Little Wolves

TRAP





Grizz took the International out in the fields with a haybine and rack running behind it. He was late for this final cutting and in a foul mood, realizing he would likely have to buy hay from the next county over to feed his cattle through winter after the poor harvest. Haying this way took two men, normally, one to catch the bales spitting out the bine and stack them on the hayrack, the other to drive the tractor and scoop up the loose hay into the thresher, running along the even rows. Without Seth, Grizz had to stop every thirty yards or so and hand carry the tumbled bales to the rack and climb up to stack them himself—long, slow, hot work.

It took him two hours to get the first rack filled, so when he came up from the fields and saw a strange truck in his driveway, a rust-eaten Silverado, he cursed under his breath. What stepped out of the truck was not the young, boyish pastor Grizz had been expecting but an old spidery man with long arms. He was clad in a wool suit and carried a slender black briefcase.

Even after Grizz shut off the tractor it continued to hum and tick. The worst of his work awaited him. He’d have to unload the rack and shoot the bales up the conveyor belt into the hayloft, where the temperature likely broiled near one hundred degrees. It was too hot for this late in fall, the heat and drought relentless. He rinsed his face at the pump, in icy water drawn deep from the well.

“Looks like hard work,” the man said as he came toward Grizz.

“It’s nothing I can’t handle,” he said, water dripping from his beard.

The visitor introduced himself as a preacher from over in Amroy named Cyrus Easton, and when he opened his Bible and began to read to Grizz about the end of times, Grizz stopped him by setting his hand on his shoulder and squeezing hard. “You don’t even know where you are or who I am, do you? I’m Seth Fallon, and this is just outside Lone Mountain. Almost a week ago my son killed a man and then went into the corn and ate his gun. So, I’m not meaning to be rude, but you’re the last person on earth I want to talk to right now.”

The end of the world. The apocalypse. Grizz smiled, completely unhinged. What a sick sense of humor God must have to send a man like this to him on such a day.

Cyrus pulled away from him and reached into his briefcase, extracting a brochure he left in the grass rather than hand him directly. “I heard about it on the radio,” he said, softer. “I’m sorry. Maybe I’ll come back another time.” He snapped his briefcase shut and peered up at the other man expectantly. “Might be I could tell you about heaven and how it’s possible for you and your son to be among the chosen.”

“You come back here and I’ll snap your neck with my bare hands.”

“Well, okay, then,” Cyrus said, gesturing at the brochure and walking to his truck. “You can look that over.” Then he seemed to think of something important because he paused midway. “ ‘Here I tell you a mystery,” he said, lifting his voice as though he were addressing not only Grizz but the cows in the pasture and the rest of creation. “ ‘We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed.’ ”

HERE I TELL YOU a mystery. Grizz had been waiting for news from the county, biding his time. He was not a man to bide time. After the little preacher man left, Grizz abandoned the rack of hay bales. Let the rain ruin them, let them rot. There were questions about Seth he had been pushing aside.

An hour later he parked his truck under the trees at the old landing. In a normal year the shade near the river hummed with bloodsuckers, but the summer of drought had palsied the oaks and stripped the cottonwoods bare. He left his truck and made for where he thought the place might be, freshly fallen leaves crackling under his boots and releasing a dusty smell, like burned cinnamon, into the grove. The river beyond was little more than a stream, so shallow he could walk across it and hardly wet his ankles.

A little ways out, a channel catfish with a body as long as his arm rotted on the bare sand. All that remained were the barbed whiskers, hinged sucker jaws, a cage of bones. A prehistoric creature of mud and deep currents, it had probably been marooned here as the river dwindled to a shallow pond and then to nothing. The sun had bleached the scales gray, and a few crows worked at the head, picking at the flesh, before they saw Grizz and flapped their wings lazily in the heat, moving to the other side of the river.

Sweat crept down his spine. In the middle of the river a long golden sandbar gleamed under the sun. He thought of his son out here with that girl just a few months before. There would have been enough water then that Seth and Leah would have had to swim to reach the sandbar.

He let himself imagine it as it must have happened. A fire crackling from the shore in a sandy pit, a beer can sweating in his boy’s hand, the river a band of caramel under the moon, Leah dipping a red-painted nail into the water and asking, You want to go swimming?

Can’t. Didn’t bring any suit.

It was innocent, the girl had told Grizz. But had it been? He imagined her undoing the buttons of her cutoffs and letting them slide to the sand, showing long legs like a gazelle’s. And then quickly, while Seth gaped openmouthed, the shirt peeled off and fluttered behind her, before she dived in her bra and panties, popping to the surface a ways from shore, her blonde hair dark and wet against her pale shoulders. You coming in or not? And when he had followed, stripping shyly with his back turned to her, and dived in after and found in her in the river, had she tasted of the beer and the river itself, the salty mineral heat of her true self, sweet breath and the carbon of stars?

A kiss, a long kiss, Seth fighting for footing as the lazy current pulled at them, Seth trying not to think of the channel cats the size of barracuda swimming near him, all the things sliding past him in that secret river. A long kiss before the girl pulled away and went for the sandbar, laughing.

They had not been alone, Leah had implied. Someone had stood on this shore as he did now, back in the trees, watching the two teenagers in the shining river. And if it had been Will, why hadn’t he arrested them for trespassing, two half-naked minors under the influence? Will Gunderson had not been the kind to look away while others broke the law. Unless Will himself had secrets out here. Unless this was not the first group of teenagers he had spied on.

Grizz breathed through his mouth, steadying himself. He had a hard time letting go of that vision of his son in the river with the girl. For a short time in the early part of summer he had stopped fearing for his son’s future, and let his guard down.

A beaten path led to a small cabin in the clearing. This was the place Grizz had been heading for all along. The cabin leaned on its river-rock foundation, something mudded together in a bygone century. This was the place Leah had told him about, where Will brought vagrants and strangers to scare them. A sign warning that this was county property was nailed near the door, but some kid had spray-painted F*ck YOU, PIG in red letters over it.

A rusty lock sealed the door shut, but one kick of Grizz’s boots splintered the spongy wood around it and sprung it open. When he stepped inside, the first thing that hit him was the abrasive smell filling up the room. A table was pushed up against one wall and on it sat a Coleman camping stove, a kettle, and a tin of instant coffee next to some chipped mugs. Above this table tools hung by nails in the planking, pliers and brands and sheers. Big iron-jawed traps for beavers and muskrat also spread around the room. Grizz saw a bottle of Stop-Rot, a woman’s hairbrush, toothbrushes, a hot-glue gun, and a rusting hacksaw all arranged on an old potbellied stove. Along the wall rested the source of the stink, gallon buckets where dead things bobbed in what he guessed was formaldehyde.

“Oh, Christ,” he said when he realized what else was here. Deformed stuffed animals were posed around the room on benches and chairs made from logs. He had glanced over them at first, thinking of them ordinary taxidermy creations, animals Will had trapped and stuffed. But he had sewn the corpses back together in unusual ways. A muskrat’s body joined with the head and wings of a pheasant rooster to make what looked like a baby griffin. A doe’s preserved head sprouted a single polished bone like a unicorn’s horn. The body of an old boar, gray and bristly, had been stood up on its hind hooves and then joined to a mannequin’s head draped with a shaggy wig. Half pig and half child, the creature’s front hooves raked the air as though fending off some attacker.

His mind tried to match the creations to the man he’d known, his dark good looks and military buzz cut he’d kept after leaving the service. Will had been a man who watched and saw everything.

A lone chair stood against one wall.

Grizz sat in it and felt it creak under his weight. His fingers traced the wood and found the place where it was scarred by rope burns. His son had been here. He had been roped into this chair.

He shut his eyes, tried to see it. Will lifting the pliers from the wall, running them along the blue flame in the stove. The black, ashy smell of it. Will bringing it close to Seth, pulling up the boy’s shirt to expose the soft, pale flesh. The burning. Burning him in secret places. Following it with a fist to the ribs, a slap. Seth wetting himself in fear and shame. Will hurting him just enough so that Seth could walk away once more.

Had Grizz seen marks on the body? He hadn’t looked. He had lacked the courage. It came to him that Sheriff Steve Krieger had known about this place from the beginning. He had been the one who trained Will Gunderson about law and order. As in-laws the two had trapped and hunted these woods together.

No one wanted to see this, Grizz knew. In town they already had the story they wanted, one about a Vietnam veteran, a hero, and a violent teenage delinquent. Grizz breathed in the acrid smell of the room, his eyes stinging. Across from him the pig child stretched open his mouth in a solitary scream.

Grizz stood and let the chair clatter behind him. Somewhere out on the road a car passed, spitting up gravel. He was aware once more of the outer world, those crows cawing as they fought over the last of the fish down at the river. Farther off in town the bells were ringing. The bells of Trinity Lutheran. Grizz knew in that moment he was hearing the end of Will’s funeral service.