Hunger of the Wolf Read online

  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.

  Number 17 was swept every day, painted every spring—the property a crack on the cliff face of respectable life that the family gripped with all its strength and stoicism. The biggest accomplishment for the Wylies, a purchase second in importance only to the house itself, was a brand-new twentieth-century American upright piano—the status symbol of the day. For the boys, playing the instrument was the same as any other chore. Chopin and Mozart and Bach were pieceworks of drudgery. The house was large for the neighborhood, a stately pile built by an antique company owner before the surrounding lands were bought up for the squat serviceable brick houses that the steelownerrun banks mortgaged to their workers. There were ten rooms in 17 Flora. The Wylies let to twelve girls. The lone surviving picture of Marie Wylie shows her with a smile as bland as potato water, leaning against a wall and staring into the middle future, fraught with the anxiety of a poor Scottish immigrant paying off a boarding house on laundry and a barber’s salary, a life devoid of any luxury, even rest—a disciple of that most demanding of creeds, the belief that one must always find a way to get along.

  The trouble of money blew in from all directions. How much was each girl bringing in for the rent? How much were they eating at breakfast? How fast were the boys running down the street and how soon would they need new shoes? How much of his tips was her husband keeping for himself? How much could she put on the mortgage this year?

  Sentimentality was for Jews and violin players. Champlain was a furnace, ringed by bodies that fed it. The Wylies came from the tumult of a steel town, the sweltering grind of factories and new houses and slabs of beef with heaps of potato mash and babies every year and death by accident in the spark ore furnaces. When Dale’s father, Bob Wylie, fresh from the mediocre town of Abermarley in the ugliest corner of Scotland, had married Marie Simpson in 1894—they met and courted perfunctorily at a Methodist church on Isabella Avenue—her aunt Millicent provided them with a mortgage because no bank would. Aunt Millie ruled the material world, in all its hard edges and bland rules, from her verandah in the middle of High Castle Road, the street immediately west of Flora. She owned the property. So when Dale, aged four, corrected his mother’s play at a hand of bridge, Aunt Millie slapped him hot roses across the face and told him that children should be seen and not heard and everyone considered it her right to do so. When Max ran away from home at the age of seven, turning up at a dairy farm three towns over, Aunt Millie called Bob Wylie to an audience in her velveteen parlor, and the man showed with his hat brim twisting in his fingertips.

  “You are raising wild children,” she said.

  “I know, Auntie, but he will be punished.”

  “Absolutely not.” The announcement lifted her off the throne of the settee ever so slightly.

  “But he ran away, Aunt Millie.”

  “All children are wild. So put away your belt, or I will have something to say about it. The boy is going to be rich. He has spunk. We need men with spunk.”

  Bob Wylie listened, because he had no spunk. He arrived from Scotland for work at the mill on the promise of a cousin and took a swung beam to the shin his third day. No one had any use for a limper in the world of men who stand up. He cut hair at The American Hotel on Davis Street, keeping the barbershop open from eight to eight Monday to Thursday and eight to midnight Friday and Saturday. Marie took in laundry at first and then lodgers—always young, always female.

  In the busy afternoons after school, the Wylie boys wafted down to their father’s barbershop to help out. The burgundy leather of the everyman’s throne, the mingled odor of manly cleanliness, bitter herbal elixirs, delicate powders, musk, the lugubrious ache of working men at rest. The place ran with the tableside chatter of the nobility of Champlain, the steelworkers who don’t have to say anything because they know they are making the world. Max and Dale sopped it up with bread-butt ears. And to everyone, whether an awkward teenage mustache or a factory-magnate muttonchop, Bob Wylie smiled mildly, servile and polite, a functionary who spoke or not at the whim of the customer. The boys swept the gray-brown pile of clippings into the corner and learned the lessons that only children can learn. They learned what money is: Who shaves. Who is shaved.

  And if ever a shiny nickel were to drop gratuitously into the dazzled palm of Max or Dale, the tip traveled straight to Bob, and from Bob to Marie, and from Marie to Aunt Millie—the large, round blackness swallowing all joy that passed into her orbit. She was the living symbol of how much of life is owing. Bob Wylie stumbled home from his twelve-hour days over the grim and gray Monongahela River into a house of women, clomping down the back stairs into what he craved most: furious basement drinking, the ultimate privacy of oblivion. Marie and the boys would grant him his unspoken wish—they pretended he wasn’t there. The basement may as well have been a grave. This too was another inarticulate childhood lesson. If you worked a full day, the women would let you go down alone.

  *

  The Wylie brothers’ sickness revealed itself on April 19, 1905, the day after Champlain’s Great Fire. From the roof of 17 Flora, Max and Dale observed the blaze beginning to swallow the city, the fire invigorated by shoddy building materials, roused by a freak gale on the evening of the eighteenth that pitched the fire to an omnivorous crackle. Crowds flooded down Flora Avenue, and when the gale started, fear washed back up the city in running stragglers. New firemen, with ever-louder alarms, arrived on the half hour, from Homestead, from Pittsburgh. All night, dread and excitement kept the boys on the roof, and in the morning, after a heavy rain had smoothed down the danger, the boys slipped to street level to explore the burnt wreckage as if it were a kind of black-boned ancient ruin designed for their personal pleasure.

  “You know what would be a cracker?” Max asked.

  “Something to shock the boys.”

  “Exactly. Some old man’s dentures.”
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br />   “Or a charred Bible.”

  “A burnt baby shoe.”

  “The hacked-off hand of a Chinaman.”

  That night, exhausted from anxious fun and morbid fascination, they fell into a sleep more profound than any sleep they had ever known. And out of this total darkness, Dale woke to find his brother screaming in agony. Max had bristles prodding through his skin and new teeth slivering their way through his gums. His face had petrified in a half scream, a half beg, fear and pain and confusion, flailing, raring on the bed, ripping the covers with fresh claws. Terror poured over Dale’s head like ice water. Father and mother rushed into the room. Bob grabbed the wolf-Max and Dale both by the scruffs of their necks, dragging them down to the basement. A leash chained to the wall had already been prepared.

  Marie held Dale gently by the hand while his father beat his wolf-brother with a bundle of willow branches. Then Bob shaved off Max’s fur, stripe by stripe, leaving a naked wolf cowering and whimpering, civilized on the dirt floor. His mother held Dale’s hand but said nothing. No one explained the magical transformation to Dale or Max: Their parents knew how to bear beastliness, and they would share that knowledge with their children, but as for its origin or its purpose, they could no more comprehend the wolf than they could comprehend other everyday miracles like the birth of children or the existence of stars. Their humility kept them stupidly wise; they could instruct their children in endurance. Dale took instruction from his mother’s ancient eyes, which stared past the suffering of her sons, into some private, unspeakable knowledge. He learned from the steadiness of his father, who held down Max the way he held down the beast within himself. They were never more of a family than at that moment, wordlessly sharing the truth of their nature, some howling, some moaning, some unspeaking.

  The boy stood in the basement with his secret, a mysterious ancient recognition. In all the agony and loneliness and magic, his whole being craved to be out again in that small patch of trees and grasses beyond the edge of town, down the tracks, down the river, where they had buried the dog. A broom leaned in the corner, the same as the one at the barbershop. Dad must have bought two for one.

  Dale picked up the broom and swept the clippings from the floor before returning to bed alone.

  *

  They were monsters. It didn’t seem to matter much. Their new natures followed the old routines. For three days a month, they had to skive off school, handing explanatory letters from their mother to the principal’s office and making up stories for their friends about work in neighboring towns. On a blood-warm June day that defied all classrooms and lessons, the boys finally egged each other to drop out together at the end of tenth grade—Max having failed the ninth twice. They could no longer stand the imprisonment. The only problem was that they would have to tell their mother. Dale was declared ambassador by eenie-meenie.

  Marie Wylie was scraping the street’s grimy laundry into hand-scalding water when he made his presentation.

  “You don’t go to school, you go to work,” she said without looking up from the gray sudsy mist.

  “That was our plan, Ma.”

  “You put money on the mortgage same as everybody else.”

  “When we have jobs.”

  “Don’t give me when. Five dollars a month or you’re back in school.”

  The Wylie boys had struck their first bargain. Freedom for five dollars a month. It seemed fair. As their mother turned back to the mass of laundry, the boys’ hearts fluttered with the moment’s terrible significance. In the morning they had been boys. In the evening, men. Dale and Max would receive no first communion, no bar mitzvah, no spirit quest. They received a much more powerful injunction: Get a job.

  *

  Max launched himself into the streets, a glutton for labor and for everything else, hauling impossible loads of garbage to the city dump, roofing entire apartment buildings by himself, alone with the fumes of tar and the high winds, delivering bottles of rye to restaurants that should not have been receiving bottles of rye. Risks of legal or spiritual or physical harm were strictly points for negotiation with him. After tumbling six stories to a stretched awning and bouncing into the street on a painting job, he walked away with nothing more than pretty plum bruises and the neighborhood nickname “Blessed Maximus.” He chased down errands—skidding messages across town or moving houses on crews or de-thistling yards—in between floury bakery shifts that stretched from four in the morning until eight and continued stretching from eight in the evening until midnight.

  Max gambled as soon as he had money to gamble with. He once bet a neighbor a month of bread on whose lawn would sprout crocuses first in the spring. He won, and then realized that he didn’t need any bread because he worked at a bakery. With that same neighbor, he wagered a week’s wages on which of their glasses of beer a fly would fall into first. All winter the glasses sat outside, filling and emptying with snow like unresolvable questions. “Blessed Maximus” eventually won when a mayfly obligingly offed itself in the scum of the remainder.

  He had the grace of those who live inconsequentially. The others in Champlain gave him the same place set apart for saints and idiots and wild animals. Max never worked in the mill, even though the steelworkers were the aristocracy of Champlain’s laborers. “Too hot,” he said to a mill man who had heard about an opening. “There’s time enough to burn later.”

  *

  Dale wanted a desk. His father never had a desk. His father shaved the cheeks of the men who worked at desks. In his starchiest high collar, a razor ring around his babyfattish neck, Dale presented himself at MacCormack and Sons, the general trading company on the corner of Main and Jarvis, whose owner, John MacCormack, had known the Wylie family in Abermarley. The windowless back room behind the storage was a claustrophobic schoolhouse of calculation and grind, an academy of pinching. MacCormack himself, with his curled white eyebrows and up-swirled hair, resembled a Scottish prophet dispatched by the god of gains and losses to ensure that the terrified clerks kept accurate reckonings of all matters local and terrestrial.

  The old man was excoriating one of his clerks as Dale timidly ducked his head inside, his presence disturbing the rhythmic humiliation that the old man was spelling out. Still stooped and without turning, MacCormack barked, “Who are you, then?”

  “Dale Wylie, sir.”

  “The Wylie boy?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Can you count?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Can you read?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Do you lie?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Do you want to be useful?”

  “I do, sir.”

  MacCormack paused to allow the air to tingle with the electricity of his judgment. “I suppose we’ll see.” His sorcerer’s fingers conjured a stool at the clerk’s booth. A job. A real job. The realest gift one person can give to another.

  *

  Dale received his business education on MacCormack’s carts from the salesmen deployed to homes and construction sites peddling everything from twine to two-by-fours to encyclopedias to Easter baskets. He learned that you sell hard to a house on a corner because you can go in three different directions and say to each neighbor that you’ve had an order from the last house. If you want to sell scissors for 25 cents you divide your scissors into two lots and sell one for 20 cents and the other for 50 cents. Collect overdue bills by sitting in the debtor’s house, smiling and ticking away paperwork, until the debt is paid.

  MacCormack’s mobile army roamed Champlain, struggling every day against the swift-flowing current of the steelworkers’ ingrained hatred of spending money. The salesmen admired, at least among themselves, panache. Their boldness, their camaraderie, their indefatigable toughness appealed to Dale’s antic heart. Like him, the salesmen were fortune-dreamers. Not like Dad, who cut hair and swept the clippings and culled the tips to buy whisky so he could slink to the basement and never look his wife in the eye. In the dusty co
urtyards of immigrants, the salesmen prospected enough desire for belonging to tease out the price of a magazine subscription. They cheerfully pretended to undercut one another on staples. They spoke to the wealthy as if they were poor, and spoke to the poor as if they were wealthy, and to everyone with the most perfect manners, their politeness and affability honed by the purifying worship of self-interest. Dale was an eager baptism to its witness.

  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 …