to watch her open one once to know how to do it themselves. As she was trying to tell Juney, wolves might not be bred to communicate with humans, but their brains are 30 percent bigger than those of dogs and 40 percent in the hippocampus, which is where mammals store and organize most of what they learn. In other words, compared to a wolf, a dog is a mere infant.

  Rin is just about to tackle Tariq when the telephone rings back in the house. She almost never gets phone calls. Juney’s teachers, the social worker, that’s about it. She hasn’t even listed her number.

  “Phone’s ringing,” Juney tells her as if she’s deaf.

  Heart flapping already, Rin wipes her hand-sweat off on her pants and returns to the nook adjoining the living room, which she has made into her office. She eyes her old black desk phone warily before picking up the receiver.

  “Mrs. Drummond?”

  “Who the hell is this?”

  “Officer Flaherty. I’m calling about a license?”

  The flapping turns into a banging, making it hard to breathe. If Rin hates people, she hates cops even more. “What license? Driver’s?”

  “No. DEC. For keeping dangerous wildlife? In your case, uh, wolves?” He says the word as if he’s never spoken it before. “It’s been reported to me that you keep wolves. If that’s true, I’m sorry to say, ma’am, but there’s no license on record for you.”

  Rin drops into her chair, sweat breaking out over her chest and back, cold as pond slime. She has been dreading this ever since she brought Gray and Silver home as pups. “I don’t have wolves. All I’ve got is huskies. People are always making that mistake.”

  Flaherty pauses. She can hear him breathing asthmatically down the line. “I’m sorry, ma’am, but I was told loud and clear that you have wolves.”

  “This is harassment,” she tells him, summoning her emergency calm and crispest sergeant voice. “I don’t mean you, Officer. I know you’re only doing your job. But my neighbors are a bunch of cranks and they’re always trying to find ways to bother me. I’m a veteran. I served to protect our country. I don’t break its laws.”

  “I know you’re a veteran, ma’am, and I thank you for your service. But I’m afraid I’m obliged to follow this up anyhow. That means you either file for the license or send us proof you got huskies. Otherwise, me and the DEC pay you a visit. Which is it gonna be?”

  “What kind of proof?”

  “Photos, ID, dog licenses.”

  She squeezes her eyes tight, rubs them hard with her free hand.

  “Ma’am?”

  “When do I have to get this done by?”

  He hesitates, and she can hear him relishing his bitty bit of power. “I’ll give you a week.”

  After she hangs up, she stares at the telephone a long while before she can move. Its rows of sinister buttons, its maleficent receiver. She looks down at the body to which she is somehow attached. Hands dangling limp as seaweed. Boots rooted to the ground.

  Betty runs up. Noses Rin’s thigh and whimpers. Come on, do something.

  Rin takes a deep breath and drags herself to her feet. She follows Betty out to the vegetable patch, where she stands over Tariq, legs apart, fists tight against her waist. “Tariq!”

  He looks up at her with a start, and she sees Juney’s face change from the blissed-out expression she keeps for him to the new wariness she has been trying on lately for her. Somewhere along the way here, Juney seems to have taken his side against hers—if there are sides.

  “Yes, Mrs. Drummond?” he says in that formal Arab way Rin doesn’t like at all. He peers up at her from under his curls.

  “Have you told anyone about our wolves?”

  He rolls up the left side of his track pants and pulls on his leg, wishing again he hadn’t blabbed to Louis. “Only Flanner. He’s that kid who followed me here the other day. Why, has something bad happened?”

  Rin is about to say, hell yeah, something bad’s happened, when she stops. Because maybe it hasn’t. Maybe she can head this off at the pass. It’s true she holds her wolves illegally—her little secret from Juney. She never could face registering them or following any of the other rules involved. She doesn’t like rules, not after the army. But she could get herself over to the library, download the damned license application, and send it in before that meddling cop and his DEC buddies stage an invasion.

  “Mommy, don’t be mean to Tariq,” Juney chimes in, clambering to her feet.

  That startles Rin. “Tariq, I want you to come with me,” she says more gently. “You need to learn a few things about wolves.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Drummond,” he says again. She scowls at him. There’s something about his unflappability that makes her want to shake him up. On the other hand, that’s probably why her wolves like him, just as they like the calmness in Juney. Sly kids, jittery kids, like that sneaky tattletale who trailed Tariq—those are exactly the type to set the wolves off. Wolves can smell nervousness. Bad intentions, too. Just as they will in those cops if they come.

  “You need to understand something about pack mentality and dominance,” Rin says as they walk to the house. “Now Gray, the big timber wolf out there, he’s the alpha male. He chooses who the pack befriends and who it doesn’t. He protects them and he bosses them. Which means he has to be the boss of everyone, including you, me, and Juney. You following?”

  She hopes she doesn’t sound the way she used to with her soldiers; not her favorite part of herself. Back in ’05, when she was promoted to sergeant at the ripe old age of twenty-two, she became known as Dragon Drummond. She was tough as boot leather and mean as a rattrap, but you had to be to get any respect as a female NCO, especially one as young as she was. Boss or be bossed, that’s how it is in the military, just as it is for the wolves.

  “Yes, Mrs. Drummond, I’m following.”

  “That means you show submission,” she continues.

  “Roll on your back with your belly up!” Juney crows.

  “Enough sass out of you, young lady. No, it means don’t stare into his eyes—look away if he’s staring at you. A stare is his challenge, and it’s your job to reassure him that you’re not challenging him, you’re a friend.”

  Tariq nods so calmly Rin suspects she hasn’t told him a single thing he doesn’t know already. But then he says, “That’s funny. Me and Gray stare at each other all the time.”

  “Well, don’t overdo it,” she says testily. “It might mean he’s accepted you or it might mean he’s competing with you for dominance. Just don’t push it.”

  “I won’t.” But he sounds unconvinced, so she decides to up the ante. “Come with me.”

  She leads him into the pantry behind her kitchen, a narrow corridor lined with zinc shelves where she stores her homemade pies and bread, canned fruit, stews and vegetables, jarred pickles and preserves. She and Juney live almost entirely on what they make
and grow themselves, although Rin has also stockpiled water and batteries in case of power outages or more hurricanes, along with a couple of extra M4 carbines and a supply of magazines in readiness for a terrorist attack, an FBI siege, or, most urgent of all, the sudden appearance of any of the men who raped her.

  “Open that,” she tells Tariq, pointing at the long chest of a freezer she keeps against the back wall, hoping he will be at least a little bit squeamish.

  He lifts the lid and peers inside, Juney hovering behind him. She follows him everywhere now, like an overeager puppy. “Yuck, what’s that?” he says, which gives Rin some satisfaction.

  “Deer. Frozen. I’ve got chickens, rabbits, squirrel, and fish in there, too. All dead,” she adds unnecessarily, still wanting to shake him.

  “Gray likes fish best,” Juney comments. “He rolls around in the scales and bones to make himself extra stinky.”

  “This is for when we can’t get fresh meat,” Rin continues, ignoring her. Then she explains the deal she’s made with local hunters: They give her the parts of the deer kill they don’t want: legs, hearts, livers, kidneys, and all the other organs they normally throw away, along with whichever little critters they murdered for fun, all of which she’s told them are for her dogs. In return, she gives them a home-baked berry or apple pie. She makes them leave their plastic bags of deer guts, their fresh-shot squirrels and rabbits outside her gate, while she leaves their pies in an old metal milk box. That way, she doesn’t have to talk to those knuckleheads any more than necessary, and they don’t have to talk to her.

  “How come you don’t hunt for the wolf food yourself?” Tariq asks. “You’ve got all those guns.” He blinks up at Rin, all wide-eyed and innocent. Which, she has to remind herself, he is.

  “I had enough of killing in war,” she tells him before she can stop the words. Hoping he doesn’t think through the implications of this too closely, she pulls three squirrels from the pot on the back shelf, where they’ve been thawing, bushy tails, beady eyes and all. “This is the appetizer. Let’s go.” Carrying them by those tails, she leads him outside, Juney holding his hand and trotting along beside him.