Hunger of the Wolf (3 page)

Leo rumbled over after the party began to wind down. “An argument over an animal,” he explained with sheepish pride. “Sigma and little Max had a fight over a blue-tongued skink.”

“Everybody survive?” I asked.

“Even the blue-tongued skink. Though I suppose there are better practices for my daughter than spitting on the heir to the Wylie fortune.”

“That was Ben Wylie?” I asked, amazed as much by my failure to recognize him as by his attendance. I had never seen Ben before, but I could recall with ludicrous precision the one time I had encountered his more famous sister Poppy. I must have been eight, a boy in late summer, playing on the rusty swing set on our front lawn. Her limousine had pulled up beside our house. The window rolled down and a woman looked out, a great beauty—a great
indifference
would be a more precise term. I did not know then about her time on all the covers of the magazines, her celebrity, her reputed string of lovers, Lou Reed and Ayrton Senna and the others, but I knew, even before then, that she was the real world of which my own experience was only a dappled, incomplete reflection.

“I hope you have good lawyers,” I said.

Leo's hand imbued
my shoulder with mock gravitas. “At least the kid is meeting the right sort of people.” He needed my approval again. Leo was always in need of something. In need of a cigarette to smoke or a golf club to swing. In need of a helping hand. Probably in need of a good talking-to. Possibly in need of money. Just generally in need, though the man had everything that a reasonable person could desire.

Kate joined us, miming exhaustion with a droop of her shoulders, hugging Leo loosely around the belly. “Sigma's napping,” she said dreamily.

“We all should be so lucky,” Leo said, kissing the part in her hair with the tenderness of a salesman before a negotiation.

Kate's good fortune radiated. The handsome husband. The beautiful daughter. The house in SoHo. The wealthy friends (Ben Wylie) and the interesting friends (me). Now I can see, looking back on my sole encounter at Leo and Kate's house, that one of the reasons I didn't recognize Ben was my incredulity that a Wylie would be out eating Moshi Monster birthday cake, looking at paintings, scolding children. In the recesses of my imagination, the Wylies dwell far, far from children's birthday parties in the shivering wasteland of their utterly banal mystery.

*  *  *

It took my father's death to bring me back to Alberta. A pulmonary embolism blew his brains out in the breakfast cereal aisle at the local Safeway. He died at the age of sixty-one, before he had a chance to grow old. A guy I went to high school with, a Mountie, informed me over the phone while I was on the Q train returning from Coney Island. Three Russian women inspected my pain with a reserved fatalistic air I appreciated as I began openly sobbing.

I hadn't seen North Lake in ten years. My parents had always visited
me, traveling to wherever I happened to be. The funeral for my father was in the school gym where I had received my high school diploma and accidentally cut Jimmy Prescott's eye playing ball hockey in the third grade, and where I had, one glorious April morning, skipping biology, fingerfucked curious, fervid Mellissa Leung in the darkest corner we could find. Everyone in town came for Dad. The managers from the pulp and paper mill where he had worked as an accountant, the farmers and ranchers, the townies who worked the resorts. My father had helped them all with money. He had been that guy. He had explained the difference between appreciating and depreciating assets, the connections between retirement savings and the tax code, the power of compound interest. All those rough men who wanted to shake my soft hand, all their wives who pressed against my too-crisp suit, their mourning was genuine, not sentimental. The world had lost a useful man. Are you useful? Am I? I tried to be that afternoon. I held my mother's hand as a half dozen North Lakers spoke halting words over his manicured corpse.

After the funeral, while my mother napped, I stared numbly out the front window; the Wylies' lawn was ragged. So I found myself at the age of thirty-five mowing Ben Wylie's grass. Then I found myself slipping inside the old cottage to smell the disintegrating country album smell, to stare upon the ridiculous paintings on nautical themes crowding the walls, to inhale the residue of my teenage naïveté, my teenage longing. To remember life before my firing, before my separation, before my father's death. The slightly sweating walls were still sweating slightly. The thick white shag carpeting that my mother hated because it was so hard to vacuum remained thick and white. I lay down in the stale regret I was indulging so thoroughly that year. There seemed to be no end to the end of innocence.

In a nook off the living room, a small well-lit space with a desk
overlooking the lake, the painting surprised me. Sitting on a pile of books, leaning against the cracked wall,
The Wolf
by Paul Klee. I picked the canvas up to assure myself that it was no reproduction. He must have bought it from Leo and Kate. My wonder infused with doom: The painting must have taken the same ridiculous flight as myself, the same five-hour car ride. I was holding a concatenation of paint and canvas worth several million dollars.

An envelope peeked out from a large leather folio of Audubon's
Birds of America
. It was the letter George wrote to Ben in the eighties about his struggle to uncover their origins. All the personal papers, the private history of the Wylies, the record they kept to help each other through their inherited sickness—I found them tucked inside other books, in furniture crevices, inside a blue trunk that served as an ersatz coffee table. I had fled my hometown to gain an education in the world, but the education I sought, a glance into the hidden workings of the machinery, had been there all along. I discovered the basement too, its dirt floors scarred with claws and a large cage fitted with chain leashes.

*  *  *

I left the painting in North Lake. I took everything else, every paper I could suss from the nooks and crannies of the Wylie cottage, back to New York in their blue trunk. Sneaking out the material without my mother noticing was embarrassingly adolescent, but adolescently delicious as well; forbidden cigarettes and forbidden knowledge are always the best kind.

The miniature Wylie archive I had purloined filled the shouty Portuguese basement. In the morning I would spread out the diaries and the letters and the photographs and the newspaper clippings that I arranged into a vast map to a subterranean geography, and in the evening
I would fold up their secrets like a tablecloth, delicately fearful that a crumb of significance might tumble off. The presence of Wylies gave my subterranean life the thrill of a secret, the secret history of how money became everything. Stealing up to the street to eat, or to fulfill the conditions of some gig, I could anchor my drifting self to the blue trunk. I only wanted to be back with them, in my dark room. The Wylies had always been my unspoken fascination. The job of a writer is to monetize fascination. I was broke and alone but I had them.

If I could uncover their story, I could sell their story, and if I could sell their story, I might have something like a future in New York. Every story is a little miracle. You make it out of nothing and you sell it for money.

*  *  *

The Mounties declared Ben's death a hunting accident. His nakedness was easy to explain, at least to the professionals. In the final stages of hypothermia, the body often senses warmth as the blood ebbs into the core. Many hypothermic deaths end with naked corpses. Coyotes or a bear may have dragged off his clothes, or wolves, who would have buried the clothes. Even if Ben Wylie had been murdered, if somebody had wanted to kill him, that somebody was far away. The official cause was death by exposure. Everyone seemed to agree, without bothering to look too closely, that the wilderness had killed him.

T
he mills of Champlain, Pennsylvania, now lie crumpled beside the brown sludge of the Monongahela River but for a hundred years they spat hot prosperity, rolling in iron and coke and manganese to be turned by the brawn of thick-tongued men on twelve-hour shifts six days a week into steel. Carnegie and Frick sold Champlain's rolled steel for a penny a foot. In the middle of this grubby miracle, somewhere around the beginning of the twentieth century, the grandfather of the dead man in the snow was a boy.

Dale Wylie stood in the brickworks baseball diamond and watched his brother, Max, sprint around the corner and across the crushed red field. Dale had no time for rising excitement; his brother was there so quickly. Max panted his urgent message: “I found a dead dog.”

A line drive cracked by, to the howled outrage of Dale's teammates. Like Dale cared about the other boys when there was a dead dog waiting. His brother led him by the hand through the quiet streets of small but respectable houses, down to the intersection of the ravine and the train
tracks. Under a mantle of pine branches lay a dead husky, its eyes already consumed to squandered holes by the tenderness of maggots.

“You want to bring the boys down to see?” Dale asked.

“Nah. They'll just poke it. That's why I brought you.”

“We have to bury it.” No justification between the brothers was needed. Boyhood has its codes.

“I know a place out of town. We could be home by supper.”

By nightfall they had only reached the junction of the train tracks across the river, and the grandeur of the sunset meeting the water was no more vivid or apocalyptic than the punishment waiting for them at home. On the weedy banks beside the bridge, Max lay down the dead husky he had been carrying so he could rest, so they could contemplate the border they were about to cross. If they followed the river through the stubbly fields, they would eventually reach a place of no human habitation. If they turned back, home.

“Maxie, do you think he belonged to anybody?”

Max sniffed. “No collar. No signs up asking for him.”

“Maybe he belonged to a drifter who was passing through or something.”

Max stared at the husky corpse for a moment, weighing.

“If he belonged to anybody, would we be out here burying him?”

They pressed on. Night pressed down. They found a stand of black pine forest, a zone of abandonment between two settlements which would have to do, smoothed out a patch naked from the needles, and dug, their cold fingers clawing at the earth, scraping the stony soil.

They laid the dog's body down in the hole, blanketed the corpse with earth, and smoothed the ground with leaves. No prayers, no condolences. Their hustle was their ceremony as they tore back home, lit only by the moon. They knew they had done the right thing. Nothing
would shake their conviction, not the irritated policeman lounging in the kitchen, not the boys' resigned, disgraced father, not their weeping mother. Neither did the salty cutting lashes from their dad's belt. The beast needed to be buried in the wild. They had buried the beast in the wild.

When their friends asked about the brothers' limping tenderness the next day at school, Dale made up a fib about a broken family teacup smashed by a mistimed ball. The Wylie boys kept their profane pilgrimage to themselves. Their parents had beat a lesson into them, though maybe not the intended one. Max and Dale learned that everything, even sacred journeys, even mysteries as profound as the moon and the stars, every last thing in this world has a cost.

*  *  *

If we could scrape away what time does to men, we would love every boy. If we could wash away the grime of the last century, the boy would be waiting at the beginning, his greed indistinguishable from hope. Every morning, six in the morning, at the whistle that called out the turn of the Champlain Steel Company shift, Dale Wylie woke up hungry for bacon. His mother had to feed every needy body, boarders as well as the family, as cheaply as possible, so her sons always woke to the slop of oatmeal, never the sizzle of bacon. Dale woke up every morning in a mortgaged house with his mouth watering from dreams.

No house was ever as mortgaged as the Wylie house on 17 Flora Avenue. The mortgage was a state of being, like living in three dimensions. Every little thing, whether new trousers or a better brand of tea or dentistry, had to be weighed in the balance of whether the cash might better serve the almighty debt which was in the hands of their aunt Millie. When the classroom chalkboard grew to be an indecipherable smear, Dale's
mother and father told him to try sitting at the front of the classroom. Dale was eventually fitted with Coke-bottle glasses at the teacher's insistence.

The boy was a living thing. The world frowned on the liveliness within him. The whole world wanted him to live less, to live quieter, more controlled, civilized. Everybody except his brother, Max, compatriot exile from the country of the dreamy and mischievous. Max was dark and rough and liked a good scrap, liked to fan open a grim, cheerful smile when the bigger boys wanted a punch-up, happy to oblige. He was a natural, a force of nature. And under the nobility of Max's eager strength, Dale had a pocket for abstract thought within the street-level realpolitik of Irish and Pollack and German children over which his brother was the ragged raja.