Little Wolves (2 page)

Clara Warren’s hand shook as she marked the words on the page because she knew she was trapped inside of one of her father’s stories, and the only way out was to write it down. She wrote as if her life depended on it, and maybe it did.

THE BOY

T
he day before, Seth Fallon limped toward town under a boiled-blue sky, a dry wind trailing him from the fields. Despite the heat he wore a long, oilcloth coat he’d taken from the mudroom, and inside the coat he had the twelve gauge his father had given him last Christmas, with the promise they would hunt whitetail in the swamp come fall.

Earlier that morning he had taken the shotgun into the shop, clasped it in a vice, and sawed off precisely seven inches. Then he sanded down the bore, oiled the barrel, shined it with a rag, and leaned the gun against the door, so he could tidy what mess he had made, discarding the sawn barrel in the trash and sweeping steel scrapings from the concrete floor. He hung the saw back on its hook, folded the cloth in a neat square, and stored it with the gun oil in a metal cabinet. When he left
everything was in its place, just as his father had raised him to do.

Barely a scratch of rain had fallen in two months the Saturday afternoon he set out for town. A summer of drought baked the crop in the furrows, leaving whole rows sere and stunted, so that the wind gnawed at what remained and lifted a fine scrim of topsoil from the fields and flung it against the outbuildings. He walked with this wind under a sun that was a cinder in a vacant sky, the gun cool against his ribs.

The farthest he had ever traveled from this valley was across the state border to Sioux Falls. This was the only home he had ever known. The town of Lone Mountain perched along terraced streets overlooking the surrounding valley, a half mile wide and thickly wooded on either side. For aeons the Minnesota River had been at work eating through topsoil toward the earth’s core, carving out this place from vast prairie farmlands stretching hundreds of miles all around.

The valley had been a place of both shadow and shelter for generations of Indians—the Cheyenne, the Fox and Sauk, the Dakotas—all who came to hide from the winter winds on the prairie. Only the ghosts of the Indians remained, but these were potent ghosts with no love for the Germans who had stolen their land following a summer of war a hundred years before, and when a little girl drowned in the river, the old-timers crossed themselves and thought of the brown hands that surely pulled her under. They later
said such a ghost moved in the boy, an angry spirit urging him on. Such darkness could not have come from one of their own.

They had lived here for generations after traveling across the Atlantic but still felt like sojourners. When the hail came, when the river bucked and broke its banks, when the children lay awake in the late hours fevered and coughing—they knew this place belonged to the devil, had always belonged to him. Prince of the broken world, broken now more than ever with the last family farms going under. The Torvicks. The Kantors. Jerry Kroger and his tribe of daughters. All gone.

And now this wickedness.

The boy stopped at the parsonage first, where the pastor and his wife Clara lived next to the church. Clara was his substitute English teacher at Lone Mountain High. Her husband was off visiting a homebound couple when the boy rang the bell. Alone down in the basement, Clara wasn’t able to explain later to authorities why she didn’t answer the door.

Next, he went down the main drag, moving toward a downtown that bustled with weekend traffic, so many people parked outside the pool hall and Jurgen’s Corner Grocery. No one later remembered seeing him on the sidewalk or could recall phoning the sheriff, Will Gunderson. It might just have been that Will was driving past at that very moment and what he saw—a school-age boy hunched into a coat in the fullness of Indian summer—troubled him.
Will was a survivor of two tours in Vietnam, a decorated veteran, and he was a known hard-ass who had taken the boy into custody several times before this day.

He pulled over beside Seth Fallon and rolled down his window to say something. What passed between them is a mystery. Seth flung open his coat and brought out the gun. No one remembered seeing Seth come down the sidewalk, but that shotgun blast echoed all over Lone Mountain.

NAMESAKE

H
e came home from driving a seed truck to find his farmyard swimming with lights from four or five squad cars parked out on his lawn. His Christian name was also Seth, like his son, but most in town still called him Grizz from his days playing nose tackle for the Lone Mountain Braves. Grizz felt as sapped as the yellow leaves clinging to the trees out in the yard, and he wanted nothing more than a Steak-umm sandwich on rye bread, to wash it down with Seagram’s and Seven and sleep until the ache in his back woke him. As soon as he saw those lights, he knew it was something to do with Seth. The cars had decals from Brown and Lyon Counties, sheriffs and deputies from miles around. Dark was just beginning to spread long shadows through the yard and surrounding fields where a couple of the deputies fanned out, their Maglites carving trails through the blond corn.

Grizz stayed in the cab of his semi, watching it all from far away, his radio tuned to Lone Mountain’s only station, KLKR, where long-dead country singers like Patsy Cline crooned above the stir of static. Lights were on in the outbuildings, both the barn and the machinery shed, and his house blazed in the falling dark. He didn’t know how long he stayed in his seat, but eventually he felt eyes on him and saw a man waving from the porch. Grizz climbed out of the cab, his legs stiff from sitting all day, and limped across the lawn to greet him. The waving hand belonged to Steve Krieger, who had cut back to part-time in the sheriff’s office, a semi-retirement. Grizz had known Steve since they were boys. Their families went way back to the founding of town, tributaries of bad blood branching between them over generations, and he didn’t care to find the man out on his porch, leaning against the banister.

“What’d he do now?” he said. From the very beginning it had been hard raising Seth alone, without a mother. Grizz was sure this new trouble had to do with drugs. It explained everything, the boy’s moody behavior, his frequent absences and trouble in school. The last time he found pot in Seth’s sock drawer he’d called the head sheriff, Will Gunderson, hoping to put a scare into Seth before it got more serious. When he saw all those squad cars on his lawn he figured Seth had gotten mixed up with dealers, Mexicans and the like, rumored to be planting marijuana in the thickly wooded river valleys and ravines, the very worst trouble he imagined a boy could find out here.

“You’d better come inside,” Steve told him in a thick voice. Steve still had black hair in his sixties and his mustache glistened with oil. He looked like he hadn’t aged a day in the decades Grizz had known him.

From upstairs rumbled the sound of boots on hardwood where a few men tromped through Seth’s room. It sounded like the house was coming apart, as if these men were set to rip right through the plaster, looking for Seth.

“Go ahead and tell me.” Grizz intended to stay standing, wanting to be at eye level when Steve said what he had to say.

“Seth shot Will Gunderson in the face,” Steve said flatly.

“What?” Grizz braced himself against the table. “No,” he said, but it was a muted protest. His mouth had gone dry and wouldn’t form the words.

“Will didn’t die right away. I want you to know that.”

“Jesus.” Grizz had grown up with Will; they had played on the same nine-man football team. When he hadn’t known what else to do with his son, Will was the one he called. Their boys were the same age, both troubled.

Steve’s ruddy face flushed a deeper red, as though the news were bleeding inside him. He kept his rheumy eyes fixed on Grizz. “The slug tore away his jaw; blew out the window. By the time people reached him Will had drowned in his own blood, and Seth was gone.”

Steve spoke in a monotone, even though the dead man he described was married to his own oldest daughter, because everyone in this place was tangled by blood
in one way or the other. Grizz saw he laid stock in such gory detail and that he was angry and wanted to paint a full picture of the horror and so hurt him with it. Steve’s heavy fists, hanging at his belt, clenched and unclenched. He looked to be measuring him now, watching his face to see what he knew.

Then Grizz did sit down because his body gave him no choice. He didn’t question any of this or think to ask for a warrant. Another parent might have doubted, but he knew Seth was capable of such a thing and had in fact done it. A gap opened up inside him where the air whistled thin and tight in his lungs. “Where is Seth?” he asked when he found his voice.

“We were hoping you might tell us,” Steve said. “When did you last see him? Did anything seem unusual this morning?”

Grizz shook his head, explaining he’d left before dawn. He hadn’t spoken to his son in two days, not since Seth overturned a table in his biology lab, shattering a twenty-five-gallon aquarium filled with channel cats, bullheads, and crawdads. Seth was suspended for it, and the principal had promised to send Grizz a bill for the aquarium and dead fish, a bill he knew the Fallons couldn’t afford. This morning when he left to drive a seed truck for the co-op, Grizz had seen a light on under his boy’s door and wondered why Seth was awake so early or if he had even slept. He had paused at the door but had not gone inside, fearing another fight.

“Found part of the sawed-off barrel in the trash out in the machinery shed,” Steve continued. “He planned this and maybe worse. Grizz, we got to find him before he hurts someone else. Tell us where he might have gone.”

The mountain. He would go to the mountain. There were caves there that only the boy knew. There were the little wolves Seth had raised from pups. He kept his head down and twisted his hands in his lap while the hope took shape.

Don’t you know your own son?
was what Steve was asking. Grizz started to explain about the twelve gauge, how it was a gift meant to reward the boy for staying in school to finish out his junior year, when another man walked in the door and drew Steve aside. They whispered together, Steve watching Grizz over his shoulder.

He put his face into his hands. The mountain wasn’t big enough. They’d send dogs and find him. He hoped that Seth had run, that he had stolen a car and made for the Northwoods and was even now nearing Canada and that the awful thing he had done had scared all the evil out of him. Wild thoughts.
Get as far from here as you can
, he prayed.
Be gone; then don’t you ever come back
. Even as he thought these things, he knew on some level his only child was dead.

Steve walked over to him. “They found Seth,” he said. “He went into Miller’s cornfield and shot himself.”

The emptiness in his gut seared up into his throat, but Grizz swallowed it and felt it burn all the way down.
When he held out his hand it trembled, but he was determined not to show any sorrow before these men. “Good,” he said, raising his gaze to Steve’s. “I’m glad he can’t hurt no one else.”

“He was carrying a bandolier of ammunition,” Steve continued, his voice rising in pitch, “and the pockets of his coat were filled with lead slugs.… If Will hadn’t stopped him earlier, there’s no telling.”

Grizz took this in. “Seth stopped himself.”

“Seth didn’t say anything to you? What was the last conversation you had?”

He tried to answer, but the words drained away. Steve kept after him, badgering him with questions. Grizz swallowed several times, and his breath wheezed in his lungs.
Don’t you cry
, he commanded himself.
Goddamn you. Don’t you give them any kind of satisfaction
. “I need a glass of water,” he said in a parched whisper, “please.”

Steve walked into the kitchen and slammed around the cabinets before he found a glass he filled with tap water and carried it to the table. He didn’t hand it to Grizz. With his man looking on, the one who had brought the news about Seth, he made a noise in his throat and hocked into the water, so Grizz would know how things were going to be for him here on out, a Fallon with a criminal history of his own in a valley settled by law-abiding Germans, the father of a cop-killer. Steve set the glass down with a thunk, the water Grizz longed for sloshing up the sides and the yellow phlegm riding the surface. Steve leaned in,
his small eyes black as beetles, and said, “Sin as ugly as yours won’t stay down.”

Grizz hesitated. His son had been right all along. Seth had come to Grizz for help, but he turned his back on him because he had to learn how this town was and his place within it.
Child, where you have gone, I will follow. Yes, even there if it means I might see you once more
.

He lifted the glass and drained it to the dregs. Then with them looking on he held the empty glass in his palm and squeezed. It was one of those old-fashioned ones his wife Jo had liked, with
Drink Coca-Cola
in red letters on the sides. It shattered in his grasp, and he kept squeezing until the shards bit into his palm, and only then did he let it drop. There wasn’t as much blood as he hoped for, his skin too leathery and cracked. He looked up at Steve, and his eyes had cleared, and he had his voice again. And he knew this was the terrible clarity that must have come over his son when he went into the fields after murdering Will. “There isn’t any reason for you to be here,” he said. “I want you out of my house.”

They didn’t leave right away, despite his words, but dark had fallen, and as news about Seth spread among the searchers one by one the cruisers pulled away.

Steve was still worked up. His son-in-law was dead and he wanted justice, but what justice could be wrung from such a situation?

Grizz wanted Steve here now. His oldest nemesis. He wanted Steve here because he was terrified of the quiet,
and he felt his son’s death like a sharp stone he had swallowed that was only now wedging into his chest.