Wolf Season

by Helen Benedict

  A rain has started up, a light but gloomy September spittle. Charcoal clouds layering on top of one another like sheaves of hay, trees bursting into rustles as if shuddering at a bad dream. Rin doesn’t like this weather. It makes her think of the long stretch of the school year ahead, the lonesomeness that shadows her while Juney is gone.

  The wolves don’t care about the rain, of course. They are focused like bullets on one thing only: food. By the time Rin and the children are in sight of the fence, all three of them are already there, whipped into a fever by the odor of freshly thawed squirrel. The closer the food gets, the more frenetic they grow, tearing back and forth, mouths open, saliva streaming. Soon they are leaping and snarling, snapping at one another and throwing themselves against the fence with great, rattling thuds.

  Tariq watches them, holding his breath, eyes big. Rin knows he has never seen them as agitated as this. “You’re going in there?” he asks her.

  “You tell me.” She opens the little hatch she cut high into the fence and drops in the squirrels one by one, imagining them as Officer Flaherty and his DEC cronies. A blur, a flash, and the wolves are ripping them to pieces amid snorts and grunts and the unmistakable squelch and crunch of fangs rending flesh.

  “Guess you don’t want to get in the way of that,” Tariq says, taking a step back.

  “Guess not,” Rin replies.

  13

  BARGAIN

  When Tariq wanders rain-soaked into Louis’s house later that afternoon, his head still humming with the snarling murmur-growl of feeding wolves, he discovers Louis scrabbling through a kitchen drawer. “Where have you been all this time?” Louis says. “I’ve been waiting and waiting. We have to go!” He slams the drawer closed and yanks open another. Like the rest of his house, his kitchen is as spartan as a barracks, its walls an unyielding beige, its meager collection of spices lined up like saluting recruits, its pots and pans buffed and hung in perfect alignment. But inside every drawer dwells a secret mayhem: Can openers tangled with buttons and thread. Pliers, paper clips, and spoons jumbled into a metallic stew. Wads of expired warranties and never-read manuals layered atop essential items, such as the car keys he is searching for now.

  “At my friend’s. Why, where are we going?” Tariq squints up at him. Louis looks taller than usual—maybe in contrast to little Juney and her bulldog of a mother. He looks big and warm, and despite his agitated mood, reassuring.

  Louis turns around, holding his keys aloft in triumph. He is calmer now, his eyes, the color of sunlit grass, smiling into crescents. “Your mom’s being released. We can get her right now!”

  “Now?” Tariq drops his sopping backpack to the floor. “Does that mean she’s all better?”

  “Not all better, no. That’ll take some time yet. But better enough. Go change—you’re drenched. Then we can leave.”

  During the entire circuitous drive to the hospital, which seems to take twice as long as usual—too many potholes and stop signs, too many hay carts and slowpoke tractors that won’t get out of the way—Tariq jiggles about in the passenger seat, barely able to contain his impatience. Just this past Labor Day weekend, he and Louis spent every minute they could with his mother, watching her blow into that plastic tube, unconsciously blowing with her, and she seemed so weak Tariq was afraid she would never come home at all. So as soon as they reach the hospital and enter the elevator, the same orange-rimmed buttons lighting and dimming, the same ding ringing out at each floor, he runs down the corridor and bursts into her room with a whoop.

  “Habibi!” She is sitting upright and ready on the edge of her bed, dressed in an embroidered white tunic and blue jeans instead of that pale blue hospital gown Tariq so disliked, her hair once again in its braid, her hands held out to him. “Come, give me a kiss.” He does, wrapping his arms around her thin shoulders and hugging her with all his strength.

  “So, my friend, they are letting me out at last,” she says to Louis, laughing at Tariq’s exuberance and then having to catch her breath. Louis is standing in the door, beaming. “I feel as if I have been trapped in here for—”

  “Mama, stop talking. Let’s go!” Tariq tugs at her braid. “I’ll carry your bag.” He picks up the lumpy green sack at her feet, filled with books.

  “Thank you, little one. Yes, I long to be out in the air again. Louis, will you help me up? My legs, they feel like noodles.”

  With Louis’s arm supporting her, she shuffles to the door, Tariq following. He hefts the bag higher up his chest like an overlarge baby, rocking under its weight. But it disturbs him to see his mother leaning on Louis like this, as if she is an old woman, and he is suddenly convinced that a doctor or some other demonic figure will pop out of nowhere and stop her from leaving. “Hurry, Mama!” he cries.

  She turns to assure him there is no need to rush, but then she sees the fear in his face. It is the same stricken expression he wore in the Baghdad hospital the day after the bomb, the day he was trying to grasp in his three-year-old way that it was his own father and grandfather he had just seen atomized into a cloud of blood; his own leg that had just been sawn off at the thigh.

  “Do not worry, little one,” she says in the murmuring Arabic of a mother soothing her child. “There is no need to be afraid. We are safe.”

  But Tariq feels anything but safe. So he begins a frantic series of bargains with fate: His mother will get out of here if he reaches the elevator without dropping her bag . . . If the elevator comes before he counts to five . . . If he doesn’t speak a word till they reach the ground floor . . . If Louis doesn’t say anything about the wolves . . .

  The bargaining works. They reach the lobby unharmed. Cross its cold, hard floor under its even colder and harder lights. Enter the revolving doors without mishap. And finally, they are successfully ejected, one by one, into the warm, wet, September evening.

  “You’re free, Mama!”

  “Yes, I am, my sweet one,” she says with a smile, folding him again to her side. And although he knows she doesn’t understand what he means, it is good enough.

  It takes only thirty minutes to reach their house, which is nestled at the intersection of two tree-lined streets bordering Huntsville and Potterstown. Louis helps Naema out of the car while Tariq wrestles her bulky bag from the trunk. “It is so good to be here again,” she says, stepping gingerly onto the sidewalk, its flagstones buckled by grass and weeds. She looks up at her house. “Oh! What happened?”

  The edge of her roof is smashed, two windows are cracked, and a fair bit of vinyl siding is missing. Louis fixed what he could while she was in the hospital, but now, looking at it through her eyes, he sees his efforts have not amounted to much. Her house looks as beaten up as his own.

  “The hurricane made the whole town like this, Mama,” Tariq tells her quickly. “Some people’s homes are much worse than ours. And Louis mended a lot of the broken stuff. You should’ve seen it before.”

  “You are always so kind to me, my friend.” She pats Louis’s hand. Her house is only a modest two-story cottage, squat as a cake box and painted pale green, a row of narrow windows squinting beneath its roof, but it is the first true home she has had since fleeing Baghdad; the first she has owned since she was turned into a refugee.

  She was sitting beside Tariq in Saint Raphael Hospital only two days after the bomb when Khalil’s fellow interpreter, Salim, came to snatch them away from their lives. “You must leave Iraq now,” he whispered. “There are informers everywhere. It could be only a matter of hours till a militia finds you.”

  She gazed up at him, barely able to comprehend. “But I can’t move my son. He’s just had an amputation.”

  “I’m sorry, Umm Tariq, you must. Umm Khalil will accompany you. She’s waiting in my taxi. Come!”

  Naema looked about in a daze. Before the war, this hospital had been the best in Baghdad. Now patients were strewn all over the floor, covered in filth, and only two doctors were left to treat the hundreds of people streaming in by the day. “B
ut where is my mother? Is she still at our house?”

  “No, she went to her uncle in Basra. We are only authorized to fly out Khalil’s mother, not yours. I’m sorry.”

  “Who is ‘we’?”

  “Sergeant Donnell and me. Hurry!”

  Lifting Tariq into her arms, blood seeping through his bandages, Naema followed Salim out, the whispers of gossips trailing them like spies.

  Over the next hour, Salim drove them to the airport through the chaotic streets of Baghdad and one terrorizing checkpoint after another. No traffic lights or police, but plenty of blaring horns, screaming drivers, and huge military vehicles with soldiers bristling from them like aliens. Tariq moaned in her lap, his face ashen, his blood staining her skirt. She held him as still as she could to protect him from the jolts of the car, trying to ignore the burning in her freshly stitched cheek while she prayed they would not be stopped, not be caught, not be killed. Hibah sat mute beside her, too numbed by the loss of her husband and son in a single instant to speak. They had nothing with them but the passports and visas hastily procured by Sergeant Donnell, the single bag Hibah had managed to pack in a panic, and the money and jewelry she had sewn inside Naema’s sanitary pads and the soles of their shoes.

  “Stay in touch with me in Damascus and I will tell the sergeant what you need,” Salim said at the airport. “He’ll to try to help you get visas to America, but it might be many months before that happens. Fi Amanhallah.” And he hurried away, taking their last tie to Baghdad with him.

  On the airplane, Naema sat in silence, the multiple shocks of all that had happened breaking over her like wave upon wave of frigid water, each slap icier than the last.

  Once they landed in Damascus, they stumbled out to the taxi line, Naema clasping Tariq, Hibah dragging their lone suitcase, their ears battered by the unfamiliar sounds of Syrian Arabic. “Please, uncle, will you take us to an inexpensive hotel in Qudsiya or Jeramana?” Naema asked the first driver, naming neighborhoods she had heard were full of her countrymen escaping the war.

  “Can’t do it, sister, too far,” he said, averting his eyes from her torn face and the mutilated child in her arms.

  She tried a second and then a third driver, only to hear more excuses. “I’ll pay whatever you want,” she finally pleaded with a fourth. “Can’t you see my son needs a bed?”

  The driver glanced at Tariq: the stained bandages around his stump, his eyes clouded with shock. He named an astronomical fee, enough to live on for two weeks. Naema knew this was robbery, but she was too desperate to bargain, as the driver had clearly surmised. Yet even then he hadn’t finished taking advantage, for once he had dumped them at an overpriced hotel in Qudsiya, he snatched their money and, before they could demand change, roared off in a cloud of dust.

  Not knowing what else to do, they entered the stone archway leading into the hotel lobby, a grand affair painted scarlet and lit by dim, multicolored lanterns. They crossed the polished mosaic floor to the reception desk, where they asked for a room. The proprietor swept his eyes over them and declared he would allow them to stay only if they paid for two nights there and then. “Yah Allah, what is the matter with these people?” Hibah wailed once they had shut the bedroom door behind them. “Have they no pity?”

  Naema laid Tariq down on the bed and prepared to change his bandages. “A thousand of us arrive in this city every day,” she replied. “Their pity must be used up.”

  The next morning Naema borrowed one of Hibah’s black abayas and stepped out of the hotel in search of food, still benumbed by all that had happened. Instantly, she was swept into a maelstrom of noise and color. Shrouded women and spry, kaftan-clad men barking their wares as they batted away clouds of flies. Street vendors barbecuing shwarma under plumes of smoke. Carts heaped with purple figs and sweating oranges. Stands crammed with sacks of lentils, rice, and tea, their scents spicing the air. It was so like Baghdad before the war she felt a strange, shifting sensation, as if she had slipped out of her body to melt into the past. And for the first time since the bomb, she wept.

  Wiping her eyes quickly, she forced herself into the street, walking for half an hour, afraid talk to anyone until she realized the neighborhood was so full of her countrymen that most of the shop signs were in Iraqi Arabic. This gave her the courage to enter a small bakery. “Peace be upon you,” she said to the baker, a skull-faced man with hooded eyes and a tightly trimmed mustache dusted with flour. After paying for her samoon, she added timidly, “I and my family arrived from Baghdad only last night. Do you know, uncle, where I might find work?”

  He raised his powdered brows. “Refugees are not allowed to work here. Don’t you know that?” His eyes dropped over her, making her feel as if a snake had slithered between her breasts. “You must seek an underground job.”

  She stepped back, drawing her hijab farther over her wounded cheek. In Iraq, she had resented being forced to wear a head scarf, never having worn one before the American war had brought conservative imams to power. But at that moment, she was glad of the anonymity it gave her and even for the cover of Hibah’s heavy abaya. Under the insinuating eyes of the baker, she almost wished to be hidden from head to toe in a burqa. “What sort of job, uncle?”

  He glanced around before leaning his dough-crusted hands on the counter and lowering his voice. “Go to the hairdresser over the road and ask her.”

  Naema picked up her bread, uneasy about what he was implying, and dodged through the barreling traffic to the far side of the street. The hair salon was nothing but a wardrobe-size shopfront containing two chairs, a sink, and a long and tarnished mirror split from top to bottom by a zigzagging crack. A heavily made-up woman clad in a lavender hijab and matching abaya was leaning in the doorway, her big arms crossed. Her lips were so thickly painted they appeared to be made of vinyl. In the light of the baker’s words, Naema could not help but wonder what else this woman did besides dressing hair.

  “You are newly arrived?” she said after Naema greeted her. “I can always tell.” She looked Naema over quickly, taking in the wound on her cheek and Hibah’s baggy abaya, nowhere near as elegantly cut as her own. “Tell me about yourself.” Naema complied, although in the barest of terms, leaving out Khalil’s death and the bomb, neither of which she could bear to speak of aloud. “The best jobs for you, in that case, are private nurse or seamstress. But such jobs are scarce and none are legal.”

  “But with all due respect, auntie, you have this salon and the uncle across the street has his bakery. Are these illegal?”

  “No, but the baker and I have been here many years and we have families here, connections. Do you have connections?” Naema had to admit she did not. “In that case, barak Állahu feek. May the blessings of Allah be upon you.”

  “What about a place to live?” Naema asked, her voice trembling. “Do you know where I might find a cheap apartment? We cannot afford to stay in our hotel.”

  The woman shrugged, sending a powerful waft of sandalwood perfume her way. “There is a three-month waiting list for even the most dismal of places. So many refugees from the war are pouring in every day, my dear, I’ve heard the government is about to close the doors to our people altogether. There’ll be a rush, so hurry.” She reached into her pocket, extracted a stumpy pencil, and scrawled her name and an address on a scrap of paper. “Go to this building, tell them I sent you, and put your name on the list as soon as you can. But I can’t promise success.”

  “May Allah reward you for the good,” Naema told her, ashamed now of her earlier suspicions, and returned to the hotel. “Why do they take us into this country if they won’t let us work?” she cried to Hibah. “How do they expect us to survive?”

  For the following six weeks, Naema went out every morning to stop anyone speaking Iraqi dialect and ask if he or she knew of a job. Day after day, she haunted Iraqi cafés, restaurants, and beauty salons, finding nothing but requests for medical help paid for by promises never kept, or offers to buy her body. But at last, she
came across an acquaintance from Baghdad, also now a refugee, who was willing to pay her to care for his dying grandmother. Later, she also found piecework trimming hijabs with lace and beads. Hibah tried to help, but her hands were too arthritic, so Naema spent her nights by the grandmother’s bedside, trying with little success to sew the trimmings on straight until the woman needed a bedpan, her bottom washed, her clothes changed, or her toothless mouth spooned with watery soup or tea. And when the night was over, Naema would return to the hotel, sleep for a few fitful hours, play with Tariq for a few more while Hibah took her rest, and then go back out to search for more work or to take him to a doctor.

  After staying at the hotel for three months, Naema’s earnings draining away on its bills—even with the money Sergeant Donnell sent them, they could scarcely afford to eat—they finally reached the top of the waiting list and were able to move into a single-room apartment. The ceiling was greased with nicotine, the air filled with the cries and quarrels of neighbors, and they had only one bed between them, but there they lived for two and a half more years, filling out forms, gathering documents, undergoing interviews and medical examinations, and waiting for hours in this line or that, whether to register with the UN refugee office, fulfill Syria’s requirement that they renew their visas four times a year, or apply to go to America. And when, at long last, the American visas arrived, spurred on by Donnell, and Naema and her little family were delivered to Albany in 2010, it was only to live in another single room, this one in the back of Donnell’s house with the knowledge that he was always there on the other side of the door. Then came the slum she found with Louis—and finally, after years of saving and searching, this cake-box house with two bedrooms and an actual backyard.