History of Wolves(59)

I kept walking.

It was another dreary snowless night. Almost no one was out—we could have walked straight down the middle of the street. Where were those luminaries? I wondered. My arms were aching under the weight of our lemony-smelling towels. Had we gone too far? Had we missed them? But no. Within a block we caught sight of the first of several long lines of brown paper bags lit up, all flickering orangely with candles.


“Ah!” Ann cried, stopping short.

Hipping her basket so she could touch my arm. “Look-it that! Look.”


At some point that year—maybe that night, maybe a few weeks later—I ended up telling Ann about Loose River. I told her about the competing nativity scenes at Christmas, the Lutherans’ sandbag Jesus and the Catholics’ ice one. I told her about the gym roof that collapsed in eighth grade and about Mr. Adler, who loved the Russian monarchs more than anything, even America. I may have even told Ann about my parents eventually, and about beautiful Lily—Lily who left us to have her baby—but I never said a thing about Patra and Paul, and I never told her what I really thought about Christian Science, which is that from what I know, from what little I know, it offers one of the best accounts of the origin of human evil.

This is where it comes from, Ann.

I think, now: That’s the story I’m trying to tell here.


When Paul was excited, he ran with big moon-landing steps. He always looked as if he were concentrating very hard, saying to himself run, run, and each time the word went through his head he’d take a slightly more determined leap into the air. When I told him to run faster, he’d just run higher, and his pace would slow way down. He’d do all this useless work, hiking up his knees, pumping his fists.

It was great to watch, and I was only a little cruel in provoking him.

“Run!” I’d say, and he’d slow down to a near crawl, almost stopping between each stride.

“Faster!” I’d say. His lips would pinch shut. He’d shunt one arm forward and one arm back. He was a kid who’d learned to run by watching dwarves in their mine, from TV, from cartoons.

“Race you to the house!” I said to him once, and, as if he’d finally figured it out—that day, at last—he’d stayed put on the dock. So I took a few exaggerated steps to encourage him. “I’m going to beat you!” I said, offering that irresistible threat, doing a thump-thump-thump with my boots on the planks. No dice. When I looked back again, he’d slunk to a lying position, belly down, his arms curled up under him on the boards.

“What’s up?” I said.

I closed in on him, casually prodded him with the toe of my boot. “This bear has gone into hibernation, looks like.”

After a moment: “I’m bored.”

“The bear is bored?” I asked, mock incredulous.

“And—” He turned his neck so his face pressed into the boards, the skin of his lip pushing out in a loop. “My tummy—”

Something about the way he said it made me crouch down and look at him more closely. Then I pulled him up to sitting. I lavished on him all I had in my little reserve. “Then you don’t know about the wolf.”

“I don’t want to pretend,” he groaned.

“This one’s real,” I promised.

This was late May, maybe. The aspens and poplars were dropping their seeds in fluffy drifts that accumulated—the way snow did—along the dirt driveway. I coaxed him into the garage with a few pretzels and buckled him in the bike while he ate them, slouched, helmeted, serenely disenchanted, looking big headed and Buddha-like in his red plastic seat. I pulled the bike out onto the driveway and swung it a little menacingly when I climbed on. “Here we go!” I yelled, hoping to throw him off balance, hoping to thrill him into acting more like a kid. It was a long ride to the Nature Center, and the whole way there I told him wolf facts, wolf statistics, wolf stories. I intended to impress him with the taxidermy wolf in the lobby. I intended to point out the yellowed canines under her blue-hooded lip, the cherryred drips of blood painted on her coral claws. I remembered the first time I’d seen that wolf as a kid, how the feeling went beyond love, how it made me hungry, hungry, hungry.

But Paul had no interest in the wolf at all. He looked at it for a few seconds and shrugged. After eleven miles on the bike, all he had to say was, “That’s not real.”

What he liked best at the center were puzzles. He found one on a shelf in the corner that exactly matched one he had at home. It was a bucolic winter woodland scene: a snowy owl perched fatly on a black branch, eyes lidless and round as two open black pots. Paul knew how to put this puzzle together by heart, so instead of looking at the wolf or stuffed foxes, instead of fingering the rubber scat or dipping his little hand into one of the wooden boxes and guessing its contents, he sat cross-legged on the floor in the corner, piecing together the same puzzle he’d done dozens of times at home. I wandered around the center to kill time, read about the tea you could make from pine needles, watched goldfish circle Peg’s aquarium. Eventually, nothing left to do, I went over and squatted next to Paul, who was holding a Swiss cheese slice of the owl’s face in one hand.

At first it infuriated me that he didn’t look up when I approached. That he didn’t acknowledge me at all, or wonder what I was doing. He scooched over automatically, let his body flow into mine and work its way onto my lap. He never stopped studying the puzzle. He settled his body against mine, arranging leg over leg, till I finally had to sit down fully on the floor. He assumed I was available and interested; he always just assumed. He bent double at the waist to reach the puzzle from the perch he’d taken on my lap. And outside—outside the window and down the road—whole mountains of poplar fluff drifted past.