The Work of Wolves (30 page)

"What's bothering me, you know," he said, "is where we're planning to take them once we get them out."

"Hanh?"

Norm was inspecting the manifold, pulling on it with both hands to see that it was tight. Under his efforts the Polaris rocked on its springs.

"We plan to take them to Ted Kills Many's."

Norm stopped rocking the car. Earl tried to read his expression, but his uncle was looking at the engine, almost as if he hadn't heard Earl.

"It looks like a good job," Norm said. "It will be different, not breathing carbon monoxide."

"What do you think of him?"

Norm gazed at the air cleaner of the car. "I think," he finally said, "these horses are beings of great spirit. It is like the old stories, nephew. In the old stories there is always danger when you cross into the spirit world. It doesn't matter where the stories come from. In all of them it is hard to find your way back. Birds eat the trail of crumbs you leave. Or you begin to think you are a bear and forget you were ever human. Memory is a hard thing to maintain when you cross."

Norm took an old white sock from the fender of the car and wiped his hands, wrapping each individual finger in the sock, rubbing off rust and grease. Then he tossed it to Earl and reached up and slammed the Polaris's hood. The clanging boom momentarily silenced the grasshoppers, and the sparrows in the cottonwoods.

"In the old stories, you have to be careful. You have to obey everything you are told to do. But sometimes not. That is the thing. Sometimes you have to behave crazy. You have to suspect trickery everywhere and do the opposite of what you are told. It depends on who's telling you. You have to know who to trust. But you have no way to know that. And you can't just cross back, nephew. There is a task to perform first. Always. You might be ignorant of what it is, but that is no excuse for not performing it."

When he was younger, Earl's grandmother had told him such stories while she beaded—people rising for reasons they didn't understand and going off to join the bear or buffalo people and coming to think of themselves as buffalo or bear until they couldn't recognize their own family. These people were always endangered, both their old and their new kin likely to mistake them, and confused by their own identity. But Earl knew the horses were real. They might be beings of great spirit, but they were also animals that smelled, right now, of death.

"In those old stories," Norm went on, "people do not realize they have crossed a boundary. This is so. They do not feel special. They do not feel blessed, and they do not feel cursed. Mostly, they just feel confused. They just think their lives have gotten a little strange. They lose their direction. That is all, they think. They are not sure which signs point the right way. They are not sure which stars to follow. It is like Goat Man, nephew. He is always out there. Leaving tracks. But when you see him, he is gone. This does not mean you did not see him. But you will think maybe you didn't. That is Goat Man's trick—to be more real when you don't see him than when you do. People can get so confused they believe they are not confused at all. That is when they are really in trouble."

"You're confusing me, you know?"

Norm laughed. "Confusion is a funny thing," he said. "It makes it harder to do anything, but it makes it more likely you will do the right thing when you do. And it can go even further. In the old stories, sometimes, feeling confused can be part of the confusion. Everything might actually make sense. And usually does. But I think it's time to start this car and see how it sounds."

"What about Ted Kills Many, though? What do you think of him?"

"You're confusing me now, nephew. I thought I answered that."

"It's just they're dying, you know? I'm not sure I have time to figure your answer out."

"So you think I should, hanh?"

Earl gave a little shrug. Norm gazed over the roof of the car at the prairie undulating away from the cinder blocks that served as steps to his home. "It's different," he said, "the guy who gives an answer interpreting it, too. But near as I can figure out what I said, if you don't trust Ted Kills Many, he may be someone you should trust. Trouble is, you trust me, so maybe you shouldn't."

"That helps a lot, you know?"

Norm opened the door of the Polaris. "I only have the stories, nephew. And I know when people walk into those other realms, they sometimes need the strangest kinds of help. Half the time the trick is recognizing the help that is there instead of waiting for the help they recognize."

Earl shoved his hands in his pockets and stared at the ground. His uncle seemed unwilling to be clear. Or maybe he couldn't be clear. "OK," he said. He had to respect what Norm had said and try to make sense of it.

Norm started to get in the car, then stopped, looked at Earl over the open door.

"I do know this," he said. "Ted Kills Many, what I know of him, he reminds me of a guy I once knew I would not have trusted with anything."

Earl almost felt relieved. At last an answer, a reason to avoid Ted. "Who's that?" he asked.

"Guy named Norman Walks Alone."

E
ARL KNEW WHERE TED'S PLACE WAS
supposed to be, but twice he took the wrong gravel roads, which started out in the right direction but serpentined around and turned into dirt tracks with grass growing between them, and then into nothing but ruts, and then into nothing at all. The second time this happened, Earl got out of the car, walked to the front of it, leaned against the hood, and stared at the prairie before him. He had the vague idea that maybe if he looked hard enough, he'd see the road reappear out there in the distance, emerging from the grass, winding its way up a hillside.

He wanted to kick something, but there was nothing to kick but the car, and it was his mother's. What were these roads doing out here if they didn't go anywhere? Probably someone lived out there—or had—someone who came into Twisted Tree every two weeks or less for supplies and who used the ruts that had just disappeared to get there. The thought made Earl both envious and angry—that someone might have a life so secure and confident that these ruts were all the connection he needed to the rest of the world. Or on the other hand it might be a life just ground down, poverty-stricken, hopeless.

There were people who knew every road on the rez and knew who lived on those roads and who had lived on them for the past many generations since the roads had been built and before even that. There were people who wouldn't be lost if they were thrown into the trunk of a car and driven around for an hour. Released, they would climb out of the trunk and take a look around and find a hill or a tree they knew, the slightest odd configuration, and from that hill or tree they would turn and point their lips in the direction of their nearest relative's dwelling and start walking. And Earl couldn't even find a place he'd gotten directions to. The peaks of the Badlands erupted from the prairie in the distance. Ted lived somewhere in that direction. But the only way for Earl to get there was to turn around and retrace his route and figure out where he'd gone wrong.

He got back in the car. Willi looked at him. "Are we lost?" he asked.

"Not lost. I just don't know where we are."

"I am glad we are not lost."

Earl backed the car in a circle and turned around. The grass between the ruts rushed along the chassis. Gradually the ruts became a kind of road again, and a mile after that they came to the dirt road they had turned off earlier. Earl stopped the car. In both directions the road ran through the brown prairie, featureless, nondescript, without suggestion or promise.

"Right or left, do you think?" Earl asked.

"I do not know. What is it you say?—I am just along for the ride? I am clueless?"

Earl pulled onto the dirt road and went back in the direction he'd come. He couldn't remember any other road leading off it, but if his directions were right, he'd already gone too far. The dried gumbo of the prairie, a powder fine as flour, rose in a cloud behind him, filling his mirrors with gray commotion. It leaked into the car, visible in the air, even though he had the fan going full blast so the air pressure would force it out. About a mile and a half down the road, he found the intersection he'd been looking for. From the direction he'd first come, it had been obscured by a few scraggly bushes, their leaves gray with dust. The stop sign that a reservation official had decided the intersection needed had been knocked over and was lying in the bushes, its metal pole bent, its letters pocked with .22 fire and shotgun pellets, so that the's was gone and the sign, facing the sky, said
TOP
in leprous-looking letters.

"Someone should fix that sign," Willi noted as Earl turned.

"Why? Maybe two cars a day go by on that road. And they raise so much dust they're visible two days before they get there, you know? Anyone who needs a stop sign there is too drunk to obey it anyway."

The Kills Many trailer house sat in a dry draw connected to Red Medicine Creek. Five cars squatted on cinder blocks and two-by-fours outside the trailer, their wheels removed. They had an ancient look about them, a sense of dignified and ceremonial purpose, and they were arrayed about the trailer like spokes emanating from a central hub. Pathways ran between them. They gave to the place a mysterious sense of quiet, of an order that might be ascertained if one were dedicated enough and thought long enough about it—that perhaps the sun rose between those cars at the solstices and that they traced like sensitive feelers the wobble of the orbiting earth. Earl and Willi coasted down the dirt track in silence, as if they were approaching an old shrine or set of ruins.

They were thirty yards from the trailer when dogs erupted from the cars—lean greyhounds that shot like living arrows out of the open windows, flew through the air, touched the ground, and flew again, arcing in and out of the grass, their ears back, in full run before they touched the ground, as if they knew no other way of moving. After them a wave of other dogs scrambled less gracefully out of the cars—blue heeler and pit bull mutts that scrabbled at the windows and fell down into the grass, their claws raking the paint. They bounded back up and followed the silent greyhounds, howling and barking, all of them headed straight toward Earl's car. In a moment he was driving through a sea of dog flesh, which parted before the car and closed behind it, the dogs in front of his windshield looking back to check the car's pace, the ones alongside threatening the tires with bared teeth. Earl gripped the steering wheel, afraid that if he changed speed or turned he'd hear the thump of tire against flesh. Like every other teenager in Twisted Tree, he'd played chicken with Bambi dozens of times, but he'd never had this many dogs surrounding his vehicle at once, and he wasn't sure any of them could get out of the way if he swerved. They'd run into another dog before they could avoid being struck.

Willi gaped. "I have never seen so many dogs," he said.

"A family's got to eat," Earl replied. "There's nothing like dog stew for protein. And nothing like old cars for raising those dogs in."

Willi's mouth gaped even wider before he realized Earl was joking. Earl stopped the car in front of the trailer house. The dogs gathered outside the doors of the car, milling, their rear ends moving back and forth so violently their feet slipped in the grass and dirt. The trailer looked abandoned, as if it had been placed here centuries ago, until it had weathered into the land and become a natural thing.

Earl opened his door a crack. The dogs closest to it backed away, their heads up, instead of coming closer and low to the ground—a good sign. He opened it further, and one of the mutts, whining insanely with desire, pressed its muzzle into the opening and, using its head as a wedge, forced the door open even though Earl pulled with all his strength to keep it shut. Scraping its neck and ribs against the door frame, its back feet kicking up spurts of grass and dirt while its front ones clawed badger-like at the floor mats, the dog forced its way onto Earl's lap, squeezing against the steering wheel, filling the car with its unadulterated dogginess, the old-cave smell of its breath. It stuck its face against Earl's as he swung his head to avoid it, and its claws dug into his thigh. The whole animal squirmed with pleasure.

"It is good that is a friendly dog," Willi said. "Or it would be eating you, I think."

Earl opened the door all the way, pushed the dog out, and stood up before it could crawl back onto his lap. He shut the door and started toward the trailer house, but dogs pushed against his legs and leapt up to put their paws on his chest. It was like trying to walk in a fast stream with boulders bumping in the current.

Then the door to the trailer house opened, and Ted Kills Many stepped out. He said nothing, just stood on the pallet propped on cinder blocks that served as a stoop and gazed at Earl, his black eyes expressionless, his mouth a straight line. Earl stopped moving, and at that moment one of the pit bull mutts leapt against his chest. He stumbled back, tripped over a dog behind him, flailed, and fell into the swarm of animals. For a frightening moment he thought his falling might become a signal for the entire pack to attack him.

Instead, the dogs were delighted. They licked him, thrust their muzzles into his crotch, raked him with their claws. When Earl tried to stand up, they knocked him down again, ignoring his cries that they stay down.

Then he heard what sounded at first like thunder, a deep guttural noise building to a crescendo and suddenly cracking at the end. Earl realized it was Ted.

"Baaaaack!" The sound rolled over the pack of dogs, stilling them. Every dog stopped moving, every head turned to the trailer house. Earl got to his feet in a world eerily still. The dogs didn't seem frightened or intimidated but merely attentive to the sound of Ted's voice, waiting to know what that voice wished them to do.

Ted lifted his hand to chest level, flicked his fingers backwards.

"Gwan now," he said in that same deep voice. The dogs waited a moment to be sure he meant it, then lifted their tails and trotted away, a few of them looking longingly back at Earl. In a few moments they'd all disappeared back into the cars or the tall grass around the trailer or the shade of the trees in the draw.