Hunger of the Wolf (5 page)

Every salesman in the pack was an object lesson, a comitragedy kernelled in a nickname. There was Jimmy “The Jew” Cartwright, who haggled with prostitutes, and there was Freddy “Freckles” McElvie, whose redheadedness faded and wrinkled so even in his fifties he looked like a dissolute boy. There was Marvin “The Moth” Carruthers, who suffered a broken engagement to a high-society lady in Philadelphia. There was Marty “The Temper” Shragge, a gentle soul who one time slapped a customer for reneging on a magazine subscription, and Peter Shore, whom they called “Roses” because he always wore a carnation in his buttonhole, and Bob “The Slob” Daggett, the sharpest dresser in town. There was Albert “Lodgepole” Pine and Don “Bushes” Dogwood and Sammy “Honeysuckle” Rose (to distinguish him from “Roses”). There was John “The Pleader” Coleman, who would resort to begging when his customers refused to buy, and John “The Hobo” Campbell, who rode the rails into Champlain from San Francisco when he was a kid, and David “The Closer” Klein, whose name either glowed with an aura of easy success or crackled with irony depending on which way he was streaky. And there was Lou “Three Strikes” Himmel, Dale's mentor, his instructor in the mysteries.

They called Lou Himmel “Three Strikes” because he had been married three times. Having to support three families in three houses meant that Himmel was constantly working, easily the best salesman in the city, and yet he could hardly afford the gray flannel suits he wore to rumpled disintegration. Dale ate lunch with Himmel whenever he could to pick at whatever scraps of his knowledge Himmel brushed away. On the job Himmel was as chipper as a cigarette girl; on his own time,
dead eyes slouched over greasy eggs and metallic beans or thin, flat beer. His wisdom had to be reamed from the pulp of his exhaustion; he couldn't even appreciate the charm of having a young disciple. His taste for such comforts had been burned away, like a tongue frazzled and scarred by hard liquor. But if Dale was willing to pay for a sandwich . . .

“Why are you always hanging around ‘Three Strikes'?” one of the other salesmen asked Dale.

“I'm sick of being around the rest of you guys, I guess.”

“And what's so great about Lou?”

“The rest of us are just winners and losers. That man will never be either.”

What he learned from “Three Strikes” Himmel was one lesson, repeated a thousand ways: Just keep going. No matter what the customer says, just keep going. No matter what you feel or think, just keep going. No matter the state of the market, no matter the state of your heart, no matter the state of the universe, just keep going. Just keep going, no matter what.

*  *  *

Hanging around the boozy night sessions or the diner lunches, Dale initiated himself in the folklore of the salesman—a tribe with its foundational mythologies like any other, stories that belonged to no one and to everyone. One hawker was famous for telling a new joke every day without repeating himself, a joke like “What's a fit punishment for bigamy?” “Two mothers-in-law.” Customers flocked to whatever he was selling. The moral: You sell yourself, not things. Two salesmen were sent to Africa to sell shoes. One telegrammed to his employer: “Returning. No market. Nobody wears shoes.” The other telegrammed: “Staying.
Market limitless. Nobody wears shoes.” The moral: Perspective is everything. He learned that you cannot sell to men in crowds. They must be alone.

After an August rainstorm that had flooded MacCormack's warehouse through a busted shingle, Dale convinced the insurance company to cover the value of the goods at nearly three-quarters of their purchase price, news which he proudly brought to his employer. MacCormack sent him back; “The damage was only about a quarter that,” he said. The Scot's honesty cost a sixth the value of his stock, Dale calculated, and no one was shrewder than MacCormack. If he was paying that price, his honesty was worth that much. Another lesson: Cynicism is not the same as worldliness.

Other lessons were vaguer; they had to be breathed in like mist. Champlain suffused itself in millworking pride, the American pride, each Moldovan or German or Italian or Scot a miniature Lucifer, overthrowing through the heft of his life the whole of the old world, the brilliantine palaces, the ancient churches, the established orders, for the self-invented squalor of the factories beside a sluggish brown river. The whole town was suffused with the exhaustion of their pride. The men were either coming or leaving, laughing or limp, dry or slick, at morning six or at evening six, into or out of the hellish furnace that fed the boundless continental appetite for steel. Not the salesmen. The salesmen belonged to no one and therefore they could not afford pride. This was their pride.

Dale was checking accounts in the MacCormack back room on a Sunday morning when he achieved a kind of secular enlightenment. This was after his twenty-fifth lunch with “Three Strikes,” his eight hundred and thirteenth exhausted accounting evening, his seven thousand and sixth rejection at the doorstep trying some pitch that never
could have closed. He saw beyond the foolishness of his young dreams, which is as close as anyone can come to wisdom. He realized that hard work and perseverance aren't worth anything. Owning is everything. People work for owners. Respectability is ownership, not labor.

How could he have been so stupid as to believe what they had told him? Aunt Millie was respectable, not his mother and certainly not his father.

*  *  *

Over a beer with his brother, out with the boys, the fellow clerks, on a brief lam in a sordid bar, Dale wondered what would happen if he told them about the wolf. If he were to let it slip. Probably nothing. Probably an embarrassed silence. Everybody has a secret life. Don't tell me yours so I don't have to tell you mine. Better to share in the laugh and suck the bitterness down with angry beer and raw eggs. He was a man like other men.

At the cottage in North Lake, two newspaper clippings have survived, both from
The Champlain Dominion
.

May 14, 1913—Yesterday afternoon, several reports of wolves spotted near the confluence of Blanchard Street and Twelfth Avenue arrived at the offices of Precinct 10. They were thought by police to be a pair of large coyotes, as coyotes have been spotted in many places near the water.

SHOTS FIRED AT WOLF IN CITY

June 12, 1914—The city's growing refuse problem, shunted off by nearsighted officials, has begun attracting wolves to the neighborhood of Blanchard Street.

Since May, when the first reports of the beasts arrived, the fearsome predators have been stalking the piles of refuse that the city's builders have dumped without ceremony on the corners of the disused Extension. The wolves have been sighted both by constables and officers of the Office of Pest Extermination.

Finally the problem of rats, which have infested the city's Irish section, has blossomed into a full-blown wolf problem. What is next, the citizens of the city are free to ask: dragons?

Only the moon brought the Wylie men together. Max was always the last to appear for the caging. As the moon crept to its violent ripeness, Dale would wait naked in the cage with his father while his mother stood, fidgeting at the cage door with contained outrage over her son's lateness. The moment he came he would have to be whisked in clothed, followed by his mother's hard gaze of judgment: How had she managed to raise such inconsiderate children? Max resented the lost time more than anything, itching to be over with the transformation so he could run out again for a score or a joke or to place bets he couldn't afford on horses that stirred loose impressions in him. For Bob Wylie, the beast was one more aspect of the universe that had to be endured. Dale hid his fear. The agony always astonished him, his self ripped to rags, hair bristling up through the skin, teeth severing down, his eyes on flame. He never remembered anything. He would wake up three days later in a naked heap with his brother and father. They would unlock the cage, clothe themselves, sweep up their feces, gulp down another drink of water—the afterthirst was fierce—and then resume the ordinary commerce of their lives. Like everybody else.

Dale knew at least that he was not alone in his beastliness. With the
salesmen railing through cagey streets or out drinking themselves to an approximation of joy in the back alley sawdust saloons, he needed no proof of the wildness in the hearts of polite men.

*  *  *

He woke up alone after the oblivion only one time. It was strange, the solitude. His mother hadn't left clothes out for him either. He called to the upstairs. Something was wrong. Something was not where it should be. He had never had to leave the basement alone. The silence began to shiver. Dale decided to chance it, unlocked himself, and remembered that Sunday morning in June meant the boarders were all at church. After a naked dash across the kitchen into the bedroom, he found Max, like a curled statue, head between his knees.

“You didn't hear me call,” Dale said, as he hurried to find underwear and a shirt. “I had to run through the house naked. Anyone could have seen me.”

Max stammered. “I didn't . . . I didn't . . .” His ineloquence stung Dale, his brother's standard fluidity cracked and shuffled. “I swear I didn't know it was that late.”

“What are you talking about?”

“It was nothing. I shouldn't say that. We had something. We used to spoon over by Bottleglass Hill, over on the other side of town. I was there. I was supposed to be here.” He mumbled down into insignificance.

“Where's Mom?”

“Buying lime in Boulder Falls. Lester Williamson lent her the truck.”

“Boulder Falls?”

Max nodded. “Nobody knows us there.”

“Max, I have no idea what you're talking about.”

Max's eyes bubbled over. A long tear splashed the length of his cheek. His hand took Dale's hand like a boy's, like when they buried the husky. He led Dale out of the empty house, across the yard, to the garden shed. In the dark, thin bars of light patterned the grimy blackness and a mound on the floor among rusty shovels and busted flower pots. Under a pile of blankets, teased back like crepe paper, the mangled corpse of a black girl was a piece of judgmental meat. Her ripped-out throat had pooled blood to the sides of her face, all the way to her ears. The bugs were on her, her glassy eyes sinking back ecstatically. She was already an ecology. Claw and fang had scraped the dangling life out of her.

“She's young,” Dale surprised himself by saying. She would be young forever.

The sudden entrance of their mother scalded the boys back from the body, which she quickly covered with the blankets. She turned on Dale with the ferocity of a glacier. “You didn't see a thing,” she said.

“No, Mother.”

“At this moment you don't exist.”

“I do not.”

*  *  *

Max and Dale went back to work as if nothing had happened. They woke. They had oatmeal. They worked. But every night, no matter the hustle or the grind, Max and Dale returned to 17 Flora Avenue to steam themselves in the calm of their mother's boiled beef and potatoes. Marie Wylie, exhausted by rounds of sewing or fluffing or sweeping or peeling or stewing, oversaw the flurry of feminine lodgers and her sons' increasing interest in the flurry with her poor woman's wariness. By 1913, Dale could say that he was assistant manger at MacCormack and Sons, while Max was about to start his own business.

“It's moving pianos,” Max announced to the table. “I'm going to find two other hefty lads and we're going to call it ‘Blessed Piano Movers.'”

“They'll think you're Catholic,” Dale said, his mouth full of rubbery beef.

“So what? I'm happy to move an Irish piano for money.”

One of the boarders suggested that Protestants never minded hiring Catholic labor. Dale agreed. “But think about the Jews, they all have pianos.”

“Everybody in town with any money has a piano,” Max said. “That's why it's a good idea.”

“All I can say,” Marie Wylie added, “is that I'm amazed we've discovered a way to make you touch a musical instrument of your own free will.”

At the dinner table, Max and Dale could only fool the girls or each other or themselves so far. And if they ever needed reminding of their humble status, they needed only to look at their mother, who loomed over the head of the table, carving beef, like the grand goddess of no foolishness. The girls chattered from the edges and the boys joined in as the platters of food circled, but Marie was at the head, a reminder that life grinds bodies and souls, that music goes silent, that every luxury is somebody's loss. She fed them. After dinner, Max and Dale fled Flora to roar in the streets again. One of the advantages of industry is that it keeps you out of the house.

*  *  *

Into the turgid climate of 17 Flora Avenue, swirling with suppressed terror and boredom, stepped the unsettling stillness of Kitty Donclaire.

Kitty worked as an office girl at the brick factory, making tea and typing memos and submitting to the leers and straying palms of the company bosses. She had drifted into Champlain from a narrow, rural Kentucky
schoolroom. At first, only the depth of her eyes distinguished her from the other tenants at 17 Flora. Amid the happy chatter, the whispered gossip, the innocent flirtations around the dinner table, she said nothing. Kitty brought silence, a swelling luxurious silence. And perhaps for this silence, Marie Wylie loved Kitty Donclaire. For the first time in their lives, Max and Dale saw the dawning of a smile on their mother's ravaged face whenever Kitty descended the stairs in her mysterious splendor, whenever she sat at the table or returned from the factory. The boys would find their mother combing Kitty's long black tresses in the parlor. The women could be heard together, lifted in clouds of laughter behind closed doors.

Dale and Kitty were always seated next to each other over the steaming Sunday roast; Dale would be called to fix a broken rail in the backyard fence when Kitty had stepped from her bath to spread her luscious, impenetrably opaque hair on a blanket to dry. Performances of English folk songs and Mozart duets became expected every Sunday afternoon in the parlor.