Hunger of the Wolf (7 page)

My boy, we were awfully far from Flora Avenue. Fucked and far from home, as Max liked to say. I tell you I would happily have cuddled Aunt Millie.

Then one night the moon lifted and Max vanished. Lord, I was furious. I even snapped on my snowshoes and followed him, followed the tracks of the wolves, but hunting wolves is like trying to
catch fish in the ocean with your bare hands. If you're hunting wolf, you need a cheap trick, like a tied-up goat or something, and I was all out of cheap tricks. I managed to snag a moose kid, though, which I took to be a triumph until I carted the carcass home and tried to eat the thing. Alberta winter is so sparse the flesh of its animals is musky to the point of poison. It's leather all the way down. Not that I didn't eat every scrap of that moose. I ate that disgusting moose and played solitaire for about a month.

Then the moon came again, and Max returned with the brood, and I returned with him and with them.

We were wolves that winter. We ran with a pack of nine. The cold was our home. Hunger was our home. There were days when we ate and days when we did not eat. We wanted buffalo or moose. Ripping apart a rabbit or a fox was just practice, playing with killing and squabbling over the bloody snow. Then when the wind rose up, we hid together under the blankets of low pines where we could find them, or burrowed under the mossy stink of aspen leaves, our breaths heaving together. The first scent in the morning was a taste of life or death. It was pure. Our hunger began in the dark. We searched for a trace of weakness, any weakness, a whimper in the middle of silence.

We always ate until our guts sagged. Then we slept dimly under a pine tree, the nine of us, in the fullness of our bellies. And that was happiness.

We almost died several times that winter. We almost ate each other. Mostly we survived on the corpses of buffalo calves that had frozen, and we ran into a herd and that kept us through the worst of January and February. We ate disguised ptarmigan, we ate dangerous bobcat. We ate voles by the hundreds. We ate what we could eat.
We ran together until the spring, when we cracked up like everything in that country cracks up in the spring, when the faint new warmth is the world trying on mercy for a lark.

The winter cored the Wylie brothers. Alberta hollowed them out. At the end of all their agonies, their stake was wilderness. They left their claim for Grande Prairie, where the sale of the tools paid for the train that carried them back to the station in Champlain where they had initially applied for the grant, which brought the business back to where it started, a neat round zero.

Stepping onto the platform, dragging their worn bodies back home, Dale and Max peered at once-familiar scenes, store owners fondling easy fruit on their counters, schoolgirls sharing lemon sherbets, oldtimers rattling uselessly to one another on the street, all as if through a green-glass aquarium. If you forget, even for a moment, why people do what they do, it can be hard to remember. On Flora Avenue, the boarders wouldn't allow them into the house, no matter who they claimed to be, so for an afternoon, the boys sat on the blue trunk while their old friends and neighbors crossed them without a glimmer of recognition. Even Marie Wylie, bundling loads of laundry into the house, had to squint through the raggedy grime to identify her defeated sons.

She walked them to their old room and then, arm in arm, up to the cemetery, to the small plot with its small slab where their father, who had been a small man, lay dead and buried.

“Flu carried him away. He was one of the first. Sudden. That was more than a small mercy.”

She inspected the grave and its marker the way she might a bolt of gray flannel brought home from the fabric merchant. Had she overpaid?
Had she received quality for money? Max and Dale squirmed in their frayed outfits. They weren't dressed right. Max in khakis. Dale in gunmetal gray. Neither with a scrap of black.

“What happened to the barbershop?” Dale asked.

“Sold it.”

“What happened to the money?” Max asked.

“The mortgage.”

That was all the eulogy Bob Wylie ever received.

*  *  *

Kitty Donclaire was very much alive. Her dark eyes were still peering from the dinner table, always by Marie's side. She no longer worked at the brick factory, though no one ever saw her working in the house. She would sit beside Marie at the laundry or over the pot scrubbing, and every now and then Marie might whisper into Kitty's ear. Nobody asked the reasons, the nature of their arrangement, least of all Max and Dale. They slunk from her gaze with a primitive unease.

Mother's law had not altered: If you stayed in the house, you helped on the mortgage. Dale needed his old job back. He had to stoop to enter the back room of MacCormack and Sons, that shrine where the Scottish prophet of fiduciary responsibility lorded over the huddled scrutineers of the ledgers, the holy books. John MacCormack was pleased. The return of Dale Wylie, prodigal businessman, justified his instinctive and acquired pessimism. As if it needed justification.

“Gentlemen, behold. Not the gods can turn back time.”

“Mr. MacCormack . . .” Dale began.

“Gentlemen, we are presented with an example,” MacCormack continued, ignoring him. “I will not say a warning. I will neither say a beacon. An example. The man who took a chance and failed. What are we to think?
Are we to respect his courage or condemn his folly? By what calipers are we to measure a man? By the scope of his ambition or the size of his achievement?”

MacCormack gazed on Dale with a tender and bloody contempt.

“How would we judge the ancient Romans? By their achievement? They have achieved, ultimately, a pile of dusty old stones. Or are we instead to worship dreams of eternity, the visions of the Jews in their desert?”

He pulled open a chair behind a stall, and shooed its disgruntled inhabitant over a half-desk's width. “I do not need to inform you gentlemen that time goes but one way. Otherwise, it would be very difficult to rate the value of municipal bonds. Time leaves us, at least, with something to evaluate. Something to look at. So what are we looking at now, gentlemen? Are we looking at a pile of dust or the elusive remnant of a dream?”

Dale sat back in his old chair. Nobody needed to explain.

*  *  *

After Alberta, Champlain wasn't enough for Max Wylie's body. He roared onto the autumn harvesting crews in Indiana, and beyond to the lumbering in Idaho and Washington, returning to spend the winter and the money in Champlain. Max would materialize without warning, gathering crowds as he strolled like a lord down Flora Avenue, everyone wanting to breathe in a bit of the winds that coursed around his strength, because he brought the smell of the whole country with him, the grandeur of the wild man. The boardinghouse women adored his stories of men who rode single logs down a hundred miles of river, and bets with Chinamen about who could climb a mountain faster, and murders in distant towns that hinged indirectly on Indian curses.
No need to boast anymore. He could speak softly. The girls would lean in.

Over dinner to celebrate his return one July evening in 1921, one of the frail office girls asked, “Mr. Wylie, what is the West like?”

He launched into a romance of the plain's grandeur, pausing on its homely churches, and the honey-storm music that seeped through the stained glass on a Sunday morning. When his mother had passed out of the room, he asked them quick, “You want the truth, girls?”

The boarders insisted they did, and Max rolled a thick slice of bread into a ball, popped it in his mouth, and whispered, “The West smells like pussy.”

*  *  *

Max meant that the West smelled like money, Dale knew. The West smelled like having a piece, not having to account for every nickel in your pocket to Mother, to MacCormack. Freedom and spending. Free-spending. Dale found out about the smell of the West soon enough. In the 1920s, MacCormack and Sons, expanding beyond Pennsylvania, promoted Dale to “director of the sales force,” a grand title for a hardship post in the timber and mining counties selling axe heads and rope, engine grease and bulk seeds, biscuits and blue jeans, selling whatever he could figure out that people wanted to buy.

In 1923, Dale arrived for the first time in Atkinson, a mining town on the Minnesota–Dakota border. The founding myth of the town of Atkinson is an appropriately bleak fairy tale. The town sits on the site of a chicken farm where the original owner, over a supper of cockerel's gizzards, sunk his teeth into soft metal. The bit was solid gold. Immediately, he slaughtered all his chickens and rummaged through their guts for more.

Atkinson fit its foundational myth well, a bloody mess made in the quest for a little money. The minor gold rush of the twenties, thirties, and forties was all slapdash, shanties zanily sprouted along cracks of real and imagined subterranean wealth. Dale loved the action. Even the train buzzed with happening. Everyone was on the make or falling apart or both. As he stepped out for the first time, onto the muddy mush of the Atkinson roads, he breathed in the town's hilarity. A man in a bowler and a taut three-piece tweed suit, arm in arm with a drunken, flattering easy lay in an emerald dress, smiled nefariously while passing. Welcome to town, buddy. See what you can pull. In Atkinson, glamorous stories were everywhere: Irish who arrived with shovels and scratched out millions. Stakers who strained nugget gold out of their canteens by accident. Telegram boys palming five-dollar tips from gamblers. Greeks who turned single coffee stands into chains of dinettes. Men were achieving respectability all the time in Atkinson.

Dale hunted from call to call, from corner store to corner store, from hotel to hotel, from camp to camp, smiling at the frowning, bored men who either hated to buy things or wouldn't or couldn't, and then offering and insisting and failing and leaving. Rejection is the river in which the salesman swims. The river is shrewd and fierce and runs cold. The faces reflected on it blur into a single rush—dubious eyes and arched brows and stupid mouths and the cynical crook of a cigarette out of a cheek. People seethe and you must seethe with them. Even the boys looked up at him funny, like he was the pig about to be slaughtered. The whores shut their doors on him tenderly, pityingly. The bartenders added a fingernail to his finger of Scotch. The man who eats what he kills deserves respect and succor. After days of pure hustle, he would save on his quarters by heading straight to the train station
where he could lean against the plinth on the platform, asleep, until the next morning's train. Why pay for a flophouse? The station had heat.

Dale stared through the grimy windows of train stations evaluating his slim chances while sucking back drab sodas and gray sandwiches, fending off despair with the stitchwork creed he inherited from his mother: Always find a way to get along. Atkinson was the opposite of Champlain. The money had mixed men up in their chances, their misery, and their furious gorgeous free women. Even the conservatives in the West are libertines. On the side of MacCormack's business, he took orders for himself. Hats from Pittsburgh. Books. An old Arab paid him a high price for Egyptian cotton. Potpourri for the brothel. To the Chinese he sold incense. But mostly it was door-to-door. Knives. Gramophones. Subscriptions to magazines. As much as he could. He went into the radio business for himself. He bought them wholesale in Pittsburgh, rented out a sufferance space under his own name to store them by the station, and hustled them wherever he could.

Luck is the by-product of effort. The effort was enduring other people, the maids who sneered and shook their heads from the sides of houses, the demented old-timers, the busy men of business pushing by, the drunks taking cracks from the barstool, reeking of pickling spice and vomit, the broken women and their adamant hate. He needed luck. That's the worst, needing luck. Dale's biggest stroke of luck was that old MacCormack never figured out how rich the territory was. MacCormack always received him back without comment, neither praise nor blame. Dale had no idea why the old man kept him on. Inertia? Or were his sales excellent? How were the others doing? The answers wouldn't have mattered anyhow. He just went out and sold.

A slow train from the men of Atkinson trundled him back to the house at 17 Flora, to the women of Champlain. A long train ride to ask: Who am I? What do I amount to?

*  *  *

In the mornings, 17 Flora floated up like a ship on a tide of girlish laughter, anchored by stern Marie and silent Kitty, and, guided by gentle Marie and silent Kitty, 17 Flora floated down to sleep on billows of sighs in the Champlain evenings. The boarding girls, wearing their heavy ambitions lightly, miasmaed the house with a silly, soft, delightful fuzz. Dale was either leaving, with the quickening scent of desperation, or arriving with the smell of train furniture and too many cigarettes on him like a cloak. He would never be a great salesman because he couldn't forget quickly enough. The face of each housewife who brushed him out the door like a dead mouse stuck in him. The dismissive eye of the shopkeeping Arab with his whoremaster's odor of rosewater lingered slightly too long. The general mania of the men laughing in pool halls, stuffing thick-skinned sausages into their gapped faces, stuck just a little too much. At home, in Champlain, on Flora Avenue, he relished the comforting somnambulance of the rooms that hadn't changed much since his childhood.

One fine judgmental Sunday, at the hour he should have been returning from church, they were waiting for him in the parlor, the room dusted every day to be used once a year. His mother beside Aunt Millie, half her size, both in black.

“You know why we are here,” Aunt Millie began. Dale perched himself on a chair designed for no one ever to sit on, and knew enough not to speak. “We want you to become respectable.”

“I am respectable,” Dale answered.

“You have a job,” Aunt Millie corrected him, upholding a bare finger. “That is something. That is not nothing. But it is not respectability.”