Sister Wolf (16 page)

Love seemed to have opened up like a pit at Marit’s feet. It took some people that way the first time, but it portended no better for any times to come. Lola had watched the impact of love on the girls in her graduating class; love had carved out their innards, leaving them with a hole in the middle like a piece of modern sculpture. One day they were dense and intractable; the next, you could see right through them. There were rumors around of a love that enhanced and tonified, that had the strengthening effects of beef tea or a football training breakfast, but she had never seen a living example of it.

Lola herself wanted sport and pleasure. Above all, she wanted no emotion that would invade her privacy. But her friend, who had pledged herself to important work, who was scratchy, impatient, and willful, who had all the traits of someone who should never live with anybody, had planted herself in the way of love like a young sapling trying to grow on a bluff swept by high winds. The sapling will bend, and eventually does break; it can never grow to its full height where it is situated.

Lola could not rest imagining Marit’s future. Her legs ached and her back ached from sitting in the chair so long. It was seven-forty-five by the clock, and the sunlight had been strong for some time. She raised the blind to let the light wake Marit, and went into the kitchen to fix two breakfast trays. Marit liked breakfasts that reminded her of Paris, so Lola heated milk to pour with the coffee, sliced a flute of French bread baked by Mrs. Gilliam’s cook, and put apricot jam and sweet butter into little white pots. She was scooping coffee into the percolator basket when she heard the shuffling of socks on linoleum, and felt two arms twined around her waist. Marit was clinging to her and scratching her nose on her shoulder. A scoop of coffee went half in the basket and half on the counter.

“Can’t we eat in here?” said Marit. “Trays in bed make me feel like an invalid.”

Lola turned around and inspected Marit closely, lifting her chin and taking a good look at her fingernails.

“Brush your teeth and throw cold water on your face. The coffee will be ready in two shakes.”

Marit smiled at her. Lola never showed the wrong kind of sentiment. She never asked how you were, or repeated the question ten seconds later, after you had assured her sincerely that you were fine. Marit told her so.

“Why should I ask?” said Lola, replacing the trays with placemats. “You’re as tough as the back end of a shooting gallery.”

Marit sat down and dipped a spoon into the jam pot. “I thought I was. Apparently there’s a fault in my psyche. The St. Gabriel fault, don’t you know.”

Lola frowned. This statement sounded like flippancy, or self-parade.

“Since you want to use the analogy, why can’t you run for your life when you know the quake is coming?”

“Because I can’t. I’m the earthquake and the victim. I also record the shocks.”

Lola set down the percolator so hard that coffee splashed out of the spout.

“I do not admire melodrama. Keep that fancy talk for your memoirs. The way you’re going, you’re not going to live to write them.”

“It’s not fancy talk, Lolly.” Her head was bowed. “It’s how it feels.”

Lola took her hand and squeezed it. She was frightened of any more tears.

“I have no business to flare up like that. I haven’t got the sense God gave a chicken. A friend isn’t good for much if she refuses to listen.”

“This friend is,” said Marit, whose eyes were blurry. “This friend makes café au lait and heats the French bread.”

“I did get you cleaned up. I want credit for that. You’re very obedient when you’re torpid.” Lola poured the coffee and handed Marit her cup. “I didn’t wash your hair; I just brushed it. I couldn’t have you going to sleep with a wet head.”

Marit buttered her bread, dipped an end into her coffee, and held it there until it was properly soaked. Little globules of fat floated on top of the liquid.

“I don’t like this,” Marit said. Lola looked up. “I don’t mean my breakfast. I don’t like to be in love if it makes me do strange things.”

“Some people shouldn’t be in love,” said Lola. “I’m not sure most women shouldn’t.”

“If I fall apart, what will happen to my animals? You know what people think. They think that someone like me only cares about animals because we feel as helpless as they are.”

“Bears and wolves are not helpless, honey. They can kill a man.”

“If it’s one to one, they can; but men hunt in gangs. Do you remember that newspaper headline?
‘SKIPPER SAVES DOG AS CREW DROWNS’
?” Lola shook her head. “I read it to you at the time. You do remember. The captain kept his Labrador in the skiff and let three crewmen hang on to the lifeboat in frigid water. Two of them died. Gabriel wouldn’t understand that, but I understand it.”

Marit was scraping the sides of the jam pot with her knife. Lola tilted her chair, reached over to the cabinet, and pulled out a new jar of marmalade.

“You talk like Gabriel is your fate, or a curse.” She opened the jar. “Look how strong you are. You snapped right back. Look at your appetite. You’re making a fine old mess on my table; wipe the crumbs off your face.”

“Gabriel is always right and I’m always wrong. I hate being wrong.”

“Then end it.” Lola flourished her napkin. “Pull out. Cut it off. Say goodbye. Simple solutions never occur to you romantic people.”

Marit’s face lit up as if she had found the penny in the Twelfth Night cake. A chunk of bread dropped into her coffee, hovered on the surface, and sank to the bottom of the cup.

“I could. I am not a rabbit. I am going to do it.”

“Write a letter.” Lola gave a wide grin, the leer of experience.

“That’s your ploy. Your little flames never know your address. He would come and find me.”

“I got caught once,” said Lola. “Did I tell you about young Neetsie?”

“Awf. Pfoof.” Marit spluttered her coffee. “Is that prep-school for Anita?”

“Her nose was so perfectly snub.” Lola was musing. “There she was, two months after I’d killed it, waiting for the same train at the North Adams Station. She fell at my feet and wrapped her arms around my ankles. She had long hair, too. Mary Magdalene. Very poor taste.”

Marit was laughing and nodding and coughing. Some of the coffee had gone down her windpipe. The story came back to her now. Lola had stepped daintily out of her shoes and walked to a taxi, leaving Anita weeping into a pair of patent-leather pumps with flat bows.

Solidarity was running high at Lola’s kitchen table. Did she need anyone else in the world, with Lola for a cohort? When they could laugh together like this, every hurt that she was feeling faded and scaled down to size. Laughter aired out her brain and blew away must and shadows, so that she could think like a sensible person whose days had purpose.

Sometime this summer the ponds in the heart of the sanctuary, which were choked with algae, must be dragged with a fine-toothed rake, and arrowhead planted around the shoreline to keep the water clear. The hackberries along the south traverse were crowding and dying. With the help of Herb Frechter, she had to mark and ring the trees which could not be saved. Somewhere by the entrance she had seen a cluster of poisonous red-capped amanitas. She must call Joe Miller, at the zoo, to see if the mushrooms had an odor which would stop an animal from eating them. The sanctuary was a school, and there was more to learn than she could master in a lifetime.

“I have to get on with my day,” she said to Lola. “The poor dog is still in his pen; it makes him frantic.”

“Well, you’re not frantic.” Lola kissed her goodbye. “That’s all I care about. Don’t rob any more graves without me, you hear that, missy?”

Marit raised the middle finger of her left hand for an answer, and banged out the door. She ran down the staircase and jumped to the ground from the seventh step. Inside the jeep, she gunned the motor and played a farewell salute on the horn. Her rattly chariot felt as smooth and responsive as a winged horse. Route 37 was the long way home, ending up on the Old Road boundary of her land. It wound through hills, unlike new 22, but she chose it because she liked taking curves. She had her nerve and her power back, and the sun on her face. Work and love were reconcilable in the sunlight. Her mistakes were pardonable.

Her first image of Gabriel appeared to her, with the beak and the eye of an eaglet, proud and short, and as fierce as she was, but addicted to mildness. Gabriel made himself perform feats of moral calisthenics in order to hold his nature in check. Her own demons wore nursery faces in the daylight; nothing had happened when she let them loose, no depletion that youth and health could not make up for. She knew that she frightened Gabriel because he sensed their kinship; he did not condemn her except to keep rein on himself. If she saw him so clearly, it made no sense to leave him. From this pinnacle of energy and high spirits, attacks of jealousy seemed like hazing rites that any pledge to love’s fraternity must endure.

As she drove on she counted off the only man-made landmarks along the road: the riding stable, the Hoe-Bowl alleys (boarded up), the brick laundry houses at the far edge of the Meyerling property, and the cyclone fence, topped with four tiers of electrified barbed wire, that enclosed her own land and its wild tenants. Or almost enclosed it. She had one job to do that took precedence over clearing algae and ringing trees. For several hundred yards between herself and the Community, in the northeast corner, the only boundary was a natural one: Yoke Pond, the deepest spring-fed body of water in the county, lying at the bottom of an ancient wood, which had never been cleared or cut for lumber since the first white settlements. Wolves will rarely swim, and the wood ran straight uphill, but every day that she delayed installing a fence in this section raised the odds of their discovery.

Beyond the point where her land began, the Old Road was unimproved. Marit had petitioned to have the bumps and potholes left as they were to discourage traffic. The township made no objection to its largest landowner’s whim, since it saved tax dollars. It took two hands on the wheel to steer around the pits and to avoid the ditch on the fenced-in side, which was widening yearly. Marit kept her eyes fixed just ahead of her. She did not expect to have to deal with a car from the other direction. The trees were so tall, and the shrubs so thick, that the road was crisscrossed with shadows. She turned on the bright headlamps to help her see.

She did not expect to see a man lunge into the road from the sanctuary side, caught in the beam of her lights and stumbling toward cover, carrying a rifle over his head like a soldier fording a stream. For several yards he ran in the open, alongside the road; then he dove for the bushes, using his gun to force his way through. As she pressed her foot down on the gas pedal she still had a bead on him by the rippling and shaking of the underbrush and the cracking of twigs. If she thought she could run him down, she was spared the temptation; by the time the speedometer read thirty-five, the thickets were still. He had veered off through the trees and would be lost in a field of horse corn.

Marit brought the jeep to a halt with its nose pointed into some briars. For a moment she was strung up between horrors; she thought that she had seen a box with knobs and a speaker attached to the man’s belt. Were there snipers still in the preserve who could talk by radio? She had a vision of Swan. Swan was dead. She saw him, as clear as prescience; she saw a hole between his eyes, gray fluid draining from the hole, not red like the blood staining his flank, where a second bullet had pierced him. The gunfire had caught him heading downhill. Gravity flung him over and over until he rolled to the level ground in a dried-up gully, thrown on his side, his neck whipped back as if it were broken, his lip pulled up, baring his teeth in a kind of sneer. Pictures of carnage came to her so fast and red, reel after reel of wasted animal bodies, synchronized with the hollow boom of rifle shot, that Marit had no mind left to call on reason, to wage debate between what she might be imagining and what foretelling.

Persons who give in to extremes of emotion get no credit for grace under pressure, or for acts of courage or daring committed in a transport. Those honors go to the straight-backed and imperturbable, not to reeds-in-the-wind or extravagants like Marit Deym. No one would commend her now for closing the doors of the jeep and remembering to pocket the key. No one would note the steadiness of her breathing or remark on her rhythmic pace as she crossed the road. There was no one to watch as she reached for a hold on the cyclone fence and thrust the toes of her sneakers into the diamond-shaped holes made by the links, as she climbed sure and cat-like twelve feet up until her waist was even with four electrified rows of barbed wire, which were vertically aligned, not tilted forward as in prison fences. There were no witnesses, so her record for immoderacy would never be balanced by the calculated risk that she was going to take.

She got one leg over the wire, nearly brushing the barbs. For an instant she swayed on the fence, straddling the wire, holding her arms straight out from her shoulders like a tightrope walker trying out the rope. The next moment she was lying on the ground, stunned by a fall that had started as a jump when one toe, rammed too tight between the links, had caught and thrown her backward into a half gainer. How she had twisted out of a dive in that short descent, to save her head and spine, she would not remember. A long time passed before she remembered anything.

She must have knocked her head, because her head was pounding. The second thing that she felt was a pain in one of her ankles; the third, that the left one was hurting, not the right one. Her body came back alive in bits and pieces: a wrist, a thigh, a buttock, and then their opposites. She became aware of two hands and a pair of feet and she flexed them slowly. There was still a no-man’s-land between her pelvis and her neck; she opened her eyes, looked down, and reclaimed her torso. She knew that she was breathing by the rise and fall of her chest, or the material covering her chest, her old blue shirt. “I am banged up but good” she thought with her thinking brain. Then she formed her lips to say “Swan”: she had powers of speech.