Hunger of the Wolf (20 page)

I think, if I do say so myself, that my papers make good hats and good cones.

It's funny, the older I become, the more I think about the future. The less future you have, the more you cherish it, I suppose. I won't trouble you with my plans for the Wylie Corporation, which are mostly my son's plans anyway, but I will tell you a little
story, which I heard about Lord Fallis, if he'll pardon the mention of his name. When I was very new to town and making impertinent inquiries even then, he asked one of his subordinates, “Who is this Wylie? Where is he from?” And the subordinate answered, “Well, he began in a town called Atkinson, which was too small for him so he moved to Pittsburgh. It was too small as well so he moved to New York. New York was too small so he moved to London, which looks like it will be too small for him as well.” “Where will he move next then?” Lord Fallis asked. The subordinate considered. “I suppose, sir, to hell.”

Friends, I am not ready yet to make that move.

George sent Lavinia home with the boy after the speech. No point forcing them to endure the infinite vanity of old men. The frail bodies of the London elite lounged in glitter. All the hectic business of the flesh had ached away from the river of the old people's souls, exposing the grime-soaked shipwrecks of their fundamental desires: for more money, for more power. A stray policeman, needling a way through the whirling gears of the silvery tables, appeared at George's side. George was needed, the bobby whispered, about a matter pertaining to his father.

In the Presidential Suite, the most sumptuous room in the world at that time, on the edge of the unmade bed, sat a woman who, despite her state of shock, wore the most perfect mist-gray silk ball gown, matching the ephemeral pearls of her eyes. She was Lady Fallis, née Marguerite La Montée. On the bed, Dale Wylie's naked corpse sprawled. The first Lord Wylie of Abermarley, worth nine hundred million dollars, had lived less than twenty-four hours with his title.

*  *  *

Dale's death would be Ben's first memory. Little Ben worried that his eyes had killed his grandfather, which made sense: He had seen him and then he had died. The rest of the business of death was a spontaneous grand adventure. In London, the disappointment of the hotel room with its weird dream of a mustard paisley-patterned carpet, mother distraught and annoyed and worried about father, who was missing. After the dreary roar between airports, the regular house filled with kind, distracted women dressed like crows and the sadness that weighed down the house like perfume-soggy drapes was the opposite of the hotel: He could run out on the new-minted spring lawns. Out to the abandoned house with its jangled locks, to the fringe of the trees. He could run wherever he liked except on the stairs. The house was so playful with shadows that the knock of a ghost on the door hardly surprised the boy.

This ghost had matted and grizzled gray hair and his raggedy clothes were worse than the men who helped the gardeners, a yellow belt pulled crossways across his narrow waist, and a stuffed blanket under his arm. The ghost hugged Ben's father. Nobody ever hugged Father.

“You look just like Dale,” he said.

“Uncle Max,” George said.

*  *  *

George and Max flew Dale's body to Alberta, then drove him together to North Lake, so he could be buried, as he requested, “somewhere in the middle of nowhere.” Ben and Lavinia were following in a town car. George drove. The man beside him was all stooped, gray rags of beard and open-air eyes and hands curled on his lap like claws. Max was
unused to sitting still, his eyes wary, almost tauntingly alive. They had nothing in common except their natures.

“Do you have any children?” George asked, for something to ask.

“None ever seemed to come along,” Max answered. “Not for lack of trying.”

George began again. “So where have you been all this time?” He knew it was the question he wanted to ask his dead father.

“I've been in paradise,” the gnarled man said with a smile.

“Alberta?” George guessed.

“You've only ever been a wolf in a cage, haven't you? I can see that. Dale was that way, too. I've nearly starved, I'm not saying I haven't. You haven't had anything to eat, the cold, the death. But then that ripped-up field mouse, his little guts that didn't want to die. Jesus himself never had a greater feast in heaven. That's the paradise I've been in.”

A little while later, after he had tried to understand and failed, George asked, “Isn't that hell?”

“After I killed that wop, I was out west, you know? I went to work in this valley, Turner Valley, where they had discovered gas, and they weren't very good at it. They flared off about thirty percent. Just burned it up. The whole place smelled like rotten eggs, and not a little, I'm saying, not a nosebleed Sunday whiff, but the real stench of the stuff. And let me tell you, among the men there I wasn't the roughest. I wasn't near the worst guy. And I was a murderer. And why I'm telling you is that the place was heaven.”

“Alberta in winter was heaven?”

“The gas kept the valley warm all winter and the deer and the antelope would come to graze off the wildflowers. A cougar came down from the mountains. Work for the asking. Hunting wherever you looked. Perpetual summer in the heat of flared-off stink. And no questions. That's heaven.”

They drove in silence for a while, leaving behind the cottage country, where people play at the wilderness, for the starker country. “I need to know one more thing,” George said. “Have you ever met anyone like us?”

“I'd leave that.” George waited for another bleary rant, another smoky-voiced gush from the rusty pump.

“I've always wanted to meet another wolf,” George continued.

“You're meeting one now.”

“But there were rumors of others, wherever you've been?”

“There are werewolf stories all over. Because there are men and there are wolves, that's why. And dogs, and dogs who are like men, and men who are like dogs. Men who are men and wolves who are wolves.”

George turned his face away. “I have this sensation sometimes that I'm already dead, that I'm seeing the world frozen, or that I've just died, and everything flashing up is the past, the dead past.”

Max laughed. “You need one of those headshrinkers.”

“Already tried.”

A guffaw scraped its way out of Max's inhuman throat. “Then maybe a good run in the woods. Although, in a way, I know what you're talking about. In a way. After Turner Valley, I stole a truck and ran to the bush after trading in Edmonton for three ponies and a kit. I launched out. And about two days later, I bought Mags. My wife. Fourteen-year-old Indian girl and I bought her for one of my ponies, a Winchester rifle, and a box of cartridges. I'll tell you something else. That's the best bargain any of us will ever make, even Dale. She sure was ready to leave her old man, too, so I'm pretty sure it was a good deal for her. Anyway, we lit out and she'd been learning to read from this old English Bible that the missionaries were handing out, and the first
thing I did was rip out all the pages and tie them up for kindling. How she roared. Laughed her ass silly.”

Something moving beyond the window startled him. He was not used to cars, maybe not used to windows either.

“So we went into ranching country and built a little cabin and a day's ride away was a ranch and another day's ride the other way was a hotel for rich American sportsmen, and I would go to work for the ranchers and steal 'em blind and Mags would go down to the hotel and guide 'em and rob 'em blind, and pretty soon we had a pretty good thing going. She set up our little cabin in the bush. We had geraniums all year round and good beef too, 'cause I would tail a few away at the end of the year, you see, and she would kill them. The way she slid a knife into a bullcalf heart, swift, painless, on the down breath, so it never even knew it was dead. That's a woman. And I remember she took the pictures of the dresses out of the magazines and put 'em all over our walls and it looked good, like a real home. And I lay with her, man and wolf.”

He closed his eyes, squeezed them shut, as if he were trying to relive the scenes of his memories. They opened full of naked tears.

“Why did you come back, Max?” George asked.

“I want to know how my brother died.”

“There's good news there,” George said. “He died fucking a British lady in the most expensive hotel room in the greatest city in the world the day he was knighted by the queen.”

Max shuffled the tears off as laughter. “That wouldn't have upset him too much, I think.”

“A proper British lady, too. The wife of an eighth earl of somewhere.”

“Good for Dalie boy.”

They drove into increasing wilderness.

“So why did you come back now, Max? Why not sooner?”

Max mused for a while, coughing, as they cut through a valley of pointless barren stone. “I suppose I couldn't ask him for money anymore.”

*  *  *

In a town car with his mother, after driving to the end of an infinity of snow and boredom, as they pulled into the driveway of a stone cottage on the edge of a frozen lake, Ben saw his father with the grizzled man, the ghost from the doorway. They were shaking hands. They seemed happy and sad at the same time. Then the man began to run. Though he was a very old man, he ran fast across the snow toward the forest, and passed into the snowy trees leaping, and as he leaped he turned, midair, into a wolf. A black wolf. Ben's father kept waving as the wolf vanished into a cover of aspens. Ben looked back to his mother, whose smile was calm and understanding, the magical transformation a matter of everyday unconcern to her. She had seen the miracle but said nothing.

T
he cab throbbed on the curb outside Kate and Leo's as I waited for them to finish screwing. The driver wasn't bothered by the wait. He could see the meter ticking over fatalistically, the
New York Post
related the city's various degradations to him in four-hundred-word nuggets, and a Starbucks venti pumpkin spice latte brightened his intermittent banter in Ibo over the Bluetooth. His life was rich with things. I had only my thoughts. My thoughts were still commercially viable then. Eight thousand words on the Wylies—enough to be cut down to four thousand—waited on my MacBook in the apartment, begging to have fresh detail, to be scoured by my anxieties and then, most gloriously of all, to be sold.

Fifteen dollars and forty-five cents later, the Stathapolouses sauntered out, Kate in postcoital lululemon, with her hair satisfyingly moist, Leo in aviator sunglasses and a padded green vest under a heavy brown wool suit jacket, like an English count strolling to shoot pheasants in a soggy Norfolk field or, rather, like some Guy Ritchie purchaseable
version of same. He might have looked all right, too, if not for the deerstalker cap with the flaps buttoned up.

“I'm not letting you in the car with that hat on,” I said. Kate and I shared guffaws, hers as light and truculent as marshmallow foam.

Leo popped the trunk and put his suitcase inside. Kate swiped the hat from his head. Leo frowned poutingly. How much of his attention must be invested in navigating the shipping lanes and coastal shoals of these class oceans. “I guess I should have worn my Beaver Patrol trucker hat instead,” he said.

“You don't have to impress the fish,” Kate said, kissing him on the earlobe and tumbling into his thick Greco-Roman shoulders. Their glow in this moment was succulent: Marriage is the blackest of black boxes but I could never have imagined that a marriage with shower-sex could be so near to collapse. Kate waved us away, brimming with the morning light, leaving the waning glow of her cupidity in the rearview mirror.

“Sorry we kept you waiting,” Leo mumbled.

“As long as you pay the fare.”

With that arrangement, we set out for La Guardia on the twelve-hour journey from the world's center to the ends of the earth, from New York to North Lake.

*  *  *

Leo had claimed he wanted to fish Alberta. He provided an excuse I could give my mother: I was coming up to show one of my city friends the great outdoors, and I hinted at vague professional benefits. The truth was that I needed to suck more information out of the Wylie cottage. I had only gone over the place once and if I was sure of anything, I was sure the Wylies had more secrets. Leo heard about the trip and asked to join me. For the fishing, he said.

My mother never would have believed me if I had said I was just coming to see her. If I had said that I was just coming to see her, she would have assumed I had cancer. If I had told her that I was coming to ask her about the Wylies, she would have said that I shouldn't bother, she knew nothing. But for a city friend, a possible professional ally, she would buy steaks from the Mennonite butcher in Mint Lake two towns over.

The drive from the airport in Edmonton to North Lake takes five hours, a full tank of gas, and the complete resources of my spirit. The moment I sit down in the car, I always remember when I came back from university for the summer, working at the ice-cream parlor in town that served maybe a couple hundred customers during the season. I had mentioned to my mother one night after work that Ian Reed, the town lawyer, had come in for a cone of maple walnut. “Now, doesn't Mr. Reed have it made,” my mother said to me. “I hear he naps every single afternoon.” To my mother, the definition of success is an afternoon nap every day. I'm not even sure she's wrong.

In the smaller towns outside Edmonton, the land is all stands of scant trees and stones and stones and a few more trees and a little lakeside water and stones. Whenever I travel south, I have contempt for the fecundity, the resplendence, the welcoming embrace of nature. Who can respect the whorish givingness of the tropics? The vastness of the north, what my ex-wife used to call “the boreality,” is unfathomably proud. Rock juts up from the roadside like endless mangled fangs. The atavism of the forest rises in the throat like relief. New York and London and all of Europe and the United States, you think as you drive, have built themselves an imposing ruse of self-importance, shunting away and forgetting that one way or another the wild will swallow them up. But here we know. We are swallowed. We know that we don't matter any more
than a tree or a stone. The darkness in the woods makes everybody a child, every story a fairy tale.