Little Wolves

INTO THE PIT





“It’s Clara,” she said. “Should I come another time?” She had her arms wrapped around herself. Grizz registered something familiar about her face, the sharpness of her features, those luminous brown eyes. She didn’t wear any makeup, didn’t need it. He felt he had known her from somewhere long before this.

He rested his ax against the porch and glanced toward the cattle. What had brought her here, walking all this way from town? It seemed the world wasn’t ready to leave him alone just yet. “I got chores to do, but I suppose I can spare a few minutes.” He carried the wood up the steps, shouldered open the front door, and nodded to the entryway. “It’s a little messy. I haven’t had many guests.”

She followed him in. The radio he’d left on spread murmuring voices through the house, Waylon Jennings. Grizz set his bundle of wood down on the bench, shrugged out of his flannel, and then unlaced his boots before gesturing toward the living room. “You can wait there. I’m going to get a fire going and then I’ll heat us some coffee. You drink coffee, right?”

“Sure. I won’t be staying long.”

He hefted the wood in the living room and set it beside a potbellied stove. Then he levered it open, balled up some newspaper, and stacked the wood around it. He struck a match, let the paper catch, and blew on it to get it going before levering the door shut once more.

“Make yourself at home,” Grizz told her while he went to brew coffee. From the corner of his eye, he noticed how she was eyeing the two matching blue recliners dubiously, probably not sure if once she sank into the cushion she could climb out again in her condition. “It’s okay,” he encouraged. “I don’t have fleas.”

She lowered herself and waited, rocking in the chair. Grizz went into his kitchen and fired up the gas burner under the percolator. This morning’s coffee, a little tarry on reheating, but his hospitality had limits.

“I added in cream and sugar,” he told her when he returned with two mugs. “The coffee’s a little thick otherwise.” He stayed standing, leaning against a bookshelf that held his collection of Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour novels.

Clara took it from his hands, mumbling her thanks. “You probably wonder why I’m here.” She took a sip, winced. Her other hand was in her pocket, and when she took it out, two hooked and bloody claws lay curled against the pinkness of her palm.

“Is that what I think it is?”

“It’ll live, I’m sure. I rescued it from a trap.”

“How’d you manage that?”

Her palm closed around the claws, and she pocketed them again. “I’ve heard talk that you and your son raised them.”

“Seth did. I didn’t want anything to do with coyotes. I warned Seth what might happen once they got big. They stayed out of trouble, till now.”

She watched his face. “I have a feeling they’re looking for him,” she said. “They don’t understand he’s gone.”

Grizz was quiet, thinking on how Seth loved the land in different ways than him. The farmwork he detested, anything involving machines. Had Seth inherited the land he would have let the lower forty, down near the river, become CRP land and return to its natural state. “I don’t want anything bad to happen to those animals. They’re a living reminder of my son.”

“What can we do?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

Her smile was faint, nervous. She still seemed agitated, her hands in that pocket as though claws were some kind of totem. Not many women would have gone to an animal in a trap or picked up something like that from the ground.

“There’s another reason I came, something I have to ask you. Around twenty years ago there was a car accident. A woman went off the road not far from your property. She tried to make it back through the storm. I was told a baby was rescued.”

The Duchess. Yes, those eyes. He knew her now.

Clara held up her damaged hand. “I was that baby.”

Grizz came over and sat down in the other chair. “Seth knew didn’t he? He figured out who you were.”

A log broke inside the stove and settled with a crackling thump. If Seth had known, then so had others. “Will you tell me the story? I’d like to hear it. The sheriff saved my life if what they say is true.”

Grizz rubbed the side of his chest where a knot had formed, a tightness in his breathing. “Saved you? That’s the story they tell?”

She nodded, and he tried to concentrate as she told bits and pieces of the story that had come to her from her father: her mother’s madness, the car abandoned in the storm, the snowy woods she tried to cross to safety. “Other people have recognized me. One old woman even called me Duchess, which is what they called my mother. There’s a lot my father never told me. I think he was still very angry with my mother.”

Grizz drew in a deep breath. “Not a winter passes when I don’t think about her. The man in the car with Sylvia, the one who broke his neck? He was my brother, Wylie. I was going to stay on the farm so Wylie could go away to school. He had a knack for languages, always did, but he was in all sorts of trouble. Fights at school. Hot-wired a car and ditched it in the river. Your father taught at the high school, thought all the boy needed was some purpose, direction. Wylie started correspondence classes in German from the university. He needed a tutor, and here was this woman, a refugee from the war.”

“My dad arranged it?”

“She was lonely by then.” His mind raced, remembering. “Pastor Schoenwald had gotten fixated on the idea that she was some kind of witch, and he spoke against her. People stopped going to her salon. So my brother would visit in the early afternoons, and they drank tea together, practiced in her home language.” He paused. “ ‘She’s seen things you can’t imagine,’ Wylie told me once. I guess you could say they grew close in more ways than one. Both our parents were dead by then, and I think he was lonely, too.”

“What happened?”

“When the affair was discovered, her shop was shut down for good. She went away. They both went away. We heard later that she was in some kind of institution. A mental breakdown. Her English wasn’t so good. She may not have even understood what was happening until too late. When she got out, she started writing Wylie letters again. I paid the phone bill and saw the long-distance charges to the Cities, nearly twice a week. I made my brother go and see Pastor Schoenwald, made him confess. For a time, the phone calls stopped, and I thought that was the end of it.”

“He never saw her before she got pregnant?”

He looked at her, for any sign of his brother in this woman. Wylie, small and dark and wiry. No, it wasn’t possible. “I know what you’re asking. I believe Stanley was your father. I feel sorry for him, despite everything that happened. He didn’t ask for any of it. She came here, you know, driving from the hospital just ahead of a storm. Blizzard predictions all over the radio, and she shows up in a DeSoto. Wylie went with her with only the clothes on his back. I grabbed hold of him, shook him. She was a married woman. But he shoved me aside.”

“It was you who called the sheriff.” Clara held herself, rocking in the chair.

“No. I didn’t know she had a baby with her in the car. I let them go. I didn’t expect to ever see them again. It might have been that your dad called him from the Cities, but Sheriff Steve has always had a sense when something’s wrong. They told me later that that Wylie died at the scene of the car accident. He never made it out. It wasn’t until the next day I heard all this, about her getting out of the car, coming on through the woods.”

“Were there coyotes back then? Some kind of wild dogs or wolves? It’s how I’ve always imagined it because of my father’s stories.”

His mind had often gone over the same territory. The woman found without any clothes on. Sheriff Will Gunderson, freshly graduated from the vo-tech, had been out there that night as well. “Wolves?” he said quietly. “If there were any wolves, they came in human form.”

Both of them startled when a rotary phone sitting on a small table rang. Grizz had finally bought a new phone a few days ago to replace the one he had destroyed. “Did anyone see you come here?” He couldn’t account for his paranoia. The ringing phone was a jarring sound, and at first he just let it go, wanting to finish his story. He had always suspected that something else had happened out there. The DeSoto had been found at the bottom of a ditch with minimal damage, a missing headlight, the windshield caved in. Sheriff Steve had hated Wylie for the headaches he caused. The story, the adulterous couple punished by Mother Nature, was too convenient for him to fully believe.

When the phone’s insistent ringing kept on, Grizz finally answered it.

“Mr. Fallon?” said a quaking voice at the other end. He heard the hesitation in the voice and what sounded like another voice in the background, whispering instructions. “We need your help. Please hurry. It’s Leah. She’s fallen into the hog pit.”

“You call the paramedics? The sheriff?”

The other end of the line had gone dead.

“What’s going on?” Clara asked when he hung up.

“That was Lee Gunderson. He said Leah fell into one of the holding ponds of their hog farm near as I could tell.”

“They can’t get her out?”

“It’s worse than you could imagine. The chemicals will suffocate you if you get too near. I have to get there, or she’ll drown. He must have called here because this is the closest farm.”

“I want to come.”

“No. There’s nothing you can do. I wouldn’t want you to see this.” Grizz already knew what he was going to find by the time he got there. No way he could make it in time. “Go home and pray. That’s the best you can do right now.”

THE GUNDERSON RANCH HOUSE sat up on a ridge climbing out of the valley, sloping woods on one side, rich flat prairie tablelands spreading on the other. They owned two thousand acres and then some, with four hog barns and vast holding pools for all the manure so many animals produced. Grizz downshifted into second gear as he pulled into the steep driveway and sped uphill.

While other farms failed and families moved away, the Gundersons’ and Steve Krieger’s family operations kept on growing. Bigger combines and bigger equipment worked the ground more efficiently, all of it paid for with bigger loans from the bank, where both men had friends, and all of it subsidized by the government. But it was because of moments like this that Grizz hated the factory farms the worst.

Hundreds of hogs piled into each reeking barn; on some nights he could hear them screaming during feeding times, a high-pitched whine that carried throughout the valley. Worst of all was the smell, a dangerous mixture of ammonium hydroxide concentrated in the manure. Hog shit could kill you. Just last year over in Lyon County a young boy helping his father pump out the pit had walked too close, been overwhelmed by the fumes, and fell inside, asphyxiating before he could be pulled out. Now this girl Leah was in the same predicament. An outsider to the area, she must not have known how dangerous it was to get too close. And why would a girl be wandering so near such a foul-smelling pit? Had it been some kind of stupid teenage dare?

He was going forty miles an hour by the time he reached the crest and pulled into the turnabout, dust and gravel spraying out behind the truck. Then he was out the door, running toward Lee, who stood at the edge of the buildings.

“Where is she?”

Lee didn’t speak and spit bubbled at the corners of his lips. He pointed at one of the holding pits.

“How long has she been in there?”

His eyes widened, and he moved his chin, as if trying to draw Grizz’s attention to the hog barn nearest.

“Goddamnit. You got to tell me more.” A girl might be drowned, and the only witness was this idiot child. The boy was clearly unhinged, the skin slack around his eyes. Was he on drugs, going into shock? Grizz took him by the shoulders and saw how dilated the pupils were, darkly brimming so they filled his eyes. Pot. That was it. They must have been smoking out here, and the girl tried something stupid. He was angry now, and so he shook him. “Now, listen to me, because we have to act fast. You call the paramedics again. Get an ambulance here. You got to do this, okay?”

Lee mumbled something.

“Speak!” Grizz roared the word, his patience gone, but when the boy couldn’t get the words out he pushed him aside and went toward the holding pond. Even from a distance he could see the place where the pump’s guide wire had broken. She must have been trying to retrieve it with the come-along line, helping out Lee with his chores, both of them stoned to the gills. Everyone else around the place seemed to be gone, even the older brother. Grizz crouched as he came closer. He held his shirt front over his face to block out the smell. He was a bigger man, much bigger than any child, and maybe his body mass would save him.

He crawled on his hands and knees, conscious of the sound of the pigs screaming in the barn. The sound make him think of the story of Legion begging Jesus to let him possess the swine and that herd casting itself from the cliff, a story that fascinated him as a child. Grizz had never liked hogs. If a demon were to select an animal, it would choose swine. Grizz went forward until he caught the come-along wire in his hands. Maybe he could lower it to the girl, fetch her out of the way. He thought he heard something as he got closer, a thin watery voice crying out for help, or the voice came from behind him. He couldn’t hear right over the hogs.

She must have still been clinging to the other end of the wire. The smell of shit burned inside his mouth, the acid chemicals stinging his eyes. It invaded his pores, his mind, but still he crept forward on hands and knees because he could not leave the girl there, a girl who had been kind to his son.

At the lip of the rim he paused and leaned over. He saw greenish-gray mire, bubbling sludge the color of rotting pea soup, the empty come-along wire floating on the surface, but no sign of her.

And then he heard footsteps pounding behind him. “Hey,” someone shouted, and Grizz turned to see a figure bearing down on him.

“Stop!” he said, wobbly on his knees from the fumes, just getting his hand up, but the other man bulled right into him, his shoulder catching Grizz under the chin, and then he was falling backward.

He landed with a sickening smack in the manure, the shock knocking the breath from his lungs. For several seconds he went under, before his toes found bottom and he fought his way back to the surface. Gasping, Grizz spread his arms on the surface to keep from sinking again and tried to keep his head above the putrid liquid. He had never learned to swim, but the stuff was thick enough that he buoyed on top of it. He struggled with every last fiber against the panic spreading through him. They called him here to die, drowned in hog shit, the last of the Fallons in the valley, and with his death his last hope of redeeming what his son had done.

The footsteps went away. “Come back!” he pleaded weakly, trying not to swallow any more shit. In the distance he heard the sound of his truck gunning. He tilted his head back to keep his face out of the poison. The aluminum siding of the pit shone silver, slick and wet, safe ground an impossible eight feet above him. With his head tilted, he saw sky. A snowflake drifted down out of the clouds, pure and white, and caught in his eyelashes. He sent his mind up into those clouds, drew in his last breath, trying to stave off his own terror, a useless rage running through his blood as the pit sucked him down.