History of Wolves(16)

I took another sidelong look at her, curious. I thought it was nice that her boyfriend had stuck around, anyhow. It surprised me in fact. The story didn’t usually go like that—usually pretty girls got married to boys who left town for the army, for Junior Hockey League—so maybe this Karen had some secret vein of talent. From the corner of my eye, I saw her breast poking out of her shirt. It looked surprisingly long, with a pimply seeming nipple. “Why don’t you just stop now?” I ventured.

“I’m not a bad mother! Studies say mom’s milk is the shit for babies. Plus”—she raised a stubbled eyebrow—”my boyfriend’s happy to stay down there for now. He calls it the better half.”

I wondered what that meant. What that felt like.

“Marco!” the seniors yelled from their trucks.

“Polo!” another car returned.

“What’s he doing to her?” the Karen wondered.

I followed her gaze back to the playground. The little girl was lying flat on her back in the gravel, Paul’s empty black glove at her side. Had she fallen? Had the swing knocked her down? As we watched, Paul crawled on top of her, his knees spread over her stomach, palms in the rocks. He seemed to be talking to her very quietly, and though there was no obvious reason to think he was doing anything wrong, I sensed there was something predatory in his kneeling stance, something aggressive. The little girl was still, her face turned away from us. Paul looked like he might have been about to kiss her on the mouth.

But he was just talking. They seemed to be playing a sort of game. “There is … matter … All is … mind,” he said. For a second it sounded like words from a book, from a fairy tale, the words running together so they were hard to hear. Then his singsong words became clear: “There is no spot where God is not.”

“What’s he saying?” the Karen asked me. “What’s going on?”

I wasn’t sure. We stood up together. But for some reason we were hesitant to approach. There seemed something very private about what we were watching, something secretive and excessive that excluded us entirely. The little girl started whimpering slightly, and Paul stayed crouched over her, blond hair hanging in his eyes. “There is no spot where God is not!”

“What the fuck?” The Karen shot me a disgusted look. “What the fuck is this?” She started forward. “I sit down in a park, and Jesus weirdos just show up out of nowhere.”

“No!” I said, startled.

“Freaks just flock to this town, like fucking geese.”

“Wait—” I followed her.

I felt a rush of defensiveness, and then—like a leaf flipping in the wind—a rush of relief arrived right behind it. I put my hands on my hips. I felt as though I’d been hiding something from her all this time, and that she’d finally called me out on a lie I’d been surprised I could maintain so long. I had no idea what Paul was up to and, for the moment, I didn’t really care. So we were weirdos. So Paul and I weren’t headed for a long afternoon of Sesame Street in a basement somewhere or an eventual brain injury from a puck to the head, so we weren’t headed for whatever crushing mediocrity this Karen and her boyfriend and her bald baby had planned. So what.

The Karen stalked over to the girl, her baby tucked under one arm. Then she grabbed the little girl by the hand and pulled her out from under Paul. For a second, the girl seemed stunned, as if she couldn’t quite breathe, but then she let out the piercing wail of a much younger child, snot bubbling from her nose. She looked at Paul with a face broken open, with a look of utter love and desolation, as if she’d given him everything in the ten minutes she’d known him, and he’d taken it, oh, he’d taken it anyhow, knowing just how much it cost.


I hadn’t planned on asking Paul what he’d been doing to her, but he brought it up. On the bike ride home, he was quiet for a long time. Then after a while he started saying, “That girl, that girl …”

So I craned my neck around and said, “What?”

“That girl …”

“Paul, you hurt her.” I felt obliged to say that.

“She fell!”

“You held her.”

“I healed her.”

“Gimme a break.”

By their nature, it came to me, children were freaks. They believed impossible things to suit themselves, thought their fantasies were the center of the world. They were the best kinds of quacks, if that’s what you wanted—pretenders who didn’t know they were pretending at all. That’s what I was thinking as I pedaled Paul home. Rain made the breaks squeal beneath us, made the bike tires drone.

“Gimme a break!” Paul said.

By their nature, kids were also parrots.





6


IN FACT, PAUL AND I DID NOT ALWAYS GET ALONG. We respected each other most of the time, and in general we were pretty good at setting up compromises. I gave Paul an afternoon at the diner eating pie, and in return he gave me an hour on the lake in the canoe. We sat in the back booth of the diner, and I paid from my slowly growing savings, smoothing one of Patra’s ten-dollar bills on the table when we were done. No oily quarters and dimes, no waiting around for change, no small talk with Santa Anna, the slightly bearded waitress.

“What makes pie so good?” Paul asked as we walked out. The sugar had wound him up. He was doing a little jig of ecstasy, hopping from foot to foot, flapping his fingertips.