Little Wolves (21 page)

There was something mechanical to his smile. Clara paused at his desk. His baby had uneven eyes, a smile like a gash along the lower jaw. “Hi, Lee. What’s your baby’s name?”

“Billy,” he said without looking at her. It took her a moment to realize that Billy was short for William, his father’s name.

Clara patted his shoulder. “That’s a good name,” she said.

He nodded again. His clothing, she noticed as she continued down the rows, smelled faintly of mildew and smoke.

Though the bags made a mess, a faint white powder coating the floor from the careless boys, the ones who tossed their flour-sack babies back and forth in a juggling game—daring Clara to report them to Miss Drimble—by the time the first two classes left she was glad of the distraction. The smell made her hungry. On her aching feet,
with a baby adrift in her stomach, sloshing around as she moved to put up the daily vocab words on the chalkboard, she smelled the fine, invisible powder and daydreamed of sugar cookies and buttermilk rolls hot from the oven, of sweet houses made from gingerbread set deep in the woods to snare the unwary.

The students seemed happy to have her back. Some complained about the strictness of the substitute, Miss Hartle, but they bent to their work after making a few lame jokes. Clara had entered the fray of their lives once more, just another odd addition like the sacks of flour they were forced to lug around. They were happy to see her again, but it seemed clear that, for the first two periods at least, they would have been fine without her.

A
FTER SCHOOL SHE WAS
erasing the board following seventh period when Leah came in. She hadn’t even heard her enter the room, just the squeak of the desk as she sat. Clara clapped her hands to remove the chalk dust. She smiled, but Leah’s smile in return was faint. They had already hugged earlier, during fifth-period English lit. “What is it?” Clara asked.

Leah nodded at the door, and Clara reluctantly shut it. She knew she was not supposed to be in an enclosed room with a student. Leah’s hair was unwashed and stringy, and she wore a boy’s baggy sweatshirt with an Iron Maiden print on the front. “I’m so glad you’re back, Mrs. Warren. I wish you could stay.”

Clara smiled. In truth it had felt good to be up on her feet in front of the room, leading discussions, telling stories, parsing words. She still carried a small, energized glow from the day. She had realized how wrapped inside herself she had been these last few weeks, tangled up in her own problems. She belonged here in the classroom. Perhaps she even belonged in this town. “Oh, you’ll see me again. Once this baby gets born.”

Outside in the parking lot they heard cars starting and loud boasting about the game this coming Friday, the blast of celebratory music to signal freedom from school’s daily oppression. Clara had the windows open to let in a cool breeze and cleanse the room from the lingering odors of the flour-sack babies. The big green felt curtains stirred slightly as an icy breeze that tasted of blowing grit passed through them.

Leah chewed at her nails, already ragged. “Do you still think about him?”

“I do.”

“He talked about you all the time. He was obsessed with your class. It was all your stories of battle and warriors.”

Her feet aching from the long day, Clara sat on the edge of her desk.

“I’ve been going to Kelan’s house after school,” Leah went on. “We can do whatever we want down in his basement. His mom doesn’t care. Kelan knows stuff. He knows things that you wouldn’t believe. Have you ever done
a séance, Mrs. Warren?” She trailed her finger along the smooth surface of the desk.

“You should really be talking to a counselor, Leah.”

“I am. Useless old prick over in Fell Creek. My dad makes me go.” She tapped her nails on the desk.

Leah’s eyes looked cagey, darting about the room. “Do you hear the coyotes? Sometimes it sounds like they’re right under my window. Like they’ve followed me home, and they’re just waiting for me to go outside. Everyone in town is talking about them.”

“They belonged to Seth, didn’t they?”

Leah nodded. “They were the only thing he loved, really. He said the world hates them, but they find a way to survive. He wouldn’t let any of us go near them, even though Kelan begged him. Seth said they were dangerous.” Leah exhaled and then tugged at her baggy sweatshirt. “I must look like shit.”

Is this what she had come to tell Clara, that she was damaged now? People could see Clara’s damage, the bad hand, the person who could never be whole. She wanted to tell Leah that she was beautiful, that she would find someone to love her one day, and that all of this would seem like one bad dream she’d woken from, but she didn’t say any of those things.

Leah’s mascara ran in black streams from the corners of her eyes. “I’m so messed up.” The sound of footsteps clumping past in the hallway outside made her tense. “I have to go now.”

“You come see me anytime, okay?”

Leah hugged her once more, burying her face in Clara’s shoulder. “I gotta get out of this fucking town,” she said, and then she was gone.

I
N THE QUIET OF
the room, Clara went to the back and sat at Seth’s desk, the princely island of space around the desk still in force with him dead. She had to wedge her big stomach to fit in, and the wooden chair groaned under her weight. The desks had iron legs painted copper and wooden lids the students could lift up to store their textbooks and papers within deep cavities. Clara lifted the lid and peered inside. Empty, except for the heavy textbook Seth had dropped to the floor to silence the other students the first day of class.

On a hunch, Clara cracked open the book and flipped to the pages at the front where the Beowulf text was laid out. The students weren’t supposed to write in their books, but intricate illustrations decorated Seth’s. He’d been scrawling the runic letters she had taught, just like at the bottom of the drawing someone left at her house.
HeWhoSleeps is waking. HeWhoSleeps has heard our call. HeWhoSleeps is coming. HeWhoSleeps will bring death to us all
. The final rune smeared, as if he’d drawn it in a hurry.

Clara touched the runes with her hands, felt the grooves the words cut into the paper. He’d pressed down hard with his pen, almost tearing the page. His last week in class, Seth had turned sullen, let his hair hood his eyes. He’d
known even then what he was about to do, was talking to the demon inside him. The skin prickled on the back of her neck. Clara stood and shut the window against the chilly wind blowing in.

THE WILDING

H
e drank until he blacked out most nights, and in the dark, feverish phantasms troubled Grizz’s sleep. Every morning his head throbbed, but he liked the hurt. He woke with the shakes, with cotton mouth; he woke in strange places, once out on the lawn with dirt under his nails, smelling of the grave, once in Seth’s bed, surrounded by the boy’s animal smell, a scent of wet leaves and sweat, where he had looked up to see his son’s
Heavy Metal
movie poster, a drawing of a leather-clad blonde riding a winged demon through the clouds, pinned to the ceiling above him.

The Dakota who once roamed this land did not speak the name of the dead. To speak the name of the dead was to call their ghost from the hunting grounds, to ask for possession, but Seth’s name swelled in his brain like a wood tick, feeding on blood and regret. His thoughts
kept circling back to the day of the shooting, Seth loping to town with the gun against his ribs, the pastor’s wife in her basement hideaway, Will Gunderson pulling up in his cruiser, the field of sheltering corn calling to his boy. It was all there, all the story he needed, but the pieces wouldn’t fit together right inside him. All he needed to do was believe in his son’s cold rage. And then in his mind’s eye he saw the trapping cabin with its gutted creatures sewn together in unnatural ways, Seth tied to the chair, his eyes rolling back in his head as Will took pliers to the tender skin under his ribs and pinched it in the metal, twisting until Seth screamed. No. Maybe that was the story he made up to absolve Seth of his evil. Two darknesses canceling each other out.

The muscles in his shoulders and arms ached as if he’d been swinging something heavy the night before. A memory, a tiny blood-dark spot, spread in his brain. He had done it, he knew deep down under the throb of his headache: stolen his son’s own body from the funeral home and buried him up on the mountain. Grizz dressed in the clothes he had tossed on his floor the night before, chewed four aspirin from a bottle beside the bathroom sink, and after rinsing his face and combing his hair and beard, he got into his truck and drove to town.

Trinity Lutheran had the classic clapboard siding of a country church. It stood as a remnant of another time, a whitewashed vision of the past that Grizz’s family had a role in preserving as much as any of them. His great-grandfather
had donated the land the church was built on, and Grizz’s name was still on the membership rolls, though he had not darkened the door of this place since Jo’s death.

He pulled up out front, parked his truck against the curb, and climbed the steep concrete stairs. The heavy oaken door groaned when he squeezed the handle and yanked it open. From inside a stained-glass window on one side showed Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemene, his face upturned in prayer. Roads curved through the countryside behind Jesus, leading to a hill with three crosses, and Grizz stopped to trace the pathway with his fingers, as he had done when he was a boy. Early evening light leaked through the rosy glass to touch him where he stood.

The anguish on Christ’s face made him think of Seth. When he was thirteen Seth went through a stage where he slept with his lights on. At night Grizz heard him grumble as he twisted in his sheets and strove for sleep and it sounded to him as if there was another voice in there, a lower timbre, a voice like footsteps crushing leaves. Seth cried out because his bones were stretching inside him, his muscles lengthening, even the bones in his face shifting. Black hairs sprouted around his mouth and under his arms, and a rash of blackheads and acne spread on his face and back, sores that wept when he scrubbed them. Grizz had forgotten how much being a teenage boy hurt, the strange aches and pains, but when Seth got sick, throwing up after meals, refusing to get out
of bed in the morning, Grizz knew this wasn’t ordinary growing pains.

In the examining room, the nurse had paid the boy compliments as Seth sat up on the papery sheet without his shirt on, his back and chest blotched with acne. “Such a fine young man,” she said, winking in Grizz’s direction.

“You play football?”

Seth mumbled his response.

“He doesn’t like organized sports,” Grizz offered for him. “He doesn’t like taking instructions.”

Seth slumped on the table, his head down, not looking at either of them. He’d quit the team the year before, just stripped off his padding and helmet and walked right off the field without looking back. He’d been fast. The best runner in the school, but the coach said he was a negative influence on the others.

“That’s too bad,” she said, before leaving the room.

“Why are we here, Dad?”

“We need to know for sure.”

“They won’t be able to do anything. They couldn’t for Mom.”

“You don’t know that.” Grizz ran his hands along the seam of his jeans, looked away. “They’ve made advances since then.” Jo hadn’t ever complained. He wasn’t even sure how much the lupus hurt her. She took her pills and went to bed early when the flare-ups were worst. Sometimes, when she snapped at him for smelling of the barn, for the way working with cattle seeped into his skin, under his nails,
he told himself it was the lupus, the pain of being eaten up from the inside out, speaking.

“They call me freak at school.”

“Don’t pay them any mind.”

Grizz knew this was bad advice. Ignoring bullies only made them grow worse, inventing more devious methods of inflicting pain, verbal or physical, to draw a reaction, but when he looked up he saw Seth was studying him, his eyes curious. “How did Mom live with it? You never talk about her.”

Grizz had always had a hard time talking about Jo. He thought about what to say now, not wanting to describe her illness. Sometimes Seth smiled his small secret smile because there was music inside him when he was alone in his thoughts. And Grizz had to turn away, the familiar expression reminding him too sharply of the boy’s mother. Seth’s hand for drawing, his fancy-flighting, his desperate capacity to love the wrong things: all this he inherited from her.

“She wanted a baby more than anything,” he began. They talked awhile longer, the two of them in the examining room, not looking at one another. He told Seth about how his mother liked old folk songs. He told about how she longed to see the ocean, and here he fell into the story without meaning to. They had started on a trip to Florida a few years before Seth was born but broke down right outside Seaforth, only a hundred miles away. “The money for the trip went to pay for a new tranny instead. At the motel
that night she filled the tub, added in bath salts. We put on our suits and climbed in.” He smiled at the memory. “Sure, she cried a little, but then she shut her eyes. ‘Tell me how it is,’ she said. Well, I had never been, so I did my best.”

A knock came at the door, Dr. Salverson with his news, but they already knew what he had to say.

“M
R.
F
ALLON
? S
ETH
?” T
HE
pastor’s voice calling him by his Christian name startled Grizz. No one called him Seth anymore. The pastor must have heard the door open and come looking. He didn’t look much older than an altar boy himself, a thin spiderweb of a beard around his mouth, pale hair and skin. His eyes skimmed over Grizz, noting the mud spattering his jeans, the dirt around his collar, his very nails black with it.

“I’ve come to ask you something,” Grizz said.

“Let’s go to my office and talk.”