Kiss of the Wolf

by Jim Shepard

  He threw the ball around with me a lot. When he threw me ground balls, he called me Luis, after Luis Aparicio, a player he liked when he was a kid. I looked him up in Bill James’s Baseball Abstract. He’s in the Hall of Fame.

  I called the police again and hung up again. I’m never going to do anything with that. I might as well just stop.

  My mom came back at one in the morning from her date with Bruno. I don’t know how long the concert was supposed to go, but I doubt it was that long.

  Last night I had a dream so bad I don’t even want to talk about it.

  Toward the end, Sister Justine came into it. Sister Justine last year was one of the ones who’d watch us during Mass to make sure we were singing the songs right. Sometimes kids would make up their own words to try and crack you up. Sisters hate that.

  Sometimes you really didn’t know the words, though, and you didn’t bother reading along in the Missalettes. She came down the row once and grabbed me by the elbow, and I didn’t even know what I did wrong. I was singing, “‘Oh, my soul, praise Him, for He is our health and salvation. Christ the high priest bids us all join in His feast, victims with Him on the altar,’” and I thought those were the right words. She scared me.

  At the end of the day on Monday, she made us all keep our seats and she announced that Todd Muhlberg was going to sing a hymn the right way for us and we were all going to listen to the right way before we went home. She kept the class after, because I didn’t know the words. This made me even more popular.

  She made me go up to the front of the room. She picked a different song and she didn’t let me use the Missalette. I don’t know why she picked a different song. Maybe she figured I might have practiced the other one.

  Then, when she had me up there, she made me wait until there was perfect silence.

  I remember standing there with my hands folded, everybody looking at me, everybody ready to go. Their schoolbags were all on their desks.

  She made me sing the whole thing. She made me repeat one part of it, because I messed it up. And the whole time I was singing I was looking at her, and here’s what I was thinking: I was thinking, You’re not making me a better person; you’re making me a worse person. I felt better, thinking that. What she made me sing still goes through my head at weird times:

  For the sheep the Lamb has bled,

  sinless, in the sinner’s stead.

  Christ the Lord is risen on high.

  Now He lives, no more to die.

  BRUNO

  Here’sa kinda jobs I had when I was a kid, these other guys were out with their seven iron at Fairchild-Wheeler: Laying asphalt. Spreading asphalt. Humping dirt for road crews, that whole Route 8 extension. Passivating. You want to see a shit job: this is a job people don’t even do anymore. Now they got machines, and they gotta replace those every few years. I was however old, twenty-two, I finally got hooked on at Vadnais Metals over on East Main Street, the first day I’m there the guy I’m supposed to report to doesn’t know what to do with me. Big, red-faced Polack; always looked like whatever you asked him was funny. Mr. Kuntz, I gotta take a leak. That’s funny? Mr. Kuntz, where do I punch out? That’s funny? I’m there bright and early Monday morning, got on new wool pants ’cause my uncle says, Light work. Mr. Kuntz is baffled. Mr. Kuntz has never heard of me. He says to the guy he’s with, We could put him on the passivator, and they give each other these looks, and I go, Oh, shit.

  They take me down like seven levels of cellars. I’m thinking, Oh, this is lovely. We come to this concrete room, I can’t describe it. For light, there’s one bulb, handmade, Thomas Edison. Nothing on the walls. It’s a huge holding area where all these hollow metal cabinets are piling up. The size of small refrigerators, hollow, soldered together. One side of the room is this big stainless-steel pit, like a giant sink. Two feet deep, ten or twelve feet around. Drain in the middle. There’s a Puerto Rican in rubber hip boots and rubber gloves in the pit. He’s got this wand in his hand, wired to a portable generator. There are these big plastic tubs with screw-on tops next to him. One says WATER. One says HYDROCHLORIC ACID.

  The Puerto Rican is introduced to me. The voices in there with the metal and the concrete, you can’t hear anything. Hector’s wearing safety glasses and his clothes are dotted with yellow, like somebody exploded a mustard bottle in front of him. There’s a little vent fan in the ceiling.

  Here’s the drill: Vadnais Metals is making its own metal cabinets, for who knows what. They solder the things together, the solder discolors the metal. They show me, with one of the cabinets waiting to be done. Even in the bad light I can see it: the little rainbow patterns around the joint, like the sun on oily water. That has to come off. Since it’s stainless steel, nobody’s sanding anything. What you do is you find some guys on the bottom of the food chain, Puerto Ricans from Father Panik Village or guineas from Kissuth Street who don’t know any better, and you show them how it’s done. How it’s done is these guys take a wand that’s charged with juice from the portable generators and they wrap the wands with gauze and rubber bands. Then they dip them into the hydrochloric acid. Then they swab the discoloration. Then the discoloration goes away, magic. Then they rinse off the cabinet with water. Then they do it again.

  Except the electricity breaks down the gauze. So you gotta keep rewrapping the wand. And to do that you gotta take off your rubber gloves. And you rinse your hands afterwards but the acid doesn’t feel like anything until a minute goes by, and then it feels slick, and then it burns. And the acid eats through the rubber. And stuff gets sprayed around. And the fumes are a solid thing pressing into your face.

  Just standing there, I was leaning back from the fumes. I said, Hey, turn on the vent, and Hector said, the first thing he said to me, It’s on.

  I’m looking at this and I go to Mr. Kuntz, When do I start? and he goes, Start now. I go, In these? and put my hands on both sides of these new wool pants. Pathetic.

  The headaches. The burns, when the shit got down into your gloves between your fingers. You’d go to rub your eye and you’d think, Oh. Very nice. That wasn’t close, was it?

  They left me there, that first day. I heard the door shut and heard them go all the way up the stairs. They were metal stairs. Near the top, Mr. Kuntz said something and the other guy roared. Laughed so hard he had to stop on the stairs to get his breath. Hector went on without me for a little while. The first thing I did was fold up the cuffs on my pants. I remember realizing this Puerto Rican felt sorry for me.

  He showed me how to get into the clammy rubber waders, how to check the gloves for prior damage. Everything that was wet, I thought, Acid. It was nine-twenty-five. I already had a headache from the fumes. I pulled over my first cabinet. It flexed and boomed with that sheet-metal sound. There was nowhere for the sound to go. Hector hit the light cord tipping his cabinet over, and it circled our heads, swinging shadows around like we were in a mad scientist’s lab.

  Those wool pants that first day had the ass eaten out of them. My shorts underneath were yellow and mealy, like wet Kleenex. You could roll pieces off them with your fingers. I punched out that day with a hole in my pants, like somebody in a vaudeville show. I stood there and punched out. My ass was cold. It was funny to Mr. Kuntz and funny to everyone else. Get a load of this, you gotta see this. Standing there at the time clock looking for his card, a wop with his ass hanging out.

  Hector got moved out after three weeks, complaining of headaches. The day Hector left, I went upstairs and said, Hey, I got headaches, too. Mr. Kuntz said, Hey, kid, I got prostate. Sally’s got a drinking problem. Hermie’s got a stutter. What do you want from me? Two weeks after that I had to stay out a day, I got acid in my eye, the son of a bitch fired me, no questions asked. I had nothing, twenty-two years old, I’m holding my hand on my ass.

  I run into a lotta women attracted to me, it’s the same story: Bruno, there’s something different about you, I don’t know why I’m so interested. Bruno, I’m thirty-five years old, unmarried. I
live with my mother, she’s a burden on me, I’m not unattractive, I still have my looks. Bruno, I never know what you’re thinking. Meanwhile, their eyes: they’d hate me if they could.

  Love. Everybody’s thinking about love.

  Two years after that job, I drove up to the University of Hartford and found the dorm where Mr. Kuntz’s daughter was a college coed. Eighteen years old, small ass, bobbed hair, in her room she did stretching exercises, legs out to here. They locked the dorms at eleven o’clock, but that was a joke. Her room was on the fourth floor. She left her fire-escape windows open.

  I sat on the top landing by some storage rooms and listened to their stereos. Neil Young. Jackson Browne. Two hours of pissing and moaning: “Oh, Lonesome Me.” One by one, the rooms shut down under me; I could feel it. It was three, four o’clock. The security guy, probably a hundred and four, went by in his little cart. I wanted a disguise that was an insult. I punched two holes in a grocery bag and tore a smiley face in it. I tied it around my neck with my tie. I went down the fire escape.

  I stood at her bed and waited for her to roll over, that’s how sound a sleeper she was. When she was on her back I put my hand on her mouth and she woke up. She understood not to scream. She got out of bed and squatted in a corner of the room. This all took a very short time. She was still holding the edge of her quilt. She dragged it all across the floor. She didn’t even look eighteen, with the light from the window. I didn’t rape her. I made her take me in her mouth.

  JOANIE

  We used to get assigned saints and martyrs to read and think about for a week, and the girls always got assigned girls who were martyred because they refused to do something impure. The stories were never clear on what. Usually the Romans were involved. The most they’d tell you was that so-and-so wanted to ravish her. I imagined a woman lying back on a sofa with her arms behind her head. After that I drew a blank. They were always clear as to what happened after she refused. We weren’t sure what the Romans wanted in the first place, but we were real clear on what happened when you didn’t give it to them.

  The stories always ended the same way: the guys doing the terrible things and killing were amazed to see, as St. Whoever checked out, that her expression was so calm. Sometimes she blessed them. Sometimes they’d convert right there. I liked to think about them feeling bad afterward. Those girls were heroes, the stories would end up, because their spirit had conquered their flesh. But it always seemed to us they were heroes because their spirit had conquered the guys’ flesh. You heard only that the girls had had something they had to overcome.

  When Bruno dropped me off and I came into the kitchen, Todd was still in his chair, like he hadn’t moved in six hours. I asked him what he was still doing up, and he said, “Nina called. I told her where you were.”

  He went to bed while I was brushing my teeth. Standing there at the sink, I said, “You gonna say good night?” And he said, “Good night.”

  It was hot, and I lay there in bed and tented the covers. The catechism always talked about duels between the spirit and the flesh—bad news for me, because one I knew was strong; the other I wasn’t so sure about.

  We always thought: something out there was so bad it was better to have boiling oil poured down your throat. It was better to have your hands cut off and fed to dogs in front of you. What was it? We were dying to know.

  They told us about sins of the flesh way before they told us about sex. Sins of the flesh were almost irresistible, and that was the end of the subject. You couldn’t think of a better way to keep our attention on something. It wasn’t all our fault. It was all sexy, all of it. Grace, sin, martyrs, everything. Protestants didn’t get that: they had a cross with nobody on it.

  But it made us independent. All this talk about guys and how out of control they were and what you had to protect: at least it meant we weren’t on the bottom.

  It gave us some distance. To this day, sometimes I think the hardest part about sex is keeping a straight face.

  There are a lot of good things you get out of being Catholic. It’s just the hard way to get them.

  Back then, we were thinking, Suppose the Romans came for us? The thought crossing your mind: that wasn’t a mortal sin. That was the devil tempting you. You were supposed to fight it. The trick was how long it had to be in your mind before it was a mortal sin: Five seconds? Thirty seconds? Two minutes? Then we thought, Was worrying about it the same as thinking about it?

  Mortal sin sent you to Hell forever and venial sins sent you to Purgatory. There weren’t too many venial sins on sex. They tended to go to mortal right away. So we’d lie in bed or, worse, kneel there in church and think those thoughts, and remember that not only did mortal sins send us to Hell; they also pounded nails into Christ’s body. You saw a lot of girls looking up at the crucifix, ashamed.

  I was up all night the night Bruno dropped me off. I ended up sitting at the living-room window.

  When they talked about sex and the devil tempting us, what they never figured out, or maybe they did, was that we weren’t worried about the devil; we were worried about ourselves. I always imagined God facing me after I died, and going, Don’t try and blame this on the devil. You were the one who wanted to think about it, weren’t you?

  NINA

  Thirty-three years she’s been around men, she hasn’t come close to figuring them out yet. Not close. She married one of them when someone with the brains of a squirrel coulda seen he was a washout first time he walked into the house. Stood around in his little bicycle-racing outfit, mad at her because she was gonna make him late. He sold commercial time for TV, so he was supposed to be a big shot. With me it was like, Mrs. Mucherino, how are you? How’s the family? Like that was the way you got around Italians, you talked about their family. He was snapping at her even then. She said, “Ma, he’s under a lot of pressure.” Who’s not under pressure? She said, “Ma, he feels bad about it, too.” So what? How many years, he was mad at the way he treated her, he took it out on her?

  So she gets hurt. She won’t do nothing about it; she won’t try and force the stugazz to help support his own kid. So at least he’s gone, right? How much trouble can she get into, then? Few months later, she’s running around with Mr. Bacigalupe himself. What am I supposed to say to her? How stupid can you be?

  You talk; they don’t listen. I talked till I was blue in the face about the cavone she went with after high school, Lawrence. Next to him, Bruno looked good. Dirty, with the long hair and who knew what else, no job, no ambition, what a mouth he had on him. I heard twice from Lucia that he was telling the neighborhood what Joanie would and wouldn’t do. I told her: he’s not coming around this house anymore. You’re gonna go off and meet him under a bridge somewhere or in the park I can’t stop you, but he’s not coming here. Ooo, that guy. I hated him so much I hated the saint he was named after. I heard after they broke up that Bruno beat him up so bad he put him in the hospital. I know this: I ran into him a month later, he had his fingers in a splint; he wanted nothing to do with me.

  I warned her a thousand times about Bruno. She knows him better than I do. And I sit there and talk and it’s like talking to the wall. Her eyes are out the window, on the dog, everywhere but me. I tell her, Joanie, I’m only looking out for you. I’m not telling you this for my benefit.

  It’s like she thinks that what’s behind her is gone, so she can either choose this or get nothing.

  I asked Sandro to talk to her. He’s her father, he should talk to her. I wait for him to think of it, I’ll be ninety-nine years old.

  He thinks I worry too much. Whatever it is, I worry too much. He still thinks the other one is coming back.

  I told him: Civil War songs are coming back. Soupy Sales is coming back. Your mother, God rest her soul, is coming back.

  That was the end of that discussion.

  The first one, as far as I was concerned, was the kind of nightmare with no surprises. You marry Gary, you know exactly what you’re getting yourself into. Bru
no I didn’t even want to think about.

  Oh, was I wild when I heard Joanie was out with him. I called to ask if she wanted to see a movie, Todd tells me she’s out on a date with Bruno. I said, Bruno. Don’t think that little stinker didn’t know what he was doing. Sandro gave up trying to calm me down. But he’s been working on me since: What good’s it gonna do to come in her house yelling? What good’s it done up to this point? Why not surprise her and not push it and try to work on her that way?

  I’m her mother. I’m supposed to be looking out for her. I want to tell her to get a life, a real life. Though I don’t know what I’d say if she said back, Ma. Get yourself one.

  Todd dreamed about the time he was almost hit by the car on Margerita Lawn: the slow motion, the pale-blue sky with the one cloud, the horn, the chrome fender. He never told his parents about it. He’d been in third grade and ran across the street to avoid being touched by Lori Malafronte. Lori Malafronte’s scream had shocked him. The dream turned into a memory of pushing snow down the curve of a car body, and he woke up feeling guilty.

  He could hear Nina downstairs. It was raining. He sat up and swung his legs to the floor. He felt weak and fuzzy. He rubbed his ear until it was hot. He found a sock. It had dog hair on it and an unpleasant damp feel. He listened for arguing but didn’t hear anything. His mother’d be mad he told about Bruno. He pulled on the sock and his little toe slid through a hole in the end. He wiggled it and imagined being dead, the Mass said for him. Girls would be crying. His father would be sorry for what he’d done. He imagined funeral bells, the flowers on the altar, people filing in. Maybe he’d been a martyr somehow.

  He stood up and stretched with both arms out in front of him, like a water-skier. He wandered over to the window. An animal that looked like a Davy Crockett hat wandered across his yard. A raccoon? Muskrat? Divorce, he thought. Separation. Remarriage. Stepson. By thinking of things you could understand them.