Little Wolves (17 page)

It took him two hours to get the first rack filled, so when he came up from the fields and saw a strange truck in his driveway, a rust-eaten Silverado, he cursed under his breath. What stepped out of the truck was not the young,
boyish pastor Grizz had been expecting but an old spidery man with long arms. He was clad in a wool suit and carried a slender black briefcase.

Even after Grizz shut off the tractor it continued to hum and tick. The worst of his work awaited him. He’d have to unload the rack and shoot the bales up the conveyor belt into the hayloft, where the temperature likely broiled near one hundred degrees. It was too hot for this late in fall, the heat and drought relentless. He rinsed his face at the pump, in icy water drawn deep from the well.

“Looks like hard work,” the man said as he came toward Grizz.

“It’s nothing I can’t handle,” he said, water dripping from his beard.

The visitor introduced himself as a preacher from over in Amroy named Cyrus Easton, and when he opened his Bible and began to read to Grizz about the end of times, Grizz stopped him by setting his hand on his shoulder and squeezing hard. “You don’t even know where you are or who I am, do you? I’m Seth Fallon, and this is just outside Lone Mountain. Almost a week ago my son killed a man and then went into the corn and ate his gun. So, I’m not meaning to be rude, but you’re the last person on earth I want to talk to right now.”

The end of the world. The apocalypse. Grizz smiled, completely unhinged. What a sick sense of humor God must have to send a man like this to him on such a day.

Cyrus pulled away from him and reached into his
briefcase, extracting a brochure he left in the grass rather than hand him directly. “I heard about it on the radio,” he said, softer. “I’m sorry. Maybe I’ll come back another time.” He snapped his briefcase shut and peered up at the other man expectantly. “Might be I could tell you about heaven and how it’s possible for you and your son to be among the chosen.”

“You come back here and I’ll snap your neck with my bare hands.”

“Well, okay, then,” Cyrus said, gesturing at the brochure and walking to his truck. “You can look that over.” Then he seemed to think of something important because he paused midway. “ ‘Here I tell you a mystery,” he said, lifting his voice as though he were addressing not only Grizz but the cows in the pasture and the rest of creation. “ ‘We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed.’ ”

H
ERE
I
TELL YOU
a mystery.
Grizz had been waiting for news from the county, biding his time. He was not a man to bide time. After the little preacher man left, Grizz abandoned the rack of hay bales. Let the rain ruin them, let them rot. There were questions about Seth he had been pushing aside.

An hour later he parked his truck under the trees at the old landing. In a normal year the shade near the river hummed with bloodsuckers, but the summer of drought had palsied the oaks and stripped the cottonwoods bare. He left his truck and made for where he thought the place
might be, freshly fallen leaves crackling under his boots and releasing a dusty smell, like burned cinnamon, into the grove. The river beyond was little more than a stream, so shallow he could walk across it and hardly wet his ankles.

A little ways out, a channel catfish with a body as long as his arm rotted on the bare sand. All that remained were the barbed whiskers, hinged sucker jaws, a cage of bones. A prehistoric creature of mud and deep currents, it had probably been marooned here as the river dwindled to a shallow pond and then to nothing. The sun had bleached the scales gray, and a few crows worked at the head, picking at the flesh, before they saw Grizz and flapped their wings lazily in the heat, moving to the other side of the river.

Sweat crept down his spine. In the middle of the river a long golden sandbar gleamed under the sun. He thought of his son out here with that girl just a few months before. There would have been enough water then that Seth and Leah would have had to swim to reach the sandbar.

He let himself imagine it as it must have happened. A fire crackling from the shore in a sandy pit, a beer can sweating in his boy’s hand, the river a band of caramel under the moon, Leah dipping a red-painted nail into the water and asking,
You want to go swimming?

Can’t. Didn’t bring any suit
.

It was innocent, the girl had told Grizz. But had it been? He imagined her undoing the buttons of her cutoffs and letting them slide to the sand, showing long legs like a gazelle’s. And then quickly, while Seth gaped
openmouthed, the shirt peeled off and fluttered behind her, before she dived in her bra and panties, popping to the surface a ways from shore, her blonde hair dark and wet against her pale shoulders.
You coming in or not?
And when he had followed, stripping shyly with his back turned to her, and dived in after and found in her in the river, had she tasted of the beer and the river itself, the salty mineral heat of her true self, sweet breath and the carbon of stars?

A kiss, a long kiss, Seth fighting for footing as the lazy current pulled at them, Seth trying not to think of the channel cats the size of barracuda swimming near him, all the things sliding past him in that secret river. A long kiss before the girl pulled away and went for the sandbar, laughing.

They had not been alone, Leah had implied. Someone had stood on this shore as he did now, back in the trees, watching the two teenagers in the shining river. And if it had been Will, why hadn’t he arrested them for trespassing, two half-naked minors under the influence? Will Gunderson had not been the kind to look away while others broke the law. Unless Will himself had secrets out here. Unless this was not the first group of teenagers he had spied on.

Grizz breathed through his mouth, steadying himself. He had a hard time letting go of that vision of his son in the river with the girl. For a short time in the early part of summer he had stopped fearing for his son’s future, and let his guard down.

A beaten path led to a small cabin in the clearing. This
was the place Grizz had been heading for all along. The cabin leaned on its river-rock foundation, something mudded together in a bygone century. This was the place Leah had told him about, where Will brought vagrants and strangers to scare them. A sign warning that this was county property was nailed near the door, but some kid had spray-painted
FUCK YOU, PIG
in red letters over it.

A rusty lock sealed the door shut, but one kick of Grizz’s boots splintered the spongy wood around it and sprung it open. When he stepped inside, the first thing that hit him was the abrasive smell filling up the room. A table was pushed up against one wall and on it sat a Coleman camping stove, a kettle, and a tin of instant coffee next to some chipped mugs. Above this table tools hung by nails in the planking, pliers and brands and sheers. Big iron-jawed traps for beavers and muskrat also spread around the room. Grizz saw a bottle of Stop-Rot, a woman’s hairbrush, toothbrushes, a hot-glue gun, and a rusting hacksaw all arranged on an old potbellied stove. Along the wall rested the source of the stink, gallon buckets where dead things bobbed in what he guessed was formaldehyde.

“Oh, Christ,” he said when he realized what else was here. Deformed stuffed animals were posed around the room on benches and chairs made from logs. He had glanced over them at first, thinking of them ordinary taxidermy creations, animals Will had trapped and stuffed. But he had sewn the corpses back together in unusual ways. A muskrat’s body joined with the head and wings of a
pheasant rooster to make what looked like a baby griffin. A doe’s preserved head sprouted a single polished bone like a unicorn’s horn. The body of an old boar, gray and bristly, had been stood up on its hind hooves and then joined to a mannequin’s head draped with a shaggy wig. Half pig and half child, the creature’s front hooves raked the air as though fending off some attacker.

His mind tried to match the creations to the man he’d known, his dark good looks and military buzz cut he’d kept after leaving the service. Will had been a man who watched and saw everything.

A lone chair stood against one wall.

Grizz sat in it and felt it creak under his weight. His fingers traced the wood and found the place where it was scarred by rope burns. His son had been here. He had been roped into this chair.

He shut his eyes, tried to see it. Will lifting the pliers from the wall, running them along the blue flame in the stove. The black, ashy smell of it. Will bringing it close to Seth, pulling up the boy’s shirt to expose the soft, pale flesh. The burning. Burning him in secret places. Following it with a fist to the ribs, a slap. Seth wetting himself in fear and shame. Will hurting him just enough so that Seth could walk away once more.

Had Grizz seen marks on the body? He hadn’t looked. He had lacked the courage. It came to him that Sheriff Steve Krieger had known about this place from the beginning. He had been the one who trained Will Gunderson
about law and order. As in-laws the two had trapped and hunted these woods together.

No one wanted to see this, Grizz knew. In town they already had the story they wanted, one about a Vietnam veteran, a hero, and a violent teenage delinquent. Grizz breathed in the acrid smell of the room, his eyes stinging. Across from him the pig child stretched open his mouth in a solitary scream.

Grizz stood and let the chair clatter behind him. Somewhere out on the road a car passed, spitting up gravel. He was aware once more of the outer world, those crows cawing as they fought over the last of the fish down at the river. Farther off in town the bells were ringing. The bells of Trinity Lutheran. Grizz knew in that moment he was hearing the end of Will’s funeral service.

RITES

L
ogan faced the congregation in his alb, a white robe meant to remind them of their baptism, as he began to tell them about Sheriff Will Gunderson. Clara listened to his homily now and measured his words against the man she had known, if only in passing.

Gossips had told her that during divorce proceedings his wife, Laura, alleged physical abuse. Within a few days Clara had been warned what might happen if she drove even a few miles over the speed limit or failed to come to a full stop at any intersection. The ex-wife sat in the very front pew, flanked on either side by her sons. Directly behind the family sat Steve, Laura’s father, and the rest of the sprawling Krieger clan, including Gretel and Bynthia in a side aisle in her wheelchair.

Clara’s only encounter with Sheriff Will Gunderson had happened in the town grocery store. Will had been a
thin man, black haired, his arms long and ropy. When she entered the store, he had been leaning against a counter, his hand lightly touching a cashier’s, a teenage girl laughing too loudly at something he said. His smile vanished the moment the bell dinged to announce Clara’s entrance. She had felt his gaze on her, tracking her as she moved to the next aisle and left them alone. No, she had only seen him in passing, but Will had seemed a man at ease in his skin, a man of appetites. The entire town packed the sanctuary. Normally, the front of the church was a no-man’s-land that only Clara occupied, but today she was wedged in tight a few rows behind the grieving family, surrounded by people she had never met. Like others in the crowd, she fanned herself with her bulletin. It was too damn hot to be dressed like this, and she felt sympathy for Logan in all his priestly layers, his face shining in the heat. Though the windows were open in the hopes of a cooling breeze, the air remained stagnant.

Midway through Logan’s homily, a wind picked up out of the east, and the sanctuary filled with a putrefying odor. Logan, his face scanning the crowd, froze. The unnatural smell swelled in the room, a searing cloud that burned inside Clara’s nose. Stricken, Logan suffered a coughing fit, and the smooth and orderly service began to break down.

The nightmare. Clara remembered his dream of seeing the devil out in the crowd, an ordinary man in a suit. She looked around her, and he could have been any of the men
here. Logan’s face purpled, as if the smell had stolen the breath from his lungs. People began to shift in their pews, muttering among themselves, and a good minute passed before the church secretary emerged from a side door bearing a cup of ice water. Logan shook as he guzzled it, spilling some on his alb and vestments. The terrible odor seemed to gather strength.

A man spoke from the balcony, and Clara craned her neck along with many others. The balcony, occupied by the hard-liners, the ones who could remember when the service was still conducted in German, was entirely gray haired. The man spoke again. “It’s all right, Pastor,” he called down, “just a little fresh country air.”

Logan handed the glass back to the secretary. He smiled faintly and wiped his brow while nervous laughter rolled through the room. The smell had seemed to rise from the fields where the boy had killed himself, but it hadn’t. It had come from the hog barns east of town. The Gunderson farm, which the boys were going to inherit, the biggest in the valley with six barns and vast holding pits for all that manure. It was ordinary hog shit they were smelling, nothing supernatural. The laughter didn’t last long; they all knew why they were here and were anxious to escape the cloying heat. Clara roasted along with them, her dark dress stretching around her big stomach, imagining the baby inside her baking like a lumpy potpie.

“With the death of Sheriff Gunderson we lost a hero, a father, a protector. We cannot forget his sacrifice. With his
passing, we want to know that we are safe. We want safety for our children. We want to be sure God will protect us in our hour of need.”

His eyes scanned the room as he found his words. “And yet, God does not call us to lead safe lives. If anything our faith makes us more vulnerable to the world, which belongs to the devil.” His words made Clara nervous. She felt the rest of the congregation straining toward him. He was not going to gloss over what had happened. He named the sheriff’s death a murder. He named the boy a suicide. Clara knew the congregation around her also listened intently because people had stopped fanning themselves with their bulletins. A stillness settled.