Wolverton Station (3 page)

There was nothing in his pockets he could use: a few twenty-­pound notes, his ticket, a map of the train line. The woodcutter was alone in the deep, dark forest without his ax, without even a Swiss Army knife, not that a Swiss Army knife would do him any good. Saunders was seized by an image of himself knocked flat on his back, the wolf in the scally cap pinning him down, his wretched breath in Saunders’s face, and Saunders raking at him frantically with the dull, ridiculous, inch-­and-­a-­half-­long blade of a Swiss Army knife. He felt a laugh rise in his throat and choked it back, understood he was quivering on the edge not of hilarity but of panic. Empty pockets, empty head—­ No. Wait. The map. He jerked the map out of his pocket and unfolded it. It took an effort of will to focus his eyes . . . but whatever his other flaws, Saunders had always had will to spare. He looked for the Liverpool line and began to follow it north from London, wondering about the stop after Wolverton Station, how far it might be.

He spotted Wolverton Station about two-­thirds of the way to Liverpool. Only it wasn’t Wolverton Station on the map, it was
Wolverhampton.
He blinked rapidly, as if trying to clear some grit out of his eyes. He supposed it was possible that he had misread the sign at the last stop and that it had
always
been Wolverhampton. Which made the next stop Foxham. Maybe there would be foxes waiting on the platform there. He felt another dangerous, panicky laugh rise in his throat—­like bile—­and swallowed it down. Laughing now would be as bad as screaming.

He had to insist to himself there would be
­people
in Foxham, that if he could get off the train, there was a chance he might live. And on his map, Foxham was barely a quarter inch from the Wolverhampton stop. The train might be almost there, had been rushing along at a hundred-­plus miles an hour for at least fifteen minutes (
No. Try three minutes,
said a silky, bemused voice in his mind.
It’s only been
three
minutes since you noticed that the man sitting beside you wasn’t a man at all but some kind of werewolf, and Foxham is still half an hour away. Your body will be room temperature by the time you get there.
)

Saunders had gotten turned around and started, unconsciously, to walk back the way he had come, still staring at his map. At the last moment, he realized he had pulled abreast of the wolf reading the
Financial Times.
At the sight of the giant dog-­faced thing on the periphery of his vision, he felt icy-­hot skewers in his chest, needling toward his heart: Saunders, the human pincushion.
You aren’t too old for a cardiac arrest, buddy,
he thought—­another notion that wouldn’t do him any good right now.

Saunders pretended to be lost in the study of his map and kept walking, wandering down to the next row of seats. He looked up, blinking, then settled into a seat on the opposite side of the aisle. He tried to make it look like an absentminded act, a thing done by a man so interested in what he was looking at that he’d forgotten where he was going. He didn’t believe that his performance fooled the wolf with the
Financial Times
in the least. Saunders heard him make a deep, woofy-­sounding
harrumph
that seemed to express disgust and amusement alike. If he wasn’t fooling anyone, Saunders didn’t know why he went on playacting interest in his map, except that it felt like the safest thing.

“Did you find the loo?” asked the businesswolf.

“Occupied,” Saunders said.

“Right,” the wolf said.
Ro-­ight.
“You
are
an American.”

“Guess you could tell by the accent.”

“I knew by the smell of you. You Americans have different accents—­your southern accent, your California-­surfer accent, your Noo Yawk accent.” Affecting an atrocious faux-­Queens accent as he said it. “But you all smell the same.”

Saunders sat very still, facing straight ahead, his pulse thudding in his neck.
I am going to be killed and eaten by a wolf on an English train,
he thought, then realized that somewhere in the last few moments his mantra had turned from a statement of negation to one of affirmation. It came to him that the time for pretend was well past. He folded his map and put it back in his pocket.

“What do we smell like?” Saunders asked.

“Like cheeseburgers,” said the wolf, and he barked with laughter. “And entitlement.”

I am going to be killed and eaten by a wolf on an English train,
Saunders thought again, and for a moment the idea wasn’t the worst notion in the world. It was bad, but even worse would be sitting here letting himself be taunted before it happened, taking it with his tail between his legs.

“Fuck you,” Saunders said. “We smell like money. Which beats the hell out of stinking like wet dog.” His voice shaking just slightly when he said it.

He didn’t dare turn his head to look at the wolf directly, but he could watch him from the corner of his eye, and he saw one of those erect, bushy ears rotate toward him, tuning in on his signal.

Then the first-­class businesswolf laughed—­another harsh woof. “Don’t mind me. My portfolio has taken a beating the last ­couple months. Too many American stocks. It’s left me a bit sore, as much at myself as at you lot. It aggravates me that I bought into the whole thing, like everyone else in this blighted country.”

“Bought into what whole thing?” Saunders asked. A part of his mind cried out in alarm,
Shut the fuck up! What are you doing? Why are you talking to
it
?

Except.

Except the train was slowing, almost imperceptibly. Saunders doubted that under normal circumstances he would’ve noticed, but now he was attuned to fine details. That was how it worked when your life was measured in seconds: You felt your own breath, were aware of the temperature and weight of the air on your own skin, heard the prickling
tic-­tic
of the rain on the windows. The train had hitched, slowed, and hitched again. The night continued to blur past the windows, some rain splatter sprinkling against the glass, but Saunders thought there was a chance they were closing on Foxham, or whatever was next down the tracks. And if the businesswolf was talking to him, then he wasn’t attacking.

“The American fairy tale,” the wolf said. “You know the one. That we can all be like you. That we should all
want
to be like you. That you can wave your American Tinker Bell dust over our pathetic countries and abracadabra! A McDonald’s here and an Urban Outfitters there and England will be just like home.
Your
home. I am honestly humiliated to ever have believed it. You would think a bloke like me, of all ­people, would know it isn’t true. You can stick a Disneyland T-­shirt on a wolf, but it’s still a wolf.”

The train hitched and slowed another degree. When Saunders looked out his window, he could see brick town houses flashing by, some lights on behind a few of the windows, and bare trees tossing in the wind, clawing at the sky. Even the trees were different in England. They were the same varieties you found in the States but subtly unlike American trees, more gnarled and bent, as if twisted by colder, harsher winds.

“Everyone is dead in the other car,” Saunders said, feeling curiously removed from himself, from his own voice.

The wolf grunted.

“Why not me?”

The wolf didn’t look at him, seemed to be losing interest in the conversation. “This is first class. If you can’t get civility here, where can you get it? Besides. I’m wearing a Gieves & Hawkes. This suit set me back five hundred quid. Wouldn’t do to stain it. And what’s the point of riding first class if you have to chase down your own grub? They bring a trolley through for us.” He leafed to the next page of his
Times.
“At least they’re supposed to. They’re taking their fucking time about it, aren’t they?” He paused, then added, “Please pardon my language. The thing about civility—­it’s hard to maintain when you’re barking mad with hunger.”

The conductor said something in a choked, wolfish voice on the intercom, but Saunders couldn’t hear him over what his own wolf was saying to him and above the roar of blood in his ears. But he didn’t need to hear the conductor anyway, because Saunders knew what he was saying. They had arrived at the station at last. The train was slamming ungently to rest. Saunders grabbed the seat in front of him and lurched to his feet. Outside, he had a glimpse of a concrete platform, a brick breezeway, a glowing old-­fashioned clock stuck up on the station wall. He began walking swiftly for the front of the car.

“ ’Ey,” laughed the wolf. “Don’t you want your coat? Come on back and get it.”

Saunders kept walking. He reached the door at the end of the cabin in five long strides and hit the
DOOR OPEN
button. The wolf barked a last laugh at Saunders’s back, and Saunders dared a final glance over his shoulder. The businesswolf was disappearing behind his paper once more.

“Microsoft shares are down,” the wolf said, in a tone that somehow combined disappointment with a certain rueful satisfaction. “Nike shares are down. This isn’t a recession, you know. This is reality. You ­people are finding out the actual worth of the things you make: your sneakers, your software, your coffee, your myths. You ­people are finding out now what it’s like when you push too far into the deep, dark woods.”

Then Saunders was out the door and on the platform. He had thought it was raining, but what came down was more of a weak, cold mist, a fine-­grained moisture suspended in the air. The station exit was across the platform, a flight of stairs to the road below.

He had gone no more than five paces before he heard loud, derisive yipping behind him and looked back to see two wolves descending from coach. Not the wolves in suits but the one in the Wolfgang Amadeus T-­shirt and the other dressed for a Manchester United match. Manchester United clapped Wolfgang on the shoulder and jerked his snout in Saunders’s direction.

Saunders ran. He had been fast once, on his track team in high school, but that had been fifty years and five thousand Whoppers ago. He didn’t need to look back to know they were behind him, loping across the concrete, and that they were faster than him. He reached the staircase and leaped down it, three, four stairs in each step, a kind of controlled falling. His breath screamed in his throat. He heard one of the wolves make a low, purring growl at the top of the stairs. (And how could they be at the top of the stairs already? It wasn’t possible that they could’ve closed so much distance so quickly, it
wasn’t.
)

At the bottom of the steps was the line of gates, and the street beyond, and a taxi waiting, a black English taxi straight out of a Hitchcock movie. Saunders picked a gate and ran straight at it. The gates: a row of chrome dividers, with waist-­high black Plexiglas shutters between them. You were supposed to stick your ticket into a slot on the top of the chrome dividers and the shutters would swing open, but Saunders wasn’t going to fuck with it. When he reached the Plexiglas shutters, he went right over them, in a graceless scramble, followed by a tumble to the ground.

He sprawled onto his stomach, facedown on the rain-­spattered concrete. Then he was up again. It was like a skip in a piece of film, so it hardly seemed he had gone down at all. He had never in his life imagined he could recover so quickly from a spill.

Someone yelled behind him. Every set of gates in every train station in the UK had an officer to watch over them and take tickets manually, and Saunders thought this had to be who that was. He could even see him out of the corner of his left eye, a guy in an orange safety vest, white-­haired and bearded. Saunders didn’t slow down or look over. A joke floated unbidden to his mind: Two hikers in the woods come across a bear. One of them bends over to lace his sneakers. The other hiker says, “Why tie your sneakers? You can’t outrun a bear.” And the first hiker says, “No shit, asshole. I only need to outrun
you.
” Pretty funny. Saunders would remind himself to laugh about it later.

He fell against the back of the taxi, clawed for the door lever, found it, popped it open. He collapsed into the black leather seat.

“Go,” he said to the driver.
“Go.”

“Where are we—­” said the driver, in the thick accent of western England.

“Town. Into town. I don’t know yet, just go.
Please.
”

“Right then,” the driver said. The taxi loosened itself from the curb and pushed off down the avenue.

Saunders twisted in his seat to look out the rear window as they left the train station. Manchester United and Wolfgang Amadeus had stopped at the gate. They crowded around the ticket taker, towering over him. Saunders didn’t know why the ticket man just stood there staring back at them, why he didn’t recoil and run, why they didn’t fall on him. The taxi carried him around the corner and out of sight of the station before he could see what happened next.

He sat in the darkness, breathing fast and hard, incredulous at his own survival. His legs shook, the big muscles in his thighs bunching up and uncoiling helplessly. He had not shaken the whole time he was on the train, but now it was as if he had just climbed out of an ice bath.

The cab glided down a long, gradual hill, past hedges and houses, dipping toward the lights of a town. Saunders found one of his hands feeling in his pocket for the cell phone he knew he didn’t have.

“Phone,” he said, talking to himself. “Damn phone.”

“Need a phone?” said the driver. “I’m sure there was one at the station.”

Saunders glanced at the back of the driver’s head, peering at him in the dark of the car. A big man with long black hair tucked down into the collar of his coat.

“There wasn’t time to stop and make a call there. Just take me to someplace with a public phone. Someplace else.”

“There’s one at the Family Arms. That’s only a ­couple blocks.”

“Family Arms? What’s that? Pub?” Saunders’s voice cracked, as if he were a fourteen-­year-­old in the throes of puberty.