Sometimes the Wolf: A Novel

by Urban Waite

  DEDICATION

  For my father,

  who has always gone his own way

  EPIGRAPH

  You know, sometimes—for a long time at a stretch—it’s like it hadn’t happened. Not to me. Maybe to somebody else, but not to me. Then I remember, and when I first remember I say, no, it could not have happened to me.

  —Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  PART I: THE KILLING

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  PART II: THE HUNT

  Chapter 6

  PART III: MISSING. GONE. VANISHED OFF THE FACE OF THE EARTH

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  PART IV: THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  PART V: THE HOUSE IN THE WOODS

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Excerpt from The Carrion Birds

  Day One

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Urban Waite

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PROLOGUE

  THE BIG MAN STOOD in the cold watching the road. He wore an orange vest over his buttoned shirt and held a traffic sign in his hand that he flipped from time to time as he passed the minutes watching the road and waiting. Behind in the night a single blinking orange light marked his silhouette, causing his shape to shift and glimmer against the pavement on which he stood. There was the sound in the distance of jet planes landing and taking off, the high wheeling cut of their engines overhead as they made their turns through the clouds, dropping out of the air a couple miles away and moving earthward.

  He had never been on a plane and all he could think of as he stood there was the way the wings seemed to drift open, the flaps bent down like a bird coming to rest on a lake. His mind taken back to a time forty years ago when, as a boy, he had sat out in the prairie grass watching chevrons of snow geese land on a pond in the Palouse. So many of them that the water appeared white as their feathers and the sound of the birds calling to each other deafened him.

  He was half turned on his heels when the headlights broke from around the corner of the road and lit him full. The road fenced in on one side with the creep of blackberries and on the other by a stand of oaks that had long since lost their coverings. The dry rasp of leaves heard from within the stand any time the wind moved. He tried to remember what he was meant to do but it didn’t come to him and he stood there in the middle of the road holding the sign. The car now drawn closer and the lights bathing his jeans in an unnatural shade of mercury blue.

  There was no one around and as the car came to a stop he stepped forward and watched the window come down. “Construction?” the driver asked.

  “Just up the road. Shouldn’t be more than a few minutes.”

  With a flick of his hand, the driver brought a watch free from his shirtsleeve and checked the time. He wore a suit jacket and black pants. A black cap rested on the passenger seat with a shiny plastic half bill. He leaned forward on the wheel and looked toward the rounded curve of the road, where above at the bend the planes could be seen landing. He turned and looked behind him down the road from which he’d come. When he turned back around, he said, “It’s late for construction.”

  “Best time,” the big man said.

  The driver looked up the road again. “Is there a detour? Some other way to get through?”

  “You can go down the way you came but it will take you just as long. Maybe longer.”

  The driver leaned back in his seat and let the air out of his lungs in a long exhale. Somewhere in the oaks the leaves were moving again but there was no wind. And the driver, who sat slumped in his seat watching the road, heard only the hum of the car’s engine and the soft putter of the exhaust.

  “Hello,” a voice said.

  The driver turned and looked up not at the big man but into the face of someone much skinnier. His face hollowed out beneath the eyes where his cheekbones protruded in smooth orbs, the shadows beneath filling the length of his face all the way to his chin. The driver opened his mouth to respond but felt only the hard crack of metal come across his chin, and then on his forehead, repeated again and again.

  When the skinny man brought his hand back from within the car it resembled a red candied apple. Rounded and shiny with blood. The black butt of a pistol visible at the base of his fist.

  With the door open and the car still running, they carried the driver around to the trunk and placed him inside. The big man, who was still thinking about snow geese, had already thrown the vest and sign to the side of the road.

  PART I

  THE KILLING

  Chapter 1

  THE DEER LAY a little way off the road at the bottom of the fence. The stomach opened on the cattle wire, with the skin peeled away and the viscera hanging loose in the predawn air. The sun had yet to crest the mountains and Silver Lake stretched away to the south for miles, dark and flat, with only the new wind that came with the morning to tousle the water and work the whitecaps. Gray slate all the way from one edge to the next, and the cattle wire and road running along it like a border. One piece of farm followed by another all the way around the top of the lake and into town, where the flatland ran out and the mountains began again, dense with fir and hemlock, sword fern and peat moss.

  Deputy Bobby Drake stood beside the open door of his Chevy, toggling down through the contacts on his phone. Too early for anyone from Fish and Wildlife to answer. All of them had been out the night before—Drake partnered with one of the officers—as they worked to stop a string of poachings in the hills. The spotter plane high up over the mountains calling in positions as Drake and the local Fish and Wildlife officer rushed to catch up.

  Now Drake waited in the growing morning haze with his breath curling before him in the twilight, the car hazards washing the scene in a slow pulse of orange, his fingernails cold on his face where he held the phone.

  The message clicked on and he listened. When it was his turn he gave his name and then the location. “Pretty near cut herself in two,” he said, looking to where the animal had caught on the cattle fence, the blood black and slick along the metal. He turned the phone away and looked at the deer, trying to decide if there was anything else he could say. A she-wolf had been at the carcass when he’d rounded the curve and caught the animal with his headlights. One rib gnawed to the white bone, and the wolf tugging at the deer, stretching the flesh along the wire.

  For the past couple weeks the wolf had been in the hills, calling out for others. Haunting the mist that came off the lake at night and threaded its way up through the mountain valleys. Sheri, his wife, turning the volume up on the television and waiting till the howls faded away and all was silent again. No sound outside but that of the trees brushing against the siding of the house, and the familiar rattle of the wind as it shook through the naked branches of the apple orchard out back.

  Drake took a step toward the fence. The head of the deer played back at a strange angle. The animal flipped o
ver on its back, where it had come to rest, eyes black and wide, looking up into the sky. Belly all but eaten clean. He didn’t know what else to say, the phone still open in his palm, and the message ticking down a second at a time. He gave the phone another moment of study before closing it in his fist.

  He wondered how long the deer had lain like that before it was found, before the wolf came out of the darkness, pulled by the smell of blood and the bleat of fear. No way of knowing something like that, but a hope it had not been long and the deer had bled out along the wire before the scavenger arrived.

  In the past couple weeks Drake had responded to three sightings. The wolf coming down out of the hills, tipping trash cans and chasing cattle. Only once had he seen her though, loping across a rancher’s field, the gaunt hips slowing for a moment as she neared the forest. The wolf, winter worn and skinny, all bone and fur—turning to regard him where he stood. No pack to run with, or cubs to nurse. One of the first wolves to be seen in the valley in fifty years and Drake had no idea what he was supposed to do about it.

  He raised his eyes and looked into the cool dark at the edge of the field. A pink light had begun to spread behind him over the edge of the mountains and in the grass the deep blue that came just before the dawn could be seen. He knew the she-wolf was waiting, shifting in the shadows beneath the trees, watching him where he stood.

  He scraped a foot over the gravel at the edge of the road, feeling a dull tightness in his leg as he watched the forest. He checked the time on his phone and then ran his eyes to the south, where the sky was lightening with the sun. Out of uniform for the day, he wore a dress shirt and slacks on his thin frame. No desire in him to leave the carcass or the wolf. And a certainty that what lay ahead of him down the road was more threatening than anything lurking in the shadows beneath the trees. Nothing he could do but move on, an appointment he needed to keep and the simple fact that as soon as he rounded the next curve, the nature of the thing would continue.

  THREE HOURS LATER Drake sat in his car watching the Monroe prison gates, waiting for his father’s release. The clouds were breaking overhead and the moisture that had condensed inside the car now showed with the sunlight. The morning had been cold and as he’d driven up through the birch that lay around the recesses of the prison, he could see the rolling barbed wire clear down the line. Wrapping over and over again as it crested one wall and then fell ten feet to the next, layer after layer of it, and no chance of escape for anyone inside, except, Drake thought, maybe his father, Patrick.

  It was almost twelve years to the day since his father had been sentenced. In the years past Drake had searched for some sign of his father in his own face, looking at himself in the mirror of his cruiser, or under the bright changing-room lights of the department. The genes there that all who met him said were evident in his face. A fine line dividing the two of them, a reason Drake had tried so desperately in the last twelve years to distance himself from the father everyone could see within him.

  All that had changed in his life, Drake thought, and all that remained the same.

  He checked his watch and then looked to the prison gate. He didn’t know what to expect and he sat there in the lot watching the single pane of the steel door, searching for the shift of light or shadow from within that would signal Patrick’s arrival. Twelve years ago the life Drake had wanted for himself at the age of twenty put up on the shelf. Everything after his father went away feeling like the life of someone else.

  Fifteen minutes went by in this way, the cold seeping in through the seams of the late-model Chevy, before he saw the door push open from within and a guard emerge onto the small concrete path, holding the door wide. Drake didn’t recognize his father at first, carrying a cardboard box in his arms, his breath curling away behind him as he walked. His beard grown full with white hair and a thin, almost animal-like mane, falling thick from his bald crown. He was over six foot, with the beginnings of a belly, and the well-built chest and shoulders he’d always had. The skin of his neck below the beard thickly veined in the cold.

  Drake got out of the car and stood, waiting. The one time he had visited his father in prison, the man had just stared coldly back at him, his head shaved to the skin, and a slight tilt to his lips as he sat answering Drake’s questions. The man locked away for a third of Drake’s life. Sheriff Patrick Drake, a legend in his time with no other family left in Silver Lake except his son and daughter-in-law.

  The deputy for years had not cared what happened to his father, shamed any time his father’s name was mentioned. The family history in the hills and mountains around the lake nothing to be proud of, Drake’s own grandfather, Morgan Drake, infamous for bringing booze and entertainment to the logging camps up and down the North Cascades, eventually settling the family in Silver Lake.

  Looking at his father now, with his hair grown out and a beard matted across his face, his skin pulled flat in places and creased in others, Drake felt like he didn’t know his father the way he should. So much time had passed with nothing being said between them. Patrick wearing the same clothes he’d gone in with twelve years before, outdated and now large on his thin, muscular frame.

  Behind, the guard closed the door and Drake heard the latch fall as Patrick crossed the lot to where he waited by the car. The old canvas coat open at Patrick’s chest, revealing the flannel shirt and jeans he’d gone in with all those years before.

  “I see you’ve gone wild,” Drake said, gesturing to his father’s white mane.

  Patrick smiled. He’d been in there a long time. And the creases on his skin looked all the deeper. “I’ve always been wild,” he said.

  In the lot behind them, Drake heard an engine start up, followed by the soft putter of exhaust, but Drake didn’t think anything of it as he took the box from his father and loaded it into the backseat, watching how Patrick put a hand to the door and lowered his body down into the car.

  IT WAS AN hour before they spoke again. The sound of the interstate moving beneath them, the thrum of the tires on the asphalt and the radio turned on low against the quiet. The absence of their voices like some living, breathing thing, tucked far back in the darkness waiting to appear.

  “Pull off at the next exit,” Patrick said, pointing ahead of them to an overhead sign.

  There was still a good forty-five minutes before they would turn off the interstate and head east into the Cascades, threading their way up the mountain pass toward Silver Lake and the home that had been left for Drake and his wife when his father had gone in.

  “You planning on knocking off a convenience store?”

  “You know that’s not what I was convicted of,” Patrick said. His eyes flashed on Drake for a moment and then looked away again.

  Drake had no idea why he said the things he did to his father. No way around what his father had done but to joke about it and hope it could be avoided for just another day. “You had a lot of people fooled,” Drake said.

  The old sheriff nodded but didn’t look over at Drake again.

  Drake took a hand off the wheel and ran it back over his scalp, feeling the close-cropped hair he’d gradually been losing since his midtwenties. Like his father he was built thick through the shoulders, with long legs and the thin, angular bones that had been passed down through their family for generations. “People still talk about it. That’s all I’m saying.”

  “What people?”

  “Silver Lake, the whole town.”

  “I never thought I’d be going back there.”

  “Well, I don’t know where you thought you’d be. We had to sell a lot of the land just to hold on to the house.”

  “I never asked you to go back there.”

  “I never asked you to get thrown in prison.”

  His father shifted, then looked behind him, reaching for something out of the cardboard box in the backseat. “I’m not proud of what I did but at the time it seemed like the only option.” He was sitting in the seat again, holding open a thin folder. “Loo
k,” he said. “I saved them, every one I could find. Even the ones that had my name in them.”

  Drake looked over at the clippings and then looked away. Some from before his father had gotten into trouble, some from years afterward. All of them he’d seen before and he knew they told something about Drake’s past that he really didn’t care for, that he wasn’t proud of, but that he’d done because he’d thought at the time it would mean something.

  Drake felt nauseous just thinking about those years. All he’d given up to come home and deal with his father’s debts. A basketball scholarship to Arizona he’d had to leave behind. All the time he’d spent trying to make up for his father’s crimes. To earn the name back. It wasn’t Drake’s fault. None of it was, and that point—most important to Drake now—had only recently occurred to him. Still, he had to remind himself that he was living for himself. For his wife, Sheri. He was living his own life in a way he hadn’t for many years. And now with Patrick sitting beside him, trying to reawaken all the old memories, all the things that had occurred in the past, Drake knew he needed to look to the future.

  “They’re all here,” Patrick said, holding a clipping up for Drake to see. “Even the newspaper articles from Arizona, from when you played basketball.”

  “Why would you keep those?”

  “So I don’t forget.”

  “Sometimes things are better forgotten.”

  Patrick paused, looking down at the clipping in his hand. Even with his eyes on the road, Drake couldn’t help but notice. “I don’t plan on making any problems for you,” Patrick said. “Not anymore.”

  Drake looked over to where his father sat in the car, the green shift of the landscape going by, the backs of houses, run-down and scabbed with paint.

  His father closed the folder and put it back with the rest of his possessions. “You don’t need to worry about me,” his father said, his eyes looking to the side mirror as the road went by in a flicker of light. “I just want you to know that I’ll be fine. I want you to know that I have a plan. Whatever I did in the past, it’s covered. You and me are going to be fine.”