Little Wolves

by Thomas Maltman

  “It’s true. I had to get part of my land declared a cemetery. It might take months.”

  “So, you know why I pulled you over?”

  “Not really.”

  “You don’t seem too concerned that the body of your only child has gone missing.”

  Grizz shrugged.

  “I’m going to ask you politely just once. Did you bury him up on the mountain, Seth? It’s what I would have done. Why don’t you take me and show me the spot where you put him?”

  “Why don’t you go fuck yourself?”

  Again, he moved quickly, or maybe Grizz was so beyond exhaustion he hardly saw straight. He felt the fist rather than saw it, smashing into the side of his face. His mouth filled with blood. When he bent over, streams of it gushed into his lap, a lone tooth in the hot rush of fluid.

  Out of the corner of his eye he saw Steve massaging his knuckles. “I could arrest you right now, goddamnit. I found this crowbar in your truck, the tarp you probably used to drag his body through the woods. You tampered with state evidence when you took his body. You committed a felony when you broke into the home. I should, but I won’t. You want to know why? Then all this mess stays on people’s minds. Then I have to deal with another set of reporters coming in from outside asking questions, hounding our schoolkids and parents. We take care of our own messes here, Grizz, and your family is the biggest mess of all. Has been from the very beginning.”

  A car passed them on the road, and the sheriff turned away to lift his hat, likely smiling to let them know that there was nothing happening over here. Grizz rubbed his chin, checking to see if the jawbone was broken. His tongue found the empty place where the tooth had been knocked out. He sopped the strings of blood from his chin with his sleeve, thinking, When the time comes I am going to hit you back, again and again and again, until I smash every bone in your face.

  When the car was gone, the sheriff leaned in, resting his elbows on the window. He went on in his subdued voice, “They’re all dead now, all except you. Kind of makes you wonder, don’t it?”

  “What are you talking about?” His words slurred; he needed to hold on to his rage to make it home.

  “Your dad. Will. Seth. Jo.” Jo had been Steve’s second cousin, his godchild. “And the whole time you were over in Sauk County, she waited for you. She was so damned stubborn. Why anyone would come here to live with you, even knowing what you are, is a mystery to me. Why she wanted you.”

  “Jo was happy.”

  “Then you had to go and get her pregnant. You knew what would happen. You could have taken care of matters. There were ways even then. Can you imagine if you had? She would still be alive. Will might still be alive. This whole ungodly mess would never have happened.”

  “No. Jo was sick. Even if wasn’t for the childbirth, the lupus would have killed her within a couple of years. Doc said so.”

  “All dead, all except you,” he repeated. He tapped the side of the door with the crowbar again and then tossed it back into the pickup’s bed. “Here’s how the rest of this is going to shake down. A few weeks from now a group of us will come combine your corn. The money will go to Nolan, to pay his expenses and for his discretion.”

  “I need that money to pay the bank.”

  “You should’ve thought of that before you tried this stunt. Stupid, so fucking stupid.”

  Grizz had only one bit of leverage. “I know about the hunting cabin,” he said. “I know that Will Gunderson took people there. I’ve seen the inside.”

  Steve was shaking his head. “You best forget such rumors. It won’t do you any good to think about it.”

  Grizz gripped the steering wheel. “I saw those things he made with my own eyes. You know what I’m talking about, don’t you?”

  “No, I can’t say I do.” He swallowed the dry air, spit in the road. “Listen, Grizz, the money will also pay for a stone, right in the section where I said he was going to be buried. Far as the rest of the town will know, your son was buried in a private ceremony. Only you and Nolan and I will know different. You say anything to anybody, try any more stunts like this, and I send cadaver dogs onto your property, and I will find and dig up the body and put it where it belongs according to the law. I will make sure you do jail time for this, and you’ll lose the farm for sure. Are we understood? Next time, you’ll lose more than a few teeth. This is what mercy feels like. I’m letting you go for the good of this town. You hear me, Seth Fallon Sr.? This is over. The end.”

  Grizz smiled through his blood. “There isn’t any ending,” he said as he turned the keys.

  HARVEST

  Clara and Logan were in the kitchen carving pumpkins when Stormy Gayle announced on the radio that coyotes had attacked a small child in town. She didn’t say the boy’s name, just that he lived near the edge of town, and he’d been playing in his backyard when his mother heard him scream. By the time she made it out of the house the boy rushed toward her across the lawn. “They were trying to eat me up, Mama! Wolves!”

  A mouth-sized chunk of his parka was missing, down spilling out. The child told his mother the coyotes had tried to drag him toward the trees, but they got scared by the roar of a leaf blower over in the next yard.

  The town’s part-time mayor, a chain-smoking lawyer named Brian Neske, coughed into the microphone. “It’s one thing,” he told Stormy, “to lose a cat or small dog. But when our children are threatened we must take action. I want to assure listeners that the authorities are doing everything possible. We’ve called in an expert from the DNR, and traps have been set. If you have a dog or cat, don’t let it wander outside, especially not at night. If the coyotes don’t get it, we’ve laced meat with antifreeze and spread it around the woods. And if you have small children, don’t leave them unaccompanied in the yard or even walking to school.”

  “Would they attack a full-grown adult?” Stormy asked.

  “It’s not likely. These are scavengers. Dangerous ones, but we’ll catch them before the week is out. I’m here to announce a bounty. You can already get ten dollars a pelt at the county courthouse, and remember, you don’t even need a permit to shoot coyotes. Consider it your civic duty.”

  “Will you shut that off?” Clara asked Logan. The news story was the last thing she wanted to hear. She had trouble believing those coyotes had attacked a small child. Not the same ones who had encircled her. If she shut her eyes, she could still feel the gray’s coarse black nose against the softness of her palm. Now Seth’s coyotes were hunted things.

  Clara sat Indian-style on a floor spread with newspapers, sawing open the skull of a pumpkin with a serrated knife. Once it was properly lobotomized, she lifted off the lid, rolled up her shirtsleeves, and scooped inside. Soon her hands reeked sweetly of the orange guts, but she didn’t mind the mess.

  “What’s that supposed to be?” Logan asked after he turned off the radio. He’d carved his pumpkin to look cross-eyed, finishing with a gap-toothed smile. His pumpkin-bumpkin, he called it.

  “What do you think?” Clara’s had moon-sliver irises. Long incisors dangled from the cavern of the mouth.

  “Looks a little ghoulish for a fall festival at a church.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment.” Clara plopped handfuls of orange goop on the newspapers, carefully sorting seeds into a colander. She planned to dry the seeds overnight on wax paper, salt, and bake them crisp in olive oil tomorrow night. “But if you must know this is Grendel’s mother.”

  “Ah, I should have guessed. Isn’t she the last monster old what’s-his-name has to fight?”

  “She’s the second. There’s always another monster in epics. Until you die. It’s the third, a dragon, that slays Beowulf, leaving Wiglaf to moon over his body as an age of darkness spreads over the land.”

  “Gloomy business, being a hero.” Logan thumped his gourd on the ground and wobbled it in the direction of Clara’s. “Prepare for battle, foul-smelling hell wench. It is I, Beowulf, wooer of maidens, mighty mead drinker, all around ass ki
cker. You will be smoten.”

  Clara smiled. It was good to be here in the warm kitchen with him. This was the Logan who had made her laugh when they first started dating. “How will you smite me if you have no sword?”

  “Oh,” he said. “I have a sword.”

  She was about to say something really naughty, but just as she was making the last cut, a slit under the eyes to represent a scar, the knife slipped and swiped across her left palm. Clara didn’t feel anything. She lifted up her hand, fascinated. Bright blood mingled with cords of orange pulp that dropped wetly to the newspaper. Across from her, Logan said something as he reached for her. The knife clattered to the floor. Clara heard an oceanic sound in her ears, and she stood too quickly, making for the sink, wanting to wash the wound, and slipped on the slimy newspapers. She managed to twist as she fell, but still struck the linoleum hard enough that her breath was punched from her lungs.

  Logan knelt beside her as she caught her breath. He wrapped a kitchen towel around her hand, pressing down to apply pressure. “You okay?”

  She blinked up at him. “I think so.” Her other hand went to her stomach. At least she hadn’t landed right on it, but she couldn’t feel the baby. She shut her eyes and sent out a prayer. Are you all right? Mommy’s sorry she scared you. In answer, a wave of nausea made her rest her head on the cool floor.

  She felt a stinging sensation in her hand as Logan dabbed at the wound. “Doesn’t look too deep,” he said. “I think we can bandage this, but you knocked yourself a good one when you fell.”

  Clumsy girl. Look at what you’ve done.

  “We should get you to the hospital, get you checked out.”

  “You think so?” A new terrible thought branched inside her. What if there was no baby? What if the baby was lost? Here now, all Logan’s attention focused on her hand. What would happen to the fragile peace they had built once the baby arrived? And yet she was grateful when Logan insisted they go to the hospital to get her checked out.

  The drive to Fell Creek took them into a starless dark split only by their headlights. The highway rose up out of the river valley, out onto flat, open prairies, passing isolated farmhouses, each huddled next to its own yard lamp and shelterbelt of trees. Clara shut her eyes and imagined what would happen if they just kept going past the hospital, past Mankato, all the way up to their old life in the Twin Cities. They didn’t talk, but Logan drove with one hand on the wheel, the other lightly touching her arm.

  After the on-call doctor probed the wound with iodine and mummified it in fresh gauze, he bid Clara undress and put on a papery gown so he could check her for vaginal bleeding. The doctor was middle aged, a thick barrel mustache around his mouth, the ends like tusks. “Why don’t you wait in the other room?” he asked Logan in a firm voice. It didn’t sound like a suggestion.

  “I’m staying.” The doctor frowned, the ends of his mustache drooping, and had Clara climb up on the examining table, put her legs in the air. He snapped on his on rubber gloves and hovered over her, pressing at her belly and side, then hard against the inside of her thighs as he inched up the gown. When his fingers slipped inside her without warning, Clara gasped audibly.

  “That hurt?” he said.

  She nodded, more shocked than anything.

  He drew out his hand and studied the glove. “You’re not bleeding at least.”

  No, just violated, she thought. Clara’s gynecologist, Dr. Frank, was a tall beanpole of a man who reminded her of Ichabod Crane, but his hands and voice were gentle, and she trusted him in a way she didn’t trust this man.

  With his stethoscope, he pressed up near her breasts before moving it to her stomach. “Sounds just fine in there. Little savage beating on his drum.” He turned to Logan. “You wanna hear it?”

  Logan came over and put the stethoscope in his ears. His eyes found Clara’s while he listened to the baby.

  On the drive home, he didn’t hold her hand. The pure country darkness of the open prairies spread all around them, swallowing up the Nova. Clara had never imagined a darkness so vast.

  “I’m scared, too,” Logan said after a long silence between them.

  She didn’t have to ask about what.

  “I never really imagined myself as a father. This is going to sound strange, but babies scare the shit out of me. Every time I do a baptism in church I’m always worried I’m going to drop one. They’re in these long, ruffly gowns, squirming all around. How can anything so small even survive in this world?”

  Love, she thought. A mother’s love should be the most powerful force on earth. She hoped it would be true of her when the time came and that Logan would find the same inside himself. “Maybe, it’s more natural than we think. How many couples out there actually feel prepared for the baby when it comes?”

  She looked away. The road bent, and her stomach lurched as they began the steep descent into the valley. Traveler, she thought, “one who travails.” The old word promising the birth of both suffering and wisdom. She felt a sudden sense of vertigo as the road dropped. The woods, the shade, the wolves, the mountain she had never seen. She was afraid, too, but also relieved to be away from the open prairies. Whatever happened, this was where they were meant to be.

  Logan squeezed her hand. “What I’m trying to tell you is that tonight, hearing the baby’s heartbeat, I’m glad the baby is fine.”

  “Our baby,” she added.

  CLARA HAD MOVED BACK in with her father following her brutal fight with her fiancé Gregory. She was between jobs and apartments, between just plain everything. By the time Clara came to live with him, Stanley had also been on dialysis for two years.

  A hospice nurse came to visit in the mornings, because his kidneys were failing. When Clara got home from her new job waiting tables at a local diner, she went around correcting the woman’s mistakes, shutting the drapes and curtains in rooms throughout the house, the way her father liked it. Her father had been a fearful man, as if he were waiting for someone to come punish him for his past.

  As Clara shut the curtains, she imagined her father’s slow terror as the nurse insisted on throwing them open, exposing him to the world. He lay on the bed like some creature fallen from primeval trees, his fingernails coiling like a sloth’s talons. She would need to cut them, since the nurse refused. Her father trembled when she came in, blinking up into the light when she turned on the lamp beside him. The IV beside his bed dripped steadily into the taped and bruised opening in his arms. “Hello, Daddy,” she said.

  “Clarie.” His voice was a husk of itself.

  “They drain you again today?” Tuesdays another nurse also came, trundling in a dialysis machine that siphoned out his blood and ran it through a filter.

  “Vampires.”

  Clara squeezed his hand. “Vampires don’t put fresh blood back inside you.”

  “It’s what she called me here, living in the dark.”

  “That bitch. You want me to call and complain again? She shouldn’t be opening your curtains when both of us have told her not to.”

  “No use.”

  “Did she clean your bedsores?”

  He coughed wetly. The nurse, a woman named Regina, would scrub him raw and bloody, or not at all, leaving his sores to fester. Sometimes Clara had to clean him, a task she dreaded. When she pressed her hand on his forehead, the skin felt clammy. The nurse had told her that he wouldn’t live to see the snow melt. He was going to die and take his secrets with him. Clara went into the bathroom and fetched fingernail clippers. Stanley’s eyes were shut when she came back in the room, his breathing raspy. She cut ivory half-moons from his left hand, holding the palm gingerly, careful not to draw blood. Each snip of the clippers made his eyelashes flutter, but other than that there was no response. “I want to know about my mother. I want to know if you loved her.”

  A vein pulsed thinly at his temple, the only sign of his irritation. “I’ve told you everything you need to know.”

  “You’ve spoken in riddles. When you’
re gone I’m going to go looking for her.”

  One rheumy eye flicked open. “You must never go back there.”

  “Why not?”

  But the eye had sealed shut again and soon, despite her questions and her clipping, he was asleep. Clara carried the curving nails into the bathroom where she balled them up in a tissue and discarded them in the waste bin. She went back into his room, pulled up the sheets around him, and was turning up the dials on his electric blanket when the doorbell rang. Clara frowned. If this was the nurse Regina, she was going to have words with her.

  But waiting for her on the porch was a young man in a dark coat, his face chapped by blowing wind and snow.

  “Can I help you?”

  “You must be his daughter, Clara.”

  “I am.” Clara hadn’t invited him in yet. The house’s heat rushed out the door, another thing her penny-pinching father disliked. “Who are you?”

  He pulled off leather gloves and held out his hand. “I’m Pastor Logan,” he said. His eyes were pale blue, almost turquoise, with lovely lashes. He had whitish-blond hair, high cheekbones. Clara held his perfectly smooth hand in hers, which he must have taken as an invitation to come inside. “I’m sorry to bother you, but I was coming home from church, and I saw your car in the driveway.”

  Uninvited, he took off his coat and hung it from a peg. Clara shut the door reluctantly. She saw his collar now, the dark clerical shirt. His presence here, his seeming familiarity, bothered her. “I still don’t know why you’re here.”

  His brow furrowed. “I’m your father’s pastor, from St. Mark’s Lutheran a few blocks down. Your dad didn’t mention me?”

  “I didn’t even know my dad went to church.”

  “Oh, Stanley’s been a member for years. He even served on the council before he started dialysis.”

  In the foyer’s tight space she was aware of his aftershave, a hint of cinnamon, and underneath the earthy scent of his skin. “We didn’t even go to church growing up.”