The Work of Wolves (11 page)

Willi's father's neck stiffened. He came out of his slump, stood erect. His head no longer wobbled, and he looked at his sister, then shook his head.

"No," he said. "Your mother. My well of life."

AFTER MARTI LEFT
, Willi's father put on his coat. Willi saw him through the gauze curtains, a shape striding down the sidewalk, the Rhine far below him, and a train speeding down the tracks along the bank. Head down. A man who might walk onto the street and be struck by a car and never notice. Maybe never care.

Willi's mother cleared the table. She had her back to him, standing near the dishwasher, when she spoke.

"We'll talk later," she said.

"I had a grandfather who died? I have a grandmother who is alive?"

"Later. First I have to talk to your father. Now go and do your homework."

HIS MOTHER CAME TO HIS ROOM
without turning on the light and sat on the edge of the bed. For a while she just sat there. Then she said, "We didn't want you to find out this way, Willi."

She stared over him, silent. A statue, bronzed by distant streetlights.

"Your father didn't get along with his father." It sounded as if she'd found the words in the glowing light. Words without emotion, like a fairy tale. And she was sitting on the edge of the bed, like she did when he was little and she read to him: a fairy tale about a father and son who didn't get along, maybe a cottage and a boat.

"Just tell me," Willi said. "I'm old enough."

"You know about the Nazis," she said. "Your grandfather was one of them. SS."

Willi had heard about the Nazis so much in school he'd grown tired of them. He thought he should be shocked—his own grandfather—but he wasn't. It seemed like a common, worn-out story.

"What did he do?" he asked.

"He was a member of a killing squad in Poland. An
Einsatz-gruppe.
He was a little man. He escaped punishment."

Willi sat up. He didn't like lying down while his mother sat. He leaned his head against the wall so that his eyes were level with hers. The cover on the bed crackled as he moved. In the darkness small, static sparks ignited in the fibers. His mother reached out to touch him, but he didn't respond. He sat unmoving, waiting. She let her hand drop from the air.

"Your grandparents tried to hide it from your father and your aunt Marti," she said. "But when your father was about your age, he found a photograph that made him wonder. His father in an SS uniform. He started to ask questions. And look in old documents."

She looked down at her hands on her knees. White, pale hands in the dark. "Marti never forgave him," she said.

"Her father?"

Willi's mother shook her head. "Yours," she said.

"She never forgave Papa? Why?"

"She didn't want to know. She's always been angry at having to know. Sometimes she pretends not to know. Pretends not to believe, at least."

"Why wasn't she angry at her father?"

She sighed. "Marti wants to love the people she loves," she said. "She wants to believe it is enough."

"And it isn't."

He was stating a realization, not asking a question.

"It should be, I suppose," his mother said. Then: "Or maybe it shouldn't."

They sat in silence for a while, contemplating love's sufficiency or insufficiency.

Then Willi's mother said, "Your father tried to kill himself once, Willi. You were young. You don't remember."

But once she said it, he did remember: vague outlines of light and noise, himself crying.

"You saved his life." And she told him what had happened: how he'd begun crying without reason, forcing her to return home, and all that followed. But even as she told of it, he remembered. And it seemed that he had remembered it before, though he hadn't known until now what he had been remembering. He had thought it was a dream. When his mother was done, Willi felt he'd become someone else: someone—now—whose grandfather had done vague and terrible things in the long-distant war; someone who had saved his own father's life, though perhaps without intending to; someone whose first memory was the memory of so doing.

"Was it because of what his father did?" Willi asked.

"What?"

"That Papa tried. Tried to."

"No. Not only that. At least I don't think so. He was always searching. Always looking in documents. I think he found something new."

"What?"

"I don't know. I think, for him, it's too terrible to tell."

"What did he mean when he said his mother was his well of life?"

"I don't know, Willi. I've never heard him say anything like that before."

"Did Papa love his father?"

His mother expelled her breath in surprise. "I suppose he did," she said.

"But he hated him, too."

"Maybe more for his silence than for anything else. For never admitting anything. He might have hated him less if his father had spoken."

"Why didn't you make Papa tell you what he found? The new thing?"

His mother bowed her head and thought for a while. "I'm a little like Marti, maybe," she finally said. "I was just so glad to have him here. I knew there was something, but I didn't want to ask for fear it would disturb him. I thought he would tell me when he was ready. Then a kind of equilibrium set in. Life went on. I didn't want to disturb the equilibrium. I decided to let it be his secret. Maybe he decided the same. Not to disturb my equilibrium."

They sat for a long time without speaking. The moon sent its light into the dark room, and the shadows of tree branches moved down the wall as the moon rose. Willi's mother reached out and stroked his arm, then his shoulder. He allowed it, but he didn't respond.

"I had a right to know about them," he said.

He was a little surprised when his mother didn't apologize or affirm his implied accusation.

"Maybe," she said. "Parents have to make decisions for their children. After that night when you and I came back to find him, your father visited them once. And said he never would again. I agreed. Even now, it isn't that easy to know we were wrong."

Willi lay awake for a long time after she left the room, thinking about the grandmother he now had. Thinking he had a right to know her. And to know what his father knew, even if the knowing disturbed an equilibrium his parents had worked to maintain. For that equilibrium made him a stranger to himself.

Four years later he lay in his borrowed bedroom in the middle of a foreign continent, staring at patterns on the ceiling and remembering how he'd done the same thing after his mother left his room. Here too, he thought, an equilibrium had settled, and here, too, he was a stranger. But to what he wasn't sure. His call to Carson Fielding had perhaps disturbed whatever equilibrium was here. Whatever silence. But Willi knew it had to be disturbed.

"A
RE YOU WAITING FOR SOMEONE
,
takoja?
"

Earl's grandmother could bead, carry on a conversation, observe the weather outside the window and in the hearts of her daughter and grandson, and watch television, all at the same time. She was watching a baseball game when she spoke, and her eyes never left the screen, so that when Earl glanced at her he had the impression she was speaking to the pitcher, calling him
takoja,
"grandchild," and wondering when he was going to throw.

"I don't know," he said.

"You don't know if you're waiting for someone."

"No."

"Then you're waiting to find out."

"I guess so."

His grandmother nodded. The needle rose in her hand, then dipped downward into the loose beads and ordered them, making tiny clucking sounds, like a small, content bird, as it found the holes and then looped another eight beads into the air, dots of light running down the thread until they tightened against the moccasin into pattern. Earl knew his grandmother wouldn't pry further, but if he wanted to tell her she would listen. She had asked the question that opened the door. Now she would wait. The pitcher raised his leg, wound up.

Willi had called the night before and told Earl that he and Carson Fielding were going back to the pasture behind Lostman's Lake. Earl had spent the weekend at home, writing scholarship applications and helping his mother cook, and on Monday at school he had controlled the jokes directed at him about his excursion to the top of Tower Hill by smiling and not responding and pretending to be focused on the teacher or his books. It wore him out, maintaining defenses. But by the afternoon, no one was saying anything about his amazing feats of drunkenness, his craziness under the towers. New gossip had already started in the halls. Earl didn't understand how stories could spring full-fledged to life between the first bell and lunch, but he was grateful for that mystery. Walking home from school, he felt relieved, like he'd shed that Friday evening, allowed attention to drift elsewhere.

Now, when Willi called, Earl could think of no response. It was like finding gum on your shoes after leaving school—an irritating little reminder of a place you'd rather forget.

"Oh," he said. "You and Carson Fielding."

He had heard of Carson Fielding, though he'd never met him.

"We will pick you up. At eight tomorrow."

"What?"

"Eight in the evening."

"I'm not going back up there."

"You found them, Earl."

Earl's mother was working late, and his grandmother, as always, had the television on. Nevertheless, Earl stepped around the corner into the kitchen and lowered his voice.

"You can't find something unless it's hidden," he said. "Seeing something and finding something are different, you know?"

"We will come at eight o'clock, Earl."

Now it was approaching eight. Earl had tried to do the advanced calculus problems Mr. Edwards had given him. He had seen classmates go off to college, with relatives wishing them luck and giving them gifts, and he had seen them return, washed out within a semester, claiming it was all worthless, all a bunch of bull, hiding their failure behind bravado, grinning about it, claiming they had better things to do. Earl didn't want to be one of those people. But he couldn't concentrate tonight. He kept listening for the sound of a vehicle. It was nearly dark when he heard tires slowing down on the highway. He was glad his mother was attending a school board meeting. If she were here, he'd have to explain what he was doing. All his grandmother said, when he went toward the door, was,

"I guess you were waiting for someone."

"I guess."

"It's good, if you were waiting for someone, that they showed up."

"Yeah. I guess. Goodbye, Grandma."

"Be safe,
takoja.
"

Earl walked out the door. He'd go with Willi tonight, but he'd make it clear this was the end for him. From behind the windshield of the idling pickup, Carson and Willi watched him impassively. He opened the passenger-side door. Willi moved to the center of the pickup seat, and Earl got in. They adjusted to the closeness, the three of them packed together, trying not to touch at the knees and hips.

Willi and Earl exchanged hellos, and Earl and Carson nodded to each other. Earl raised his hand across Willi's chest, but Carson ignored the gesture, put the pickup into gear, and started up the driveway. Earl let his hand drop, rubbed his knee with his palm, trying to make his attempt to shake hands look like something natural. He didn't know whether Carson hadn't seen his hand or had deliberately ignored it.

Earl looked out the side window at the basketball hoop his uncle had erected for him when he was in elementary school. It was the only time Lorna had allowed Norm on the place, and then only because Earl was unrelenting in his begging. He'd had such visions of being a basketball player, and he needed a hoop to practice at. Now the ragged net, shredded by the wind, flapped back and forth under the splintered plywood backboard.

"Didn't know you were comin," Carson said, not glancing at Earl. "Don't really need three've us for this."

It was exactly what Earl had been thinking, but the comment made him flush. Carson was polite, but reserve and politeness could hide a lot of things. It was almost an art form, the way people used politeness. Earl had experienced it from store clerks and waitresses—that quiet aloofness that both formed and withheld judgment at the same time. Earl often wished that if people didn't like Indians they'd just say so right up front and be done with it so he didn't have to guess.

'"Well," he said, "I guess we're all three here."

He remembered Norm working on the basketball hoop that day, talking about everything and anything. Earl had been a fourth-grader. He'd stood looking up at his uncle on the ladder, waiting for him to ask for a socket or wrench, eager to show him he knew what the tools were. Earl felt his mother's eyes inside the house, so he stood a little distant from the ladder, but he watched his uncle's every move and listened to every word he said. Norm was talking about his time in the Army, the training he'd gone through, the people he'd met. He told Earl about a white kid from Philadelphia who'd never met an Indian and had a hard time believing Norm was a real one. "Wondered if I lived in a tipi," Norm said. "And when I said I lived in a house—this was before I was living in my motor home—he thought I was just pretending to be Indian. Any real Indian, he thought, had to live in a tipi. When I asked him if any real white man had to live in a castle, he didn't know what I was talking about. But we got along good. The Army turned us both into grunts anyway. Which is what the Army does best. Hand me a ratchet, wouldja?"

Earl hurried to Norm's toolbox. He loved the way the tools were arrayed, all their gleaming forms, the endless choices they implied. He found a ratchet and handed it up and watched as Norm attached a socket he'd pulled from his pocket and tightened the nuts that held the backboard up, his hand spinning the ratchet in quick half-circles, so quick the silver handle looked like a propeller blurring the air.

"'Course, things're changing," Norm said. "It's getting so people now want to
be
Indian. Or think they do. And I got to say some of them get pretty good at being Indian. But there's one thing someone who's not Indian can't fake, and they can't fake it even if they marry an Indian and get adopted by an Indian family and get an Indian name and do genuine Indian arts and stand in line for genuine government commodities. And what is this thing, nephew? I'll tell you. Get into a pickup with two white guys in South Dakota, and if you're still Indian then, you're a real Indian. Hanh."