The Wild (21 page)

Soon Cindy became uneasy. They seemed to be going in an almost perfectly straight line. This was fine, but it didn't strike her as the sort of thing Bob would do. He'd get confused, double back, fall down gullies, end up at the edge of cliffs. But she had to trust Fox; he was the expert.

Even so—Bob in the woods? He'd practically gotten himself killed trying to track wolves in Minnesota back in the early seventies. And then there was that camping trip where he'd forgotten the matches and failed to pack the tent in the tent pack and brought the wrong hiker's map and missed the bus, and then laid their campsite at the edge of a pretty waterfall which had become a raging torrent during the ten-hour downpour that had taken place that night.

And the poor guy was out here with no hands, trying to keep himself alive with half the population of the northeast cheerfully hunting him down.

Lost in her thoughts, she wasn't aware that she had fallen behind until Fox was standing in front of her. "Look, Mrs. Duke, we can't keep breaking stride for you. Either you keep up or you don't keep up. The car's half an hour behind us. You can go back if you want to."

"No. I'll keep up."

He started again, twisting and turning through the trees like some sort of ghost, followed by Kevin, who was almost as swift. "I've been thinking," Kevin said as he moved, "we need to hit a town and buy a Walkman. One of us has to be listening to the news at all times in case there's another sighting reported."

Fox grunted. Twigs were scraping Cindy's head, she had leaf dust in her right eye, she'd practically shattered her knee slipping on a toadstool the size of a pancake, and now she was tumbling head over heels down a ravine she hadn't even noticed.

She did a complete somersault. When she saw the top of the forest rush past, leaves against a pale pink streak of dawn, she forced herself to relax totally. Then she hit with a thud. There was a jagged rock right under the center of her back, but she had managed to loosen up enough so that she flopped over it rather than breaking in two. "I'm good, no problem," she shouted. Then she was on her feet and up the ravine and running to catch them.

As he talked Kevin hopped from stone to mossy stone in a little brook.

"Listen," Fox said. "I think the water has a message for us. He passed this way. The brook remembers him."

Cindy could not keep her mind on the water. She was more interested in her own ragged breathing and the excruciating pain at the back of her left heel, where her boot seemed to be grinding down to bone. She flopped back in a bed of leaves and mushrooms, and stared up through amazingly tall trees. It was now full dawn, and the orange and red leaves were clearly etched against a blue sky.

When she listened, the brook did indeed speak to her. She sort of understood what Fox meant, that the water had a message. It wasn't a direction, a piece of information, it was another kind of message, vibrant with obscurely useful meaning.

"I tell you one thing," Fox said, "the way this water smells, there's a town upstream."

"I don't smell anything. The water's fresh."

"You don't know the meaning of fresh water, then," Fox replied. "I've drunk perfectly fresh water. Bathed in it. The more filth you can smell, the farther along you are on the road home. That's the message of this water."

"What he's saying, Mama, is that we need to get to the town."

Nonlogical thinking was what they called it. Or was it nonsequential thinking? Cindy sighed and got up. "I hope there really is a town."

"Hell, just through those trees is a gigantic condo development. We're in New Jersey, ma'am, one of the most densely populated states in the nation. The only reason we don't see it is that Bob avoided it. This forest is a thin strip of green between armies of housing developments, believe me."

Half an hour later they were walking along a road. A mini-mart stood next to an Exxon. Rite-Aid Drugs and Wendy's had occupied the center of town, hard on to the lawn and garden center and the drive-in bank. Kevin picked out an inexpensive Walkman at Rite-Aid and Cindy was elected to listen with one earphone.

When they started back to the woods to reconnect with Bob's trail, she found herself walking to the drone of WINS, all news all the time. The Brooklyn-Queens Expressway was jammed from Grand Central Parkway to the Gowanus Canal, due to a disabled tractor-trailer. It was now 9:14. In sports, the Oakland A's had beaten the Orioles.

Torture, torture, torture. Slog through the woods while listening to this drivel. She was bored. She wanted a cup of tea and a good book. She wanted to lie down. She wanted to cuddle Bob up tight and make love to him.

"In other news, the escaped wolf has been sighted along the New York-New Jersey border. Waldemar town Supervisor Richland Frye and his daughter were camping at Braemar Park Site 12 when the wolf leaped in the window of their shelter, menaced Mr. Frye, and knocked him unconscious. Young Miss Frye wrapped herself in a sheet and ran the four miles to Waldemar to give the warning. Mr. Frye was treated and released at North Orange Hospital in Waldemar."

Cindy was sitting on the ground by the time the story was over, her hands pressed against her ears in order to drown out her son's frantic questions.

"It's him, there's been another sighting!" She repeated the story.

"Waldemar. My God, your husband's doing damn good. He must be covering more like twenty-five, thirty miles in a day."

To make a long story miserably short, it now became necessary to hike all the way back to the car in order to drive to Waldemar.

Lying in the backseat, inert with exhaustion, Cindy vowed that she was going to take control of this expedition. Fox wanted to do what he was best at, which was track. But good strategy and good detective work were more important. If only she could anticipate Bob's own thinking, she felt sure she could put herself in his way instead of trying to chase him, which was obviously hopeless.

Waldemar. He was now traveling due north. The question was, what did he know about the region he was entering? He would be bound to use that knowledge to his own advantage.

Her mind returned to the early seventies, to those ridiculous camping trips.

She knew. Just like that, she knew where to intercept him. Sitting up, she told Fox. When Bob got there—and he would get there—she would be waiting;

Chapter Eighteen

A
HUGE WILLOW TREE GAVE BOB HIS NIGHT.
N
EVER,
not even as a child, had he felt as small and vulnerable as he did now, sheltering in the tree's silent, protective fronds.

He dreamed of deep woods, the trees stalwart and concealing friends, and in his vague, shadowy dreams he ran after slow, fat rabbits. Then he dreamed of an enormous old cruise ship, and he was his old self. He and Cindy were taking a cruise through cold, islandless seas in the dead of winter aboard this ramshackle vessel. Like the other passengers she was dressed to the elegant beckoning of the past; she wore white flowing silk, the whispering evening clothes of the turn of the century. She smelled like wysteria, and indeed her jewels were their color, cunning glass earrings and necklace believed by the awed, hissing passengers to be priceless.

Bob was restless on the ship, frightened of its rough progress and the deep clanking of its engines. In his exploration of the dun ballroom, the weathered dining room with its frayed chairs and chipped Spode, the algal swimming pool, the cold, musty cabins with their sagging beds and their hair-choked bathtub drains, he became less and less sure of the vessel.

Then the others went parading in to a dinner of grapefruit halves with withered maraschino cherries and some sort of very dubious curry, chicken or rabbit, cat or rat. Bob found the fourth level, the deck where the crew lived. It was a brown, awful, rotted mess crawling with rats, spread with feces and bits of unidentifiable rot, and from its portholes he could see that the bows of the ship were plunging so deep that water was pouring down the smokestacks.

The crew were worse than zombies, listless, their vigor escaped with the last heat of their bodies. Some of them lying in their bunks had become almost flat, and when you touched them, their skin turned to dust.

They had to leave the ship. To get to the dining room Bob had to crawl through a squishy, musky tunnel. It disgusted him, all the intimate wriggling that was necessary, and the sins of the woman, her exhaustion, her poor diet, her fear, were contained in the stink of the canal.

Emerging, his tuxedo flowing with a slick substance, he confronted Cindy, telling her the truth about the ship, and saying that they had to get off at the next island.

"But there aren't any islands, and this ship won't sink." She surrounded him with her smooth arms and buried his face in softness and wysteria.

Then he heard water gulping in the bowels of the ship and ragged, exhausted cries.

He awoke to a rushing morning. In the night a northern storm had come, bringing with it long gray arms of clouds and icy flecks in the air. The fronds of the willow whipped his broad head with armies of yellow leaves. As he staggered to his feet, unaware yet of hunger and thirst and pain, this was one of those moments when he thought he understood some elusive secret, when perhaps a poem could come from him that would be nearly good, the very lines of the ship rendered into words. But then he became aware of the stunning, overwhelming beauty of autumn's smells, how very subtle and rich were the aromas of the ground, the leaves, the fust of mushrooms, the dirt, the sour little smells of insects, and through it all a wild freshness, the north wind coming down the Catskills.

He knew exactly where he was. This morning he would take the path up past Veerkeeder Kill Falls on the south face of the Shawangunks and proceed into the fastness of the chain of preserves and parks that protect the mountains and all that live upon them. As long as fifteen years ago he had come up this very trail with Cindy, taking her camping, trying to teach her his own techniques for living off the land. She never learned, though; to her, camping consisted of hauling the whole twentieth century into some comer of the woods and re-creating it there, with a wood fire for effect only. One cooked on a portable alcohol stove. One ate dried food reconstituted in boiling water. One drank not from the fresh-flowing streams but of flat city water brought in canteens and bags.

Bob sniffed the air. There wasn't a human smell in it. It seemed almost as if his body was becoming wider and bigger, encompassing more space. As he left mankind, the world opened out to him. Wolves are creatures of small society. They are not like ants and men, living in vast hives, entirely surrounded by their own kind and odors. On the wind Bob smelled ice, leaves, the bloom of the witch-hazel plant, cold stone, water. There was hardly a single detectable tang of smoke, no undertone of chemicals, little odor of human bodies, no smell of cold steel and oil, the sign of the gun.

He felt exultant—and he wanted to tell Cindy. He wanted so badly to say to her that he'd—but he couldn't say anything. He couldn't talk to her, couldn't share his life with her, never again.

Cindy. It was the most beautiful of all the words he could no longer say. Dear, sweet Cindy.

He moved off in the predawn, traveling slowly at first, then, as his thigh loosened up, going faster, slipping under the low-reaching boughs of saplings, through stands of hemlock, upward and upward. After an hour of steady trotting he came to Veerkeeder Kill, which was merry and fast, speeding down from its mountainside. The water was full of iron and seemed almost to catch in his teeth, leaving them vibrating. It was fiercely cold, so cold that it seemed to clarify his breathing even more than had the air. His sense of smell grew ever more powerful.

Raising his head, sniffing deep to find a rabbit or some other small creature, he smelled something that made his heart twist on itself and his tail droop.

It was her. Unmistakable. She was somewhere up on the mountain. He threw back his head, his thoughts dark with recognition and longing. She had been thinking and planning very carefully, to anticipate his route.

He wanted to get to her, to feel her arms around him, to take her and give himself to her.

His mind whispered, God help us, and the wolf threw back its head and howled through the rushing autumn morning.

Her scent lay close to the ground, wrapped in other smells, Kevin's humid freshness, and the old, smoky odor of another body. Had she hired a guide? It was certainly possible. After her experiences camping with him, her distrust of the woods had become profound.

As he climbed the path beside the spraying falls he became more and more uneasy. What would happen when they met? Could there be a real relationship? He imagined himself sitting in the living room, Kevin reading to him in that fluttery boy's voice of his. Or his dinner, pretty on one of the yellow checked place mats and a china plate, on which might be beef stew with a side of endive salad and a bowl of red wine, all neatly laid in a corner of the kitchen floor. There would be signals, nod to turn a page when he was reading by himself, a couple of taps to open a door, and it was all a pipe dream because in fact there would be no money and all the problems with the police and the ASPCA and heaven only knew who else.

But Cindy was a terrific person, she could solve problems. The only thing she'd never been able to do was hold down a job. She was too stubborn and proud to get along with bosses.

He climbed so easily, a free wolf in the air of morning, that he reached the top of the falls far more quickly than he had as a man, and with no gasping, no scrabbling, no skinned hands or dubious pains in his knees. This body was wonderful to feel and be.

Now their odor became strong. His nose directed him to their sleeping forms. Going softly closer, he inhaled the most amazingly intimate odors from them. He could smell everything, their sweat, the grease of the hamburgers they had eaten for supper, the light acidic content of his son's stomach, the fouler odor of the man's belly with its must of digested beer, and Cindy's contents, sour dairy: she'd had ice cream for dessert. He loved her harder; when she was sad she ate ice cream.

He did not want her to be sad.

With the total clarity that these things sometimes bring, he knew exactly what he had to do. There just couldn't be any question about it. This woman, this poor little boy, were his family. That meant more to him than life itself, than anything that had transpired. His skin crawled when he remembered his desire to commit suicide. How great a sin that would have been against these beloved sleepers. Look at them: Cindy with that amazingly pure skin of hers. How madly he had loved that skin. He could smell it now in heady detail. The lives of scented beasts were so intimate.

Odors that might once have seemed foul to him no longer seemed at all bad, not even the sour, unwashed stink of the man who was with them. Odors were not characterizable as good and bad. They were too complex and interesting. Just the smell of that man—he couldn't even count the number of separate odors involved. There were thousands. A whole art must exist in potential around the selection and orchestration of scents.

Still, though, as much as he enjoyed his wolf, it was time to make a final and heroic effort on behalf of real life. As soon as he had smelled Cindy there came to him the definite sense that the wolf was on some level less real than the human had been. It was a wonderful body, true, but it was also primitive, totally unsuited to a man of poetry and thought. He, who sometimes spoke well, had been reduced to a rude state indeed, given this minor voice, capable of no formed words, and the crude paws for hands, paws that could never write a line.

And yet he was in here, full of thoughts that ought to be written, love and hope to speak, defenses and challenges, all made of words. He wanted to love his wife, to love his son, to somehow apologize to them.

When the man with them moved, Bob knew he was awake. How long had he been lying there watching him snuffle his family? A great moon face came oozing out of the blankets, rimmed by black hair. The eyes were tiny and as dark as obsidian. What was this man, Hispanic? No, Bob knew an Indian when he saw one.

An Indian. How interesting that Cindy had gotten an Indian. Where in the world had she found him, this man who moved so slowly that it was hard for wolf eyes to follow him?

Then he was on his feet. A swift, watery motion. Scary. Up close, human beings were tall and alien, their heads so far away, their faces terrifying with knowledge.

The Indian stood absolutely still. His face, though, was dark with staring. He was absolutely concentrated on Bob. His stillness made him hard to keep in the eye; this man knew something of wolves.

One reason that men were so scary was obviously that they were dangerous. There was another reason, though, one it was hard to put into words. It had to do with the very animation of their faces. They looked too aware. And he knew they were: the human mind has gotten lost; it has strayed too far from its wild origins. Animals were distinguished by their concentration on what was in front of them. The human mind went back and forth, in and out, complicating. It could not find anymore the shadow upon the grass.

The wind soughed across the mountain, the falls sounded like glass. In Bob's nostrils were the smells of water and stone, and of his beloved family. The light had taken on a rosy grayness, and a sparrow twittered nearby. Why in this sweet morning was the man moving like that?

He wanted to kiss Cindy, to hold her, to feel her snuggling against his breast.

The Indian came closer, oozing like heat-softened plastic, his arms and legs seeming almost jointless. "Shape-shifter," he whispered. "Shape-shifter, please tell me your secret."

To calm the man, Bob sat firmly down on his haunches. He let his jaw drop and his tongue hang out. His face was not very mobile but he thought he must be smiling. He yapped once, trying to awaken his family.

"Shh! Tell me before they open their eyes. Think what it would mean to my people, shape-shifter. Think what it would mean!" He squatted before Bob, his hands open and pleading. His face tightened, his lips drew back. Bob could see his skull, and his death, and the long quiet years in the ground. He had a clear notion: The body belongs to the ground, and the ground knows it. "Please, shape-shifter, give me a sign." He screwed his eyes closed, his hands were begging claws. "Think what it would mean to us. We Indians could change into wolves and foxes and deer, and we could go back to the forest!"

Bob was startled enough to growl sharply. The man's eyes bulged wide open. "You—you understood?" The wind swept down, ruffling Bob's fur, making the man squint. "Snow's coming!"

Kevin leaped out of his sleeping bag and threw his arms around his father's neck, kissing him wildly, his tears filled with the smell of the ocean and his skin with the fragile scent of youth. Then Cindy was there, too, and she kissed the side of his muzzle, his lips with careful, determined sensuality. "You never run from me again," she said, her voice going low. "Never!"

He looked at her. Before the knowledge that he now faced, he felt ashamed.

He could not live in the human world, not as a wolf, not as a dog. As much as he missed Cindy and Kevin, he didn't even want to become human again.

You, wolf, will be back to making cold calls from that stuffy office, the man at the bottom of the Empire State Building.

He snarled at the Indian, who had produced a little straw packet, which he was opening.

"We've tried shifting a million times. I used to do it when I was a kid. I wanted to be anything except an Indian. If I'd been able, I think I'd willingly have turned myself into a lawn mower. As it was, I tried for hawk, for eagle, for wolf, for deer, for panther. All I got was burned hands when my ritual fire blew up."

He spoke as if Bob could not understand him. Bob had gone up on all fours, and made sure he was between the people and the mountain. His instinct wouldn't let him be comfortable with the falls behind and three human beings blocking escape.

He was ashamed of himself when the notion of simply trotting off flashed through his mind. The Indian could probably track him, but he could never catch him, not without an off-the-road vehicle or an airplane.

He heard Cindy muttering to herself, her words inarticulate. It would hurt so much less if she wouldn't pray. Her religion, like his, was indifference. They were lapsed Catholics, both of them, full of quiet pride that they had solved the algorithm of guilt so well that they could enjoy the croissant Sundays that kept them home from church.