Under the Wolf, Under the Dog Page 4

One of her tubes looked clogged. It made me feel like I couldn’t breathe.

  “Where’s Welton?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” I answered. “I think he’s over in Foote.”

  She coughed, and went, “Tell him I had a dream about him. Will you do that for me?”

  “I’ll tell him.”

  “We were at the circus and his pants kept falling down. It was funny. Tell him that for me, okay, honey?”

  I said, “Sure, Mom.”

  After that, she took my hand and asked me to do an Our Father with her. I knelt down at the side of her bed and bowed my head. She took my hands with one of hers, and we began. Her fingers were bloated and soft. While we prayed, I sort of went blank. I kept waiting for something to stir inside — like a holy fluttering or whatever — but it never came. I could hear my own voice praying, and I hated how high it was.

  When we were through praying, my mom fell asleep. She might have even drifted off during the part about the Kingdom and the Power and the Glory. I took my hands back and watched her for a minute. Even though her mouth was all dried and shriveled, she was sort of smiling. The morphine always made her happy. I must confess here that there was a time or two when I was tempted to slip the needle into my own vein just to see what it was like, but that would have been heinous.

  There was a breeze coming though her window, and the moonlight made her teeth look sort of gray.

  I slid my hands out from under hers and quietly left her room.

  In the living room, my dad was still in his La-Z-Boy. He was asleep and the TV was still on, with the sound turned down. It was some old black-and-white movie, and these two gangster types in expensive raincoats were shaking hands on the deck of a ship. One looked like he wanted to kill the other one. My dad’s mouth was open and there was a snore caught in his throat. He somehow looked like he was dying of thirst.

  I nudged his shoulder a couple of times and he stirred and then his eyes opened. The whites were pink and dull-looking.

  “Steven,” he said. “Everything okay?” His voice was small and congested.

  “Mom wants you to shave,” I said.

  It’s weird. He was staring at me like he was feeling guilty about something. It seemed almost like he wanted me to punish him or something. There were long, gray whiskers all over his face.

  After a minute he nodded, touching his face.

  “So are you gonna shave?” I asked for some reason.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I’ll shave tonight. Before I go to bed.”

  But I knew that was a lie because he would never even make it to his room. He would fall asleep in the La-Z-Boy like he had every night for the past week and a half.

  When I got back to my room, I wasn’t tired anymore. I was completely agitated, if you want to know the truth. I really have no idea why. Maybe it was because of the way my dad was just sitting there in the living room all slothful and dehydrated.

  There’s this picture of Jesus that I have over my desk. My mom put it there when I was a little kid. She used to make me pray to him before I went to bed. Jesus looks completely malnourished and sort of sad and hopeful at the same time. I had this weird urge to X out his eyes. I even opened the top drawer to my desk and grabbed a black permanent marker — I removed the cap and everything — but when it came down to it, I couldn’t do it — it was like there was this force field around Jesus or something — so I put the cap back on and dropped it on my desk.

  All of a sudden, for some reason, my room felt like it was shrinking, like the walls were totally closing in on me.

  So that’s when I left.

  The keys to the Fairmont were on the kitchen table. I grabbed them and stuffed them into my pocket. I figured no one else would be using them anytime soon.

  7.

  So I headed east on Highway 20.

  Even though I never usually wear one, I put my seat belt on because the minute I pulled out of the driveway, I started having these totally gothic visions of my own brains being splattered on the inside of the windshield.

  Healthy, right?

  After about ten miles, Highway 20 turns into a two-lane snail stream dominated by semis. Passing is essential if you want to get anywhere fast.

  Even though it wasn’t ten o’clock yet, it seemed like that kind of late when you can hear the secrets hidden in the droning of crickets and power lines and that slow, creepy leaning of corn. It’s probably because of how with regard to the modern world, the places around Foote and East Foote are still like forty years behind. Most of them don’t even have fast-food restaurants, and the majority of them are called townships.

  The highway was dark, and every time a car came toward me, I kept thinking it was a cop. I mean I had my license and all that — I wasn’t technically doing anything illegal. I guess I felt like I was sort of on the run or something, and when I think about it now, maybe I was.

  I turned the radio on to this talk show. Some totally paranoid evangelist-slash-DJ was riffing about gangs in Los Angeles and how many weapons the Crips and the Bloods have been stockpiling over the years. According to the host, the West Coast gangs had enough artillery to take over the state of California.

  A bunch of loners started calling in and giving their opinions. One woman from Omaha, Nebraska, said she’d seen a movie about a gang but that they weren’t mean at all. She said that they were actually very talented singers and dancers and that for them it had nothing to do with guns or drugs. For them, she said, it was all about the ownership of certain New York City rooftops.

  Another caller said that perhaps it was simply a sign of the times that a mongrel people was organizing and perfecting its systems of violence. Then he admitted to owning a few weapons himself. The redneck was so drunk you could practically smell the fumes coming through the speakers.

  I got bored with the radio after about fifteen minutes and turned it off. The last thing I needed was more insanity in my life.

  I had just passed Galena, Illinois, and was a few miles from Elizabeth, which is this little Hallmark card that boasts about four houses. I had no idea where I was actually going, except that it was east. For a second I entertained the idea of heading all the way to Chicago.

  I imagined myself standing on the shores of Lake Michigan, the city totally like throbbing behind me, my hair blowing like crazy.

  Suddenly the steering wheel was vibrating. For a second I thought that something had broken — an axle or the steering column or whatever — but then I realized it was me. I looked at my hands and they were trembling so bad I thought the veins in my wrists would burst.

  A semi passed, and when its headlights filled the Fairmont, it made me focus on the road again. When I looked at the speedometer, I realized that I was going almost eighty miles an hour, which meant that the semi was going at least ninety. It was definitely the fastest I have ever driven, and I’m lucky I didn’t crash.

  That’s when I started doing the Our Father again. I have no idea why. It just sort of poured out of me. And I recited it way too fast, like there was some sort of creepy priest in the back seat trying to damn me or something. But when I got to the part about the Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory, I said the Kingdom, the Power, and the Gory. I even repeated the line, knowing that I was making a mistake, but Gory just kept coming out. It felt like someone else was making me say it, which is a pretty frightening situation when you’re all alone and you’ve just hijacked your parents’ car.

  When I got to Elizabeth, I pulled over to a Shell station and I got full service. I was sort of hyperventilating, so I had to take a moment to catch my breath.

  Behind the gas station there was this huge cornfield that was so vast and unending it somehow looked like if you walked into it, you would disappear forever. The stalks were probably six feet tall. It was a starless night. The moon was low and huge and yellow, and it somehow made everything look blue. And the breeze was all strange and eerie. It was almost like the field was breathing.

  I killed
the engine and asked the gas-station attendant guy to fill it up with regular. He was like fifty years old, a veteran tobacco-chewer with old-man strength.

  While he was washing the windshield, he was sort of staring at me through the glass. He spit some tobacco juice off to the side and kept washing without missing a beat. You have to wonder how a guy like that winds up working at a gas station in the middle of nowhere. For some reason he was really starting to make me nervous — maybe it was because of how he hadn’t yet uttered a single word. I slid out of the car and headed toward the station. Behind me I could hear the squeegee sort of crying on the windshield, but I didn’t dare look back because I was afraid he would still be staring at me.

  Inside the gas station, I bought a Coke and headed back to the car. I paid the attendant guy and stood staring at the cornfield for a minute.

  “You okay, son?” the gas-station attendant asked. He had a deep, sleepy voice.

  “I’m okay,” I said.

  He waited till I got in, and then he shut the door for me. He was a lot nicer than I thought he would be.

  “Drive safe, now,” he said, and then headed back into the gas station.

  I sat there for a moment and thought about my mom. It was her groans of pain that would get me the most. Sometimes they didn’t even sound human. Sometimes she sounded like a cow, and for some weird reason, that made me think about hamburgers and I suddenly realized how starved I was.

  I started the car and headed back toward the highway.

  8.

  Well, I think it’s pretty obvious that I never made it to Chicago.

  I never even made it past Elizabeth, Illinois, if you want to know the truth.

  In fact, when I left that Shell station, I turned right around on Highway 20 and headed back to East Foote.

  By the time I got home, it was maybe 11:30 P.M., but I couldn’t say for sure. I was shocked to discover that my dad had actually gotten himself off the La-Z-Boy and gone upstairs to bed. The house felt weirdly deserted. It was so quiet, you could hear the clock in the kitchen.

  I seriously was going to make hamburgers, but there was no ground beef. All I could find were a couple of steaks in the freezer, but they would have taken hours to thaw, so I microwaved some Chunky beef stew and drank about half a gallon of milk.

  I felt sick and depressed after that.

  So depressed that I decided to call Mary Mills.

  During the summer she would practice the piano at the gifted school. The building was supposed to be closed, but she had some special privilege because of her big Juilliard audition. Toward the end of June, I would crawl in through a tornado panel in the chemistry lab and take my shoes off and sneak down the hall and watch her through the window in the door to the recital hall. I know that that’s a bit stalker-like, me spying on her like that, but I never meant any harm. I just really liked to hear her play.

  So the painful truth is that Mary used to date this totally thick-necked, silent guy named Shane O’Meara. He went to Carroll High School — the big, prestigious parochial school in Foote — and he was the star of the football team and shaved his head and he was this totally devoted Catholic, too, like he wouldn’t have premarital sex or anything and there was this rumor that he was going to play linebacker for the University of Wisconsin in the Big Ten. Instead of going to Madison, he decided to stay home and play at Governors College in Foote. His choice to stay home and play at the smaller school made him a local hero. He was written up in the Foote Bugle like nine times that year.

  Some people said O’Meara stayed because of Mary Mills, but they broke up at some point during the first semester. Rumor has it that she got pregnant and they got an abortion down in Iowa City. Who knows if that’s true, though? Rumors are like roaches. All I know is that she used to wear this totally sacred ring he gave her — some Irish love band or whatever — and one day she came to school and she wasn’t wearing it anymore.

  So I mustered some courage and grabbed the Foote phone book. I stared at it for about twelve minutes, and then I leafed through and found the M’s. I called all seventeen listings under Mills — at least half of them hung up on me — till I got Mary’s house. This totally bored, monotone guy answered. I think he was her father. He sounded like he was either pissed off or drunk, like some alcoholic country-and-western singer or whatever. I imagined him wearing spurs and a lot of turquoise. He called for Mary and she picked up another phone.

  “Hello?”

  Her voice was like something impossible that you long for. Like the ability to fly or breathe water.

  I was like, “Hey, Mary.”

  “Who is this?” she asked.

  “It’s Steve,” I replied.

  She said, “Steve who?”

  “Steve from the gifted school. Steve Nugent.”

  “White Steve the Mathlete?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “White Steve the Mathlete.”

  Man, to be known as White Steve the Mathlete is pretty embarrassing. But it’s true — I was a Mathlete. I was ranked second on the team, in fact, and fourth in the whole Mississippi Valley Conference.

  There was a pause.

  I could hear her swallowing.

  “What do you want?” she asked.

  “Um,” I said, “I don’t want anything.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  Things were obviously going nowhere fast.

  “How are you?” I asked.

  There was another pause. I heard a TV in the background. It sounded like some kind of Western. Cowboys were fighting with Indians, and horses were galloping across the dusty desert plains or whatever.

  “Why are you calling me?” Mary then asked. She didn’t say it mean or anything — she just asked it.

  I took a deep breath and said, “I don’t know. I just wanted to say hey.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Hey.”

  “Hey,” I stupidly said back.

  “It’s going on midnight, Steve,” she noted.

  “Yeah, sorry about that,” I offered.

  “How’d you get my number?”

  “Um,” I said. “From like the phone book.”

  This was definitely turning out to be a mistake. I said, “I guess I sort of needed to ask you something.”

  “What?”

  I thought I was going to ask her if she wanted to maybe get together — to like go bowling or see a movie or something — but that’s not even close to what came out.

  Instead I said, “Do you think George Washington really chopped down that cherry tree?”

  “What?” she said, obviously a bit thrown. I don’t blame her — I would’ve been thrown too. But I couldn’t quite seem to make any sense. Maybe it was because I kept picturing her standing there in her nightgown. Her dewy shoulders aglow in her kitchen and all that.

  “George Washingmachine,” I remember hearing myself saying. “Do you think that cherry tree thing even happened?”

  I have no idea why these particular words were coming out of my mouth. I mean, I hadn’t been thinking about George Washington at all. And the fact that I said Washingmachine — how crazy is that? The strange thing, though, was that I really wanted her opinion on the matter, and I wanted it so bad that it almost started to feel like I was involved in a life-or-death situation. I was so nervous, I think my teeth were chattering.

  “Steve, I have to go,” Mary said.

  “I mean, you can totally tell he was lying about not being able to tell a lie,” I continued. “Just look at him on the nickel.”

  “I have to go to bed.”

  “Wait,” I begged.

  “I really have to go, Steve. Bye.”

  “I love you!” I cried.

  She was like, “You what?”

  It was too late. I couldn’t take it back.

  “I love you,” I repeated.

  “Oh,” she said. “You do?”

  “Yes,” I answered.

  Then things went blank. I could have been a fish in an aquarium. Just floating t
here without a brain.

  On the other end, that Western was reaching new limits of Indian war cries. It sounded like they were finally going to win one for a change.

  I started to open my mouth, but nothing would come out. Neither of us spoke. For a second I thought maybe she dropped the phone.

  Then I heard her dad’s voice in the background.

  He said, “Bed, Mare.”

  He sounded totally dead. Like he was one of those bodies with a voice. No heart and no blood. Not even a lung. Just a body and a voice.

  “You play so beautifully, Mary,” I said. “You’re better than Beethoven and all those guys. You’re so much better —”

  That’s when she hung up.

  I was so in love, I went into my room and drank half a bottle of Robitussin. It was maximum strength for cough and cold. I decided to change my clothes and put on this gabardine cowboy shirt that Welton let me borrow last Halloween. It has black deerskin shoulders, red sleeves, pearl snaps, and blond tubing. He bought it in Barcelona during this European trip he took with his underclassmen AAU basketball team, just after his sophomore year. I never gave it back, but he didn’t care. He stopped changing his clothes after he lost his job at the nursing home. Or maybe it was even before that. He would like totally lounge around in these old brown suit slacks my mom used to make him wear to church. The brown suit slacks and his green orderly top from the nursing home. It was an odd combination. It made him look like he was either just being admitted or released from the hospital.

  Anyway, I changed into Welton’s gabardine cowboy shirt, and even though it was still like eighty-five degrees, I put on a pair of brown corduroy pants and I started sort of dancing around the room. Nothing too fast. Just a little two-step. And Mary Mills was like right there with me. Obviously she wasn’t really there, but I sort of pretended like she was the bottle of Robitussin and I was dancing with her and drinking her sweet delicious tears.

  And then all of a sudden I realized how little time we have. Like on the earth, I mean. And when I say we, I mean everyone. It was a profound realization, and I suddenly had to share this fact with Mary. I know that sounds insane because of how it was already after midnight and all the other crazy things that had happened that day, but it was one of the most important feelings I’ve ever had — my chest was swelling and everything.