It didn't matter. I am not afraid. If death was a foregone conclusion, then fine. He accepted his death. The abandon of the damned. He accepted the fact that he was poised, now, in the heat of a lethal duet; and that, if it came, he would meet the wolf's attack.
Only the wolf was not attacking.
Just watching him.
Very closely.
And he realized that something was happening here: some kind of primal contact measured in milliseconds, in heartbeats and body English. It was imperative to make exactly the right move: no more, no less. Show no threat. Show no fear.
Slowly, slowly, he lowered the bar, relaxing his grip. Never changing his expression. Never taking his eyes off the beast. Not blinking. Not breathing. For one long moment's silence, nothing happened. Yes. "It's okay . . ." he began.
And suddenly stopped.
The wolf rose—slow as a striptease, gradually revealing to him its full height—and Syd felt a rush of perfect terror course through him: closing his throat, sucking the air from his lungs, undeniable and utterly outside of his control. Its eyes, when it stood, were almost level with his chest. Its body extended back into the darkness. He could not see its end.
But he could see every drop on its blood-flecked snout in astonishing detail, could hear the thunder in its lungs and smell its feral breath. For one terrible instant, the death he smelled was indistinguishable from his own.
I am not afraid, he told himself and tried to make it true.
The wolf's eyes locked on his arm, waiting. He did not move. I am not afraid. Then it tilted its head, brought its gaze back to his, regarding him in that moment with a curious and disarmingly canine manner. I am I am. Its ears twitched, registering every molecular change in the air between them. Not afraid. And suddenly it was true.
He looked in its eyes. The wolf looked back.
For one moment, it was as if they shared a perfect understanding.
Slowly, then, it lowered its head—eyes still glued to his own—and let its jaws open wide, biting down on the breastbone of the slaughtered deer. Its jaws were enormous. Syd could hear the soft clack of teeth and wet bone.
The carcass came up in the wolf's maw easily, head lolling on its gracile neck. A moist, slender loop of intestine unfurled, dropped four feet, and dangled from the open belly. It dragged and was sullied on the bloodstained ground as the beast turned at last, heading back into the woods and the deeper darkness. Disappearing first in stages, behind the trees, then altogether. Without a trace.
Without a sound.
Leaving Syd Jarrett alone, once again, with his thoughts. Only no thoughts were forthcoming. Just the icy whisper of the wind through the trees. Just the sound of his own ragged, thunderous heart. Another sound: rising, like castanets. His own teeth, chattering. Jesus Christ. He had broken out in a full-body sweat, pasting his thermals to his skin. But the pounding in his head had mercifully vanished.
Get back to the car, the voice of reason told him, before you freeze to death. Good plan. His legs were shaky as he turned and started up the hill.
It took no more than a minute to climb the embankment, heading back to the road, and his car, and the world. It was all right there, where he had left it. Almost as if he had never been gone.
He wondered, picking up his pace as he walked the narrow shoulder, if any of it had been changed, or if it was him. He wondered what the upholstery would feel like. The grip of his steering wheel. The sound of the blues.
A truck rolled past, on the downhill side. He was buffeted by its Shockwave, swayed slightly in its wake. He watched it rumble around the bend, then gone. A bird flew by. A sparrow this time. It had not flown south, for whatever reason. It would die if it didn't.
He wondered how he felt about that perfect understanding.
He wondered if any of it would ever feel the same again.
2
THE MEMORY OF the wolf still continued to haunt him as Syd wheeled into the hulking expanse of the Monville Mill Works: a sprawling, sagging jumble of dead furnaces and lifeless smokestacks hugging a mile-long stretch of the Monongahela River.
Once upon a time, the lifeblood of an industry coursed through there, etched in soot and sweat and molten metal. Furnaces roared twenty-four hours a day: gobbling iron ore, coke, and coal, and spewing out an endless stream of plates, pipes, and ingots to feed the world's seemingly insatiable need for steel. Some fifty thousand people had worked in the mills that lined the river, three times that many in the communities that surrounded and supplied them.
Syd had gotten his first job there in '80. The reasons seemed sound enough at the time. High pay. Benefits out the wazoo. Ironclad job security, once you got some seniority under your belt. Hell, except for the strikes, you were practically bullet-proof.
Once upon a time, that had actually been true. But for guys like Syd, it was like they'd bought into the myth just
in time to watch it belly-up and go under: jerked off by wage cuts and givebacks and concessions, followed by layoffs and closings and staggering unemployment. Monville was a ghost town now: from a onetime work force of over six thousand, less than two hundred were scattered across its length and breadth, most of them engaged in the process of cannibalizing the great industrial corpse.
Syd passed through the deserted Braddock St. gate, dodging long-neglected potholes as he pulled in next to Tommy Kramer's mud-spattered Chevy 4x4. Tommy and Budd Ruhr were huddled in the cab, Little Feat blasting behind the fogged-over windows. Judging from the opaque cloud around them, Budd's last crop of homegrown was a raging success.
Like Syd, Tommy and Budd used to be open-hearth crew, blue-collar elite. Like Syd, they now considered themselves fortunate to find any work at all. Syd couldn't quite picture any of them as computer programmers, or leaning out of a fast-food drive-through, going you want fries with that?
So they worked whenever they could, wherever they could—the last six weeks or so humping for a nonunion contractor that was tearing the mill down, selling the scrap, and making way for a condo development. It paid a big six-fifty an hour, plus zero benefits. It sucked.
They were lucky to get it.
Tommy looked up as Syd got out of his car. He was a big, bearlike man, with a craggy, bearded face and a kerchief obscuring his receding hairline. His eyes were red as Bing cherries. "Drugs in the workplace," Syd clucked. "Tsk tsk tsk."
"Can't say as I rightly give a fuck anymore," Tommy replied, clambering out of the truck.
"D'ja hear about Bobby Carmichael?" Budd said. His eyes were bright, morbidly gleeful. "Blew his brains out last night."
"Say what?" Syd was stunned. Bobby had just returned from a five-month stint in the badass flatlands of Arkansas, looking for work. The bank had foreclosed on their house while he was gone. His wife had packed up the kids and headed off to California. Syd had known him since high school. "Are you sure?" he asked.
"Damn straight," Budd assured him. He was a squirrelly little sonofabitch some ten years their junior, with frizzy blond hair and an enormous Metallica patch on his jeans jacket, and he thrived on disaster. "Way I heard it, finance company was gonna repo his car. He did it in the lucking driver's seat, stuck the barrel right in his ear, man. Brains ended up all over the dashboard, even got squished in the a.c. vents. . . ."
"Jesus."
"Way of the fuckin' world, bro'," Tommy said. "That's the ninth one this year, and we still got a month till Christmas." He clapped Syd in an embrace that smelled of stale beer and too many Marlboros, held out the stub of a joint. "Want some?"
"Nah." Syd shook his head. "Things are weird enough as it is."
Tommy nodded, gestured toward Syd's crotch. "Did you piss in your pants again!"
"Very funny," Syd said. He pointed to the bloodied fender. "Had a little accident with a deer, coming in."
"No shit." Budd hopped out of the truck, coming around to see. He shrugged, surveying Syd's car. "Coulda been worse. Think your insurance'll cover it?"
"Yea
h, right," Syd muttered. "I'm already assigned risk. Might as well roll my policy into a tube and shove it up my ass."
"Lucky it didn't go through the windshield," Budd said, taking the joint. "Had a cousin who hit a buck up near Beaver Falls. Totaled his car." He nudged the dent absently with his work boot, smearing the blood. "D'ja kill it?"
"Not exactly," Syd said.
"Not exactly?" Tommy, who had hunted every single season since he was old enough to tote a gun, looked at him quizzically.
Syd explained as best as he could: about the deer and the truck, the blood-trail leading into the hollow. He meant to leave it at that, skip over the wolf part completely. But as the story unwound, he found he couldn't help himself. He needed to do a reality check.
The results, on the first round, were less than encouraging.
"That's a pretty weird story you got there, ace," Budd said. "You sure it wasn't a dog? Like a shepherd, maybe—?"
Syd shook his head. "Ever seen a German shepherd crack a deer's chest like a goddam Milk-Bone?"
"Shit," Tommy said, drawing it out to two words: shee-it. "You really expect us to believe you saw a wolf that big, and not ten miles out of town . . ."
"Swear to god," Syd answered, emphatic.
". . . and you actually came within spitting distance of this thing, and it just looked at you."
"Yep."
"And then it just up and disappeared into the woods and left you there."
"Uh-huh." Syd nodded.
Tommy looked at Syd, the car, and back. Then he took a deep breath. "I just have one question."
"Shoot."
"Did you piss yourself right when you first saw the wolf . . ."
Budd choked, almost lost it. Tommy, too, barely made it to the punch line.
". . . or did you wait till the wolf saw you?"
The two of them erupted into gales of laughter. Syd felt his face flush with embarrassment and anger. "Yeah, well, fuck you guys," he muttered.
"Aw, lighten up, son." Tommy threw a beefy arm around Syd's shoulder. "You wanna get insulted, check out your paycheck this week."
Syd resisted for a moment, still pissed. Then he sighed. "It really happened, man."
"Yeah, well," Tommy shrugged. "What do I know?
Weirder things have been known to." He gave Syd a brotherly squeeze. "C'mon, boy. Let's go see if we work today."
The three of them walked toward the gate in silence. Tommy's face had taken on a contemplative light. "This wolf of yours," he said at last. "Was it male or female?"
"I didn't ask. Why?"
Tommy shrugged. "A wolf in estrus can act pretty strange sometimes."
"What's estrus?"
"Heat, boy." He paused, thought about it. "November's kinda early for mating season, but you never know."
"Ooooh." Budd leered, lascivious. "Maybe it wanted you, Syd."
"Yeah, right." Irritated.
"Puppy love . . ."
"Put a lid on it, Budd."
"Doggy-style . . ." he persisted, pleased with himself.
"SHUT UP!!!" Syd and Tommy chanted in unison. Budd's grinning pie-hole dried up in a flash. Syd studied Tommy's face intently. He knew that Tommy was a whole lot smarter than his mountain-man appearance might lead one to believe. Wheels were turning in there. He wanted to know what they meant.
"So what else?"
"I dunno," Tommy shrugged. "Was it alone?"
"Why?" Budd jumped in. "You think there's more than one of 'em?"
"Beats me," the big man said. "But I'll tell ya one thing: if there is a wolf in these parts, I'd guess that it has a mate."
"Unless it's looking for one." Syd wasn't sure why he said it.
"Good fucking luck," Tommy snorted. "The only wolves around here anymore are the ones with suits and cellular phones."
Just then they passed a sleek black BMW parked against the warehouse wall, its polished midnight skin and hand-detailed chrome in stark contrast to the gritty ochres and browns of the yard. Tommy nodded at the little corkscrew antenna protruding from its tinted rear window. "Speak of the devil," he muttered, and nudged Syd knowingly. "Looks like Bobo's here."
Syd groaned and shook his head. A surprise appearance by Beau "Bobo" Harrell was always good for a laugh, particularly if you thought job security was funny. Harrell was scum.
More specifically, Beau Harrell was a sour, opportunistic little prick, and his contracting company was a blue-collar gulag. He got the contract by undercutting every other bid by thirty percent, and in so doing became one of the town's few remaining employers, last refuge for those lucky enough to get a slot and able to withstand the degradation implicit in taking it. As a boss, he was both abusive and unscrupulous; as a human being, abusiveness and unscrupulousness were his most endearing qualities.
They reached the foreman's trailer, got on the crew line. A dozen other disenfranchised souls were there, smoking and shuffling their feet. The three men joined the queue. Just then the foreman came out, a burly barrel of a man with a face like a bulldog and a fur-flapped hunting cap; the short stub of yesterday's cigar protruded from the corner of his mouth like a big tobacco tampon.
"Yessir, Mr. Harrell," he said, then turned and descended the steps. He waved his clipboard, sent groups of men this way and that. Budd went with one crew. "See ya later," he said.
The foreman checked his list, grunting. "Jarrett, Kramer, this way," he gestured. "You're tearing out the boilers in unit five."
"Lucky, lucky," Tommy muttered.
"I love my life," Syd added facetiously. "My life is great."
"Beats the alternative," Tommy replied.
Syd thought of Bobby Carmichael, and wondered.
3
IT WAS SIX-THIRTY when Syd finally arrived at the tiny two-story walk-up he called home, another day of gainful employment safely behind him.
He keyed open the door, pushing aside the pile of mail laying heaped on the floor. He sighed as he stooped to retrieve it; he was beat to shit, physically speaking, and the day's correspondence didn't help much on the psychological front. Bills, bills, bills, junk mail, and bills. He riffled through them absently as he crossed the room, thinking that the old saying was wrong. There was one more certainty in life, aside from death and taxes.
There were bills.
Every month, in ceaseless cycle, falling through the mail slot like some weird variation on the old Chinese water torture. The phone was overdue, the electric was overdue, his Visa card was maxxed to the point of no return. He'd long ago forgone such luxuries as cable TV, so that was mercifully absent. Ed McMahon's preening mug beckoned from a Publishers Clearing House mailer, assuring him that he may already have won a million dollars!!!, but Syd wasn't holding his breath.
He tossed the pile unceremoniously onto the kitchen table and headed for the bathroom, pausing en route to put on some music. The living room was tiny and run-down, but well-ordered and clean. The furnishings were strictly Salvation Army—a lamp, a seedy tweed sofa, and a Naugahyde recliner with big holes in the arms, huddled around a tacky coffee table like bums on a barrel fire.
His stereo alone was impressive—Philips power- and pre-amp, Denon tuner, Nakamichi CD and cassette deck, and an old Technics turntable for his 78s. A pair of Boston Acoustic speakers hunkered in the corners like squat sonic sentinels.
The audio system and his music collection were the only things of value he'd salvaged from his former life, and he treasured them. He scanned the rack of CDs, pulled a Melissa Etheridge disc and popped it in, hit the random search button. Syd wandered over to scarf a cold Keystone from the fridge. The player hummed for a second, then sweet sad acoustic guitar filled the air, arpeggiated cascades that transformed the cramped space of the room. The voice that followed was smoky and haunting, filled with loss:
"Everybody's got a hunger No matter where they are
Everybody clings to their own fear
Everybody hides some scar
Oooooh, precious pain . . ."
"Empty and cold but it keeps me alive
I gave it my soul so I could survive
Keeping me safe in these chains
Precious pain . . ."
The envelope was postmarked Pittsburgh and addressed to him; the handwriting was his own. The return address was preprinted in a tiny cursive script. Anthony P. Weisman, attorney-at-law. Syd felt his stomach drop like a gallows trapdoor.
"Oh boy," he said. "Here it comes."
He sat down, readying himself. He knew in his gut what it was. He opened the envelope; inside was a grainy one-page photocopied letter and a very plain document from the Court of Common Pleas, 59th Judicial District of Pennsylvania.
Dear client, it stated bluntly. Your divorce is final. . . .
A few meager paragraphs followed, mostly a lot of redundant legalspeak explaining why the certificate didn't have an official colored seal but was completely legal and authentic anyway.
Syd took a swig off his beer and flipped the page. The attached document was just as perfunctory: it is ordered and decreed that on such-and-such day, blah blah blah, Sydney C. Jarrett, plaintiff, and Karen L. Jarrett, defendant, are divorced from the bonds of matrimony. Etc., etc., blah blah blah . . .
Syd felt his spirit plunge, do a spastic death-jig where his stomach had been. So much for pageantry. He held the piece of paper up to the waning light, marveling at how little substance there was to it. After all the pomp and circumstance surrounding the conjugal act, you'd think the flip side would at least have some heft. Maybe be carved in stone or something, like a memorial, or a headstone. Here lies the marriage of Syd and Karen Jarrett.
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