Wolf Moon (2 page)

    One day at the quarry a fierce murderer named Maples, a man nobody troubled, not even the guards, started making fun of a fifteen-year-old boy who was serving time for killing his father. The boy was pretty and slender as a girl. It was whispered that Maples was sweet on the boy but that the boy wouldn't oblige him in any way. This day at the quarry Maples suddenly went crazy. For no reason that anybody could see, he grabbed the boy and hurled him into the water. Then Maples, still crazed and angrier than anybody had seen him, ran down into the water himself and grabbed the boy, who was just now getting up, and held the boy down under the water till he drowned. Several times the boy surfaced, screaming and puking, but Maples just kept holding his head under until the deed was done. I started down into the water, but an old con who'd always looked out for me grabbed my arm and whispered, "Maples'll just kill you next, kid, if'n you go down there." And I knew he was right. And so I just stood there like all the other men in that hot dusty quarry and watched one man kill another.

    My fourth year there tuberculosis walked up and down the cell blocks. More than two hundred men died in four months.

    In all my time inside I had only one fight, when a new man, trying to impress everybody, made fun of my face, how it was all scarred up from the wolf that time. I don't know why it bothered me so much, but it did and I damned near killed him with my fists. For that I got what the guards called a "shower bath," which meant stripping me naked and directing a stream of high pressure water from a hose to my face, chest, and crotch. When you fell down, they kept spraying away, till your balls were numb and your nose and mouth ran with blood. I was so sick with diarrhea afterward, I lost twenty pounds in the next week and a half.

    In a way, even though I'd been angry when the warden told me I couldn't grow a beard, I was grateful for how scarred my face was. Sure, people looked away when they first saw me-I was a monster now, not a human being-but my appearance always reminded me of why, lying there in the doc's office right after the white wolf attacked me-why, despite the physical pain from the bites and slashes, and the mental pain of having seen both my brothers die-why I wanted to go on living.

    I wanted to repay Schroeder for how he'd betrayed us. That was my one reason for existing.

    Parole was not a major event. Early in the morning of a certain day, a guard took me forward to the warden's office, where I received ten dollars, a suggestion that I read every day the Bible the warden had just handed me, and a plea to stay away from bad people like myself. When you wait so many years for something, you expect to feel exuberant. I didn't feel much of anything at all. I just wanted to see Gillian and hear more about Schroeder.

    A buggy took me to the train depot, where I sat for an hour on a hard little bench and let the locals gawk at me. It probably wasn't real hard to see that I'd just gotten out of prison.

    

    

    By the time it was a year and a half old, the wolf was no longer a pup. Nor was it exactly a wolf. Its weight of 160 pounds marked its maturity, but the tasks it performed belonged not to the wolf family-which was essentially peaceful except for hunting-but to a predatory state that could only be man-made.

    Schroeder, using methods a wolfer named Briney had shown him, built an enormous cage for the animal and let him out only when there was a task to be performed-or only when the wolf was being trained.

    Schroeder believed that violence begat violence, and so he was remarkably cruel with the wolf. When the animal failed to perform properly, Schroeder beat the animal until it crawled and whimpered. Thus broken, it once again became malleable.

    Schroeder trained the animal for eight months before testing it.

    One chill March day, Schroeder took a husky about the same size as the wolf and put it in the cage, locked the door, and spoke aloud the Indian command for "kill, " which was supposed to turn the wolf into a frenzied beast.

    The wolf did not turn on the husky.

    Schroeder spent an hour alternately calling out the command and threatening the animal.

    When it was finally clear that the wolf would not attack the husky, Schroeder opened the cage, withdrew the dog, and then began beating the wolf until the animal seemed ready to turn on its master.

    But Schroeder had been ready for that. He clubbed the animal across the skull with a ball bat. The animal collapsed into unconsciousness.

    This training continued until the year that Schroeder met the Chase brothers and arranged for them to rob the bank of which he was part owner.

    By then the wolf was obedient, as he proved when he murdered the one Chase brother and cruelly attacked the other.

    The wolf no longer remembered the smell of smoky autumn winds and the taste of cool clear creek water and the beauty of sunflowers in the lazy yellow sunlight. He no longer even remembered his mother and father.

    There was just the cage. There was just his master. There was just the whip. There was just the prey he was sometimes ordered to kill and rend.

    He was still called a wolf, of course, by everyone who saw him.

    But he was no longer a true wolf at all. He was something more. And something less.

    On a fine sunny dawn, the roosters stirring, the wolf awoke to find that he had company in the large cage.

    A raccoon had burrowed under the wire and was just now moving without any fear or inhibition toward the wolf

    Instinctively the wolf knew something was wrong with the raccoon. For one thing, such an animal was not very often brave, not around a wolf anyway.

    And for another, there was the matter of the raccoon 's mouth, and the curious foamy substance that bearded it. Something was very wrong with this raccoon.

    It struck before the wolf had time to get to its feet.

    It ripped into the wolf's forepaw and brought its jaws tight against the bone.

    The wolf cried out in rage and pain, utterly surprised by the speed and savagery with which the raccoon had moved.

    In moments the raccoon was dead, trapped in the teeth and jaws of the wolf as it slammed the chunky body of the raccoon again and again against the bars of the cage.

    And then the wolf, still enraged, eviscerated it, much as the wolf had been taught to eviscerate humans.

    Then it was done.

    The wolf went back to his favorite end of the cage and lay down. His forepaw still hurt and he still cried some, but oddly, he was tired, exhausted, and knew he needed sleep.

    When he woke, he stared down at the forepaw. A terrible burning had infected it.

    He still wondered about the raccoon and where it had gotten all that nerve to come into his cage and attack him.

    Soon enough the wolf went back to sleep, the inexplicable drowsiness claiming him once again.

    

    

    In the summer of '98 the folks in Rock Ridge were just starting to sink the poles and string the wire for telephones. I knew this because all three of the town's newspapers told me about it right on the front page, in the kind of civic-pride tone most mining-town papers use to prove that they really are, after all, a bunch of law-abiding Christian people.

    On a sunny June morning filled with bird song and silver dew, I sat in a crowded restaurant located between a lumberyard and a saddlery. The place smelled of hot grease, tobacco smoke, and the sweaty clothes of the laborers.

    Near midnight I'd pitched from my dry and dusty mount and taken a room down the street at the Excelsior Hotel. I didn't know exactly what to expect from Gillian yet.

    According to the Gazeteer, Rock Ridge was a town of four thousand souls, five banks, twelve churches (I found it curious that the Gazeteer folks would list banks before houses of the Lord), two schools, ten manufacturing plants, and a police department of "eighteen able and trustworthy men, among the finest in all the West." (On a following page was a small story about how a prisoner had died of a "mysterious fall" in his jail cell, and how his widowed mother was planning to sue the town, which of course told me a hell of a lot more about the police force than all of the newspaper's glowing adjectives.)

    I was just about to ask for another cup of coffee when the front door opened up and a man in a dark blue serge uniform with shiny gold buttons on the coat came in, the coat resembling a Union Army jacket that had been stripped of all insignia. He wore a Navy Colt strapped around his considerable belly and carried in his right hand a long club that had an impressive number of knicks and knocks on it, not to mention a few dark stains that were likely blood that soap hadn't been able to cleanse. The contrast of his natty white gloves only made the club look all the more brutal. He had a square and massive blond head and intelligent blue eyes that were curiously sorrowful. He was probably my age, on the lee side of thirty.

    He made a circuit, the policeman, like a mayor up for re-election, ultimately offering a nod, a handshake, a smile or a soft greeting word to virtually everybody in the place. And they grinned instantly and maybe a little too heartily, like kids trying hard not to displease a mean parent. They were afraid of him, and some of them even despised him, and the more they grinned and the more they laughed at his little jokes, the more I sensed their fear.

    When he was done, he walked over to a plump serving woman who had long been holding a lone cup of coffee for him. He thanked her, looked around, and then settled his eyes on me.

    He came over, pulled out a chair, sat down and put forth a hand that looked big and strong enough to choke a full-grown bear.

    "You'd be Mr. Chase?"

    I nodded.

    "Got your name at the hotel desk. Always like to know who's staying over in our little town."

    I said nothing, just watched him. Hick law, I figured, trying to intimidate me into pushing on. He wouldn't know anything about my time in prison, but he wouldn't want me around town, either, not unless I had some reason for being here.

    "Name's Ev Hollister. I'm the chief of police."

    "Nice to meet you."

    "This is a friendly place."

    "Seems to be."

    "And we're always happy to welcome strangers here."

    "I appreciate that."

    "Long as we know their business." When he finished with this line, he shot me one of his empty white smiles.

    "May be looking for a place to settle."

    "You have any special trade?"

    
Yeah
, I wanted to say,
bank robbing. Which bank would you suggest I hit first?
"Nothing special. Little of this, little of that."

    "Little of this, little of that, huh?"

    "Uh-huh." I gave him one of my own empty white smiles. "All strictly legal of course."

    "Glad you said that."

    "Oh?"

    He took some of his coffee and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He was proud of those hands the way a man is proud of a certain gun. They were outsize, powerful hands. "Cholera came through here three months ago."

    "Bad stuff."

    "Struck the Flannery family especially hard."

    "They kin of yours?"

    "No, but they gave this town two of the best officers I ever had. Brothers. About your age and build. Damned good men." He looked at me straight and hard. "You ever thought of being a police officer?"

    I could imagine the men back in territorial prison listening in on this conversation. They'd be howling.

    "Guess not, Chief."

    "Well, if you stay around here, you should consider it. The work is steady and the pay ain't bad, forty-eight dollars a month. And folks have a lot of respect for a police officer."

    My mind drifted back to the mother of the youngster who'd died in a "mysterious fall" in his jail cell. I wondered how much respect she had for police officers.

    "Well, I sure do appreciate the interest, Chief. How about I think it over for a couple days?"

    "Lot of men would jump at the chance to be on my police force." There was just a hint of anger in his tone. He wasn't used to getting turned down.

    I put forth my hand.

    He stood up and made a big pretense of not seeing my hand sticking out there.

    "You think it over," he said, and left.

    The smile was back on him as soon as he reached the front of the place, where he flirted with a couple of ladies at a table and told a bawdy joke to an old man with a hearing horn. I knew it was bawdy by the way the old guy laughed, that burst of harsh pleasure.

    Through the window, I watched Chief Hollister make his way down the street. The water wagon was out already, soaking down the dust as much as possible. A telephone pole was being planted on a corner half a block away. Ragged summertime kids stood watching, fascinated. Later they'd spin tales of how different a place Rock Ridge would be with telephones.

    Up in the hills you could see the mines, watch the smoke rise and hear the hard rattling noise of the hoists and pumps and mills. In prison an ex-miner had told me what it was like to be 2,300 feet down when the temperature hit 120 and they had to lower ice down the shaft because that low your tools got so hot you sometimes couldn't hold them. And sometimes you got so dehydrated and sick down there that you started puking up blood-all so two or three already rich men in New York could get even richer.

    And who would keep all those miners in line if they ever once started any kind of real protest?

    None other than the dead-eyed man I'd just met, Rock Ridge's esteemed police chief, Ev Hollister. Over in Leadville they'd recently given a police chief and two of his officers $500 each for killing three miners who were trying to lead a strike. Law was the same in all mining towns.