Wolf Season

by Helen Benedict

  “Let’s go around the back,” he says to his mother and Louis.

  They follow him in silence, Louis reaching out to clasp Naema’s chilled fingers. He knows she has been trying to persuade the Child Protection authorities to reveal where they placed Juney so she can take her away from there and bring her home, as Tariq has been begging her to do. “I may not be able to save the children of Iraq, but I can help to undo the war for two children right here,” she said to Louis. But so far her efforts have been stymied by the slow-moving cogs of bureaucracy and the apparent unwillingness of every human being within it to help. “Blind children need special care,” they keep telling her. “We have to consider your qualifications.”

  Tariq leads his mother and Louis over to the goat pen beside the barn: empty. Then to the chicken hutch, its door blown open, the eggs cracked and eaten, not a hen to be seen. Next, he takes them to the vegetable garden out back—Juney’s garden—uprooted and decimated, deer, rabbits, moles, foxes, and groundhogs having broken through Rin’s netting and gobbled everything in sight now that there are no dogs to stop them. Juney’s bird feeder is empty, as well. Everything is as still as if holding its breath.

  Tariq walks around all this without a word, clutching Purr. Finally, he turns to his mother and Louis. “I’m going to call the wolves. You can come, but don’t speak when we get near, okay? Just be quiet and don’t move.” Purr is struggling now, so he puts her down. She seems content to slink along beside him.

  Approaching the fence, he scans the woods beyond for any sign of movement. The wind has dropped now and the sun is low enough to have drained the trees of their remaining color, leaving them hunched and dull in the waning light, like a crowd in the rain at a bus stop. He presses himself against the wire, hoping Gray will catch his scent and come, as he has so often before. He waits.

  Naema and Louis wait, too. Now that Naema sees the eight-foot fence topped by a coil of razor wire, the hefty lean-ins holding it steady, the heavily chained and padlocked double door at its entrance, she realizes there never has been anything to fear from Rin Drummond’s wolves, just as Tariq said.

  Tariq stands still and alert for a long while, sending all his will and longing out to Gray. Come, he tries to telepathize, come, father wolf, your boy is here. Ta’al, el-theeb el-’ab, ebnek hna. But the trees only look back at him indifferently and not a shadow moves. So he lifts his head and in the same imitation of Juney he tried before, he calls, “Gra-aay, Silverrrr, Eboneeey.”

  Naema shudders, for the call sounds alien and haunting and utterly unlike her son. But Louis has the odd sense he has heard this sound before. Then he remembers: the loons of the Adirondack lakes. Their unearthly wails of warning.

  Tariq waits with the patience he has learned from his months of watching the wolves. Then he calls again.

  Far back in the woods, hidden in a den deep beneath a large granite rock, Silver pricks her ears. A shiver of hope runs through her and she tries to stand, struggling to heave herself up on her front legs. But she is too weak and can only collapse. She is nothing but ribs and fur now; blind, her mouth crusted and dry, her white coat thin and filthy. Her mate has stopped coming to feed her, as has the other creature. Her son is never here to groom her. She has no water, aside from the rivulets that trickle in with the rain.

  With a great effort, she lifts her head off the ground and returns the call with the loudest and most desperate howl she can muster.

  Had Juney been here, she might have heard, deep underground though Silver is. But a breeze has stirred up again and a sibilant rustle of dry leaves is sweeping through the woods, so Tariq hears nothing.

  He scoops up Purr again and buries his face in her neck, trying not to cry. “They’re not here,” he says to his mother and Louis, his voice trembling. “Oh, Mama, where has everyone gone?”

  33

  CANE

  It is so dark in here. Everything in this place is sharp and hard. The bed frames and doors and tables and chairs. They bump into Juney. Gash her shins. Bang her toes.

  Ms. Jackson has given her a cane because Juney lost hers when the police arrested her. She says Juney should use it all the time so things don’t bump her so much.

  But at home, Juney didn’t need her cane all the time. She could see with her nose and her fingers and ears and her dogs and Tariq. She could see with her mother.

  Ms. Jackson won’t let her visit her mother. They didn’t kill her, Ms. Jackson told her, so Juney is not an orphan like some of the other children here. But what else is she if they won’t let her visit?

  She heard them whispering in another room, Ms. Jackson and some man. They don’t know how well she can hear. She heard them talking about a prison and a place for the blind. She doesn’t want to go to a prison for the blind. She wants to go home to her mother.

  She wants her mother. She wants Tariq. She wants Ebony and Silver and Gray, and RufusBettyRickyPop and Purrand-Patch. She wants her bird feeder and her flowers and Hiccup’s grave and her tomatoes. She wants the weeds in the garden and the eggs under the chickens and the rugs under her feet.

  She wants the fire. She wants the sun. It is so dark in here.

  34

  PACK

  The doctors are giving Rin enough painkillers to numb a buffalo. Morphine, Percocet, Vicodin, OxyContin—she has long since lost track. But even though she has been locked up in this hospital for eleven days now, they won’t tell her anything about Juney. Where she is. How she is being treated. Whether she can find her way around. If there is anyone to console her.

  Rin heard her screaming. Even through the pain and shock, even through the sky spinning into her head, she heard her. Juney must be so scared, so very scared. Will your sea urchin fingers help you now, little bean? Your radar senses? Your songs and your happy rocking?

  “I need to see my daughter!” Rin yells and yells all day long. “I need to see my child!” Nobody listens.

  They chained one of her arms to the bed. The door to her room is guarded day and night by a cop. “Why?” she asks him. “I can’t even walk, my leg is shot up so bad. I have to piss in a goddamn bedpan. What did you expect me to do, come tearing out and attack you with my IV bag?”

  But she doesn’t care what they do to her here. She only cares about Juney.

  Flaherty did do quite a number on Rin, though. The doctors tell her she’s lucky to have the leg at all, given that he shot her with a Glock 37—she still might end up like Tariq. All she did was fire a warning shot. Way over his head, no less. If he had been army-trained and less damned trigger-happy, he would have known better than to open fire on a woman standing on her own goddamn porch with two kids beside her. It’s a miracle he didn’t hit Juney. Or Tariq.

  Is there no one in this godforsaken town full of godforsaken people who is willing to help me get my daughter back?

  Meanwhile, visitors keep bothering her all the time. Doctors and nurses, of course, interns and first years. But also cops, lawyers, DEC officers, Child Protection snoops. Even reporters.

  The cops come to tell her she’s in about the deepest shit a person can be, having shot at one of their sacred clan. Fact that she didn’t shoot at him but over him interests them not at all.

  The lawyers come to promise they’ll fight the charges. Pull up her PTSD records, her service, her honorable discharge. Shock the court by pointing out that those so-called officers of the peace came tearing onto her property with no warning, pointing guns at her service dog and her blind daughter over nothing but a stupid license. Rin listens, nods, rolls her eyes. Who are they kidding? Nobody’s going to give a hoot about any of that, not when she threatened a police officer. “Dream on, boys,” she tells them. “Dream on.”

  The reporters come to ask her why she did it and was it the war and does she feel she’s being treated right. She rattles her chain and says, “You tell me.”

  The Child Protection snoops come to say they are “looking into” a permanent home for Juney, meanwhile still refusing to
say where she is or when Rin can see her, until she screams them out of the room.

  The DEC officers come to discuss her wolves. She finds it hard to believe these are the same folks who run those nerdy little forest rangers giving leaf-peeping tours in the Catskills. “You were keeping your wolves well,” they say—they being two bottle-tan men with thick-thatched yellow hair. “We were going to advise you to go for the exhibition license, given that you raised your wolves in captivity, if you’d listened to us instead of shooting.”

  So why did you arrive at my house armed to the teeth like a SWAT team? Cowards.

  Oh well, too late now. She’s fucked everything up in style. What comes around goes around, as they say. She steps on a doctor and almost drowns her to save her own. Cops shoot her to save theirs.

  As for her dogs, they pumped them full of tranquilizers and took them to the pound. That will be the death of them, as she trained them to be so unfriendly to strangers. Rufus was such a good Seeing Eye for Juney, taking her to and from the school bus every day; Betty so loyal, with her soft, black eyes and pudding-brown coat.

  Rin has no idea what happened to her cats and goats and chickens. Running wild, no doubt, prey for foxes and the packs of coyotes who show up regularly in her woods like a gang of muggers. But her wolves—Gray and Ebony, poor sick Silver—nobody will tell her what has been done with them. And when she asks, those DEC bastards only get all skitter-eyed and back out of the room.

  I need to see Juney. Tomorrow, maybe, they say. A new word, tomorrowmaybe. I wait and I wait, I plead and I plead, but tomorrowmaybe never turns into today.

  Still, the visitors keep on pouring in. A physical therapist who tortures her by forcing her to lift her shattered leg and wiggle the ankle. A creep calling himself her “pain manager” who pumps up her morphine as if hell-bent on turning her addicted. A second team of lawyers who orders her not to talk to any more cops or reporters and gives her bad news disguised as good. “Public sympathy is on your side,” they say at one point. “Your case has become so notorious we may have to move your trial,” they say the next.

  Even a clump of hippies turns up, claiming to be veterans.

  “Hi, comrade,” says one, which immediately puts her off. “We’re from VVFTWOOV.”

  She eyes them from the bed. A motley crew of aging geezers in gray ponytails, their addled brains topped by baseball caps festooned with peace signs and patches from the Vietnam War. “What the hell is Vee Vee F-T WooVee?”

  “Vietnam Veterans for the Welfare of Other Veterans.”

  She looks at them in disbelief. “What do you want?”

  The lead geezer grins at her, white hair straggling out from under his cap, ten teeth missing. Former methhead if she ever saw one, just like her brother. Either that or a junkie. She met a lot of junkies in the army—three in her own platoon, all dead within a year of getting out. “We want you to know we’ve got your back.”

  “Listen,” she tells him, heaving herself up in the bed as best she can, which isn’t far, given her leg and the chain. “First, I don’t consider a bunch of decrepit old Deadheads my comrades, so you can quit saying that right now. Second, did you notice that I happen to be a female? So why didn’t you come with a woman if you’re so keen on my frigging welfare? Third, if you’re going to call yourselves veterans, clean the fuck up. You look like something dredged out of the bottom of Woodstock.”

  They leave in a collective huff.

  But amid all these parasites, torturers, liars, and loonies, a couple of visitors arrive who give her a true surprise. The first is Tariq’s mom, wearing her white doctor coat and her shrapnel scar, who seems destined to haunt Rin’s life whether she likes it or not. The second, coming in right behind her, is that hooah army guy Tariq calls his uncle.

  “Are they treating you well, Mrs. Drummond?” Naema asks.

  Rin stares at her as if she’s one of her phantoms. The woman’s back sinking under her foot.

  Naema walks up to the bed and brushes the sweaty hair off Rin’s forehead like a mother. This is the first gesture of kindness Rin has received in this place. From her, of all people. A rocklike weight shifts inside Rin and she nearly breaks down and weeps.

  “If you call chaining me to my bed and not letting me see my daughter ‘treating me well,’ sure,” she says, yanking herself together. “But I guess they’re doing the medical stuff right.”

  “Yes, you do not have to worry about that. I checked their procedures and they are correct. But you must be in pain. Are they giving you enough painkillers?”

  “Yeah, but I don’t want them. I’m not interested in turning into a morphinehead. You got any news of Juney?”

  A flicker passes over the woman’s face, a flicker Rin doesn’t like the look of at all. “We do. She is in a foster home in Albany, a private house with some eight or ten other children. But this is only temporary—”

  “A foster home?” All the stories Rin has ever heard about child molesters and beatings and kids locked in basements come clamoring into her head. She was hoping Juney was in some place responsible, at least, like a boarding school for the blind run by people who know what they’re doing. “Why is she in a foster home?”

  Naema’s brow pinches up and she pulls at her skinny brown fingers. She glances at the hooah guy with the look a woman gives the man she trusts. He steps over to stand beside her, a towering hunk of a war vet next to a fragile stick of an Iraqi. Takes all kinds, Rin supposes.

  Naema speaks again. “The authorities, they said it is because they could not find any relatives to take her.”

  Rin examines her. She is so like Tariq. That same acorn skin; same narrow face and delicate body. And for once, Rin knows exactly what she must do. “Get her out of there. Get my daughter out of there and take her home with you. Please?”

  Naema glances at Hooah. “Mrs. Drummond, this is exactly what we came here to ask you today. We, too, wish to take her out of that place. We want her to stay with us for as long as she needs to—to stay with Tariq, who loves her.”

  Rin’s eyes sting. She closes them quickly, the relief coursing through her stronger than any morphine. She pictures Juney living with Tariq, having him as a brother. She pictures them doing their homework together on the floor, swaying in front of the fire.

  “Thanks.” For the moment, she can say no more. Did she just thank an Iraqi for taking her daughter? She hasn’t felt this flippy-floppy since she was driven out of the army for being pregnant and raped. She feels like a weeping fish.

  Opening her eyes, she wipes them dry and tries to master her voice. “Have you seen her?”

  “Not yet.” Naema is still pulling her fingers. “The bureaucracy, it is very slow. But we will persist.”

  “Are you sure they’ll let you take her?”

  “I think so, yes. These agencies, they are happy to find private homes for the children. It is less expensive for them that way.”

  Hooah speaks up then. “It might speed things up if you write a letter vouching for us.”

  “Sure, but I doubt it’ll help. Not now they’ve decided I’m such an unfit mother they won’t even let me talk to my kid.” Rin stops speaking. Breathes. Digs around for her voice. “Does she know I’m all right?”

  “Yes,” Naema replies. “She knows you are recovering in a hospital.” And once more, she leans over to smooth Rin’s head. She smells of the starch in her coat but also of a flower Rin knows, a scent she remembers . . . jasmine, that’s it. A favorite perfume in Iraq, which, for some reason, is not triggering her right now.

  “Tariq, he spoke to Juney on the phone yesterday,” Naema continues. “We are able to do that, at least, thanks to my former nurse. She knows the woman who runs the foster home. Sarah Jackson is her name. She told us we can visit Juney next week.”

  Listen, god-I-don’t-believe-in, make this Jackson person kind. Make her understand Juney. Make her gentle.

  “Mrs. Drummond . . .” Naema is still stroking Rin’s brow, her hand dr
y and cool, and Rin is surprised by how soothing it is. “As a mother, I understand something of how painful this must be for you. We will telephone Juney every day until they let us see her. Tariq, he will give her your messages and her messages we will bring to you.”

  Rin lets her head fall back against the pillow and stares at the ceiling, trying to hold on to this one tiny shred of light for as long as she can: Juney and Tariq talking.

  “When Tariq spoke to her, what did she say?” Her voice comes out more of a croak than a voice.

  Silence.

  “She’s unhappy, isn’t she?” Rin whispers.

  “Yes, I am afraid she is. She wants only to leave that place and be with you. But she is safe; we are sure of that.”

  This time, Rin can’t even feel ashamed of weeping, soldier though she is. Wiping her face hastily with her sheet, she glances around the room. “Where is Tariq anyway?”

  “They would not let us bring him, I am afraid.”

  “Oh, right.” She rattles her chain again. “I’m a dangerous maniac now. So how come they let you see me?”

  “The press.” Hooah is speaking this time. “Your story’s all over the place, embarrassing the hell out of the cops. It doesn’t look good when a state trooper shoots at little kids. Or female veterans. They’re trying to rustle up better PR by allowing you visitors.”

  “They give Flaherty a medal yet?” Rin doesn’t even try to hide her disgust.

  Hooah shakes his head. A mighty handsome head, she just noticed. He’s got a couple fingers missing, and she can guess where from. This warms her to him somehow. “He’s under investigation.” He raises a telling eyebrow.

  Rin tries again to push herself higher on the pillows, about to give Naema a message for Juney, when a scrawny nurse marches through the door, face like a dried apricot.

  “Visiting hours are over. You have to leave now.”

  “We will leave when we are ready, thank you, Nurse,” Naema replies, her tone as crisp as her coat. That shuts the nurse up. Rin likes that.