Saint Peter’s Wolf (35 page)

Indeed he was, feinting, dribbling the dazzling black-spotted ball. The grass of the Marina was so green as to be garish, and the bay beyond was sunny, the hills of the Marin headlands glowing with their flush of winter grass.

He trotted over to me and shook my hand. He stood with his hands on his hips, panting, and I could hardly begin my confession until he stopped laughing at the score he had just made. He kicked a ball that bounded over to us, and then we both turned to watch the sailboats in the blue water.

“I'm glad you came,” he said when his breath was steady. “I tried to call you a couple of times.”

“I was out of town,” I began. What a silly way to put it, I thought, and hardly a brave way to begin.

“I wanted to tell you about Gneiss,” he said, adjusting a sweatband on his wrist. “You know, that man out of Washington.”

“Yes,” I said blandly. “I remember him well.”

“It turns out he was dismissed by the Feds months ago. They cut off his funding. There was a cover-up. He tried to torture a man into confessing he was a vampire. It was in Chicago. Nearly suffocated the man.”

A dark-eyed, black-haired man who liked his words to have impact, Solano turned to look at me. He continued, “He avoided deeper shit by promising to go into therapy, but he went AWOL so many times they fired him, and when he kept doing his investigations with his own funds they started to come after him. They wouldn't admit this. They'd say that he was out of their office all right, but give them a call next time he drops in. They've been looking for him all over town. They think he's still here. I keep laughing about it.”

“Laughing!”

“He's a major embarrassment for Washington. He's a lunatic, a very dangerous man. Apparently he has some money, and he attracts these wanna-be FBI types, sadistic little guys in suits.”

“I'm surprised.” And I was. I felt great unease, suddenly. I wished—I desperately wished—that we had burned his body.

“Yeah, me too,” he said, cheerfully. “Really surprised. He comes out here and tries to jerk us around.”

I could barely ask, and so I coughed, adjusted my collar, and said, “What about the Night Beast?”

“History. Old news. It got burned up. Were you out of the country or something? Burned to a crisp. What a relief, too. Just what we needed, an animal going around eating people's insides.”

“It sounds as though you actually believe that.”

“Oh, he tore people up pretty good. I believe that.”

“No, I mean—you believe he's dead.”

“Don't worry, it's dead, all done, burned to bones.” Perhaps he said this with just a touch too much vehemence. “It's Gneiss that worries me. You know, I even thought for a while that maybe he killed that couple in Golden Gate Park himself, just to make it look like his investigation was necessary. I mean, this guy is sick. I think they want to put him in a big white net. He's going to really embarrass Washington. They tell me he's got a major hangup on brutality. I thought he was sick from the moment I saw him. I never trusted him.”

“That woman.…” I began.

“The raped lady. Doctor, you have the touch. The psychological magic bullet.”

I must have showed my bewilderment.

“You cured her. You didn't hear?”

I could not even manage a syllable.

“Dr. Eng is really pleased. When you saw her the lady went crazy, correct?”

“The sight of me caused a trauma, to put it mildly.”

“But a couple of days after that she developed what was called therapeutic amnesia, and a couple of days ago she got out of the hospital perfectly well.”

I steadied myself, and began what I knew would be a long speech. “There are things you don't know about all of this.”

“Like how wolf semen got squirted into that subject's vagina.”

“For example, yes.”

“Listen, I wonder about that, too.”

“I know how it happened.”

“You did it yourself, right?” He laughed. “I have to run, Doctor. These guys can't play without me.” Indeed, the game had faltered and stopped, with the ball desultorily wandering from one figure to another. “But I'm going to keep you in mind for all our sick crimes from now on. The best psychotherapist in the City. No one else even close.”

And he ran, hard, away from me, back to the game. I knew this much: he did not want to hear anymore about it.

I did nothing but watch them play for a moment, my hands in my pockets. Johanna had been right. A confession was not what they wanted to hear.

The mention of “psychotherapist,” however, told me what I must do next, but before I did anything further, I hurried to a pay phone and called Cherry at what had been Orr's number.

The afternoon was like none other I have ever seen. The sun was too bright, the white caps on the water winking, the gulls drifting, white and charcoal, with bright yellow hooks for beaks.

Cherry did not answer.

She was destroyed emotionally and mentally, I knew. And so was Carliss. I had ruined them.

Then, as I was about to hang up, she answered the phone.

“Benjamin, the most wonderful thing has happened!”

I blinked. “I can hardly ask—”

She was coy. “Someone's first husband is getting a divorce. And he was in town and he saw his son and his ex-wife, and guess what?”

“Let me guess,” I said, feeling stupid.

“We're moving to Pennsylvania this week. My ex is a salesman.” By which she meant, I suppose, that he worked fast, and that he was persuasive. And by which she conveniently ignored her second ex, or ex-to-be, myself.

“You feel all right?” I asked.

She assumed that I meant to explore her feelings toward me. “A special man,” she said. “You,” she added. “Very special.” She was silent for a moment. “We got all fouled up somehow.”

I tried to respond, but she interrupted me.

“Oh, it was awful. Did you hear? He was eaten!”

“I did hear, and I just wanted to offer my—”

“Right before our eyes! What a sight to carry to our graves, Benjamin. Carliss swears he's going to go into zoo management now, and we rent videos about Africa and the world's great land carnivores. I think it's his way of dealing with it. Rationalizing it. Intellectualizing the entire horrendous thing. I was so frightened, and of course—but what a way to die, fighting to defend your family against a humungous wolf-bear.” She wept. “I am so proud of him. I see now how he loved me.”

Words were hard to use. I agreed. I supposed Orr had been a loving man, in his way. What I did not say was that Cherry was a far more facile, flexible, and—I had to think it—shallow person than I had ever dreamed.

“Ben,” she was saying. “I'd like to see you. Carliss would.…” She faltered. “He'd like to see you, too.”

Carliss and I could have shared a life together, I thought. We should have been close.

“He asked about you, said he wondered how you were doing.…” Her voice trailed off. “We'll be here a few more weeks. I have to finish some ads I'm writing, and write a speech on pollution of the seas.”

I loved her once, I reminded myself, and not that long ago.

I spoke to Carliss. “We're moving out,” he said, in a way I associated with a cowboy film.

“I was sorry to hear about the terrible thing—”

“It was pretty bad,” he acknowledged, and he sounded so much older than when I had last heard his voice. “Mother was pretty upset.”

“It must have been terrible for both of you.”

“There was blood all over,” he said, without much sorrow.

I sensed that he was about to say, “It was like something in a movie.”

“I have to take care of Mom,” he added. “This has been rough for her.” His diction slipped for a moment, his voice cracking just a little as if the strain of this adult tone was too much. “This is a boring house,” he said.

I attempted a hearty, jokey tone. “After all the excitement I guess any place would be boring.”

“It was more fun at your house.”

“Take care of yourself, Carliss. I almost got to know you.” Carliss was already more mature, already a different person, on his way to manhood. I would never know him well.

Neither of them were shaken. Perhaps I should not have been surprised. We are all the offspring of generations of survivors, and all blessed with the ability to forget. Perhaps only the dead remember, not as the living recall, but by the fact of being unable to deny any longer, unable to pretend.

Carliss, though, was seeking something from me, something real. Perhaps I had been enough of a father to him that he actually wanted to see me again.

Go see him. Take his hand. Tell him something that will last him a lifetime. Something about being a human being, something about the night.

The call ended formally. I wished him well, and he assumed a tone worthy of a diplomat, disguising his disappointment with the brittle maturity of a child.

I called Johanna, wanting to hear her voice. She did not answer, and in my great ignorance that did not trouble me. The phone made its staccato purr in my ear. No one.

Reassuring myself briskly, I hung up the phone. Don't worry. Everything is just fine, regardless of what you might think. Because I did think it. I couldn't help it: drive home. Drive home now, this very instant.

Forget it, I told myself, with an impatient mock-parental voice in my head. You're going to make yourself sick, worrying like this. Wipe your hands on your pants and try to relax.

It did no good. I had the thought like a pulse in my skull.

There is something wrong.

Thirty-Nine

I did not recognize Dr. Page at first. He was growing a mustache. It was gray, and made him look less the calm, perceptive psychiatrist and more the superannuated gigolo. He stroked his mustache as though aware that it was still a disguise, and not quite a part of his normal appearance.

“I may shave it,” he said at last.

I reassured him that it was quite distinguished. He was therapist enough to detect a hopeful lie.

I had dropped in at the end of his visiting hours, entirely without warning, but he had accepted this as a social call, and had expected me, I think, to suggest a game of tennis. When I had expressed a need for professional consultation he had offered me a chair with that briskness I recognized as half irritation.

I sat, and folded and unfolded my hands.

He gave me the same smile I have given hundreds of clients who think to themselves: where can I begin?

“I am in love with a woman,” I said.

His smile was warm. “Not the worst condition in the world.” Perhaps he expected that most common of confessions, that I had fallen in love with a client.

In a moment I realized the core of my fear. It was not for myself. I sought protection for Johanna. She could not continue to live her magical, half-human life without some sort of protection. Someone would eventually catch her with a bullet. She was too vulnerable. Another Night Beast scare would send everyone reaching for their closet shotguns.

I continued, with a trembling voice, “She is not like any other woman—any other person—I have ever known.”

He let our pause last for several heartbeats, then he suggested, “Tell me about her.”

Professional, ever-rational Dr. Page smiled at me. He was an expert on, among other things,
in vivo
anatomic data obtained by magnetic resonance. He had published two books on the organization of the human brain. He was a scientist. I knew him well enough to sense his intellect as an adversary.

Unless I could convince him of the truth. Then his rational mind would be a tremendous ally. Page was a man of considerable reputation. I leaned forward, and gazed at my palms as though to read something written there.

“Have you ever heard,” I said, already regretting phrasing it as a question, “of shape-changers?”

Perhaps I expected him to be disappointed or confused. He settled back in his chair with a look of surprise, but of interest, too. “I have the feeling you are about to tell me all about it.”

And so I told him everything.

It was a long monologue, and at one point Dr. Page got up, switched on a lamp against the darkness, and then returned to his chair. Sometimes he ran a finger over his new mustache. He asked few questions. He listened.

At last, after I had described the shore, and all the bodies with the one we most wished to see, and the soccer game with the energetic Lieutenant Solano, I fell silent.

The long tale had left me calm. Our silence was so complete that neither of us wanted to break it.

Dr. Page at last tugged a pair of glasses out of his jacket pocket, put them on, and took them off, toying with them as he spoke. “Dr. Ashby was an important man in your life,” he said.

This had so much the flavor of a beginning that I did not bother to respond.

“His death shook you more than you thought.”

“He was a wise man. And he was very kind.”

“Yes,” said Page, nearly regretfully. This had not been the confession he had hoped to hear. “Furthermore, divorce is always distressing. It can turn people inside-out. You know this as well as I do.”

“I know—it can be terrible.”

“Byrd, this won't do. Forgive me.”

I waited.

He opened his mouth, and then he shut it. “I have a failure of nerve. I keep trying to work up to the subject of wolves, and I can't do it. It won't do. It's all too silly. You have to get on with your life.”

“I am trying very hard to get on with my life, but no one will believe me.”

“I'm going to be blunt.” He said this with pride, as though it were an unusual accomplishment. “People will have trouble believing you because they are sane, rational, sensible people. You are uttering delusions so fantastic that you cannot even pretend to believe them. Look at you—completely calm, quite focused. Insisting on the most absurd fantasy.”