History of Wolves(73)

“Hey,” the man said. “Everything okay?”

Their license plate said Illinois. Land of Lincoln.

I kept going.

The car, a station wagon with a canoe lashed to the roof, slowly followed along as I walked. Like one of those dogs you can’t get rid of.

The man had furry eyebrows. “We’re not trying to be creepy,” he said. “And you’re right to be wary, of course. But I think—”

The car drove over a fallen branch, which cracked very slowly and loudly.

The man went on. “I can’t help but think you look like you could use a ride somewhere? Do you need a ride somewhere? The map says it’s woods for fifty miles in this direction. Just lakes and woods.” He held the map out the window to show me. As if I didn’t know this already, as if this was news to me.

But he was watching my face very closely.

“Okay,” I said finally. Late afternoon was settling in around us. The bottle of aspirin was still in my hand. I felt calm, delivered. “It’s not far,” I promised.

In the backseat, the little kids in their shorts and T-shirts helped me buckle my seat belt.

I had to direct the car. I had to say “slow down” at the turnoff to Still Lake and then point the way in the shadows toward the narrow road that led to the Gardner cabin. The visored woman was a good driver, and she took it easy on the gravel roads. The woods passed by languidly, the branches a blue-green slurry through the windows. I wondered how long I could keep the woman driving—she was very trusting, I could tell. I had the feeling I could point down any backwoods road, any rutted path, no matter how remote, and she’d go where I said. When I found myself enjoying this thought, it felt like a betrayal of something, though I wasn’t sure what, so I urged the careful woman driver forward. I tried to warn her of bumps in the road, of future dangers. “Sometimes it’s hard to see deer. You gotta watch out if you’re driving at dusk. Keep that in mind for later. There’s no streetlights or anything.”

The woman gave me a little smile in the rearview mirror. Like: I know.

The man was into small talk, but not like Leo, who liked facts, or my dad who only did baseball, weather, and fish. He asked me where I was going. I said “home”—which I guess sounded about right to him, because he left it at that and started telling me about their campsite up near Turquoise Lake.

“Ever been there?”

I couldn’t help rolling my eyes. “A million times.”

“Any tips?”

I thought about it. “There’s a bald eagle’s nest on the north shore.”

One of the little kids, the girl, said with all earnestness, “Cool.” She had out a notebook, and she wrote it down. Eagels Nest. At the top of that page it said Plans, and next to that was a second list for Memories. Here’s what she’d written down under that: Dead deer on the road. Girl who looks like a boy. Doesn’t know how to use a seet belt.

“S-E-A-T,” I told her.

She made the correction, rubbing at her paper with the eraser.

The father up front said, “We’d love to see a bald eagle.”

The mother said, “We’ve seen some hawks, but not any eagles. That would be great.”

I almost told them then: There’s something wrong with Paul.

I almost said it. I think I need some help.

But I didn’t because I knew they would help, and I didn’t want Patra squinting at them through the front door in her T-shirt, her panties exposed, or Leo shooing this other father away with a sweaty handshake. I didn’t want to see Patra shushed by Leo, sent back inside, or Leo tucking in his shirt and blinking his bloodshot eyes as he explained the way back to the highway. And I knew that if I somehow got this visored woman inside, if I somehow got her past Leo and into Paul’s room, it would mean the end of Janet and Europa for good, the end of everything worthwhile. So I had the woman take the slow way around the lake, going down the one-lane logging road that was almost never used, that was overgrown with shrubs and young aspen. I had her take the boat access road to the shore and double back. As she drove, I could see the woman watching me very closely in the rearview mirror. She was driving and watching me both, but I broke her gaze and looked down at my lap.

Beside me, the boy reached out and touched Paul’s aspirin bottle. “What’s that you got in your hand?”

“I got a headache,” I said.

Though I no longer did. It was gone.

We were going so slowly and the woods were so shaded and dark it seemed the trees, not the car, were moving. They were sliding past the windows, mechanically, and it was the car that seemed fragile and hesitant.


Then the Gardner cabin appeared. Car in the driveway, front shades closed, white cat peeping out one window.

“Oh!” the woman driver exclaimed, surprised. Plainly relieved to have reached a real destination. She rolled down her window to get a better look. “What a nice little house! Just hidden away back here.”

I could see the little girl writing it down. Codage.

She wrote it down carefully. Deep in the woods.


At some point—not long after that summer ended—the woods started to seem different to me for good. Let me be clear. This feeling started long before the twenty acres on the east shore of Still Lake was subdivided, and subdivided again, by developers from the Cities. It started long before the channel was widened between our lake and the next, before the aspens and pines were cleared and all the new houses built. Those were only the most obvious changes. What I’m talking about is something else. I remember watching the wind scuttling through a branch near the beginning of tenth grade, and thinking I could see the earth’s orbit setting up a chain reaction of weather that made the blowing branch inevitable. I looked up at the foliage and saw electrons from a not-so-distant (and not-so-spectacular) star turning carbon dioxide into a yellow-green leaf. Abe died later that fall, and as I dug a hole for him beneath the pines, I started to think about what would happen if we never found humans or humanoids or intelligence or cells or life of any sort anywhere else in the universe. I started to think maybe all those astronomers were wrongheaded in their quest, that the difference between life and nonlife was minimal at best, probably beside the point. We’d gotten it backward. We’d pointed our telescopes into space in hopes of seeing ourselves, and seen so many clumps of chemicals reflected back. There was no helping the boredom I thought. After Abe died, after Leo and Patra left. There was no changing the loneliness.