Jayne and Juan came up beside me at the window. “I’m worried about Sirius,” she said.
“You ought to know by now that you can’t baby a wild animal,” Juan answered in a weary I’ve-been-through-this-a-thousand-times-before voice. “Wolves live outside in the Arctic; they’re tough. They curl up in a snowstorm, sleep through it, and when it’s over they stand up and shake the snow off.”
“But those wolves are used to it; Siri isn’t and there’s no shelter on the tennis court. We should bring him in the house.”
“No we shouldn’t,” Juan growled. “Wolves don’t belong in houses.” Someone needed to remind this couple that they didn’t have to bicker; they were no longer married.
“You could put him in the van,” Jayne said.
“No, I can’t do that either. He’s not going to like being cooped up in the van listening to the sound of hail pelting the roof. That kind of racket would terrify him.”
“I want to go out and see how he’s doing.”
“You can’t go out in this.”
Jayne watched the hail and the minute it stopped she pulled on a pair of boots and went outside to check on the wolf.
Norman Alexander and Bob Bartel sat on the sofa talking about radio collars. Charlie Clark brushed aside his wolf skin, sat down next to them and made himself an herb tea.
“An activity-monitored collar can tell you within hours if an animal has died,” Alexander said. “We had good luck finding them by plane.”
“Why don’t you insert radioactive disks in their bellies,” asked Charlie Clark, “so their shit glows in the dark and you can track it by satellite?”
“Just another way to waste the taxpayers’ money, if you ask me,” said Don Phillips.
Charlie Clark wouldn’t let that go by. Charlie Clark didn’t seem like the kind of guy to let anything go by, a born agitator. “You welfare ranchers should talk about wasting the taxpayers’ money. You lease your grazing land from the federal government for a quarter of what you’d pay for private land. Every $1.00 you generate costs the taxpayers $1.25.”
Don Phillips smiled as if he’d heard that one before and given his answer before, too. “Well, you know that land we lease was pretty sorry land. That’s why the BLM took it over in the first place. I don’t know that there’s anybody interested in it but us. We’ve been good caretakers.”
Bob Bartel, who was in the unfortunate position of having to please everybody, brought the conversation back to wolves. “If we have to radio-collar them and insert radioactive disks in their bellies and if we have to spend money then we’ll do it. Under the Endangered Species Act the government has an obligation to try to return the wolf, but we want to do it in a way that will do the least harm.”
“It’s not going to work here,” Norman Alexander said, a firm look replacing his usual sour expression. “It’s not going to work anywhere, because there is insufficient heterozygosity in the breeding population.”
“That’s a matter of opinion,” said Charlie.
“I happen to think my opinion is better than yours.” Spoken by a person who was male, pale and a scientist besides, a man who was used to having the last word.
Dismissed by Charlie Clark who was also male and pale but thirty years younger. “I don’t,” he said.
“Well, I know something about breeding and I’m with Norman on that one,” said Don Phillips.
Juan Sololobo, who had been standing by the window listening to all this, spoke up. “Well, now you’ve all said how wolf reintroduction is going to affect you. All I ask is that you think for a minute about how it will affect the wolf. It’s a magnificent, intelligent, powerful being that was here long before we were and has every right to be here still. Everyplace wolf reintroduction is mentioned is going to find some reason not to want it, but if those thirty lobos in captivity are not released somewhere soon they’re gonna get too tame to go back. And there will be no more wild lobo, only some old zoo animal. Think about that for a minute. The end of a magnificent species that once freely roamed this earth. I can’t think of anything sadder. All it would take is just a little bit of adjustment, a little change in your attitude—nothing major—and the lobo could live here, too.”
“All right!” said Charlie Clark.
No one else said anything. Now that the storm was over there was nothing to keep them anymore. They all stood up and were preparing to leave when the door burst open and Jayne ran in. Her face was flushed, her hair was wild and her hands were shaking. “Oh, God, this is a disaster,” she cried, “a goddamn fucking disaster. Sirius is gone.”
It was Juan’s worst nightmare come true. He stood still and got so pale you could practically watch the blood draining out of him. He pressed his hands to his forehead for an instant and then he said, “He can’t be gone. I locked him in; he can’t be gone. Not here, not on Jaynie’s property.”
But he was. We all went outside and stood beside the tennis court shivering and wondering what to do. It looked like someone had snipped through the chain with a wire cutter. The gate was open, the chain was dangling free, the still-locked padlock had fallen to the ground. The tennis court was empty except for a layer of hail and a yellow tennis ball stuck between the links of the fence. Hail holds no tracks, animal or human, and once it melted there wouldn’t be any tracks on the ground either.
Juan, who was too distraught to think clearly, ran around calling out “Siri,” but like he’d said, Sirius was a wolf, not a pet, and there was no answer. Norman Alexander and Bob Bartel analyzed what a wolf in that situation would do. Run away, was their opinion. Buddy Ohles analyzed how he would track him. Don Phillips worried about his cattle, Charlie Clark worried about the wolf.
I thought about means, motive and opportunity. A wire cutter wasn’t hard to come by—it could be purchased in any hardware store—and it could this very minute be sitting in any one of a number of vehicles parked in the driveway. But I wasn’t a cop and I didn’t have the right to look. I put motive aside for a moment and moved on to opportunity, to who had arrived late: Buddy Ohles and Charlie Clark. Who had left the room: Perla Phillips and Jayne Brown.
******
Jayne went inside and dialed 911 and was told that Sheriff Ohweiler would come by in the morning. It got dark soon and everybody went home. Those of us who remained at the ranch had a restless night. Juan and Jayne stayed outside and howled for Siri. Around midnight I went to the guest room, took my old friend Cuervo Gold from my bag and had a hit. Then I got into bed and tried to sleep even though I know that sleep—like sex—isn’t something you can try for. You have to just let go and let it happen, but wakefulness was a vise that had been squeezing me between its fingers. It wasn’t the howling or worrying about Sirius that kept me from sleeping, although I couldn’t help listening for the difference in pitch that might indicate the response of a real wolf. Howling was better than the sounds I was used to: pounding stereos, screaming cicadas, air conditioner hum, sounds operating on a frequency that pushed at the limits of the sanity envelope.
It was the expectation of a bad dream that had been keeping me awake, but after a while the desert air (which always cools down at night) and the howling had a soothing effect. I fell into a real sleep, and I didn’t dream about people who smiled as they killed, either. It hadn’t hurt at all to put some distance between me and Albuquerque. I dreamed the dreams I used to have, dreams of the opposite. In the desert I dream of rain forests and waterfalls. In the city I dream of space. When I’m alone I dream of the Kid, when I’m with the Kid I dream of being alone. I woke up once during the night layered in black velvet. It was dead quiet, the kind of quiet that sucks sound in and swallows it up. Expecting the Kid to be lying next to me guarding my dreams like he had been lately, I reached out for his shoulder but it wasn’t there. I felt quickly all over the bed and found nothing but an unslept-on pillow and then I remembered I was in Soledad alone. That was why it was so quiet. I listened to the silence wondering what had woken me, relieved
it wasn’t my bad dream, although it might have been someone else’s.
The quiet was broken by a sob that came from the adjacent bedroom, followed shortly by another. The sobs were harsh, irregular, painful, wrenched straight from the gut, the sobs of someone who didn’t know how to cry, a man. A good cry has a steady flow, but he was fighting it, not letting the tears come and go. That’s the kind of cry that gets rid of nothing, that would leave him feeling like shit in the morning and left me feeling like a voyeur now.
“Oh, Jaynie, Jaynie, Jaynie,” Juan Sololobo cried, “if I lose this wolf, too, it’ll kill me.”
“Shh,” she said and began to comfort him in the way she wanted to or knew how. When I heard the bed creaking softly and rhythmically, I turned my back and pulled a pillow over my head. Sex could be an expression of many things, I thought. One, which I hadn’t really considered before, was comfort.
******
“I hope you got some sleep anyway,” Juan said over breakfast—a bowl of granola and a banana.
“More than I’ve had since spring,” I replied. Jayne hadn’t gotten up yet but Juan had and he sat across from me at the kitchen table. He picked up the skim milk carton, sniffed to make sure the milk hadn’t gone sour and poured it over his granola. He looked terrible. His skin sagged like unset concrete, shadows hung under his eyes. I could imagine how he felt, too, physically and emotionally—losing a beloved animal ranks way up there on the life sucks list. A crying hangover may have been news to him, but I doubt if there’s any female in America who gets as far as high school without knowing how it feels the morning after: ragged nerves, a stuffed-up head, dry, puffy eyes, emotions that are drained like life had pulled the plug. Juan had gotten up before anyone, made a pot of coffee and was already on his third cup. He’d been outside and circled the house a couple of times, too, he told me, and seen no sign of the wolf.
By the time I got to my coffee I needed a cigarette. “Do you mind?” I asked Juan, pulling my Marlboros out.
He shook his head no, hesitated for a minute, then said, “Let me try one.”
I lit it for him, then lit my own and took a couple of deep wake-up drags. The minute he inhaled he started to cough and continued to cough until I punched him on the back. He ground the cigarette out. “Ugh,” he said. “I haven’t had one of those things in years. Thought it would help. Maybe there’s nothing that will help.”
I wasn’t averse to a shot of Cuervo Gold in my morning coffee myself and I had the bottle in my room, but I didn’t suggest it. If he was, as I suspected, a recovering alcoholic, that would be the worst thing to do. I watched him gulp down some more coffee.
“Do you sleep alone in Albuquerque?” he asked me.
“Not lately.”
“Living with someone?”
“Not exactly.”
“Not living with someone but not living alone either. Now that’s an interesting state of affairs.”
“It must be something like being married but not being married, being divorced but not being divorced, if you know what I mean.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean. I never could get all those different states straight. I can’t love ’em just because I’m married to ’em or hate ’em because I’m not. I sure hate sleeping alone though. I know that. Maybe it’s time to just settle down and stick with one.”
“This wouldn’t be a bad place to do it.”
“It’s a beautiful spot all right, but there’s one thing wrong with it.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s in Soledad.” His thoughts returned to the wolf. A few minutes’ diversion is about the best you can hope for when something bad happens. Thoughts always return to the hurting place, like a tongue feeling for a missing tooth. “They’re gonna kill him,” he said. “They’ll be all over those mountains today looking to kill him.”
“They don’t have the right to unless he attacks their livestock. Would he do that? “
“I’d say no—he’s never killed anything in his life—but they’ll say yes. They’ll find a dead carcass somewhere too decomposed to tell what got it and blame the kill on Siri. Shoot, shovel and shut up, that’s the way they operate.”
“Is there any chance he’ll just come back here?”
“A chance,” he said and laid his hands on the table, staring at L-O-V-E and W-O-L-F. “Would you mind sticking around while I talk to the sheriff? He’s due here any minute.”
I was his lawyer, after all. “I don’t mind,” I said. “Who do you think did it?”
“Buddy Ohles,” he replied. “Who else? He’s got a bad case of trigger itch.”
5
JAYNE JOINED US eventually, sniffing loudly as she entered the room to let me know she’d smelled my smoke. She walked up behind Juan, leaned over him and let her long blond hair tumble down and dangle into his empty cup. She had the aura of a well-stroked cat or a woman who’s just had sex with someone who knows her well. There’s an excitement that comes from sleeping with a stranger, a satisfaction that comes from sleeping with someone who knows what you like. They’d spent a lot of time together once, but not recently, so they were probably having it both ways with the added spice of risk thrown in. They must have known the chances of making this last were not great. Since my own sex life had taken a hike, I’d begun speculating about everyone else’s.
Juan reached up with his L-O-V-E hand and held Jayne’s. She smiled lazily, making me feel like a voyeur, no, an audience, because voyeur implies that Jayne didn’t want to be watched and she seemed to be enjoying it. She disengaged her hand, turned away, arched her back, stretched her arms up to the ceiling, to the side, to the floor. She was wearing short shorts, a T-shirt and running shoes. Her body was California fit, her breasts silicone perky. If you ask me the fit body craze is as tyrannical as bound feet, girdles and corsets used to be—another way to make you feel that what you are naturally isn’t good enough.
“Jayne runs every morning,” Juan said, shaking his head in a mixture of admiration and disbelief.
“Care to join me, Neil?” she asked, bending over and looking up at me through her hair while her palm lay flat on the floor.
“No thanks.” I was already pondering my next cigarette.
“I thought women lawyers ran,” Jayne said, standing up, flinging her hair over her shoulders and bending backwards.
“That’s women detectives,” I said. “Women lawyers drink.”
By the time Jayne returned from her run she’d lost the happy cat look. Maybe because Sheriff Ohweiler had shown up and was sitting at the kitchen table. It was only ten o’clock in the morning but both of them were sweating profusely already. His was staining the crevices of his khaki uniform; hers evaporated from her skin. She didn’t bother to shower, just poured herself a glass of OJ and sat down at the kitchen table.
Juan, Ohweiler and I had already been outside and examined the chain and the broken link. It would appear to any objective observer that someone had taken a pair of wire cutters and cut through the chain. Objectivity, however, was not Ohweiler’s middle name.
“You know that’s a powerful animal,” he said. “If it pushed against the gate, it could have stressed the weak link and split it right open.”
“It was a clean break, Sheriff,” I said. “A weak link would have just opened up. Somebody cut it.”
“And he didn’t push against the gate either.” Juan replied.
“How do you know that?” Ohweiler asked. “You were inside, weren’t you?”
“Siri is my wolf; I know.”
“Well, I’ll take this in for evidence.” Ohweiler had proceeded to remove the chain and padlock, put them in a plastic bag and lock them up in the trunk of his car.
When Jayne arrived he was berating Juan for his so-called careless manner of securing a vicious animal. Juan’s L-O-V-E and W-O-L-F hands gripped the table. He was getting pretty stressed himself, although I didn’t think he was likely to break. “Sirius isn’t vicious,” he said. “There are kids
all over the country who can tell you that.”
“He locked the door with a quarter-inch chain and a padlock. I saw him do it,” I said. “That’s not exactly careless, either.”
“We’re going to be testing that lock and chain for fingerprints,” Ohweiler said, “and signs of stress.”
“You’ll find mine on there,” Jayne said, “because I touched it when I went out to check on Siri.”
“Mine, too,” said Juan.
“Um,” said the sheriff. “You never should have left that wolf alone in a place that isn’t visible from the house in a town that’s not known for loving wolves. If you ask me it was pretty damn careless to bring a wolf into Soledad in the first place, pretty damn careless.”
“That tennis court happens to be on private property, Sheriff,” Jayne said. “Seems to me I’ve got the right to have a wolf locked up on my property if I want to, especially a wolf that’s got a permit.”
“You got the right if you can keep it on your property, but chances are that wolf ain’t on your property, chances are that wolf is going after somebody’s pet or cattle. Don Phillips found a dead calf on his ranch this morning and something killed it. Bob Bartel’s out there inspecting it right now.”
“Didn’t take you guys long, did it?” said Jayne. “Calves die all the time and you and Don Phillips know it. It could have been a coyote, could have been a dog, could have been a mountain lion, could have been natural causes.”
“What about finding out who set the wolf free?” I asked. “Isn’t that why you were called over here?”
“It’s under investigation, ma’am, but right now I’m charging your client with not securing a vicious animal under Section 77-1-10A.”
“Bullshit,” said Juan, who pounded the table so hard his coffee spilled out of its half-filled cup.
“Juan’s wolf gets set free or stolen from my property and you charge him with not securing a vicious animal?” Jayne shook her head in disgust but not amazement. Apparently that was the way the law worked in Soledad County.
The Wolf Path Page 5