Errantry: Strange Stories (37 page)

Nina watched, too stunned to move. Not until the wolves turned and began to stream back into the shadows did she call out.

“Wait!”

The biggest wolf paused to glance back at her, then disappeared into the underbrush with the others. Only the grizzled wolf slowed, and looked over its shoulder at Nina. For a long moment it held her gaze, its tawny eyes and pale muzzle gilded by the moonlight. Then it too turned and trotted into the darkness.

Nina shook her head, trying to catch her breath. Astonishment curdled into terror as she thought of the reception not far away. She raced to the tree Uncle Lou had climbed, and beneath it found the plastic Sainsbury’s bag. Stuffed inside were his clothes, velvet jacket and corduroy trousers, socks and underwear, and at the very bottom the worn Moroccan slippers.

At sight of them she began to cry, but quickly wiped her eyes. Clutching the bag to her chest, she pushed her way back through the trees and overgrown brush until she reached the path again.

Somehow she found her way back to the carpark where she’d left the Aston Martin. She passed no one, walking as fast as she dared before breaking into a run as she neared the hedge that bounded the lot. The moon had dipped below the trees. The sounds of the reception had long since dwindled to the distant drone of departing cars.

She started the Aston Martin, heart pounding as she eased it onto the access road and headed toward the main highway, sobbing openly now, always careful not to exceed the speed limit.

At last she reached her apartment. She parked the car in the underground garage, leaving a note on the windscreen for the security guard so it would not be towed; retrieved the manila envelope from the glovebox, grabbed the bag containing Uncle Lou’s clothes, and went upstairs. She poured herself a stiff drink—a martini—downed it and with shaking hands opened the envelope.

Inside was a long, affectionate letter from her uncle, along with the title to the Aston Martin, and precisely detailed instructions as to how to dispose of his clothing and answer the awkward and inevitable questions that would soon arise regarding his disappearance. There was also contact information for his longtime accountant and solicitor, as well as for an old friend who lived in central Romania—and, of course, a copy of his will.

In addition to the car, he left the Pallis Mews flat and all it contained to Nina, along with his shares in the By Night enterprise. And there was an extremely generous bequest to the Whipsnade Zoo, with a provision that a sizable portion of it be used for the continued upkeep and improvement of the gray wolves’ habitat.

Nina sold the Aston Martin. Upkeep was costly, and she worried about it being vandalized or stolen. After six months she moved into the Pallis Mews flat, refurbishing it slightly and donating the unworn clothing to Oxfam, though she kept the Moroccan slippers. She continues to visit Uncle Lou every week, taking the train to Luton and then the bus to the zoo. The gray wolf exhibit is seldom crowded, even on Sundays, and Nina often has it to herself. Sometimes, the grizzled old wolf sits at the edge of the enclosure and gazes at her with his tawny eyes, and occasionally raises his white muzzle in a yodeling cry.

But more often than not, she finds him outstretched upon one of the moss-covered boulders, eyes closed, breathing gently: the very picture of lupine bliss as he sleeps in the afternoon sun.

Errantry

I was hanging out in Angus’s apartment above the print shop, scoring some of his ADHD medication, when Tommy Devaraux ran upstairs to tell us he’d just seen the Folding Man over at the Old Court Grill. This was some years after the new century had cracked open and left me and my friends scrambled, even more feckless than we’d been thirty years earlier when we met as teenagers in Kamensic Village. The three of us had been romantically involved off and on during high school and for a few years afterward, held together by the wobbly gravitational pull exerted by adolescence and the strange, malign beauty of Kamensic, a once-rural town that had since been ravaged by gentrification and whose name had recently been trademarked by a domestic housewares tycoon.

Angus had never left Kamensic; he’d spent the last three decades nurturing a musical career that never quite took off, despite a minor 1977 hit that continued to generate residuals and a ringtone that now echoed eerily across the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. His most recent job had been with a brokerage firm absorbed by MortNet. The three kids from his first marriage were grown, but the younger ones, twins, had just started school, and child support and legal bills from the second divorce had stripped him of almost everything.

His ex-wife Sheila and the twins remained in the McMansion out by Kamensic Meadows, but Angus lived in a third-floor flat he rented from another old friend who owned the struggling printing company below. The entire rickety wood-frame building smelled of dust and ink, the faintly resinous odor of paper mingled with acrid chemical pigments and the reek of melted plastic. In bed at night in Angus’s room, with the old presses rumbling on the floor below, it felt as though we were on board a train. Walls and floors vibrated around us, and a sallow streetlamp coated the window with a syrupy greenish light. A few yards away, real trains racketed between the city and the outer exurbs.

I lived sixty miles north of Kamensic, in the next county, but spent more time in my old stomping grounds than reason or propriety allowed. Angus was my half-brother, the result of what Shakespearean scholars term a bed-trick. We didn’t know of our complicated parentage when we first slept together, but once we learned about it we figured it was too late and what the hell. Few people besides us ever knew, and most of them are now dead. My own career, as assistant professor of Arthurian studies at a small college upstate, had flamed out due to accusations of sexual harassment (dropped when a student recanted his story) and drug and alcohol abuse (upheld). Despite my dismissal, I found work as a private tutor, coaching rich kids on their college admissions essays.

“Vivian,” Tommy said breathlessly when I opened the door. “Angus here?”

I brushed my cheek against Tommy’s as he swept inside and crossed to where Angus sat hunched over his computer. Tommy peered at the monitor and frowned. “Where’s Estelle?”

Tommy had a little obsessive thing that dovetailed neatly with Angus’s frenetic energy, as in their latest collaboration, a thirty-seven-song cycle Angus was writing about Estelle, an imaginary woman based on a real woman, a stockbroker Tommy had dated once. She eventually hit him with a restraining order and moved to Vermont.

Angus scowled. “I’m taking a break from freaking Estelle.”

“Well, sacrifice that Voidwalker and log off,” said Tommy. “I just saw the Folding Man.”

“At the Old Court?” Angus ground out his cigarette and lit another. “He’s there now? Why didn’t you just call us?”

Tommy glanced at me imploringly. He was tall but sparely built, softer than he’d been but still boyish, with round tortoiseshell glasses on a snub nose, his long dark hair gone to gray; slightly louche in a frayed Brooks Brothers jacket and shiny black engineer’s boots. He was a Special Ed teacher at a private school and dealt with autistic teenagers, many of them violent. He’d been attacked so often by kids bigger and stronger than he was that he’d started to have panic attacks, and now took so much Xanax just to get through the working day that his customary expression was a rictus of mournful, slightly hostile chagrin—he looked like the Mock Turtle after a lost weekend.

“Well, he left,” he said. “Plus my cell phone died. But he gave me this—”

He sank into a swivel chair beside Angus, hands cupped on his knees as though he held a butterfly. The illusion held for an instant when he opened his hands to display a tiny diadem of russet and yellow petals that fluttered when he breathed upon it.

“Nice,” said Angus grudgingly. “He’ll be gone by now.”

I crouched beside Tommy. “Can I see?”

“Sure.

I picked it up and weighed it tentatively in my palm. Angus’s Focalin was starting to have its way with me, a diffuse, sunny-day buzz that meshed nicely with the day outside: mid-afternoon, early May, lilac in bloom, kids riding bikes along the village sidewalks. I drew my hand to my face and caught a whiff of the Old Court’s distinctive odor, hamburgers and Pine-Sol; but also, inexplicably, a smell of the sea, salt and hot glass.

I blew on the bit of folded paper. It fell onto the floor. Angus grabbed it before I could pick it up again.

“He gave it to me,” Tommy said in an aggrieved tone.

But Angus was already opening it. Tommy and I stood beside him as he carefully unfolded wings, triangles, unveiling creases in once-glossy paper, swatches of azure and silver, topaz, pine-green. The yellow and fawn-colored petals must have sprung from the other side of the page, torn from a magazine or brochure.

“Someone’s been to the beach.” Angus held up a finger dusted with glittering specks, spilled sugar or sand; licked it and smoothed out the paper on his desk.

“What does it say?” asked Tommy.

“‘YOU ARE HERE.’”

I edged between them to get a better look. The paper was four or five inches square, crosshatched with grayish lines indicating where it had been folded countless times. It was almost impossible to imagine it had ever had a shape other than this one, and impossible to remember just what that shape had been—an insect? Tiger lilies?

“Beach roses,” said Tommy. “That’s what it’s a picture of.”

“How the hell can you know that?” demanded Angus.

“It’s a map,” I said.

Angus’s cellphone buzzed. He glanced at it, muttered “Sheila” and turned it off. “Let’s see.”

I adjusted my glasses and frowned. “It’s hard to see, but there—those lines? It says Route 22.”

“That’s the Old Court there,” Tommy agreed, squinting at a blotch on a smudge of shoreline. “Those dotted lines, that’s the old road that runs parallel to it, out towards that apple farm where they want to put the development.”

Ashes dropped from Angus’s cigarette onto the ersatz map. When he blew them away, a tiny spark glowed in one corner.

“There.” Tommy stubbed out the ember with his finger. “It ends there.”

“Like I said.” Angus finished his cigarette. “X marks the spot. Let’s go check it out. Who wants to get stoned?”

Angus had retained a company car, I never understood how. The back was filled with his stuff, sheet music, CDs, manila envelopes, Happy Meals toys, a guitar case. I sat in the front with Angus’s hand on my knee. Tommy shoved stuff aside and slumped in the back, his face pressed against the window. He looked like a kid on a long drive, at once resigned and expectant. I thought, not for the first time, how little had changed since we really were kids: still bombing around on a Saturday afternoon, drunk or stoned or generally messed up, still screwing each other when no one else would have us, still singing along with the radio.

“Is there a channel just for your songs?” asked Tommy as we drove over the railroad tracks and headed north to old Route 22. Angus tapped the radio screen until he found something he liked. “Like is there a satellite that just beams ‘Do It All Day’?”

Angus nodded. “That would be the Burnout Channel.”

“This is the Cowsills,” I said. “That song about the park and other things.”

“
And then I knew
,” chanted Tommy, “
that she had made me happy
.”

“Happy, happy,” echoed Angus. He began to sing his own words.

“
I love the Folding Man

He may be just a drunk

And I’m a worn-out skunk . . .
”

Outside the remnants of old Kamensic slid past, stone churches, the sprawling Victorian where Angus had grown up, now a B&B; the ancient cemetery with its strange stone animals; Deer Park Inn, a former dive that had been cleaned up and christened the Deer Park Tavern, its shattered blacktop newly paved and full of SUVs and Priuses. It was easy to blame these changes on Marian Lavecque, the domestic maven whose reign had redrawn the town’s aesthetic and cultural boundaries.

But I knew the decline stretched back longer than that, to the years when Angus and I had first become entangled. So it was hard sometimes—for me anyway, since my academic background had trained me to see patterns everywhere, a subtle tapestry woven into the grungiest Missoni knockoff—not to feel that our
folie a deux
had broken something in the place we loved most.

One upshot was that we had to go farther afield now to find a bar that suited us. I’d never heard of the Folding Man being anywhere but the Old Court.

I reached to touch Tommy’s knee. “You okay back there?”

“Sure,” he said. “We’re on a quest.” He smiled as Angus’s voice filled the car.

“I love the Folding Man

He may be just a geek

And I’m a burned-out freak . . .
”

Tommy was the one who’d always believed in things. Even though he could never really explain to you exactly what those things were; only trace circles in the air when he was drunk, or go into long rambling exegeses of conspiracies between real estate developers and the Zen Buddhists who’d built a retreat house on what had once been old-growth forest, or the purported sexual relationship, based on a mutual desire to make artisanal cheese, that existed between Estelle, the woman he’d been obsessed with, and a dotcom millionaire who  also lived in Vermont. I felt protective of Tommy, although when drunk he could become bellicose, even violent. Asleep he resembled a high school athlete fallen on hard times,
his T-shirt riding up to show a slack torso, gray hair, an appendectomy scar like a wincing mouth, a bad tattoo of a five-pointed star.

Whereas Angus retained the body he’d had as a teenager, his skin smooth and unblemished, pale as barley; he slept curled on his side and breathed softly, like a child, occasionally sighing as in some deep regret he couldn’t acknowledge in waking life. Then the lines on his face seemed to fade, and his eyes, closed, held no hint of what burned there when he stared at you.

“Let’s stop for a minute,” I said as we crested the hill overlooking the Old Court.

“He won’t be there.” Angus glanced into the rearview mirror. “You said he left.”

“Yeah, he left.” Tommy opened his window. A green smell filled the car, young ferns and the leaves of crushed meadowsweet. “But stop anyway.”

Inside, the Old Court was sunlit, its curved oak bar glossy as caramel and warm to the touch. A few elderly bikers sat drinking beer or coffee and watching the Golf Channel. We sat at the far end, where it was quieter, in front of the brass bowl that held the Folding Man’s handiwork.