Hunger of the Wolf Page 4

  “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 b
lack 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.

  The only way for Dale to assuage the uneasiness the girl provoked was long sessions of midnight masturbation—tricky when the bed’s shared with a brother, his mass of flesh snoring then wheezing, farting, calling mangled monologues in slurry tempos, then panting and curling away. Wet dreams, loaded with bunches of collapsing black hair with bright black eyes, and her bent animal body, relieved him, anxiety finding its own way out of the labyrinth.

  *

  On April 3, 1917, Max careened into the offices of MacCormack and Sons with the happiest news any young man could imagine: A public and acceptable killing was about to begin. The war was to be the great chance of their lives, the effort of a generation, the American boys setting off to solve Europe’s stupid problems once and for all. Dale and Max skipped work to sign up along with the other clerks at MacCormack and Sons. The authorities snatched Dale out of the queue even though he had removed his glasses. His astigmatism was so marked that no examination was necessary. They refused Max for “a murmur in the heart” after a series of short, gassy doctors prevaricated into their beards.

  Max wept in his brother’s arms like a jilted bride.

  “We’ll find something else, Maxie,” Dale said.

  “All right for you, right? Everybody knows about your eyes, but I can see. I can see.”

  “We’ll find another way to do our bit.”

  “That’s what the fellows who can’t serve say,” Max said.

  The Wylie boys never left Flora Avenue without their ATTEMPTED AND REJECTED badges, which deflected shame but not the anguish of irrelevance. The war had welcomed the other young men out of the light of the ordinary world into the deathly cool halls of history, where the names are inscribed forever on walls nobody reads. Even with the AR badges blazing, every gesture of the Wylies’ lives, lifting a forkful of boiled beef or steeping tea or planning businesses or chatting with a fellow clerk about the latest speakeasy, wasted to insignificance.

  The other men, the men who mattered, paraded down Main Street on their way to Cantigny and Belleau Wood and the Marne—their shoulders scattered with flowers from children and kisses from women and tearful gazes of old men—while Max and Dale roared in their useless privacy. Max moved pianos. Dale kept books.

  *

  More than money, more than the beast, irrelevance provoked the Wylie brothers to the wildest decision of their lives. They moved to Alberta. The Canadian province had only possessed a name for a dozen years when the Wylie brothers set out to stake a farm in the country around the Peace River. Alberta had no shadows of any kind—a landscape free from the codes with which human beings spin a false, self-sustaining dream to blur the hard lines of hunger and death. Marie Wylie begged her sons to stay. She had been grateful that all the masculine silliness of the war had miraculously washed out, and now her sons were going to throw away their good fortune on a lark.

  “You have solid jobs and good prospects,” she said, sucking in her tears in the parlor as they made their announcement.

  “They’re giving away land, Ma,” Dale explained.

  “And they’re not making land anymore,” Max added.

  “Bob, tell these boys. Tell them how likely it is they’re going to get rich off farming.”

  Bob peered up with his sad eyes, somewhat shocked that he had been asked to speak, then shrugged. “Land is land,” he said. It was as close to meaning nothing as he could manage while speaking.

  “See, Ma. If we crap out, we’ll still have the land.”

  “What kind of language is that? Already you’re talking like gamblers. You’ll have nothing. You’ll have nothing.” She tossed her handkerchief on the floor and fell back in her chair, defeated. She had worked so hard for boys who were going to throw over their futures for a patch of wilderness in a foreign country. The waste was only slightly less impious than suicide.

  *

  I found Dale’s explanation of Alberta in the blue trunk at the cottage, right on top of all the other papers. It was a letter sent to George when he assumed control over the North Americ
an operations.

  June 23, 1961

  Dear George,

  Now that you’re the big man I should probably tell you about the disaster. I should tell you about Alberta. It was more Max than me, even if that does sound like an excuse. The pamphlet from the Canadian government drifted down to him from the hand of one German girl’s daddy or another. A lot of them drifted down from the north. Pamphlets and Germans. He just couldn’t stand to live in Champlain much longer and there wasn’t any more work for him to do. MacCormack refused to let me into the business, so we needed something more, both of us. We just had no idea how much more there was.

  We left in what we thought was the spring, with what we thought were the necessary tools and kit, which I had horsetraded down to a pittance with old Johnny Mac. The deal itself was pretty sweet. The Canadians were giving away, to anyone who asked, a quarter-section of land, with the agreement that ten acres a year for three years must be cleared or it reverted to the government. They had to fill up that nowhere and why not with us?

  A quarter-section of land is property enough, but I Englished the ball a bit, so that I got a quarter-section, then Max got a quarter-section, then Ma, then Pa, and I traded it around till they were all neighbors, and the Wylies owned title on a full section of land for nothing. I pray you never have to know this but a full section of land is a kingdom. And I’m not just saying that. There are kingdoms in Europe smaller than a full section, so I had finagled us a kingdom for free, that’s what I figured.

  We should have known, from the train ride out, that we were headed nowhere. Every berth filled up with Ukes. Ukrainians. People who had been farming for ten thousand years. If you opened their veins, grain poured out. The distances that boggled us didn’t seem to bother them much. If you told those folks there was a free quarter-section on the far side of Uranus, they’d find a way to get there. We had heard it was a seven-day ride to Edmonton, and I don’t know why we didn’t believe it. It’s like when the doctors tell you how childbirth works, and you figure, “They must be exaggerating. It can’t be like that or we’d all be dead.” But there it is, although that’s for another letter, I guess.