Kiss of the Wolf

by Jim Shepard

  “Fuck do I care? Walk. Fly,” Bruno said. “Take a fucking monorail. Get outta the car. Want me to get you outta the car?”

  “Wait, wait,” Todd pleaded. “We did hit him. We did hit him. We were going along and my mother was driving too fast and we just hit him.”

  Bruno leaned back across him and shut his door. Then he sat up and waited.

  “We stopped and went back, but he was dead. She went back, I didn’t go back. We were gonna go for help. I thought she was gonna go for help. But then she didn’t, and the cops were there when we came back, and we went home and she called, but she didn’t get through.”

  “She called the police?” Bruno asked.

  “She didn’t get through. It was busy. I heard it,” Todd said. He was still crying.

  “And this is the way it happened. Exactly.”

  “And then we never called again.”

  “And then somebody found an envelope. Your mother found an envelope.”

  Todd shook his head.

  “Don’t start with me. Your mother found a fuckin’ envelope,” Bruno said.

  “We didn’t. I swear.”

  “The money in that envelope was not all Tommy’s. You understand?”

  Todd shook his head and hiccuped. He wiped his face.

  Bruno sat forward. “Tommy and Joey Distefano and I were holding that money.” He put his hand out, to show what holding meant. “Holding that money, for some other people. Those people want their money.”

  “We didn’t find any,” Todd said.

  Bruno flapped his lower lip with his index finger. It made a light, popping sound. “Your mother went over to Tommy after, but you didn’t?”

  Todd nodded.

  Bruno watched him a minute longer and then started the car. “Aw right, look,” he said. “We’ll go get somethin’ to eat. We’ll stay out. Far as your mother knows, we went to the game, you didn’t tell me anything. Understand?”

  Todd nodded.

  “Hey. Am I here all alone? You understand?”

  Todd said he understood.

  Bruno put the car in gear. They backed over something backing out. They drove to an Arby’s in a better part of town and Bruno made him order a big meal even though he wasn’t hungry. When the food came, Bruno went to the men’s room behind the bar, and when guys came and went and the connecting door swung open, Todd could see him talking to someone on the pay phone.

  NINA

  Over the last few months I told her about every possible group I could think of: the Serra Club, the Christian Mothers, the Ladies’ Sodality, the CYO, the Rosary Society, the Parish Review Board, the St. Anthony’s Women’s Society, even the Knights of Columbus. Or it didn’t have to be in the Church: there were bus trips I knew about to Atlantic City, to the mills in Fall River, to Broadway shows. Ida What’s-her-name ran them out of her house.

  I even told her about this martial-arts class they were running at the Bridgeport Y. I figured, you know, a woman alone.

  Nothing. She didn’t want nothing to do with any of them. Okay, I figured. This Gary thing’d take a while longer.

  Instead she ends up with Mr. Bacigalupe.

  I took Sandro’s advice; I didn’t push it. Let her tell me when she’s ready to tell me. So we sat there like chidrules and it never came up. I even said, “You got something you wanna talk about?” She said, “No.” She was always like that.

  I wanna tell her, You get involved with him, I’m wearing black. I’m in mourning. I lost a daughter.

  So we’re sitting there in the kitchen and she doesn’t want to talk about him and she doesn’t want to talk about anything else, either. I was telling her about my bursitis, which is awful lately. My shoulder, it absorbs the dampness at night. I feel like a sponge. She’s barely listening.

  I told her the house looked good and asked if she was having company. She gave me a look like what was I getting at, and I felt like saying, Hey, forget it, let’s not talk, let’s just sit here, all right?

  I asked about Gary, had she heard from him.

  I asked about her son.

  The dog, we talked about the dog.

  Finally, I go, “Joanie, I give up. What do you wanna talk about?”

  She goes, “Ma, you’re not helping any, you know?”

  This is what she said to me, after I sat there for thirty-five minutes talking about things she could do to help herself. I felt like saying, Okay, maybe they weren’t the best ideas, but I was trying, you know? I was trying.

  It hurt, what she said.

  They think you don’t have any feelings at all, that you just come and go without them. We were over Lucia’s the other day, she and Todd were outside the whole time. It looked like hell. I asked her if maybe she shouldn’t come inside, and she came back at me so fresh I thought, Forget it, and went right back in the house. In front of her son, too.

  Then she gets in these moods and it’s like, Jeez, Ma, we don’t see enough of each other. I just keep my mouth shut; I don’t say a word. Every now and then, though, I tell her, When you want something, you have to work at it.

  They don’t wanna know nothing. They gotta learn the hard way, just like we did.

  I can’t talk to Sandro about it. The kid’s fine. Gary’s coming back. She’ll work it out. Happy days are here again.

  This morning we were sitting there in the breakfast nook, I was going through the mail. The Church was raising money again, like in the old days, for the orphans in the Philippines or Indonesia, the little kids with flies on their noses. And I started getting tears in my eyes. Sandro sitting there, thinking I’m nuts. And here’s the thing: I was crying for myself. I was looking at poor kids who didn’t have a pot to piss in and crying for myself, like seeing their faces was making me panic, making me think that there was nothing I could do to get out of my life.

  TODD

  In the toilet at Arby’s I tried to figure out what to do. On the metal wall of the stall there was a sign: IT ISN’T POSSIBLE FOR US TO CLEAN AFTER EACH USE. Somebody scratched out enough letters so it said, IT ISN’T POSSIBLE TO CLEAN AFTER U.

  My mother says when I was little and a kid had been beating me up on the playground, she found me one night going to bed with a hammer.

  I had time to confess and make it right and I didn’t. I had chances. I knew what the right thing was and I did the wrong thing. I had the Sacraments and all this training and I did the wrong thing, and kept doing it.

  God’s supposed to forgive you if you’re sorry. I’m sorry.

  Also in the toilet in Arby’s I said an Act of Contrition. I got off the toilet to say it.

  Someone came into the bathroom and I had to get up. It was an older guy and he gave me a look when I opened the stall door. I don’t know what he thought I was doing in there. My knees were wet from the floor. My eyes were like I had an allergy.

  Part of me is glad. Glad that someone knows, glad that something’s finally going to happen.

  My dad’ll hear about it in the paper, or maybe from a relative when he calls like a month later.

  There was this kid I knew in third grade. He always, always got in trouble. He would only get hit between classes. Sister would take him to the office then, so he wouldn’t miss anything. I remember the way, on the days he was in trouble, he spent the whole period at his desk, sitting up straight, his hands folded, waiting.

  JOANIE

  My mother and father argue about directions. They have fights over what’s faster, this or that road. Which has more traffic. My mother’ll say, Why you going this way? You coulda gone that way. As a kid, I sat in the back and had to listen. Even then I knew they were arguing about this decision instead of the other ones. How they ended up here, how they got here. Instead of where they ended up in general. I mean with their lives.

  My mother’s turning into one of those old people who think the rules are going to hell everywhere, the kind who hang around the pool at condos watching for rule violations. Reporting the kids without towels, the kids
who do cannonballs.

  But then I’ll see, like this morning, that she left some stuffed shells for us, wrapped in that careful, housewifey way, and my heart’ll go out to her.

  I don’t want to hurt her about Bruno. When I was with him, it was like my head was saying no but my mouth was saying okay. Which is about the way the two normally operate.

  A month or so after Gary left, Todd and I were sitting on the floor in the living room one night, listening to the radio. We were in a kind of stupor. The TV was broken. It was hot, and Todd kept rubbing his forehead with a wristband he was wearing. It reminded me of the summer he was always drying his sweat with a hand towel he carried around. We were listening to an oldies station. They played Petula Clark’s “Downtown.” Todd hummed along. He sang the last part to himself at the end, and I remember thinking that maybe we’d be all right, maybe we were going to make it.

  All these days since the car thing have been the same, like ugly cabins along a swampy lake.

  I never tried to be Queen of Heaven, but I did want to be a good woman, a good mother. It turns out I didn’t know how.

  I wake up every morning with my heart racing, like every day will be the day that things work out, or at least get resolved.

  The sisters used to say, You don’t get exactly what you pray for, you get what God thinks is best. So I used to figure I might as well just wait for that, anyway.

  My mother said to me once, just in passing, impatient about something or other, “Well, when were you ever happy?” It stuck with me. I should have said, Easter Mass, when I was little. With my white dress and white gloves. My candy to look forward to, the sun on the lawn in front of the church, the air fresh in my nose, the trees with the birds I didn’t know, talking, calling things like Red key, Red key, or else So Soon, So Soon.

  What would she have said? She probably would have said, Oh, you weren’t even happy then. But I was, I think.

  I just want it all to stop. This morning, after Todd went out, I sat on the sofa with his peeled-off sweat shirt, like it was the last warm thing of his I’d touch.

  BRUNO

  The way to get respect is to treat people like dirt. It’s surprising how many people hold this view. I’m told this often. People say this to me; I say no. But I’m no professor. Many times I’m wrong. Often I’m wrong.

  People surprise you. People disappoint you. Sure, you say to yourself, so-and-so was a disappointment, but this person, this person I know. And look what happens.

  A more dispassionate man would have said, She doesn’t respect you. My friends said this.

  You have to have the ability to see the facts without being sidetracked by the history. By your expectations. What are expectations? Rehearsing your own lack of imagination. Joanie’s not like that. Joanie’d never do that. Please. The Japs would never attack Pearl Harbor. John Hinckley was such a quiet boy.

  Distance. What you need is distance.

  What you do is you keep clear who your friends are. Who treated who like what.

  Altruism is fine. Altruism is sweet. But you have to think of yourself. Because who else is going to?

  And here’s something else nobody knows: the week before she got married, I sat in her mother’s kitchen three nights in a row until two in the morning, four in the morning, later than that. I wanted to know, out of curiosity, Did she think Gary was ready for something like this? Did she think she was? I was telling her over and over, He’s a good man. Fine. We know that. All’s I’m saying, Is he right for you? And she said, a little sad, but mostly smiling, Bruno, you haven’t given up, have you? I said, Forget me. Forget me. I’m talking about us. And she said, There is no us. There’s only you.

  I kissed her good night that last night. She didn’t want to, but that was all there was to it. I had tears in my eyes. When I was up close to her, I whispered in her ear. I said, “You know this is wrong.” And when I let her go, she said, “Sometimes you gotta do the wrong thing.”

  This is what she said to me after all our time together.

  The morning of the wedding, I went over to see her again. This is how much pride I had. She was doing her hair in her mother’s bedroom. Her mother was thrilled I was there. I said I had an emergency message, coming through. All the way up the stairs, she’s trailing behind, tugging on my jacket flap. I had to hit her hand away. And I knock and peek into the room, with the mother standing behind me in the hall, and there she is, sitting there in her white already, three hours early, doing nothing, hands in her lap. And she goes, “What are you doing here?” What am I doing here. How many years, Christmas, New Year’s, Easter, I been coming over here? How many years I’d come over, I’d spring for something?

  Tonight on the phone, Joey said, “That didn’t teach you, nothing’ll teach you.”

  He said, “Now do you believe me?”

  I feel bad sometimes. I know I haven’t lived the right way. I know sometimes people got hurt. They’ll always be people like me, people who’re glad to be the way they are but also think, now and then, that maybe a vaccination somewhere didn’t take. Maybe it’s that simple. I read once, I think it was Meyer Lansky, he said, Some people just never learn to be good.

  Joanie spent the time Todd was gone poking through his room. The dog wandered in to check on her, shouldering the half-closed door open and unhurriedly nosing around before leaving. She waited until the dog was gone and then pulled out everything he had hidden. The box of letters under the board games in the closet (Phalanx!, Goal!, Storm at Dieppe), the little red spiral notebook, the round candy tin his father bought him on their one trip to the Caribbean (Zombies: Coconut Chocolate Clusters). She knew where everything was. She’d found everything cleaning at one time or another.

  The candy tin was filled with photos. Bruno mugging for the camera with his hands curled like a movie monster’s. Gary with a new ten-speed and long hair, a photo she’d taken when they’d first met. Audrey on the sofa. Audrey under the willow, a tennis ball in her mouth. Gary pushing Audrey down a snow pile in some kind of king-of-the-hill game. A picture her mother took of the three of them at the beach, Gary holding Todd’s boogie board and looking off, Todd holding her hand and staring straight at the camera. Gary painting the garage.

  Near the bottom of the tin she came across a Polaroid of the three of them and felt a lurch, like she’d stepped on a loose rug. One side of the image was smeared the way Polaroids sometimes got. The photo was three years old. Bruno had taken it, in their kitchen. She and Gary were at the kitchen table, and Todd was standing between them. The overhead light, a fake Tiffany thing, was prominent. Todd was holding a coffee-table book Bruno’d just given him on football called The Gladiators. He was looking directly at the camera. Gary was lifting the salt shaker with two fingers and a thumb, and watching her in a sidelong way. He looked unhappy. She had her eyes on the table. Minutes before the picture had been taken, she’d collided with Bruno in the darkened living room. He was coming from the upstairs toilet, she didn’t remember why; she’d been going to get something to win an argument. Gary and Todd had been in the kitchen. Bruno had stopped her with his arm after their bump. His fingers had pressed her neck forward. He’d kissed her, softly, like he was putting a daughter to bed, and she’d kissed him.

  Now, with the photo on the rug in front of her, seeing after all these years that moment, Gary’s face, and Todd’s expression, she thought, Had they known?

  The door opened downstairs. She shut the lid of the tin and put everything back and just got out of the room by the time Todd hit the bottom of the staircase.

  He stood with a hand on the railing, and they looked at each other.

  She came down the stairs. He started up them. “I didn’t hear you come in,” she said. “I didn’t hear a car. Audrey didn’t bark.”

  “She doesn’t bark for Bruno anymore,” he said, like she should know that.

  She eased over to let him past. She said, “How was the game?”

  He looked at her, and she saw he w
as near tears. He continued up to his room, and she followed. He climbed onto his bed, and she went over and knelt next to him and took his shoulders and asked him what was wrong.

  He was looking past her arm, and his expression changed so much she turned to follow his line of sight. There was a slightly curled black-and-white photograph on the rug.

  “Get outta my room,” he said.

  “Todd,” she said.

  “Get outta my room,” he howled. He burst into tears. She tried to hug him but he fought her off. Audrey peeked in the door. Joanie got up and held her hands at her sides like they were wet, and then backed out of the room and shut the door behind her.

  She pitched into the upstairs bathroom and sat on the toilet and put her face in her hands. “Oh, God,” she said.

  The phone rang. It kept ringing.

  “Answer the phone,” he shouted. His voice scared her so much she jumped up.

  “I’m getting it, I’m getting it,” she said.

  She ran downstairs and snatched it up.

  “I’ll tell you, my husband,” Nina said. “They’re gonna make a movie about him, called Lights On, Windows Open: The Sandro Mucherino Story. Oh, how he wastes energy.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” Joanie said.

  “How are you?” Nina said. “Todd back yet?”

  “Ma, I got no time,” Joanie said.

  “You got no time,” her mother said. “I say one sentence, you got no time?”

  Joanie put her hand over her eyes while she stood there holding the phone, and pulled downward like she was trying to take off a mask. “Whaddaya want, Ma?”

  “I’m tryin’ to find out how things went with Mr. Bacigalupe. That’s all.”

  Todd came downstairs and stood next to her. His eyes were wet. His mouth was a straight line and the rest of his face scared her. He stood with his hands on his hips.

  “Did you find an envelope there?” he said.

  “Hold on a minute, Ma,” she said. “What?” she said to Todd. She had her hand over the receiver and felt a pain in her chest.