Sister Wolf (11 page)

“… to preserve wild animals that have strayed into the asphalt jungles of Pittsfield and Albany, forced to subsist on rotting garbage, murdered by delinquents and speeding cars. …”

George Schulte, helicopter pilot, stretched out his arms with an evangelical flourish, long arms that spanned a row of boxes behind which he stood as he delivered the opening pitch.

“… raccoons, opossums, foxes, squirrels, owls, hawks, and nonpoisonous snakes,” he continued, slapping the top of each box in turn, causing a scrambling or a yawping inside, except where the blue racer lay coiled.

“… humanely trapped and flown by my team to the woody recesses of the Tri-State National Forest and the Deym Sanctuary …”

Marit stood in the back of the hall, next to the curtain hung for voters in town-council elections. Stewart Odell, who taught chemistry at the high school, was pulling at the sleeve of her jacket and talking in an audible whisper. He was urging that the Airlift be given an acronym, which could not be AA, and just as certainly not BAA (Berkshire Animal Airlift). Stewart pressed up too close to people when he spoke to them. Marit could see the thinning hair behind his ears, and the red marks left by his glasses; it made her want to pound lumps on him.

“You spray when you talk,” said Marit, backing away. “Perhaps your bite needs adjusting. You must ask your dentist.”

George Schulte produced a toy model of a helicopter, convinced that the rustics in the audience had never seen one, and waved it over the boxes, whirling the propeller with one finger to illustrate his points. George talked like a press release, or a brochure. Marit tried to remember who had suggested that he be the principal speaker.

Several whispering duos had formed by the partial shelter of the homemade election booth. Eleanor Stoeber was head-to-head with Sarah Rippey. Apparently, Eleanor had missed an episode of
A Silver Lining.

“… it showed up on the brain scan. Dr. Mac wants to do more tests before he tells Andrea.”

“No,” breathed Eleanor. “She has a concert tour ahead of her!”

Marit caught Lola’s voice, and then she heard Horty Wake’s. She leaned in to pick up the thread.

“… the only girl I’ve ever met who made a profit on her abortion.”

“How could she?” asked Horty.

“Very simple,” said Lola severely. “She collected five hundred dollars from all four of them.”

In the front row across the aisle sat Moira Raymer, who wrote the social notes for the Dangerfield
Beacon.
Marit recognized her felt beret and the shell-studded glasses on a chain around her neck. A pad lay open on her lap, but she was not writing notes on the Airlift. She was counting the money in her wallet, spreading the bills out in fan formation, like a hand of cards.

Marit had asked the
Beacon
to send their nature writer—anyone but Moira, who was campaigning in print to get the Deym preserve opened to the public, on the model of Mott’s Jungle Joyride in Oneco, New Hampshire. Marit had paid one visit to Mott’s, where the tourists were driven around in zebra-striped vans and warned, if they valued their lives, not to roll down the windows. Most of them paid no attention, so the driver was forced to brake for a party of apes, who were fighting in the middle of the road over a bag of popcorn. These same apes later climbed on the van, waving empty bottles, and beat a tattoo on the roof while the women and children shrieked. The apes were thin, the lion was shedding, and the hyena was covered with scales. Marit had wanted to feed the Motts and Moira to those wretched animals; red meat would soon correct the symptoms of malnutrition.

Marit moved a few steps forward. She was trying to calculate the attention span of the rest of the seated audience. It was not much greater. Every person she saw was knitting, shifting, groping in a handbag, or working on his cuticles. The Airlift committee members, sitting in the second row, were passing wrapped candies back and forth. George Schulte was writing the Airlift budget on an easel blackboard.

Then she felt the itch. The spackle of red pinpricks on the insides of her wrists was not caused by her rough linen sleeves. Marit was literally allergic to fools. The Animal Airlift had been her idea; it was out of her hands now. She was democrat enough to know that work gets done when the workers make it their own, but the autocrat in her chafed at the wrists. The Airlift had turned into a living village satire, and she was playing a stock-in-trade character, the Patroness.

These dozers, knitters, and cuticle pickers thought that the suffering of wild animals extended to worms and flea bites, and that their peril could be annulled by placing “Deer Crossing” signs on two-way roads. She remembered Dr. Devane, the gentleman vet, refusing to splint the leg of a hurt raccoon that she had brought him in a cat-carrier. Marit had spent hours watching that coon, sauntering on his unbroken hind legs, longer than his front legs, elevated in back like the rigged chassis of a stock car.

“Better put him down, Marit, you’re a good shot.”

“I’m paying for it, god damn it! Pretend he’s a cocker spaniel!”

“Let him go, Marit. Wild things cure themselves sometimes.”

She had splinted the raccoon’s leg herself, in an agony for both of them, the splint fastened on knock-kneed, and Marit’s fingers bitten to the bone from forcing painkillers down his throat. He had limped away and she had searched the property for days, finding him dead, out in the open, by the winter garden. If only a swifter predator had finished him off; but she knew that she might have given him too much codeine.

Could this grangeful of rural worthies feel the death or dwindling of species on their own bodies, like a pain around the heart? One hundred and fifteen bobcats ran in the Berkshires, according to the latest headcount. Inspecting some acreage near Mount Greylock, Marit had come upon one of them. Along for the walk—if mincing in wedge heels was walking—Lola had gone off to see if the real-estate agent had been lying about a trout pool on the property. She had come back to find Marit with a spotted body laid, Pietà fashion, across her lap, the tufted ears and neck ruff drooping limp in death; and Marit holding a spring-trap out before her, which encased one severed, dripping paw, like a reliquary. Lola had stumbled out of her shoes and crouched down. She had dragged and pulled until Marit gave up the trap, and torn off her silk ascot and mopped at the blood on her friend’s arms.

“Honey lamb, you’re a mess; poor fella; he’s not a bob-
kitty
; stop calling him that; Marit, I’m going to have to slap you!”

Marit’s mouth twitched, and tears filled her eyes. She wiped them with the tips of her fingers, pretending that she had a lash or a mote caught under her lid, in case anyone was watching her. She preferred to think of herself as a person who did not cry easily. She had not wept at Vlado’s deathbed as he lay choking on his last breath. Luba had usurped all the grief in the atmosphere, leaving her daughter dry and stone-faced. Was she weeping now for herself or for the animals? Was their danger only a mirror of her own helplessness? Scorn and dishonor, if she were just a well of self-pity, and the animals her way of plumbing it. Was it merely her own death she saw on the charts that she scanned, the yearly census of diminishing animal populations? She could imagine shooting a woman in a leopard coat, or a dandy in elephant-hide moccasins, with a shell of outsize caliber and without remorse. Did Geronimo scalp white soldiers out of bloodlust, or to defend his shrinking homelands? If there were no wild corners left, the world would be like this unventilated Grange Hall, filled with upright sheep musing quietly in their chairs.

Marit saw a figure—two figures—across the hall, and felt a presence behind her.

“I don’t like to disturb you in your private thoughts, Miss Deym.”

It was Sheriff Stoeber. She did not bother to turn and acknowledge him. Her gaze was fixed on Gabriel Frankman in the distance. A woman was with him, claiming his attention. She was carrying a schoolbag shaped like a briefcase, or a briefcase that looked like a schoolbag. There was a large percentage of men and boys at Meyerling: had Gabriel vowed never to associate with members of his own sex?

“What can I do for you?” Marit asked, giving the Sheriff her profile. Gabriel’s companion had chunky calves and a cap of black hair. She wore ballet slippers and a full skirt puffed out with petticoats. Perhaps she thought she had come to a session of country dancing.

“Folks called in about noises out by your Old Road fence.”

The Sheriff had sidled into her line of vision, but Marit did not meet his eyes. She addressed a mole in the center of his forehead.

“What kind of noises?” she asked.

He was holding his hat in his hands and kept turning the brim. She shot a look past his head. The black-haired woman was gone. Gabriel was standing alone.

“Like a dog baying. But these folks said it was different.”

“I have a malamute, Sheriff. Sometimes he gets into the sanctuary.”

“Well, I heard it was more than one, and they answered each other.”

Suddenly, Marit caught the threat in his words. She looked him in the eye and favored him with a smile.

“People are like that, Sheriff. They know I keep animals, so they hang around the fence on a dare, like kids on Halloween. Why don’t you refer those calls to me? We must educate people.”

She extended her hand and he touched the tips of her fingers. Then she nodded. He took her nod as a dismissal and backed away as if he had been trained, like a courtier, not to turn his back on the sovereign.

Sounds of alarm began to ring in Marit’s head, scoring pictures of ruin. Pictures of beautiful cream-gray Lakona and her new wolf pups, ambushed in their den. Pictures of hunters with fresh-killed skins hanging from their belts, wiping their bloody knives across their thighs. Marit made her way toward the rear of the Grange. The anteroom would be empty. She slipped through the inside doors into the entrance hall. No one was there, just a pile of leaflets on a trestle table. She pressed the heels of her palms into her eye sockets, pressed as hard as she could, to wipe out images of doom with a pattern of flashing dots.

She felt hands pulling on her forearms, pulling her hands away from her eyes. She could only see black, but she gave in to Gabriel’s touch. Now his hands were linked behind her head, cradling her head, and his voice murmured words to calm horses
(easy, easy, steady there, hold on),
until the fight went out of her shoulders, which were squared all her waking hours.

“I came to find you,” he said, and pressed her head down on his shoulder.

She could see now, and remember her dread. She shied away from him.

“You know. You saw them,” she said, and for an instant she thought that he might have called the Sheriff.

“What did I see?” he asked, moving a half-step toward her.

“You saw the wolves. The Sheriff knows I have wolves. I need more barbed wire. I can raise the voltage. I need another malamute, a mate for Nikolai. I could tell him they were howling at each other. …”

“You’re babbling,” said Gabriel. “Keep your voice down.”

He advanced on her, crowding her. She held up her arms to ward him off. He reached out and wound his hand in her hair, without jerking her head, taking care not to pull her scalp. He raised her head, requiring her to look at him. She was very still, like a cat being held by its scruff.

There was a rumble from behind the inside doors. The meeting was over. Gabriel whipped his arms to his sides as if he had been spined.

“Let’s go home,” he said, grabbing her hand. She did not stop to question his choice of words. They dashed toward the outside door and made a vaudeville exit. He stubbed one rubber toe on a warped floorboard, while she grappled two-handed with the rusty doorknob that would not turn. He sent the door flying, finally, with a kick from the same stubbed foot, and an angry groan.

Marit drove back to the house with the accelerator down to the floor, as if an all-points bulletin had been put out on her car. Inside the house, she pushed the door shut very carefully in order to damp the faintest clicking of the lock. They crossed the hallway on the tips of their toes and sneaked up the staircase, wincing when they made a stair board creak. Marit led the way over the carpeted corridor toward her childhood bedroom. At the open door of another bedroom Gabriel pulled her back. He pointed inside.

It was Luba’s room, converted to a guest room. A galaxy of silver-framed photographs had stood on the bureau and covered the walls; they were stored in the attic now, boxed and tied and labeled. Luba had slung ropes of amethyst, coral, and pearls over the mirror sconces; she thought it was too fussy to coil each necklace up, every time she wore it, in its own chamois case. When she supervised Vilma, her maid, packing for a trip, Luba had a photographic memory of the contents of her drawers and closets, down to the color system by which her sweaters and lingerie were filed. When she came home late from a dinner, and Vilma was asleep, her memory failed her; she let her garments lie wherever she happened to step out of them. She had done her maquillage in the center of the room, without a mirror, smoking and talking to Marit or Vilma. Marit had never crossed the blue Chinese rug without raising clouds of face powder as she walked.

Since Luba’s death, Marit had purged the room of its patrician slovenliness, but not its glamour. It was a room that trapped the light and held it, even as the day waned, in the chased surface of the silver altar candlesticks on the dressing table, in the oval mirror framed in gilt-wood ribbons over the headboard, in the golden eyes of the peacock feathers printed on the bedspread and the heavy looped draperies.

“Here,” said Gabriel very softly. “It has a double bed.”

Marit laughed out loud. “Why are we being so stealthy?”

They moved to the side of the bed, facing each other, their arms crossed in front of their chests. A space of two feet yawned between them. Gabriel’s back was to the window. The late-afternoon sun struck him from behind, outlining his figure with light. His features were in shadow; she could not read his face to get her cues. She shut her eyes and reached out a hand to feel his cheek. He turned his face into her palm and kissed it; then he pulled her over the gap.