The Wolf Gift (43 page)

“Okay,” said Stuart, jabbing a thumb in the direction of his own chest, “this is what I personally think is happening with this guy. I think he’s a normal human being to whom something horrible happened. I mean, forget the werewolf crap, it’s getting old, it’s going nowhere, and we’ve seen the mugs and the T-shirts. What I mean is, this guy got some kind of infection or disease—like acromegalyia-something-or-other—and it changed him into this monster. Now, my father went to the Amazon which was his big dream, I mean, all-time huge dream to go to the Amazon, go down the river, walk in the jungle, whatever, and he got an infection that within one week destroyed his pancreas and his kidneys. He died in a Brazilian hospital.”

“That’s horrible,” murmured Reuben.

“Oh, yeah, right, it was. But this, this creature has had something like that happen to him. The hair, the bone growths—.”

“What bone growths?” asked Reuben.

“He’s got huge bony hands, bony feet, bony forehead, you know. There are diseases that produce this kind of growth, and in his case he’s covered with shaggy hair on top of it. He’s isolated like the Phantom of the Opera, like the Elephant Man, like a freak in a carnival, like Claude Rains in
The Invisible Man
, and he’s out of his mind. And this guy has feelings! I mean intense feelings. You should have seen him standing
there looking at Antonio. I mean he was just staring and staring at Antonio. And he put his own hands up, like this, oops, almost pulled out the IV, shit—.”

“It’s okay. You didn’t.”

“He put his hands up to his head like this, like the sight of Antonio lying there dead—.”

“Stuart, stop!” screamed his mother. Her tiny little body squirmed in the chair. “You’re just going on and on and on!”

“No, no, no, Mom, I am talking to a reporter. This is an interview. If this guy did not want to hear about Antonio and what happened, he wouldn’t be here. Mom, can you get me another milk shake? Please, please?”

“Gaaaarrrrr!” said his mother and rushed out of the room on her spike heels. Beautiful body, without question.

“Now,” said Stuart, “we can really talk, can’t we? I mean she’s driving me crazy. My stepfather beats the hell out of her and she blames it on me. Me. I’m the one to blame for his slashing her entire closet full of clothes with a box cutter, me!”

“What else do you remember about the attack?” Reuben asked. It was inconceivable that this ruddy, bright-eyed boy could die from the Chrism or from anything.

“Strong, unbelievably strong,” Stuart replied. “And these guys stabbed him too. I saw that! Saw that! I mean they really stabbed him. He didn’t even flinch, man. He just tore them apart. I mean tore them apart. I mean we are talking gross, man. I mean we’re talking cannibalism here. They’re not letting witnesses talk to the press, but they can’t stop me. I know my rights under the Constitution. I cannot be stopped from talking to the press.”

“Right. What else?” asked Reuben.

Stuart shook his head. Suddenly his eyes watered and he turned into a six-year-old right before Reuben’s eyes and started sobbing.

“I’m so sorry they killed your friend,” said Reuben.

But the boy was inconsolable.

Reuben stood by the bed with his arm around him for fifteen minutes.

“You know what I’m really afraid of?” the boy asked.

“What?”

“They’re going to get this guy, the Man Wolf, and really hurt him.
They’ll shoot him up with a machine gun, they’ll club him like a baby seal. I don’t know. They’ll really hurt him. He’s not a human being to them. He’s an animal. They’ll pump him full of lead the way they did Bonnie and Clyde. I mean they were human beings, yes, but they pumped them full of bullets like they were animals.”

“Right.”

“And they’ll never know what went on in the guy’s mind. They’ll never know who he really is or was or why he does what he does.”

“Does your hand hurt?”

“No. But I wouldn’t know if it was on fire. I have so much Valium and Vicodin in me right now that—.”

“Gotcha. Been there. Okay. What else do you want to tell me?”

For half an hour, they talked about Antonio and his macho in-law cousins and how much they’d hated him because he was gay, and hated Stuart, whom they blamed for Antonio “becoming” gay; they talked about his stepfather Herman Buckler who paid the guys who’d kidnapped Antonio and Stuart, and wanted to kill and mutilate them both; they talked about Santa Rosa, about Blessed Sacrament High School, and they talked about what it means to be a really really great criminal lawyer, like Clarence Darrow, who was Stuart’s hero, and he would take the cases of the marginalized, the neglected, the despised.

Stuart started crying again. “Must be the drugs,” he said. He crumpled up again like a little child.

His mom came in with the chocolate milk shake.

“You’re going to get sick, drinking this!” she said with a vengeance, slamming it down on the bedside tray.

When the nurse appeared, she discovered that Stuart had a temperature again and said Reuben had to go. Yes, she said, they were giving him the rabies treatment, of course, and a cocktail of antibiotics that ought to take care of anything contagious from this wolf being. But Reuben had to go now.

“The ‘wolf being,’ ” said Stuart, “that really has a nice ring. Hey, will you come back, or do you pretty much have your whole story?”

“I’d like to come back tomorrow, and see how you are,” said Reuben. He gave Stuart his cards, with the Mendocino address and number written on the back. He wrote all his numbers down for Stuart in his hardcover copy of
Game of Thrones
.

On the way out, Reuben left his card at the nurses’ station. If there is any change, please call, he asked. If he thought about this kid actually dying, he would break down right then and there.

He caught the attending physician, Dr. Angie Cutler, right outside the elevator and urged her to contact Grace in San Francisco, since he’d been through all this with his mother handling the case. He tried to be as tactful about this as he could, but he was inwardly convinced by now that his mother’s treatment of him probably helped him to survive. Dr. Cutler was a lot more responsive than he’d expected. She was younger than Grace, knew Grace, and respected her. She was kind of sweet. Reuben gave her his card. “Call me anytime about this,” he said, murmuring something about what he himself had experienced.

“I know all about you,” said Dr. Cutler with an inviting smile. “I’m glad you came to see that boy. He’s crawling the walls in there. But he does have marvelous recuperative powers; it’s a miracle. If you had seen the bruises on him when they brought him in.”

On the way down in the elevator, he called Grace and urged her please to connect with the doctor. The kid had been bitten. It was true.

His mother was silent for a moment. Then she said in a strained voice,

“Reuben, if I were to tell this doctor the things I observed in your case, I’m not sure I’d have much cred with her at all.”

“I know that, Mom, I understand. I know,” he said. “But there just could be some really important things you could share with her, you know, about the antibiotics you used, the rabies treatment, whatever you did in my case that might help this boy.”

“Reuben, I can’t really call the boy’s doctor out of the blue. The only person who’s been the least interested in what I actually observed in your case was this Dr. Jaska, and you wouldn’t give him the time of day.”

“Yeah, Mom, I realize. But I’m talking now about the kid getting treatment for the bite, that’s all.”

A chill came over him.

He was walking out of the hospital now to the car, and the rain had started up again.

“Mom, I’m sorry I didn’t stay and talk to Dr. Jaska. I know you wanted me to. And maybe if it will make you feel better, I can talk to the man soon.”

And if I had stayed, well, then by the time I’d passed Santa Rosa, Stuart McIntyre would have been dead
.

There was such a long silence that he feared he’d lost the connection, but then Grace spoke up again, and she sounded like somebody else with Grace’s voice.

“Reuben, why have you gone up to Mendocino County? What’s really the matter with you?”

How could he respond?

“Mamma, not now, please. I’ve been here all day. If you could just call the doctor, just volunteer, you know, that you handled a case like this one—.”

“Well, listen. You have to take the final rabies shot tomorrow. You know that, right?”

“I completely forgot.”

“Well, Reuben, I’ve left messages for you every day for a week. It’s twenty-eight days tomorrow and you have to have the final shot. Does this beautiful young woman, Laura, have a phone? Does she answer it? Could I perhaps be leaving messages with her?”

“I’m going to get better at all this, I swear.”

“Okay, listen to me. We were going to send the nurse up there with the shot, but if you like, I can contact this doctor in Santa Rosa and arrange for her to give it to you tomorrow morning, when you visit this boy. I could strike up a conversation with her, and if there is anything I know that would be of use to her, anything that I’m willing to share, that is, well, let’s just see what develops.”

“Mom, that would be perfect. You are my peach of a mother. But does this mean it’s actually been twenty-eight days since that night?”

It seemed a century had passed; his life had been so completely altered. And it had only been twenty-eight days.

“Yes, Reuben, that’s when my beloved son, Reuben Golding, disappeared and you took his place.”

“Mamma, I adore you. I will somehow in time answer all questions and solve all problems and bring harmony back to the world we share.”

She laughed. “Now that does sound like my Baby Boy.”

She rang off.

He was standing beside the car.

A strange feeling came over him, unpleasant but not terrible. He
imagined a future, in a flash, in which he was sitting with his mother in front of the fire in the great room at Nideck Point and he was telling her everything. He imagined their speaking to one another in intimate tones, and that he shared this thing with her, and she welcomed it, and enfolded him with her expertise, her knowledge, her unique intuition.

There was no Dr. Akim Jaska in this little world, or anybody else. Just him and Grace. Grace knew, Grace understood, Grace would help him grasp what was happening to him, Grace would be there.

But that was impossible, rather like imagining angels over his bed in the dark at night, guarding him, with wings that arched to the rafters.

And when he imagined his mother in this tête-à-tête, she took on a sinister coloration that terrified him. There was a malevolent gleam in her eye in his mind, and her face was half in shadow.

He shuddered.

That could never be.

This was a secret thing, and could be shared perhaps with Felix Nideck, and always, and forever, as long as that might be, with Laura. But not with anyone else … except perhaps that chipper, bright-eyed boy with the freckles and the grin who was upstairs now healing miraculously. Time to go home, home to Laura, home to Nideck Point. Never had it seemed so like a refuge.

He found Laura in the kitchen making a large salad. She said one of the things she did when she was worried was make a large salad.

She’d rinsed and dried the romaine lettuce with paper towels. She had a large square wooden bowl rubbed with oil and with freshly cut garlic. The smell of the garlic was tantalizing.

Now she broke the lettuce into crisp bite-sized pieces, and she tossed the pieces in olive oil till they were glistening. There was quite a pile of these bits of lettuce, glistening.

She gave the wooden spoons to Reuben and asked him to toss the lettuce slowly. Then she put the finely chopped green onions in and the herbs, taking out pinches of each herb—oregano, thyme, basil—and rubbing each pinch between her hands as she sprinkled it over the salad. The herbs clung perfectly to the glistening leaves. Then she added the wine vinegar and Reuben tossed more and then she served up this salad with sliced avocados and thin sliced tomatoes, and soft warm French bread from the oven, and they ate it together.

The sparkling water in the crystal glasses looked like champagne.

“Feel better?” he asked. He’d eaten the largest plate of salad he’d ever been served in his life.

She said yes. She was eating daintily, looking now and then at her freshly polished silver fork. She said she’d never seen silver like this old silver, so heavily and deeply carved.

He stared out the window at the oaks.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“What isn’t?” he asked. “Want to know something terrible? I’ve lost track completely of how many people I’ve killed. I have to get a pen and paper and make a count. I don’t know how many nights it’s been either, I mean how many nights I’ve been changing. I have to make a count of that. And I have to write, write in a secret diary, all the little things I’ve been noticing.”

Strange thoughts were running through his mind. He knew he couldn’t continue this way. It was virtually impossible. He wondered what it would be like to be in a foreign land, a lawless land where there was evil to hunt in hills and valleys, where no one kept track of the number you killed or how many nights you did it. He thought of vast cities like Cairo and Bangkok and Bogotà, and of vast countries with endless tracts of land and forest.

After a while, he said:

“That boy. Stuart. I think he’s going to make it. I mean he’s not going to die. Whatever else will happen I don’t know. I can’t know. If only I could talk to Felix. I’m putting too much hope on talking to Felix.”

“He’ll come back,” she said.

“I want to remain here tonight. I want to stay indoors. I don’t want the change to come. Or if it does, I want to be alone with it in the forest, the way I was in Muir Woods that night when I met you.”

“I understand,” she said. “And you’re afraid, afraid that you can’t control it. I mean that you won’t stay here alone with it.”

“I never even tried,” he said. “That’s shameful. I have to try. And I have to go back down to Santa Rosa in the morning.”