Sometimes the Wolf (11 page)

It was a long time since Drake had allowed himself to think of those years. When he’d been a young man, a couple years past high school, living in another state, in a city a hundred times bigger than Silver Lake, playing basketball.

Drake loved it all. The running endlessly, one end of the court to the other. The quick shots, the passes from player to player, the fade, the rebound, the way the world never seemed to pause in all that time and one action fed into the next like a flood of water carrying everything else along.

It was the beginning of his third year when he went into his coach’s office to tell him about the trouble back home. Telling his coach all the things the newspapers were saying about his father. And the coach standing up from his desk and walking around to sit facing Drake, trying to work through it all, trying to tell Drake he would always have a place on the team. Though Drake knew—no matter what the coach said—that the offer could wait only so long.

Drake sat in his father’s room, a room that had once been his own, and looked the articles over. Many of the clippings were about him, but the majority of them were about his father, about his arrest and then later conviction. That time in Drake’s life almost a complete wash. Like he’d been there and not there all at the same time. Gary had come to the airport to pick Drake up and told him how Patrick had been led into the courtroom for his sentencing. How even in the week since he’d been arrested, Patrick seemed to have lost weight, shrunk back into himself. The jumpsuit too big on his frame and the shuffling, almost hesitant, steps he took as he came out into the court, his eyes downcast on the floor.

Drake had tried to picture it all then, but he couldn’t get a grasp on it. The man Gary was describing so unlike the man Drake had grown up with, leading him on horseback through the hills. Camping in the high meadows in the years before he’d left for Arizona and listening to the rut of elk as they brought their antlers together late in the evening. Drake and Patrick rising from the small butane stove to stand watching as the big animals clawed the earth a hundred yards away, diving at each other with lust-filled abandon. The clash of their fighting echoing off the rocks high above while Drake and Patrick looked on.

Later Drake would sit in the courtroom with his grandfather and listen to the charges laid against Patrick. The trial going on for five days and then the judge waiting as the jury gave their verdict, listening to the foreman go down through the charges. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty.

Drake shuffled the articles in his hand. He’d read them all. He’d been a part of many of them, seen most of it with his own eyes as the reporters sat a couple rows back scribbling notes on paper. All of it taking shape. Drake’s vision of his father slowly cracking, until finally it had all crumbled, flake by flake, as his father was led away and Drake sat watching.

The articles dropped off until Drake saw his own name mentioned again in the Seattle paper. The story not about his basketball career anymore, but his role as a deputy, his father’s history, and the arrest Drake had tried to make in the mountains outside Silver Lake ten years after his father had gone away. An attempt that would eventually get him shot, leaving him as close to death as Drake ever cared to be.

He looked at them all, shuffling back through each clipping on the bed, trying to make sense of it. His life in this valley. His father’s life. The two so dissimilar from each other, but in many ways the same.

Everything his father, Patrick Drake, had ever done. Every highlight and failure. His rise as sheriff, the death of his wife to leukemia, and his eventual fall, outlined there for the world to see. And not a single article in his father’s collection mentioning the two dead men outside Bellingham.

What had Patrick said to Ellie on his first day out? Don’t get caught.

Drake looked up from the articles and saw his father staring in at him. His bald scalp still wet from the shower. His eyes red and worn from the water. “Is this why you came in here earlier?” Patrick asked.

Drake followed his father’s eyes to the open drawers beneath the changing table, all of the clothes in disarray, hanging loose over the sides. The cardboard box on the bed next to Drake with the articles spread everywhere on the mattress.

“You don’t trust me,” Patrick said. He was wearing a towel around his waist, standing there in the doorway. He was staring at Drake with an intensity Drake could only remember from when he’d been a child.

“There have been things said about you that I can’t ignore,” Drake responded, keeping his eyes focused on the door frame near his father’s head. Looking but not looking.

“By who?”

Drake took the box off the bed and set it on the floor again. “The DEA has been following you around.”

“Is that a fact?”

He met Patrick’s eyes. “They say you had something to do with two men getting killed outside Bellingham before you went away.”

“And you want to know if I did it?”

“I want to know if it’s true in any way. If you knew these men, or had anything to do with their deaths.”

“I told you a long time ago when you visited me that I wasn’t going back in.”

“I know what you told me,” Drake said. “What I want to know is if you killed those men.”

Patrick looked at the open drawers again and then looked back at Drake. “I didn’t do anything to those men.”

“But you know of them?”

“I know of them.”

“Then you know about the money, too.”

“Yes,” Patrick said. “There’s a lot of people who’ve heard about the money.”

“That’s how you got into all this, isn’t it? For the money. So that you could pay off Mom’s medical bills.”

“That’s what I’ve always said. I took on that second mortgage and never was able to pay it.”

“You did it for the money then?” Drake didn’t know why he was repeating himself. The emphasis he put on the end of the sentence more of a command than any kind of question and he realized he really didn’t want to know.

“There was no other reason. That was it, that was all there was,” Patrick said. “I never did intend to do that type of work for long, and I don’t intend to do it now that I’m out.”

Drake moved his hand over the articles. Gathering them up and putting them back into the folder. He knew he should let it go. His father had said he didn’t kill those men. Drake knew that should have been enough. But a lot of time had passed since Drake had gone away to college and his father had made the decision that would ultimately change both their lives.

“I’m a deputy now,” Drake said. “I know it’s been twelve years, but there are still plenty of people who probably question what I knew about you, and what I know now. I don’t want you to put me in that position again. If the DEA is still looking into this then there’s a chance Sheri and I could lose the house.”

“The only way that would happen is if I was stashing money or drugs on the property.”

“Are you?”

“Who do you think I am?”

“A convicted drug smuggler,” Drake said.

Patrick laughed. “You
really
don’t trust me.”

Drake stuffed the folder back down into the box and turned away from the bed. “I don’t know how I’m supposed to.”

“You’re supposed to because you’re my son.”

“That’s a lot to ask,” Drake said.

“You’ll see,” Patrick said. “I’m not going to be a bother to you. I’m going to be out of your hair just as soon as I can. Living my own life.” He walked over and took a set of clothes from beneath the changing table, taking his time.

“I don’t think the DEA is going to give up just because you say you didn’t do it.”

“I’d be disappointed if they did,” Patrick said.

DRAKE TOOK
a long shower. Letting it run cold before he allowed himself to shut off the water and pull the curtain back. Standing in front of the mirror he listened to the house beyond the door. Outside the sun was setting and the light came through the bathroom window with a low pink hue. The slight movement of air felt on his bare feet where the cool air from the hallway slipped in beneath the door. He half expected his father to be gone when he came out of the bathroom, never to be seen again. Simply to have walked off into the woods, where the darkness might eat him.

Drake ran a hand up his forearm, pressing his thumb to the purple scar tissue. One hole all the way through. Clean and simple. It felt like nothing now, just a raised circle of skin. Only really identifiable to those who knew the story that went with it. He rubbed his thumb up his forearm several more times, watching the pink flesh go white, then fade away again as his thumb moved on. Nothing he could do about it now.

When he came out of the bathroom Patrick was sitting in the living room drinking one of the beers Sheri had bought a few nights before. Patrick’s attention turned to one of the catalogs that came every month in the mail. One of the home magazines Sheri liked to dog-ear and leave around the house even though they barely had enough money to buy groceries some months.

“You want to go by the Buck Blind?” Drake asked. He was standing at the entrance to the hallway in a pair of jeans and a flannel shirt, his towel over his shoulders and his hair mussed. “Sheri can get us a good price on a pitcher.”

“Yeah,” Patrick said, “we can do that.”

WHEN THEY GOT
to the Buck Blind Sheri was just finishing up her last couple tables. She gave Drake a kiss and sent him and his father ahead to the bar. “I’ll be just another forty-five minutes,” she said. “Gary and Luke are in there if you want to say hello.”

Drake led his father through the doorway into the bar. Dim compared to the restaurant, the bar had been built when the grocer next door went out of business and the restaurant decided to expand. The walls all brick and mortar, and a doorway from restaurant to bar opened up halfway down the wall. Tables ran one side, while opposite, a wooden bar took up almost the full length of the place. Only open for five years, the bar already had the smell of spilled liquor, sweet and dusty in the air, while in the summers the air felt thick and closed up by the brick walls. Everything, even the random kitsch along the walls, gave the feel of a bar in someone’s home basement.

“I heard you guys caught your wolf,” Gary said. He was sitting midway down the bar with his face turned toward them as they came in. Luke sat on the stool beside him, still in his uniform.

“My dad actually got her,” Drake said, motioning back over his shoulder toward Patrick.

“You let the ex-con shoot the wolf?” Gary asked. “With a gun?”

“Come on, Gary,” Drake said. “You know it was a tranq gun. There’s nothing to that.”

“Just warning you. Because that’s not how the court will see it.”

“I know the rules,” Patrick said.

They sat in a line down the bar next to Gary. Luke raised his head to look at Patrick and then eased off the stool for a moment to shake the old sheriff’s hand. “Good to have you back,” Luke said.

Drake watched and after Luke sat back down he asked about Cheryl.

“False alarm,” Gary said. “One of her friends thought she remembered Cheryl saying she planned to go down to see a boy in Seattle.”

“And the parents?”

“She’s done this a few times now. Andy is still out looking for her but we’re thinking she’ll show up tomorrow or the next day.”

The bartender came by and they ordered a round, and then Drake ordered two more for Gary and Luke. Gary kept smiling, running his fingers over the edge of the pint glass and looking at Patrick. Finally saying, “You don’t recognize the bartender?”

“No,” Patrick said, turning to follow the man as he tended to a customer at the other end of the bar.

“It’s Jack.”

Patrick leaned farther into the bar, trying to get a good look. “Bill’s son?”

“Yeah, same kid. Only a dozen years older now.”

When Jack came over their way again Patrick caught the kid’s eye. “You’re the bartender here?”

“He owns the place,” Gary said.

“No shit.”

“I’m a partner,” Jack said. “I don’t own it.” He was leaning against the back bar now, his arms crossed. Skinny with acne scarring along the line of his jaw. Drake had known him his whole life. He was a little older than Drake. They’d been in high school together.

“Jack is one of my hunting buddies. Aren’t you, Jack?” Gary said, looking to Jack where he stood on the other side of the bar.

“If you call going up into the woods to drink a fifth of bourbon and stare at some trees hunting,” Jack said.

“Sounds about right,” Patrick said. “How’s your father doing? How’s Bill?”

“Passed away five years ago. The money he left me went into this bar, though, so it seems fitting. He was always putting his money into booze as it was.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

“Yeah, well it happened. That’s how it goes,” Jack said. A man at the other end of the bar signaled for service. Jack was off the back bar and beginning to walk away when he turned to Patrick and Gary. “Look, next round is on me, okay? It’s good to see you, Pat.” He was already halfway down the bar before any of them could say anything.

They moved over to a table after they finished the round Jack bought them, sitting for a long time bullshitting about the weather and giving Patrick a hard time about being back in the world. Luke making several prison-shower jokes that never got any of the other men to laugh, but Patrick nice enough to smile and let the comments roll past him. One of the old loggers down at the other end of the bar was playing Lynyrd Skynyrd on the jukebox and they listened to “Free Bird” for what seemed like twenty minutes.

“So you’re the sheriff?” Patrick said. He whistled a bit as he said it, letting the air escape from his lungs for a long time. “How’s that working out for you?”

Gary looked up from the beer in his hands. He’d been listening to the song playing on the jukebox. “To be honest: it’s tiring,” he said. “I chase down every little thing people have any concern over.”

“A cat goes missing I bet you’re on it,” Patrick said. He was smiling now and Drake could see he didn’t envy the man.

“Something like that. Luke and I spent half the day looking for that girl from town. She never was much for staying around here as it was.”