Wolves
Then I found him. Everyone told me don’t bother, it was cold and getting dark and they were sending a search party anyway, and young lady you are staying inside tonight because God help me I am not letting you vanish too. But I had to. What did some dumb search party know that I didn’t? They’d be out there all night, tripping over roots and fumbling in the snow, because to them this place was the woods and not Tormalia. Easy for trees to blur together when you don’t give them names. Easy to miss badger holes when you don’t make them fiefdoms.
Adam hadn’t disappeared and neither would I.
We named it when we were kids. Before Dad left, I never knew what he would or wouldn’t let me read, so I’d follow Adam through the library like a lost puppy because he always knew where to find those DK books with the crystal-clear pictures. He found the word tourmaline in an index once and the rest was history. Mythology, more like. His neighborhood was on one side of the woods, mine on the other, but in those days we could walk far enough to meet in the middle and nobody’s parents gave a damn until someone’s face ended up on a carton.
So the woods were Tormalia. The oak where we’d meet, big and ancient—200 years is a long time when you’re a kid—we obviously had to treat with fatherly reverence, so we called it Abe. (Adam’s mom worked in D.C.) The badgers were some nonsense word we’d ripped from Wonderland, vorpalians or something like that. Abe was the tavern where we recounted our journeys. Every clearing was a meeting hall for a different species’s exclusive kingdom, half the time an animal we’d never even seen: the creek for the bears, the flat grass for the deer, the trail for all the pets on telephone poles. What kid wants to think about some runaway pup getting frozen in a lake? Cooked under a bridge? Smeared on the interstate? At our age those things didn’t happen. At our age they came here, to the woods, to Tormalia, and became thieves, knights, invisible spirits—anything but forgotten.
We’d never so much as smelled wolves.
I couldn’t feel my shoes anymore by the time I found one of his. His shoes always had to be yellow, no exceptions, didn’t matter if they were sneakers or slippers or galoshes like this one. Some “quirk of the brain,” as he started calling them, when junior high loomed on the horizon. I never asked. Figured it was the kind of eccentricity his parents put up with because they could afford to. Now his clothes snaked through the Stag King’s clearing, galosh 1 galosh 2 sock watch hoodie sleeve, so far so grim, and then the blood
The chewing was what led me to him. Not the chewing you’d think, not those huge horrible monster gulps and jaws that snap hollow like an alligator’s. I read alligators don’t even sound like that, not really, they make that noise in a studio by blowing up a watermelon or something.
Two wolves. One young, one old, both patchy with mange. Heads bowed over meat and bone. If I didn’t look at the whole picture I could’ve convinced myself I had my face pressed up against the misty glass of a butcher shop window. The yearling looked at me first. They’re a lot bigger than in the movies, not like dogs at all; but when they’re little, like this one, they’re little. I wondered if something was wrong with their mouths. They looked at me and went on chomping—so softly, so quietly, smack-smack-smack. I could close my eyes and almost play pretend again. I was at dinner with my parents and the TV was warbling. I was in the library with Adam, watching incredulously as he attempted the ridiculous task of eating a Pringle without getting caught.
The quiet was an apology. A dignity. Sorry we got to him first.
I should’ve brought a gun. Maybe I could’ve screamed, or thrown something, chased them off. I don’t know why I didn’t tell anybody. I told about Adam, I’m not a monster, but I let the wolves go.
I figured it was as good a burial as he’d ever get.
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