Wolf Moon (6 page)

    I didn't say anything. I walked around the side of the house, and there, in a large cage made of galvanized wire, paced the wolf. In the sunlight his coat shone ivory; but his eyes, when his head swung up suddenly, were still the same odd yellow. An Indian was dumping raw meat through a small door in the cage. On the hot wind you could smell the wolf's shit and the high hard stink of the grass he'd pissed in.

    I walked closer and he started growling again, that low rumble I'd first heard when my brother Don was dying in his bed that long ago night.

    The Indian, still on his haunches, looked over his shoulder. "He don't like you, man." He had graying hair worn long and a faded denim shirt and work pants. His feet were brown and bare.

    "So I gather."

    "He's a bad one, this wolf."

    "Yeah," I said. "I know."

    The Indian pointed to a hole in the ground where a small animal had burrowed up into the cage. "Raccoon. Should've seen what the wolf did to that little bastard." The Indian grinned with teeth brown as his skin.

    I knelt down next to the Indian, gripping the wire with two fingers for support.

    The wolf, who had been growling and going into a crouch, lunged at me suddenly, hurling himself against the cage and ripping his teeth across the two fingers I had inside the cage.

    The pain was instant and blinding.

    I fell back off my haunches, grabbing my bloody fingers and gritting my teeth and trying not to look like a nancy in front of the Indian who stood above me grinning again with his bad teeth and saying, "I told you, man, that wolf just plain don't like you."

    I got to my feet, still hurting, but I pretended that the pain was waning. "Maybe I'll come back here some night and kill that sonofabitch."

    The wolf was still glaring at me, still in a crouch, and still growling.

    "He'd like to fight you, man. He really would."

    I glared back at the wolf and left.

    

    

    Hanratty was still at his post behind the jack pines, Winchester laid across his saddle. He waved, friendly as always in his way, but he didn't fool me at all. If he had to, he'd kill me fast and sure and never pay me another thought.

    That afternoon, Hollister held one of his weekly meetings for the entire eighteen-man police force.

    We stood in the back of his office, at full attention the way he'd ordered, while he gnawed on our asses the way a military man would.

    He had plenty of complaints. One officer, and he said the man would know who he was, was found sleeping down by the mill. The officer would be docked ten dollars from his next check-this was damned near a fourth of the man's pay.

    Then he held up his whistle and showed it around as if we'd never seen anything like it before. "Some of you seem to think it's embarrassing to use this-but I want you to use it anyway. Any time there's a crime, any time you're pursuing somebody, I want that whistle blown so that the citizens and your fellow officers know that you're carrying out your duties. When your fellow officers hear the whistle, they're supposed to lend you a hand. And when the citizens hear it, they're supposed to get out of your way." He held the whistle up for us to see again, put it to his lips and filled the slow golden afternoon air with an ear-shattering blow. Then he said, "If I catch anybody forgetting to use his whistle, I'll fine him five dollars." There was the usual grumbling.

    The final matter was drunks. "Our friends Hayes and Croizer have been getting overeager again. Last Monday night they arrested two miners who were walking home drunk. How many times do we have to go over this, boys? We're not here to make the lives of working men any harder. Those poor bastards catch plenty of hell during the day-they don't need us to add to it. The rule is-unless a drunkard is causing some kind of trouble, he's to be left alone. If he's having trouble walking, then walk him home if you've got the time, or find a citizen to go get the drunkard's wife or son to take him home. But I sure as hell don't want any more people arrested just because they've got a snootful. Understood?"

    We nodded.

    "Good," Hollister said. "Now get to work."

    We were just turning to leave when Hollister said, "Chase, I need to speak with you."

    I turned around and faced him. He sat himself down and took a pipe from a drawer and put the pipe in his mouth and his feet on the desk.

    "I kind of got my ass chewed on because of you, Chase."

    I couldn't figure out what he was talking about but I got a sick feeling in my stomach. Hollister was known to fire men almost on a whim-especially if he'd been drinking, and he had that look now-and I could feel that old prison fear in my chest. But instead of getting locked in… this time I was going to get locked out- of a good job and wages.

    "Because of me?" I said.

    "That fop of a night clerk at the Whitney Hotel."

    "Oh."

    "You sound as if you know what I'm talking about."

    I shrugged. "Hell, all I did was look at the guest register."

    He smiled. "Without asking that sweet little man's permission."

    I laughed. "So he complained?"

    "Oh, did he complain. He had a letter waiting for me on my desk this morning. He was filled with civic outrage." He sucked on his unlit pipe. "Western towns like ours hate police departments. Just about everything we do, the people consider infringing on their rights in some way."

    He wasn't exaggerating. Ttowns over, a group of outraged citizens, angered that the police chief had imposed a curfew following three drunken murders, took two young policemen hostage and threatened to kill them unless the police chief packed up and left town. The outraged mob had been led by the mayor and a minister. Eastern papers liked to talk about how the "Wild West" had been tamed now that a new century was about to turn. But that didn't mean that police forces-too often crooked and violent-had found acceptance, because in most places they sure hadn't… not yet, anyway.

    "Why were you looking in the register anyway?"

    For the first time I noticed that he was watching me carefully. He seemed suspicious of me.

    "I saw two men get off a train. They didn't look right to me. I just wanted to see what names they registered under."

    "Didn't look right to you?"

    "Slickers, was how I had them pegged. Remember that confidence game that man named Rawlins was running on old folks a month ago? That's how they looked to me."

    I didn't tell him about them taking late-night horses from the livery and riding out of town.

    "You ask them their business?" Hollister said.

    "No."

    "That would've been better than bothering that sonofabitch at the Whitney. He's very popular with the 'landed gentry,' as they like to be called, and the 'landed gentry' likes to see us as a group of barbarians. This only gives them something else to bitch about."

    "I won't bother him anymore."

    "I'd appreciate that, Chase. You're doing a good job. I don't want to see you get in any political trouble with one of the mighty."

    "I appreciate the advice."

    He looked at my bandaged fingers. I'd put some iodine on them. They still smarted from the wolf bite. "What's wrong with your fingers?"

    I didn't want to tell him about Reeves. "I cut them when I was sawing some logs."

    He laughed. "You're about as handy as I am." When he laughed, he pushed a little breath up on the air. Pure bourbon.

    I said good-bye and left his office. Before I even reached the doorway, I heard him sliding a drawer open.

    I glanced back over my shoulder just as he was turning his chair to the wall so he could lift up his silver flask and tip it to his lips.

    

    

    Before work next morning I took Annie up into the hills. She wanted to collect leaves.

    I found some hazel thickets and showed her how to dig into the mice nests surrounding them. You could find near a quart of nuts that the mice had already shelled and put away for bitter winter. But we didn't take any, of course, because the food belonged to them.

    Annie made a collection of the prettiest leaves she could find, taking care to pluck some extras for her mother, and then we stood on an old Indian bridge and watched clear creek water splash rocks and slap against a ragged dam some beavers had recently built. Annie counted eight frogs and six fish from up on the bridge.

    We took the east trail back, watching sleek fast horses the color of saddle leather run up grassy slopes in the late morning sun.

    When we got near the house, she stopped at the abandoned well. Four large ragged rocks formed a circle around the well, inside of which Gillian had placed a piece of metal to cover the hole.

    Now, expertly, Annie bent down, lifted the piece of metal up, took one of her leaves and closed her eyes and said, "I have to be quiet now and keep my eyes closed."

    "How come?"

    "Because I'm making a wish."

    "Oh."

    "Mommy always says that's what you have to do for God to hear you."

    "Be quiet and close your eyes?"

    "Uh-huh. And drop something down the well that you really like."

    And with that she let the pretty autumn leaf go from her hand. It floated gently down into the darkness.

    Gillian had told me about the well, how it was pretty shallow, and how the folks who had the house before her got sick drinking from it.

    "You glad you're my pop?" Annie said, opening her eyes. She'd heard a boy at school call his daddy his "pop" and had decided she liked it.

    "I sure am."

    "Well, I sure am, too." She smiled and put her hand in mine. "I always knew you were my pop."

    "You did?"

    "In my dreams I always had a pop. I couldn't exactly see him real good but he was always there. And then the day I saw you in front of our house-well, I knew you were my pop."

    "Aw, honey," I said, feeling sad for all the years she hadn't had a pop, "honey, you don't have to worry about not having a pop anymore. I'll always be here."

    "Always?" she said, squinting up at me in the sunshine.

    "Always," I said, then reached down and swung her up in my arms and carried her home just that way, her blond hair flying and her laughter clear and pure. The only thing that spoiled it was the sore throat and aching muscles I had. I was apparently getting sick.

    

    

    Around ten that night, I just happened to be standing half a block from the Whitney Hotel. And Lundgren and Mars just happened to be standing on the porch of that same hotel. They couldn't see me because I was in the shadows of an overhang.

    Lundgren smoked a cigar. Mars just looked around. He seemed nervous. I wondered why.

    Fifteen minutes after coming out onto the porch, Lundgren flipped his cigar away exactly as he'd done the night before, and then, also as he'd done the night before, led his shorter friend down the street to the livery where the Mex gave them two horses already rubbed down and rested and saddled.

    Lundgren and Mars rode out of town, taking the same moonlit road as last night.

    I finished my rounds of the block then cut west over by the furrier, where the smell of pelts was sour on the cold night. Moving this fast didn't make me feel any better. The damned head cold I'd been getting was still with me.

    The alley behind the Whitney was busy with the usual drunks. Henry, a half-breed, had pissed his pants and was sleeping, mouth open and slack, propped up against a garbage can. A hobo with but one finger on his left hand was having some kind of nightmare, his whole body shaking and cries of "Mother! Mother!" caught in his throat. And there was Jesse-Jesse as in female, Jesse as in mother of three, Jesse as in town drunk. Most nights her kids (the father having been killed four years earlier in the mines) kept tight rein on her, but every once in a while she escaped and wandered the town like a graveyard ghost, and usually fell over unconscious in an alley.

    I debated waking them and making them leave. But that would only mean that one or two of them would possibly remember me.

    I made sure as I could that they were all sleeping, and then I climbed onto the fire escape that ran at an angle down the back of the Whitney.

    I moved fast. I could always say that I was following a suspicious character up here. But I wouldn't want to use that excuse unless I had to.

    Lundgren and Mars were staying on the fourth floor. I pulled the screen door open and went in. The hallway was empty. I started toward 406. In one of the rooms I passed, an old man was coughing so hard I thought he'd puke. The corridor smelled of whiskey and tobacco and sweat and kerosene from the lamps.

    I was two doors from 406 when 409 opened up and a man came out. He was so drunk he looked like a comic in an opera-house skit. He wore a messy black suit and a bowler that looked ready to slide off his bald head. He was weaving so hard, he nearly fell over backward.

    I pressed flat to the wall and stayed that way while the drunk managed to get his door closed and locked.

    He didn't once glance to his left. If he had, he would have seen me for sure.

    He tottered off, still a clown in an opera-house turn.

    Shaking, neither my stomach nor my bowels in good condition, I went to 406 and got it open quickly. You learn a lot of useful things in prison.

    The room was dark. Some kind of jasmine-scented hair grease was on the air. I felt my way across the room, touching the end of the bed, a bureau, and a closet door. By now I was able to see.