Hunger of the Wolf (12 page)

In Pekora, South Dakota, in the spring of 1939, in the middle of negotiations with the stoic owner of
The Agricultural Fair Dealer
, Dale and Jack were dining on wonton soup and fried rice, past midnight, in the Garden of Earthly Delights, when Jack, not looking up from his bowl to take a hefty gulp of rye, said, “I guess I'll take over the negotiation tomorrow, boss.”

The full moon rose that night. Dale searched Jack's face, but his eyes stayed at the bottom of his bowl. They had shared the road for months and Dale had assumed, like he had to, that his explanations—bad flus, family visits—had been accepted.

“Unless you plan to come in,” Jack added.

“No, you take it, Jack.”

“The thing about me, boss,” Jack said, tongueing a clot of oily rice out of his undergums. “I'm smart enough to know what I don't want to know.”

The dread blushed over Dale again. And what was Jack's secret? That's what Dale, shifting in the booth, wanted to know. What moonlit howl was Jack keeping to himself that he understood so casually how to treat a secret life?

*  *  *

The gambling sure wasn't his secret. Not a small town in the whole Midwest that didn't have a back alley door willing to welcome Jack Taggart down a flight of low steps into a gathering of the dentist, the doctor, the lawyer, and the main street storeowners. They loved Jack. At any game they cared to play, he was the best player in the room. His problem was that he would deliberately take odds that he knew were poor, just for the sake of the gamble. When he won, he was vicious. Catching an ace in the hick seed lot back room, he screamed, “Go pick pennies out of the urinal.” When he lost, clutching his hair, he stumbled out over the smashed glass of broken bottles, the tossed butts of all those townie sons of bitches laughing, displaying the trophy of the necktie he had wagered on a thin draw.

Dale preferred Jack losing. To cure himself of the sting of losing, Jack could sell dog meat to a Brahmin. He was the ideal hustler: a gifted salesman whose biggest scores lasted mere days, who lived in the begging rumblings of a permanent need for high-profit wins. Jack cut angles for others even when he couldn't himself. He put Dale on to Utah bonds when they were selling at pennies on the dollar; a
Western government, he figured, could never stomach the humiliation of a default. When the bonds were later realized at par, the windfall provided a rare cash infusion into the Wylie properties. Later, in the 1950s, Taggart picked the sites of the Texas oil drills. Jack Taggart was always lucky for the Wylies, even if he was a curse on himself, and the curse spilled over his life in periodic, mesmerizing waves of degradation.

While Dale checked figures, Jack sat across the train table in a pool of self-disgust, rumpled, gambled-away, and Dale never spoke; he usually waited until the mud puddle of Taggart's mood, which sunk into clotted self-pity, inevitably evaporated as they pulled into the next town, where he could earn it all back in commission, which he almost always managed to lose again at dice or cards or in the darkly magical whisking of stones into cardinal corners that the degenerates called fan-tan.

Dale was surprised when Jack, flummoxed in his usual way, broke the silence. They were pulling out of a dense, flat, brambly odor of cattle in the dark of the train station in Sioux Falls into the clear disconcerting light of the foothills on their way to Oregon, to investigate a few papers that might be up for grabs.

“How long we been doing this, Dale?” Jack asked.

Dale looked up from the latest batch of telegrams. “You've been with me almost two years now.”

“How long we going to keep doing this?”

“Until I'm sitting on a throne of diamonds on a pile of money that reaches to the moon.”

“That's what you need?”

Need? How could he talk like there was an end to need? A boy in Hamilton College who would sometimes be a wolf, who would
someday share in the beastliness, someday need to hide. That would do for a lifetime's neediness. Self-pity makes men stupid.

“You'll do it forever,” Dale tried. “You can't not do it. You are a force of nature.”

“I'm broke, Dale.”

“So what? You'll earn it all back in Portland or wherever we're going now. Where are we going?”

“And then lose it again?”

“And then win it again, like you always do. I'm not your mother but you could stand to stop the gamble when you're up for once.”

Jack shot his cuffs, badgered his nose. “I'm broke in a deeper way.”

“Don't kid a kidder,” Dale said.

Jack rubbed a hand over his stubble. “I've got to tell you something that I don't want to tell you.”

Again Jack filled Dale with dread, an after-lemony drying in his mouth, like his chest was a squeezed sponge. “Are you sure you want to tell me then?”

“I don't know who else I'm going to tell. That's about the size of it. That's about where I'm sitting right now.”

Jack Taggart's secret was a family in Florida, a wife named Scarlet and a son named Lee, starving in Sarasota. The cash Jack was gambling away wasn't entirely his to chuck in fistfuls on the bonfire.

He was begging Dale for a loan. Dale never gave him a loan. On the train in the foothills, Dale instead made the shrewdest deal of his life. He agreed to take care of Jack's wife and son, so long as Jack worked for him. He would set them up in the coach house behind Larchmount Crescent—which meant, incidentally, that he could write off all repairs on the property as business expenses. And he would send Lee to Hamilton College with his own son—also writing off the expenses as a part of Lee's
salary. In total, Dale Wylie bought a family, forever, for a few thousand dollars a year. Jack Taggart was unable to stop himself from falling into Dale's arms, shuddering with happy sobs of gratitude, in public, on a moving train headed to the next newspaper or radio station or whatever else was there for the buying.

*  *  *

When Jack's wife and son arrived in Champlain, George watched the boy and his mother arrive from the backyard second-floor window. Their cheap summeriness stood out against the angular skeletons of the October trees, the rusty pillows of dank piled leaves. They were wearing the same outfit: matching cream shorts and orange juice shirts. The mother was a pinup drawing magically sprung to life, a Southern belle Floridified, a pink stick of chewing gum that walked around. The boy squirmed like a drooping humiliated flower. Marie Wylie answered the door.

“Hi. Are y'all the Wylies?”

“I'm Marie Wylie.” She offered her hand but Scarlet threw herself into her fellow woman's arms, reeking of rum like an Easter candy.

“I am just so pleased to meet you. Jack has told us all about you, and how wonderful this country is up here. It's a bit cold, though, isn't it? A bit too little of the sun. Look at me, all bubbling over when I've got unpacking to do. This is my boy, Lee.”

She reached over to the shoulders of the boy, whose sullenness looked starved, so hungry he'd forgotten hunger.

“Pleased to meet you, Lee.”

“Pleased to meet you.”

“Ma'am,” Scarlet corrected.

“Ma'am,” Lee added.

“All of it.”

“Pleased to meet you, ma'am,” Lee recited.

George could see the ambivalence of his grandmother. Marie disapproved of the woman's liveliness, sympathized with her effort to present herself, hated her colors, liked her manners. “I hope you find the coach house to your liking,” she said.

“I'm sure we will. I know we will. Now, I'd better skedaddle and help the movers organize our things. You know how that can be.”

Marie restrained herself from offering any help. You never know with Southerners. She might be taken seriously. “Good luck with that. See you later.”

Scarlet bumbled over to the coach house, passing a flirtatious remark to the most heavyset lifter, a mass of mover, who lowered a credenza to leer at her curves as she sashayed into the house. Lee was left in the wake of the moving men and furniture, an afterthought lounging on the grass, studying a local civilization of ants. He had a sunburned face, eyes like spilled ink. George drifted downstairs; his father would want him to.

“You must be Lee,” George said.

“You're George, right?” The bright boy lifted x-ray eyes.

“That's right.” George curled on the other side of the thickening ants in the grass, great adventurers in a hidden world.

“They told me we were supposed to be friends.” Lee held out an arm crawling with half a dozen bits of black.

George nodded with automatic admiration. “That's what they told me, too.”

They talked about ants. Ants never needed to know if they were important or not—every one irrelevant as the next. Already they had recognized that neither of them was used to talking, not to other boys
or to themselves, and that they both were living in dark silent houses, and neither of them saw his father much. George and Lee shared their loneliness, which is a stronger bond than mere companionship. They were imitating their fathers. Who isn't?

*  *  *

As he grew older and richer, Dale preferred the movies to people. It was at the Paradise Theater, in Champlain, that he saw
The Wolfman
—all right and all wrong—and after the show, he wandered through the old neighborhood in a daze of half recognition, until he found himself standing outside the nearly derelict storefront of MacCormack and Sons.

Dale stooped to enter. The offices were the same, exactly the same, but lower, grimmer. The dusty corners, the windowless rooms with the same sturdy stools he had polished, the same anxiety-riddled clerks, and MacCormack himself, turning to fix his gaze on the interloper.

“Look upon him,” he declared to his clerks. “Look upon that man.”

Dale knew MacCormack could smell the death on his own business. The big hardware stores with their immaculate supply lines and their hammered-out logistical systems would finish off small outfits like MacCormack's. The old man had gone ragged in his desperation. He kept going, no matter what. If everyone who knew he had no chance collapsed, capitalism would dissolve in its own acidic mist. Every business is a tragedy, every last one. It either eventually dies or becomes so big that it belongs, truly, to nobody. Business maintains its furious optimism to mask this terminal condition.

“Look on that man,” he shouted to his clerks. “Look upon the man who has come out of the wilderness. He has come out of the wilderness and the question always with such men: Is it a prize or a loss? Beggars and lords are all the same.”

“Hello, Mr. MacCormack.”

“They always want something more, men like this man. Their appetites are of such a kind that they can never be satisfied. Tell me, have you come here for a job or to walk over me? I can't tell which, Dalie, though I always knew you'd come back for one or the other.”

Dale throbbed with pity for the wobbly old trader, a cunning man crazed by his own wiles. It was MacCormack and Sons but MacCormack had no son. Business is a way for men to give themselves fathers and sons, fathers who grow cold and die, sons who run away, and money to bind them together, money to tear them apart. The room stank of sentiment.

“Thank you,” Dale said.

“Is that what you came here to say? Right. You've had your say. Now go.”

Dale rose out of MacCormack and Sons as if out of the tomb. He didn't need any more fathers. And his son was going to Hamilton.

*  *  *

“I didn't go to school in Florida,” Lee Taggart admitted to George in the car on the way to their first day of third grade.

“Just watch me. I'll show you. The big boys tell you what to do and you have to do it. And then when you're a big boy, the little boys have to do what you say. It's fair in the long run,” George said, trying out a phrase he had heard his father using.

“What are the big boys like?” Lee asked.

George stared like a philosopher-king out the window at the piles of gravel and ashes that would cram every corner of Pennsylvania if the men of that state had any say in the matter. “They're big,” he declared.

The first week at school, George became the proof of his own lesson. George's housemaster, the redheaded lesser son of the attorney
general of Connecticut, tipsy on smuggled cider and the arrogance of sixteen years, decided to ratify his first day's control over the underlings through a demand for toast. George brought toast to his chambers, where his housemaster was hosting. The toast had blackened edges. The housemaster smashed the plate out of George's hand and declared that George was to strip down to his underwear and stand out in the rain. The other upperclassmen mumbled approvingly. What's the point of cruelty if you never display it?

The rain was near freezing, a thick, sleety wall. George had been told to stand outside in his underwear in the rain. Therefore he stood outside in his underwear in the rain. Lee found him before the curfew bell, by which time George had been enduring the cold for nearly six hours.

“They're asleep now, George,” Lee whispered. “They're all asleep. I think you can come back now.”

George straightened. “They haven't let me go yet.”

“I don't think anybody wanted you to stay out all night.”

“No. Maybe not.”

“So why don't you come in?”

A thick smile, a mild smile, cracked open.

The next morning, the Hamilton masters on their way to classes discovered George standing outside in his underwear in the rain, in a state well beyond the point of embarrassment to the school and encroaching on territory dangerous to their individual careers. Inquiries were made. Discussions were held. Letters were written. Suspension? Required. Even if his father was the attorney general of Connecticut.

After the fever, a long dream of ice in his blood, George woke up to find Lee waiting, legs crossed and reading
White Fang
in the steam-pressed, light-soaked infirmary.