He was weary and after a while the brandy bottle slipped from his fingers and tilted and spilled on the floor and he laid his head on the arm of the couch and fell asleep.
At some point he began to dream. In his dream all this tumult and disorder had fallen away and his life stood in marvelous symmetry. He and Lynn and Jesse had survived. The world had done its best to unhinge them but they had come through unscathed. The world had tried them with fire and water but the water had cleansed and soothed them and the fire had tempered them so that they were the stronger for it, and they were together, hand in hand, standing by peaceful waters.
When he awoke there was a sour taste in his mouth and a weight in his chest and his face was wet with tears. He got up and shambled into the kitchen to the sink and halted abruptly when he saw Jesse standing by the sliding glass door looking out at the patio.
Jesse saw Bender s reflection in the glass and he turned. There was a curious look on his face, almost a sly complicity as he looked at Bender in silence and pointed at the glass.
They crouched before the plate glass like conspirators. The rain-wet flagstones, the dripping trees. Then in silent wonder he saw the wolf. It came at a lope out of the trailing honeysuckle, ragged and ill kept like some wolf cobbled up out of the leftover parts of other wolves and resurrected and set upon him by some dark alchemy. It bounded onto the flagstones and sprang at the glass. It slammed against it and for a microsecond the glass bulged inward with a marvelous elasticity and glass and wolf alike were frozen in midair as if time had skidded to a halt. Then the glass exploded inward and all Bender’s senses were so assailed by stimuli he could scarcely comprehend everything: the smell of the rainy night blown in and the sweet nostalgic reek of flowers and the feral charnel smell of the wolf. The air was full of pebbled glass. It rattled off the walls like hail and sang along the Formica countertop like grapeshot. He could hear the wolf’s claws snicking along the tile floor and clawing for purchase and he had only time to enfold the child and turn Jesse’s face into the hollow of his throat before the wolf was upon them.
Good ’Til Now
VANGIE THOUGHT this day would never end, and what got her through it was thinking about the time her husband had been fired for having sex with a woman in a cardboard carton. Vangie had always been more interested in the carton than in the woman. The woman was just a faceless coworker who had crawled — how else would you get in there? — into a cardboard box and had sex with Charles. But the box was something else. How big was it? Was it lying horizontally? Who crawled in first? Was there protocol involved here, etiquette? What did you say to someone in a cardboard box? They had been caught not by one person, who might just conceivably have kept his mouth shut, but by four or five workers who’d come into the storeroom to sneak cigarettes and been treated to an impromptu floor show.
It was about the size of a goddamned refrigerator box, Charles had said sullenly. Charles had been contrite and humiliated for about fifteen minutes, and then the Hemingway implications of the whole thing had struck him. It seemed in some manner tied to the level of his testosterone. It proved beyond all conjecture the appeal he had to women. It was an ego thing, and since Charles was a hunter who mounted the heads of his victims on wooden plaques, Vangie thought it was a shame he hadn’t managed to get some sort of trophy out of the whole affair.
This had been five years ago, and it had crossed her mind a few times that she and Charles might not be as made for each other as they had once thought; but by then their son, Stephen, was a year old, and Stephen was such an enormity in her life that he dwarfed even so tacky a thing as adultery committed inside a cardboard box.
All day she had been thinking that she and Stephen and Robert might just pile everything into the car and flee. Flee had been Robert’s word. Just flee west ’til the wheels run off and burn, the upholstery cracks and the paint fades and the moccasins die. She was wondering if adultery had an expiration date like something you’d pick up from a supermarket shelf. A statute of limitations. If she left and Charles tried to win custody of Stephen, maybe she could hit him with that. Perhaps hit him first. He had even beaten her once, in a halfhearted way, but he had been drinking a lot then, and he had cried and promised that it would never happen again, and it had not.
Even this Robert Vandaveer business could be laid at Charles’s door, if you wanted to carry things back far enough.
Charles had been deer hunting with a band of his friends down on the river, and he came back talking about Vandaveer. We met this weird fellow down on Buffalo, Charles said. Some kind of writer, songwriter or something. Weird, but all right. He gave us permission to camp on his place. Hair down to his ass, but he’s all right. He even drank a beer with us.
For a while all Charles could talk about was Robert Vandaveer. Vangie figured he’d taken Vandaveer for some proponent of the cult of machismo, some writer of the Hemingway-Jim Harrison school. Robert had done this, Robert had done that. Robert had constructed his lodge with his bare hands. Robert had even cut the timber with which he bare-handedly constructed his lodge. Then Charles had abruptly stopped talking about Robert Vandaveer.
What happened to Robert Vandaveer? she asked him.
We’re not hunting down there anymore, Charles said.
Yet that night a year ago the name had stirred some lost memory, and before bedtime she went through her record collection. She’d always loved music, had written songs herself, and she owned an enormous number of tapes, CDs, records. She found what she was looking for with absurd ease. As if they had been stored, all stacked in sequence and lying in wait for her. The subtle machinations of fate, Robert would have said in an ironic tone, if she had ever told him. Emmylou Harris had covered two of Robert Vandaveer’s songs. Johnny Cash had recorded a Dylanesque song that Vandaveer had written. There was even a recording by Vandaveer himself, one of his own songs, on a Rhino collection called Folk Troubadours of the Seventies.
Later she wondered why she had searched for the songs. Why she hadn’t just let it lie. Maybe we are all the authors of our own doom, she thought. Maybe we lay by the cobwebbed artifacts we’ll need for our future undoing. At some unknown point we’ll rummage through them for the cord that fits the throat just so, the knife with the perfect edge.
VANGIE WAS A TEACHERS’S AIDE and a counselor. Stephen was in the second grade, and she had taken the job when he started kindergarten. The days had been long then, too. They had been long, but they hadn’t cut the way this one did.
At noon she went to the teachers’ lounge and used the phone to dial Robert’s number. The phone rang and rang. She held it so tightly against her ear that it hurt, but she just let it ring. She could see the room the phone was in. The scarred pine table it sat on. She wondered if he was drinking. She wondered if he was passed out on the couch with an empty Wild Turkey bottle cradled against his chest as you’d cradle a child. She didn’t think so. She figured he was laying rock on the chimney he was building. He’d completed the fireplace, but the lodge was an A-frame and high roofed, and the chimney would have to be enormously tall to clear it. He kept building scaffolding higher and higher. She kidded him about the thin air, about nesting eagles. He wrestled the stones from one level of the scaffold to the next. Five-gallon buckets of mortar. He was stronger than he appeared.