History of Wolves(11)

Behind me, I could hear voices clearly. Forks clawing plates, dinner getting cold.

I punched some random buttons and held the phone to my ear. I imagined Patra watching from behind, so I took a big breath.

“No, Mom! I’m fine. I’ll be home in a couple hours. No, they’re nice! Patra and Paul. They’d like me to stay after dinner. They’d like me to play Go Fish. They’d like me to read the kid a story and watch The Wizard of Oz on a DVD. They’d like me to stay and eat popcorn. No, I don’t know what they’re doing up here. She’s an astronomer or something, or her husband is. No, that’s not mysterious, it’s very scientific, it’s the definition of science. It’s stars. No they’re not going to kidnap me, they’re a mom and her son, not a cult, not a hippie commune or anything weird. Oh, they’re pretty innocent, actually. They need guidance and help. They need someone to teach them about the woods.”





4


WHICH I DID. In April, I started taking Paul for walks in the woods while his mother revised a manuscript of her husband’s research. The printed pages lay in batches around the cabin, on the countertop and under chairs. There were also stacks of books and pamphlets. I’d peeked at the titles. Predictions and Promises: Extraterrestrial Bodies. Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. The Necessities of Space.

“Just keep clear of the house for a few hours” were Patra’s instructions. I was given snacks in Baggies, pretzels wound into small brown bows. I was given water bottles in a blue backpack, books about trains, Handi Wipes, coloring books and crayons, suntan lotion. These went on my back. Paul went in my hand. His little fingers were damp and wiggling. But he was trusting, never once seeming to feel the shock of my skin touching his.

He wasn’t like animals. I didn’t have to win him over.

Ten bucks a day, Patra offered, so I quit my part-time job at the diner, where I’d had to wear a paper apron pinned like doll clothes to the front of my sweater. I’d always felt an ache of reluctance, anyhow, when diners left me their mugs and plates, their half-eaten sandwiches. They left behind wet dimes caked in tiny crumbs. Patra paid in crisp ten-dollar bills.

After school I took Paul to a place on the lake where the granite was striped in great glistening tracks of quartz. A few slabs of ice still shingled the shore. Superior gulls swooped over us. We settled on the reindeer moss and ate our pretzels in silence. Usually, Paul went through his bag in seconds and then, turning the bag inside out, licked salt from the plastic. Sometimes I smoked a furtive cigarette and tossed it quick in the open water. After ten minutes or so, our butts were wet, so I ditched the backpack behind a tree, and we set off.

Away from the sun-warmed rocks, the afternoons got pretty cold by five o’clock. But it was April. Though the buds were still hard as arrow tips on the trees, we could smell the syrupy resins from the pines. We could smell the rot of leaves beneath clumps of snow in the ravines. I no longer held the boy’s hand. This time of year, the woods were very empty and soft, very accommodating to little boys who wanted to jump off rocks and logs. I would go on ahead a few paces, scouting out a path through the mud and brambles. Paul usually brought along the leather glove—he only ever had the one—and he filled it now with stones, now with pine needles. Now with shiny black pellets.

“Oh, gross,” I said, looking back.

“For the City,” he explained.

I raised my eyebrows. “The city needs rabbit poop?”

“Cannonballs,” he corrected.

He wasn’t as boring as I expected. He said “watch out” to squirrels, got mad at litter, washed his cannonballs until they dissolved in a beached canoe full of water. I taught him to snap twigs back to mark the path home, to walk on the lichened parts of rocks that were less slippery. To break up the silence, for something to do, I started naming things off for him as we went. Trailing arbutus. Chickadees. When we came across some beer cans under a greenstone ledge, Paul pointed and I said “rust.” Sometimes Paul told me about his father’s research (“he counts baby stars”) and his mother’s job (“she corrects his words”) and the City he was building on the deck. It had roads of bark, walls of sticks and rocks, train tracks of flattened leaves.

“Who lives in the City?” I asked him once. I remembered children from a long time ago when the bunkhouse had been full of them. They did things like build cities for fairies. They made up tiny people who came out at night.

“Nobody lives there.” He looked frustrated by the question.

“Then why are you building it?”

He shrugged. “It’s just a city.”

“Just a city,” I repeated. I could respect that.


He took me for granted. When he climbed up a rock and couldn’t get down, he held open his arms—without saying a word—and I lifted him under the armpits. When he had to pee, which was often, he just said, “I gotta go,” and I steadied him as he pulled down his pants. The first time I saw his penis, I felt a wave of sympathy and disgust, the way I’d felt, once, when I’d come upon a clump of nude baby mice in the hollow of a log. Those mice had blue bulges for eyes, pink tails wound together in a big lump. “Yuck,” Paul said, when I helped him pull up his damp underwear and wipe his hands on a leaf. “Yuck,” I agreed. The next time, I pointed at a log and said, “Try to hit that.” Overhead each afternoon we could hear the Canada geese coming back. We could hear them giving directions, laboring through wind currents, setting down their Vs. When the sun had just about set, we turned around, Paul lagging, getting farther and farther behind, so as the day grew truly cold—miniature winter setting in, the way it does at night in April—I put the backpack on Paul, and Paul on me, and we headed back toward his house on the lake. His fingers made corkscrews in my hair and his breath heated one ear.