Wolf Read online

  I checked my trotlines, a simple device to catch fish without fishing. You bait the small hook and tie the line to a tree or low-hanging branch. The first line held nothing but a bare hook but the second had a small brook trout, the stupidest of trout, about nine inches long. I cleaned it and let the guts wash away in the creek not wanting to attract raccoons who seem able to smell fish guts from miles away. I put the trout in foil and let it steam with a slice of onion then ate it with bread and salt. For dessert I stuck my finger in a small jar of honey and licked it off. The sky was barely beginning to lighten and invisible birds sang, rather as we are told now, to warn other birds away.

  I slept a few hours after the sun came up; strange about night fears and how my courage strengthens by noon. I had hummed my soaked brain to sleep with “The Old Rugged Cross,” the equivalent for me of a trench confession. A woman sang it at the funeral in a clear tremulous whine, a wet wind coming through barn slats. But the grandmother had insisted on this anachronism and it was her oldest son. I sang many hymns during a summer in New York City in a room on Grove Street that looked out onto a six-by-six air vent the bottom of which was covered with newspapers, bottles and old mopheads. Rats crawled there in daylight. I couldn't handle the city; it seemed consistently malefic and I wanted to be elsewhere but I couldn't go home, having announced I had left forever. Old songs learned as a fifteen-year-old Baptist convert: “There's a Fountain Filled with Blood” (drawn from Emmanuel's veins), or “Safe Am I” (in the hollow of His hand), or the best one, “Wonderful the Matchless Grace of Jesus.” I simply had no business there in Sodom but refused at nineteen to accept the fact. Sally salved me, Grace greased me home. No control over my cheap sense of such words as destiny and time. I wrote lists of things I wanted or missed for want of the ability to complete a sentence; always half drunk in airless heat as if the words were squeezed out through the knuckles:

  sun bug dirt soil lilac leaf leaves hair spirea maple thigh teeth eyes grass tree fish pine bluegill bass wood dock shore sand lilypads sea reeds perch water weeds clouds horses goldenrod road sparrows rock deer chicken-hawk stump ravine blackberry bush cabin pump hill night sleep juice whiskey cards slate rock bird dusk dawn hay boat loon door girl bam straw wheat canary bridge falcon asphalt fern cow bees dragonfly violets beard farm stall window wind rain waves spider snake ant river beer sweat oak birch creek swamp bud rabbit turtle worms beef stars milk sunfish rock-bass ears tent cock mud buckwheat pepper gravel ass crickets grasshopper elm barbed-wire tomatoes bible cucumber melon spinach bacon ham potatoes flesh death fence oriole corn robin apple manure thresher pickles basement brush dog-wood bread cheese wine cove moss porch gulley trout fish-pole spaniel mow rope reins nose leek onion feet

  When finished I had a choking sensation and walked around with it for days. I would start on West Forty-second and walk along the docks under the highways, always as close to the water as possible, around the tip of the island and the Battery then up to East Forty-second, scarcely noticing or remembering anything. I couldn't return home as a failure, having sold my graduation suit and pawned my graduation watch. The salutatorian's speech was “Youth, Awake.” A busboy, then washing the inside windshields at a carwash, then a bookstore clerk for a dollar twenty an hour. I always was as stealthy as possible on Tenth Avenue, having seen Slaughter on Tenth Avenue years before.

  By noon the air had become warm and still though far above great dark stratocumulus clouds rolled along from the northwest, across Lake Superior from Canada. There would be a bad storm and I wasn't ready for it; I jogged the three or four miles back to the tent, the first raindrops beginning to fall on the leaves and the wind gray and chilling. I gathered as much kindling as possible and threw it in the tent, then began digging a ditch around the tent with a hatchet, scooping the dirt and roots with my hands for want of a shovel. By the time I was finished my clothes and skin were soaked and I crawled into the tent and stripped, shivering while the storm roared along, a cloudburst that bent trees and broke limbs, made creeks through the woods. I slept in exhaustion and awoke about evening and saw through the flaps a puddle where my fire had been. It was still raining, though now softly, and very cold. I wanted suddenly to be in a hotel in New York or Boston, to be warm after sleeping off lunch and to take the cellophane off a glass in a yellow bathroom and pour whiskey in the glass then add a half inch or so of chlorinated water and plan the evening.

  When Marcia went to California I followed a week later but missed her in Sacramento from which she traveled south to Santa Fe, New Mexico. I was broke by Sacramento and had in any event lost interest in her; seeing new country or a new city has always wiped the immediate past clean. I didn't have a picture of her and when I tried to envision her, the features would change vaguely and then I would have to start over as if dressing a bald mannequin, but then an eye would drop to the floor or the mouth would enlarge or the ears would disappear. When I tried to imagine her with someone else I felt nothing; she had mentioned several times that she wanted to make love to an Indian someday, not, of course, ever having met one; a Cheyenne brave with full war regalia blasting her. Then he takes her scalp and she lookes like a shaved bloody collaborator after World War Two in France, in black and white in Life magazine. Nothing, no feeling. Perhaps it could have been different had we stayed together but I didn't want to marry; I wanted to save money and go to Sweden where I would see if any distant relatives looked like me and when I discovered that they didn't, I would go to a small island in the Stockholm archipelago and learn to be a fisherman, and spend my life on a boat catching cod. The Baltic would always be cold and the beaches covered with black stones. After a decade or so I would write a note home in broken, misspelled Swedish which my family would take to a local college to get translated. I would announce that I had decided to follow the trade of my great-grandfather and had already fathered a brood of towheaded idiots by a fat woman who ate nothing but butter and fried salt herring.

  The last evening I spent with Marcia was melancholy and sweet. We sat on the porch swing at her house until it began to get dark; then we walked across the lawn and down the driveway to my old Plymouth. It was still very warm, a dry August evening when darkness does nothing to freshen the air. We drove the ten miles to the cabin in silence and when we pulled up in front of the cabin I missed his motorcycle by inches. I thought Victor must have walked to the tavern down the road. She got out before I could open the door for her. The lights weren't on but I found the switch near the door with no difficulty. The cabin had been cleaned, though hastily. The walls halfway to the ceiling were paneled in cheap knotty pine and above that a bright yellow paint on uneven plaster. There were no curtains on the windows. The linoleum was florid red and worn bare in front of the sink. I poured her a glass of beer and drank the rest from the bottle as there was only one clean glass. She seemed quite comfortable despite the ugliness of the room, walking around rather gracefully, looking at Victor's photos of his women and sipping the beer. I asked her if she wanted some more beer and she said she didn't care. Then she walked into the bathroom and said that there were bugs in the sink. I went in and we stood looking down at the cold whiteness of the sink and the moths and dead mosquitoes around the drain. We looked up simultaneously—the mirror looked back at us with a terrifying clarity—her face, less tanned in the bright light, damp brow, her long hair caught up in a bun. I stood behind her with a look of such patent absurdity that she laughed. I felt that I had attained consciousness for the first time in weeks, that her beauty had previously been only an idea. She slipped off her blouse and then let her skirt drop to the floor. I felt light, airy as if I were watching the scene from a distance or in a dream. She turned to me and put her face against my neck. I kissed her briefly and looked into the mirror. In the bottom of the mirror the cheeks of her buttocks were pressed tightly by our weight against the sink, then her back, smooth but surprisingly well muscled, and my hands darker against her white skin. Then I saw my face poised over her shoulder and I smil
ed and stuck out my tongue.

  Much later, after I had taken her home and returned to the cabin, I thought that I had never had such great pleasure with so little thought, that all of what occurred had done so in a sensual haze interrupted only by drinks of cold water and a few cigarettes. Even the trip back to her house had been diffuse, hypnotic. It is strange to know a girl you can love without words, with whom language is only an interference. It was always so with Marcia. We talked and laughed and walked around a great deal but when we began caressing it became an utterly wordless rite. The first time we made love there had been blood but she apparently had not thought her virginity worth mentioning.

  Now with the kindling from the tent I made a dim sputtering fire, barely enough to boil the coffee. My breath rose from the tent mouth, the air not much less than freezing in June. In New York the people with money would have that spavined look of being on the verge of summer vacation whether for two weeks or a month or the whole summer for some wives. Barbara would be leaving for Georgia with the child, perhaps leaving the child there on her way to Europe. She had seemed so hopelessly corrupt when I first met her, strangely lamblike but with an aggressive decadence that confessed real planning, as a few girls of a particular sort of literary bent plotted their lives on the bases of novels they had read. I met her at Romero's, a mixed race bar in the Village where she had come with a lanky Negro from her painting class. She had been loudly and hysterically drunk within an hour and her friend had left in embarrassment.

  —Are you part Mexican? she had asked.

  —No, I had said, nearly immobilized by shyness.

  —Well, you look it. Are you sure?

  —Maybe ever so little bit, I lied. I wanted to please her. She looked like a fashion model, easily the most beautiful creature I had ever met.

  We talked senselessly for a few minutes and I ordered her another drink but the bartender refused. She left abruptly and I followed, very sure that I would trip between the stool and the door. The bartender grinned. I felt old and sophisticated but still clumsy. We walked a few blocks, she in wobbling silence, to a luncheonette where we had coffee and where the counter waitress told me to get the girl out of there before she puked. When we got to my room she quickly stripped and put on a T-shirt of mine for lack of pajamas then threw herself into bed. Asleep before I could focus my eyes on her body or say anything. I got naked into bed and touched her belly but she was already snoring. I felt curiously numb and giddy as I had a year or so before when I put my equipment on before a football game knowing I would spend the next few hours getting the shit kicked out of me. I lay there for a while touching her legs and breasts and sex, where I left my hand, thinking that this was actually the first time I had slept all night with a girl and that it was unmanly to take advantage of a drunk woman. Her stomach growled beneath my hand and I hoped she wouldn't throw up as it was four days before I was due for clean sheets. Then I got up and turned on the light and looked at her, first from a distance then very closely, an inch or two away to be exact. I thought my heart would explode, I got back in bed and hovered over her trying to enter but I finished at touch.

  I awoke at dawn feeling very depressed and guilty and watched her from a chair by the window. Her breathing was deep and steady in the shadows, the sheet drawn back far enough to show a smooth hip and white buttock, the remnant of a suntan on her back. I got up early out of habit but disliked doing so in the city, the clank and hiss of the garbage truck on empty Houston Street, the soiled light, even in the summer the sun never quite clear, the air smelling as if it had been sprayed with some oily chemical. She moved slightly then turned over on her belly, the sheet twisting about her, pulling farther down until it encircled her thighs. Like a picture in a dirty magazine. No excitement but an unexpected deadness. She seemed to radiate heat and sleep with her had been suffocating—the strange sweet odor of her, the perfume wearing thin, the room shrinking in bitter sleeplessness with first light. I dozed in the chair for an hour or two, waking to the full noise of the street. She still slept though covered now. I went out in the hall and took a shower and when I returned she stood in front of the hotplate on the dresser making coffee.

  —Those niggers tried to get me drunk, she said smiling.

  —I don't remember it that way.

  She cooled her coffee with water, drank it hurriedly. Then she wrapped herself in the loosened sheet.

  —I want a shower.

  I told her where it was and to be careful as the hot water, when there was any at all, was scalding. A girl naked or practically, the important part naked anyway, drinking coffee in my room. I almost wanted to go back home and tell an old friend. I got into the bed which was warm and smelled beery.

  I lay there in my trousers breathing deeply to quiet my nervousness. When she returned in what seemed an hour she stood completely naked beside the bed combing her hair with short nervous strokes, looking down at me. I reached out and touched her. She turned, dropped the comb, and got in bed beside me, reaching her one hand down and unzipping my pants. I took them off quickly and we kissed. I entered her without pausing though she wasn't nearly ready.

  Early that evening I walked her down to the corner of Macdougal so she could hail a taxi. We watched some children playing basketball in a small park behind a high fence. She gave me her phone number and address. I felt different and wondered if anyone would notice. We had alternately screwed and slept and smoked throughout the day with a short trip out to a delicatessen. She put my prick in her mouth which had only happened once before with a whore in Grand Rapids, and I went down on her which I had never done before, though I had read about it with my friends back home. We all assumed that everyone had eaten a woman and when some poor freak admitted he hadn't we all laughed knowingly whether in the locker room or on the farm. I felt sore and raw. At nineteen one day's worth of screwing had nearly equaled all that had occurred in my life up to that date. Every curiosity was settled for the moment and I could still smell her on my hands and lips. And nose. I walked into the Kettle of Fish bar and loudly ordered an ale which was a definite change as I usually mumbled in bars with a sort of hick Herb Shriner accent that New Yorkers had difficulty understanding.

  I used the rest of the kindling and dried a small log into burning. I fried some potatoes and onions and ate them out of the pan. It was barely light but clear and the first shafts of sunlight caught the mist rising up through the brush and trees. As it did in the Black Forest in 1267 with peasants rising early, drawing on their boots in the wet dawn. I wiped the rifle with my shirt, the beads of moisture that had formed on its cold steel barrel, and began walking upstream again to continue where the rain had interrupted me the day before. By the look of the conservation map it was the deepest part of the forest unmarked even by log roads, and with the unnamed creek I camped beside running from the closest of two small lakes in a thin crooked trickle, widening gradually as it poured northward to Lake Superior.

  About a mile from the tent I came upon a conical pile of fresh bear crap. Eating thimbleberries, must be. It took a few moments to recover from the shock but then I knew black bears scarcely ever bothered anyone. I walked quietly through the wet ferns which had soaked me to the waist, then saw perhaps a hundred yards ahead on a hummock on the edge of a small marsh the bear. He suddenly turned to me, catching my scent, then with an almost indiscernible speed crashed and whuffed off into the marsh.

  All of them were the same. Convinced of this, they revolved their particularities around a single head, the body's parts too were interchangeable. When young there was the breathlessness of looking up the word “sin” in the dictionary after a morning spent in Bible school. Jezebel, Mary Magdalene, Ruth at my feet, Lot's daughters, Solomon's concubines. They caused the frenzy at Gadara when the madman, who broke his bonds over and over, was healed and the spirits went into a herd of swine, three thousand of them, and they cast themselves into the sea and drowned. Froth and waves from pigs drowning. I multiplied the pigs in the pen
next to the corncrib. There were eight of them and it was difficult to imagine thousands each with the spirit of an evil woman. When you have changed and cleansed yourself of all vileness the dozen or so women around the country you have mistreated will know this and cast themselves into the Red Sea or into the pigpen. They could be pinpointed on a map of the United States and Canada. I would that you were either hot or cold in Laodicea. Underpants drawn down the thighs behind a chicken coop. She said at twelve see my ass. In front of your eyes and no one to confess it to. The dead woman who played the piano for Wednesday night prayer meeting is in heaven now and can see what you do to yourself at night and what you do to others at home or work or play. Nothing can be hidden from the dead and they can't help us though they must weep for us. You could hear the chickens clucking, the ground scratched bare underfoot. You have no hair I have some. I will get mine after my next birthday I'm told. Uncles at war in Guadalcanal might die. You touched her thing. At the Nazarene Revival the preacher said in the circus tent the young couple's little daughter fell into the pigpen and was eaten by the pigs in punishment. He turned to drink and women. She turned to drink and other men. Then they heard a hymn on the radio and many had prayed for them especially their mothers and they wept by the radio and asked for forgiveness. Soon they had a new child. God works in many ways His wonders. I'll go to Africa and be a missionary and save the heathen Negro savages though fraught with dangerous lions and snakes. Her ass is bare, the chickens clucking in circles thinking we're going to feed them. The missionary played the accordion and sang a hymn in the African language and showed slides of the Dark Continent. And of a leper with a giant jaw and one ear missing who had been brought to Christ at the mission. The girls were forced to marry at ten, in the fourth grade only. I found a book of Flash Gordon in my cousin's desk where in the rocket ship Flash Gordon put his thing all the way through the woman and out the other side where a man had it in his mouth. In one place and out the other. Joe Palooka too with boxing gloves on, trunks around his knees before the fight with famous people at ringside. A friend of mine had given their Negro maid five dollars of Christmas money to raise her dress way up. What did she look like I don't know her underpants were on underneath the dress. Five dollars. In summer rowing down the lake at night we looked in the window and she had no clothes on at all. Tm not sure they are all like that, if their hair is a different color they are certain to be built differently. But when I came up through the waters in my white flannel pants everything was new and the Holy Ghost was in the baptismal font felt in my chest which was at bursting. Maybe held the breath too long. It lasted, the ghost, for a week or so even if my father said you wont have to take a bath joking. Or am I a heathen? Billy Sunday saved my father for two days but he got drunk on the third. Backsliding they call it.