The Wild (24 page)

The old man, who was tall and emaciated, wearing a tattered herringbone sports jacket and plaid pants, took a spread-legged stance and lowered the halberd. "Let her go, Charlie," he said. "I can cut off balls with this thing just as clean as heads."

"That's gotta be an illegal weapon or something." The two Charlies complied, though, and Cindy felt a great relief. Kevin stepped forward and slammed the encyclopedia down on Little Charlie's head, whereupon he sank into the snow without so much as a sigh. "Aw," Big Charlie cried, "why'd you do that?"

"That's my
mother,
scumbag!"

"Oh Lord. All I wanted was to talk to her. I want her to consider me a suitor, that's all. I need a wife. Eileen died, damn her, and I need a wife, oh, God I do. I've got love in me. Yes, I've got love in me."

The old man jabbed with the halberd, and Big Charlie became silent. "I'm tired of men like you, you brutal fool," the old man said. "I ought to hurt you." The halberd whistled and Big Charlie had to jump.

Little Charlie raised himself up, squinting and rubbing his head. "Somebody oughta whip that kid, he's a damn sonembitch."

Louie came running down the street, shouting and waving a large knife. "You let them alone, Gilford Forbes! It's just their way."

"The hell, Louie, nobody drags women off like that, not in my sight. This is the civilized world, and if you don't like that, you can damn well move to South Africa or someplace."

"Come on, Mother, it's time to go."

The tension between Louie and Gilford Forbes seemed ready to erupt into a battle. Cindy was not sure what would happen if the spindly old man actually began to use the halberd, which was obviously as sharp as a razor. She wasted no time following Kevin, who was already on his way back to Forbes's house.

Forbes backed up, marching like a spider, rather than turn away from the other men.

The house was an old one, really no more than a cottage, with a wooden porch populated by an ancient swing and choked in the tendrils of what in spring and summer must be a laurel. Beyond the front door was a living room full of bulky furniture, overstuffed chairs, a large and complicated Wurlitzer organ, and on the walls prints of familiar Impressionists: Van Gogh's
Starry Night,
Renoir's
Bathers,
and four or five others. They added an altogether incongruous note of intense cheer to an otherwise drably comfortable scene.

"Please make yourself at home, Kevin's mother," Forbes said. He bowed. "The altogether estimable mother of a most remarkable young boy." He smiled, his cadaverous face cracking into a grin so wide that it seemed about to cause his lower jaw to disengage itself and flop down along his neck. "I am Gilford Forbes, former don at Christ Church College, Oxford, former tutor at Harvard—alas, all very former. Presently Kevin and I are engaged in setting ponderous poetry to light music and light poetry to ponderous music. An interesting exercise, Pound's
Cantos
chanted to the tune of 'A Rock and Roll Waltz' and the works of Rod McKuen intoned to Beethoven's
Missa Solemnis.
Your screams did not fit, and I must apologize to you—"

Kevin rushed forward and hugged her.

Gilford Forbes smiled a little nervously. Kevin glanced just sharply enough at Cindy to communicate the message that he had kept his father a secret from this man. The boy must already have told the old man some story—some lie—that explained their presence here in Olana.

"A broken life," Kevin murmured sadly. His face was grave. Cindy saw again the stoniness that more and more often appeared in his eyes.

She nodded. "That ends at Parma Lunch."

"You'll get back on your feet. You're young!" There was an extended silence after the old man's remark. "It's cold," he added. "Would anyone care for tea?"

Wordlessly, Kevin went with him into his tiny kitchen. "Where did you get this Darjeeling?" she heard her son ask.

"In Toronto. I've also some scones. Your mother might like one."

"She hardly eats anything."

The man did not answer. Cindy sat in an old Morris chair. This was an extraordinarily comfortable room. The wood stove crinkled softly, beads of snow tapped against the window. Beyond it, in the darkening afternoon, the sinister little town seemed about to settle into the woods that surrounded it. Nothing moved in the street, no car, no pedestrian, not even a wandering dog. Idly, Cindy picked up a magazine, a literary journal called
Prometheus.
Bob had bought it from time to time, and the look of it brought back memories. She glanced through it, impressed mainly by the beautiful printing and layout. Then she saw a poem by Gilford Forbes.

The snow trumpets silently down,
Hurrying the shadows in
The terrible land,

Enforcing the migration of bones,
This snow, laboring with the force
Of dangerous old laws.

The fire shuffled again, and the snow pinged on the window. Cindy realized that in this moment she had come face-to-face with the mystery. It stood revealed before her, as if a door had at last opened—but only into endless night. Tears collected in her eyes. She could not look again at the magazine. Instead she pushed it to the floor with her knuckles and wiped her hands on her dress. A tiredness akin almost to death stole over her, dropping around her shoulders like a cloak of cold chain. She bowed her head, aware only as her glance passed over it of a tiny cross hanging on the wall, a priest's black cross.

"So you see," Gilford Forbes said, "I'm broken, too." He put her cup of tea into her hands. On the saucer there was a scone cut in two and buttered, and it looked awfully tempting. "Before you, woman of the broken life, stands a ruined priest. I will tell you my story if you will tell me yours."

How could she? His story would move, it would touch, it would enlighten in a fine and decent manner. Her story would sound lurid and absurd.

Even so, Bob was out there in the snow, or he was dead, a pecked hulk on a roadside, or a pelt in some trapper's winter storehouse. "I was caught in flagrantibus delictis. I pluralize because I was with two of my students, a young woman and a young man. We were in the dressing room, in the bottom of a cupboard. The shaking of the cupboard attracted the attention of the choir, which was just coming down after singing High Mass. One of them opened the thing and there we were, wallowing naked in a pile of vestments."

Another silence developed. Kevin looked steadily at his mother, his eyes intractable. She was not to tell.

"You were thrown out?" she asked.

"Difficult to do to a priest." He held up his hands. "They will still bear the Paraclete. I was hustled out of Cambridge and posted to an obscure boonie parish. No more Newman Club for me, no more students. The trouble was, that incident—which was my only transgression of celibacy—assumed such enormous proportions in my mind that I could no longer bear to abide by my vows. Night after night I thought of the wonders of that time in the cupboard, how good they had tasted, smelled, how warm and lovely it all was. Dear God, I still do. It was the central experience of my life. I've never tried sex again, for fear of disappointment."

"They must have been marvelous people," Kevin said.

"Marvelous looking. They were a team. I got their number out of a singles paper. They were undergrads doing a little whoring to make their lives more comfortable. God, they were wonderful." He sipped his tea. "Your story, please."

"No," Kevin said. "You have to be careful of him, Mother. He never had that experience. He wasn't even a priest. He's trying to trick you."

Gilford Forbes smiled, this time a little thinly. "Your point, Kevin. I suppose that you must remain a mystery to me, too."

Cindy would have told him everything. Why not, what did it matter? Look at the Indian—he understood more about what had happened to Bob than she had imagined possible, but he had not the strength for the journey. And Monica: "Call me if you need me. I love you." In other words, good-bye.

Only she and Kevin remained, in this difficult time. She bit into the scone, which was still cold in the middle. As she chewed she heard shouts outside, more than one shout in the muffling snow.

Forbes frowned, looking toward the dark gray window. Kevin put his teacup down and stepped over to the door. He opened it, stepped onto the porch.

Another shout, this time accompanied by the shape of a man running down the street.

Kevin returned. His face was horribly twisted, his eyes were darting with fear. "Wolves," he whispered, "they've seen wolves at the north end of town."

"Really! I had no idea there were wolves in New York State. In a way that's lovely, if they don't just shoot them."

Without another word, forgetting how lightly dressed she was, forgetting her fearful experience with the Charlies, Cindy jumped up and dashed out into the snow.

Up the dark streets she raced. She could hear Kevin beside her. Whether Forbes had come or not, she did not know.

As she ran she heard it. She stopped and looked up. Kevin looked up. Ahead of them a man carrying a high-power rifled stopped also, and he looked up. A cat, which had been sitting in a window, darted away.

The howl rose and rose, a plasma of dark pealing echoes, powerful and loud.

Kevin's hand came into her own. That was Bob, she knew it in her freezing bones. Bob was here, and the town was turning out to meet him. Bob must stand against a town full of sharpshooting roughnecks.

She ran, Kevin ran. Far behind them Forbes— who had been running—dropped to a walk with a gesture of annoyance.

Bob was here. At last, at last she had found him. With a frantic little scream in her throat, she made her way through the snow, determined this time to find a way to share life with him as best she could, on whatever terms he would grant.

Part Four
Homecoming

We left when we were too young
to know.

Now we are far away and going farther.
Home, we say, home. . . .
We watch the empty dark.

—Robert Duke, "Home" (1985)

Chapter Twenty-One

B
OB HAD GONE DASHING ACROSS THE FROZEN
S
T.
L
AWRENCE
Seaway, his claws crackling on the ice. He had leaped over floes and cracks, slipped, got up, and slid forward, barking joyfully.

The eyes of the other wolves had followed him. None barked back, no tail wagged. For his part, Bob had been so excited that he couldn't stop barking. Smelling the wolves this close made thrills sweep up and down his body. Their odor was sensuous, incredibly attractive. It was far richer to his nose than any human odor had ever been, more so even than Cindy's beloved scent. As he ran, his mind cast about for meaning in this odor, but there were no words that described the experience of smelling it.

These wolves lived in this heaven of smell; they were used to it. Beyond their individual smells— the sharp, shocking aromas coming from the pack leaders, and the sweet smells of the lesser wolves, there was another odor, which was the combination of them all, the majestic smell of the pack as a whole, a fine old spirit of an aroma.

When Bob was about ten yards from the pack, the wolf at the lead had barked once, a sound as sharp as a shot. It went deep into Bob, exploding in his heart. It was a warning and a command: it said stop.

Bob had stood, his tail wagging, his tongue slopping out of his mouth. He gathered himself together: he was a man inside, after all, and he had his dignity.

The dignity of a man, though, is nothing before the dignity of a king of the wolves. Human governments rise and fall across a few generations. This king was the inheritor of ten thousand generations. His pack was an ancient kingdom, and he ruled it by traditions that extended back into the mists. He had come forward, his legs stiff, his ears cocked, on his face a look at once curious and fierce. Bob could see his nose working.

Bob's whole attention had gone to this wolf. By degrees he was realizing that he would not be welcome here. It hurt him. He had come an awfully long way to get a reception like this. He might be a man, and feel he was a man, but he was also a
wolf,
every inch of him. If he had any rights at all, it was among these creatures.

In his rising anger he had made a mistake: he barked loudly. It was a challenge, it couldn't be interpreted any other way. The king of the wolves snarled horribly, lifting his lips to reveal startlingly effective-looking fangs. His pack seethed behind him. A strong musk came from them, as if they were spitting odor at the interloper, trying to cover his unwanted scent. Bob could feel his own glands working, could smell his own anger and excitement. His neck tickled: his hackles were rising.

The king strutted, ears back, eyes fairly cracking with rage. Bob had to think, but he was getting too scared to think. He was acutely aware of the fact that he was out here alone in this wilderness, and the only creatures he could trust, the only companions that were even close to his own kind, were rejecting him out of hand.

What to do? He couldn't explain himself, he didn't know the language of the wolves. And they had a language, he could see, hear, and smell that. It was a thousand, a million times more rich than anything he had ever read about. Tails flickered, expressions rushed through faces, complicated waves of odor and sound flashed through the pack like little storms. They were so incredibly integrated, they were like one person.

How could anybody have ever thought that these were simple beasts? Bob was faced with the shocking realization that the wolves had evolved an intelligence and a sense so great that it was literally incomparable, and yet so different from man's intelligence that it was all but invisible to the human mind.

There was no rational shape to it, no sense structure. It had words, though, sentences that were songs, and through it all there was creeping what he could only describe to himself as angry, rejecting prejudice.

His heart ached. He knew that he was going to have to fight again. It was so damn sad. He lowered his eyes and tail.

When he did, the whole pack erupted at him, barking with savage fury. Then their leader, their arrogant, strutting king, was at his throat, bellowing, his jaws flashing in the white, snowy light. There was more fury, more wildness in this assault than Bob had ever known before. It was literally fantastic in its energy, like a hurricane, like the explosion of a mountain, like some holocaust come down from heaven. The wolf snarled and snapped and slammed directly into Bob's chest. Bob was bowled completely over, his own growl sticking in his throat.

In all of his previous battles, with the shepherds at the pound, the coydogs in Central Park, with the bear, this had been the moment when his wolf instincts took over and carried him to victory. But this wolf was so powerful that it shattered all instinct. As he rolled and tumbled beneath its attack he was swept by aromas that stunned the very center of his being. He was awed, humbled, titillated by the smell of this wolf. He could not fight back, he just could not.

The wolf bit him hard in the throat and he found himself turning over on his back. He felt an awful, delicious stirring of what could only be described as ecstatic humility. He spread his legs and turned his head, baring throat and genitals to the powerful creature that dominated him. The wolf was not large, nor was he old, but he was so lordly, so proud, so certain of himself that Bob simply could not stand up to him.

For a moment he held Bob's throat, then he released it. Still full of strut and anger, the wolf suddenly did a most intimate and embarrassing thing. He bent down and nuzzled Bob's penis with his cold, damp nose. The contact injected a fiery vibration of purest pleasure into Bob's body, a pleasure so great that for a moment he was incapable of thought, of motion. As the wolf continued its exploration wave after wave of sheer, delicious enjoyment rocked Bob's being.

Then the pack leader tossed his head, snorted as if contemptuous of the gift he had given, and walked away from Bob. For a moment Bob lay there swooning, helpless. Then there came to him another aroma, this a scent he could identify from his old life: it was the smell of a woman.

She moved forth over him, circling him. He had never seen such beauty as the king's mate. She was young and strong, her fur shining white and light gray in the sun. Bob's own chemical essence poured desire through him. He almost wept to see such female magnificence. Hers was a new esthetic, of rich odors, deeply satisfying, the kind of smell Bob could imagine living within forever, intimate and sweet, conjuring images of furious passion. He recognized her odor: this was the wolf who had licked him after the fight with the bear.

When she stood over him, Bob again felt the same helpless wave of submission the king had given him. Then she also touched her nose to him, most intimately and without a trace of what he had once called shame. At once his body reacted, bursting with pleasure so great he thought it might actually kill him. For a long moment she continued, extending the examination, learning him.

When at length she was done with him, he was more in love than he had ever been or dreamed possible. The complex, equivocal coupling of his human life seemed a mutant shadow compared to this. She was so beautiful, so grand, so calm and magnificent—he could hardly believe her an earthly creature.

He knew the secret behind the feeling of the dog for its master. Canine love is not like human love, not at all: it is all rapture.

She stepped off him and, growling in her throat, strutted about with her tail high, as if enjoying her conquest. Her mate looked on warily. The tension coming from the other wolves was high. They whined and strutted, some of the lesser ones snapping at each other. One or two barked. Bob realized that the pack was in heat. Coming upon them, he had gone into heat, too. What a small word for the largest emotion and the greatest pleasure he had ever known. He found himself lying there on his back in the snow and thanking whatever God there was that he had been freed of the bondage of being human. Something in the air had changed. The wolves were no longer holding him captive, no longer humiliating him. He was free to rise, and he got up, to stand hangdog before the king and his queen, too much in love ever to leave them, too alien ever to be accepted.

The queen regarded him. Her face—all soft fur and glittering, passionate eyes—seemed not unwilling. He circled her, his nose drawn to the center of her magic, the spot beneath her tail from which there flowed her nectar.

Up close the smell was so good and so fascinating that he simply could not quit inhaling it.

With a little growl she moved away. She had sniffed him, too, but in a perfunctory manner, an act perhaps of protocol or at best mild curiosity. He was being rejected. How was that possible? How dare she drive him to such a pitch and then turn away from him?

With a quite involuntary snarl he leaped on her back. He felt his penis strike at her like an arrow.

Instantly she was out from under him. So quickly that he could not tell how she had done it, she upended him in the snow, and he found himself once again with his legs in the air. His throat hurt; she had grabbed him by the neck and turned him over.

Again she dominated him, this time licking his exposed penis and causing an explosion by doing it that actually did make him faint. For a few moments he was on another ground. The she-wolf seemed serenely regal. Far off Cindy stood, and in a thin voice called his name.

This time when she had finished with him, he found that he could not arise, not until every one of the other wolves had had his or her way with him. They strutted about in a kind of ecstasy of domination, one after another threatening him, standing over him, then examining him.

At the end of it there was not one of them to whom he would not roll. He would do anything to be with them, he adored them. To him they had acquired in full amount the magic he had always suspected was possessed by the nonhuman beings of the earth. They were living close to the central truth of things, their passions unencumbered by the cluttered mental hodgepodge that afflicted humankind.

When he got to his feet and went strutting toward them, the smallest and least of them, a scruffy little female wolf with a kink in her tail— the last one to have sniffed Bob—ran at him and snapped fiercely. Even though Bob was twice the animal's size, he turned away. The wolf wanted him to roll, and she barked furiously, then went for Bob's throat. Bob rolled, but another wolf had snapped at his attacker, who disappeared back into the milling, nervous pack.

Bob realized what had happened to him with these animals. Stunned by the unexpected intensity of the pleasure they were giving him, he had let himself be dominated by all of them. Instead of fighting for a place, he had wound up outside the pack's order altogether. He cursed himself for submitting to them. But how could he have avoided it? He would do the same thing again.

The little wolf, who was a female not in heat, bland smelling, returned to worry him. He wondered what would happen if he fought her. Or should he fight the lowest male, or go back to the king? He really had no idea. All he did know was that they had at once seduced and rejected him.

It was a more profound event than he at first realized. Night came on and he wound up sleeping some distance from the other wolves, outside of the inner border of their scent, the line beyond which they had to use scent marks to define their territory.

He would have thought they would huddle together in the snow, but each wolf slept alone, tightly curled in on himself, nose beneath tail.

Bob was not like them; he had neither their peace nor their confidence. Again and again in the night he remembered the extraordinary ecstasy they had granted him. If they could all evoke such powerful sensations in one another, how did they survive, how did they bear one another's presence? He was mad with lust and love, a trembling little creature beneath the cold stars, ignored by those whose touch he craved.

He raised his head in the middle of the night, alert with an idea that made him weak all over again. Perhaps, if he challenged the alpha female, she would once more carry out the ritual with him.

He had no trouble finding her: her heated scent made her a constant beacon to any wolf. None of the other females were like her. Bob got up and walked across the creaking snow. He bent over her motionless form and sniffed, smelling the sweet beneath the unwashed dogginess. Her muzzle was soft, her fur glowing in the starlight.

Then, with a snort, she leaped to her feet. Not an instant was wasted: she attacked Bob with snarling, barking fury. The whole pack awoke and jumped up, but he was already lying on his back. He was rewarded once again by the whole strutting, delightful ritual, and was again passed down the pack and out to the rear, being finally dominated by the scruffy little female.

He crawled away, besotted, crazed with a hunger for more. Some of them had been a little perfunctory this time, though. He suspected that he would bore them if he challenged too often. A wolf pack was a psychosexual Gethsemane for the rejects, a bed of love and torment. For its members, though, it was Eden.

God curse the serpent and the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Compared with the animals, man is numb, and it is knowledge that has made him that way. Bob looked up at the sky, and learned in that instant more about the whole wheeling of the universe than all science knew. Without words, he understood the subtle indeterminancies of the laws and saw the endless frame upon which time is woven. He knew the true purpose of thought: It is not to process information, but to seek the law. Modem science is the burned stubble of ancient magic. Once we flew: now we struggle sadly along.

Curled up tight, he slept fitfully in the snow. When he woke up, it was with a lingering impression that some sort of kindness had soothed him in the night. Then he saw the wolves moving. They were cast in golden light. They were deities. Highest among them was the heated goddess, who undulated, wagged her tail, and gobbled snow.

The wolves were excited, yapping and running about, dashing off into the snow with their noses to the ground, then coming back, tails high, eyes agleam.