History of Wolves(43)

“She’s got such a pissy look,” my mother finally said, laughing at me. “Look at that look.”

“Just don’t go counting things near the highway,” my father finished.

I slid very slowly from the cliff of his lap. Since Tameka and the Big Kids left, I almost never even left sight of the bunkhouse and cabin. I let one leg go first, then the other, thinking my father might pull me back up. Then I lay on the floor, looked at the wormy brown laces of his boots.

“Seriously,” my mother said. “She told me she wants to measure the cabin. And she’s counted our dishes, apparently. We still have all sixteen spoons.”

“Children like to count,” my father said, knowingly.

“This one’s got a talent for it.”

On the floor, I bit into my father’s bootlace, chewed for a moment. I could tell by the way he cleared his throat that he was getting ready to stand up, head for the shed.


There wasn’t ever anywhere to go inside. There were only two rooms on the ground floor—the kitchen space and the bedroom—plus a stepladder to the loft, where I slept on a goose-feather mattress jammed against rafters. The loft was a particleboard platform. My bedding was a pile of army-issue sleeping bags that smelled of mildew and smoke. From the low ceiling hung a yellow cloth with black cats smoking cigarettes in an intricate, dizzying pattern. My mom drew this around my sleeping bags when I slept—unless it was too cold, unless it was winter. Then my father slung the old mattress over his shoulder like the body of a disheveled fat person he loved and wished to save. He hoisted it down the ladder and laid it by the stove. “Sleep,” he told me, straightening the mattress creases with a wide red hand. “Get a good dream.” He patted an old jacket into a pillow-like shape.

He was kind to objects. With people he was a little afraid.

Winters were especially confining. We were all tied—as if by rope—to that sooty black furnace. Which has a certain romance, I know, if you tell the story right, a certain Victorian ghost-story earnestness people like, and I’ve told the story that way to the delight of shark-tooth-wearing dates in coffee shops. So many people, even now, admire privation. They think it sharpens you, the way beauty does, into something that might hurt them. They calculate their own strengths against it, unconsciously, preparing to pity you or fight.


Like that mechanic I dated in Saint Paul. Eventually, he got tired of sneaking out of my bed in the morning; he made me come to his apartment to see him. He got me drunk one night, fed me burritos. He laid out tarot cards in rows on his blue carpet, pointed at the gargoyle face of the Fool and asked what I thought. Apparently, he’d been a psychology major before he was a mechanic. He had a thing for Carl Jung, as well as an intimate knowledge of carburetors. He wanted to excavate my past.

“Isn’t this supposed to tell the future?” I asked, sitting cross-legged on his floor. I was just tipsy enough to give him a hard time.

“It’s tea leaves, babe, not magic.”

“Ah. You give me superstition, not the good stuff.”

“I promise this’ll be good.” He scooted closer to me on his knees. Held up one finger. “Give me a second. What does this card make you think?”

“That Fool looks like pretty easy prey, if you ask me. His eyes are closed.”

“Okay. That’s perfect. What else?”

“Does he have, like, a pig on his stick?”

“I think that’s a rucksack.”

I narrowed my eyes. “Where’d you learn to read tarot again?”

He narrowed his eyes back—he was smiling though. “Who was easy prey in your childhood?”

“Did I ever tell you I know quite a lot about wolves?”

“Ha! The Girl Scout, I know her. The Girl Scout comes out whenever you’re nervous.”

“Like, I’m your wolf expert. Ask me anything.”

“Who was easy prey, then?”


The truth was, that old woodstove was narcotic and banal to me as a child, so I was drawn to it without seeing it, and hated it without wondering why. The winter I was nine, I laid my cheek against it while I was reading Mush, a Manual on the floor. The burn made a bubble of clear skin—a round half globe like the air bladder of a fish—under my left eye. The bubble grew as the days passed, rose translucently from my face, obstructed my vision when I looked down. If my parents noticed, they didn’t draw attention to it. At school I made excuses to go to the bathroom and poke at it in the mirror. Sometimes Sarah the Ice Skater would be there, too, leaving class early so she could change before practice. Sucking a Blow Pop, snapping a leotard under her crotch. “Sick,” she’d say, peering at my reflection in the mirror and touching her own cheek.

And once, coming closer, getting curious, “Did your dad do that to you? Is that the kind of thing they do to you?”


I had two chores to do with my dad: chop wood and clean fish. By the time I was ten, I could chop whole logs on my own, so my dad gave up that chore for me to do alone. But we did the fish together until I was in high school, working quietly over a pair of buckets in the shed. We used bleached fillet knives that we scraped against the whetstone before starting—and that was the best part, always, the gravelly, ringing drag of steel over rock. The sound made the hairs on my arms prickle up, my teeth ache pleasurably. Then there was just the sluice and slop of skins coming off. There were our two fist-size puffs of breath punching the air side by side, my father’s and mine. Ha. Ha.