“I think they killed them all except one.”
“Who killed them all except one?”
“Whoever. They don’t know.”
“How many were there?” Frank asked.
“There were six, weren’t there? There was the black female, the mother — the one they called Alberta because that’s where she was supposed to come from. They shot her —”
“Who?”
“They don’t know,” Eileen said. “The senator said that environmentalists were shooting them to make ranchers look bad.”
“Then they poisoned the male, I believe. Two pups were shot off the highway. How many does that leave?”
“Oh, yes, Mr. Copenhaver, they poisoned that other pup at the campground over in the Gallatin. I believe the senator explained that the Bozeman Girl Scout troop might’ve done that to help protect fawns. Although I heard the Girl Scouts denied it and their troop leader wasn’t real happy about the senator. So, there’s just one, and he’s this real silvery male they had on TV going across the Cayuse Hills. He’s almost grown. They’ve got a radio collar on him. Fish and Wildlife says he’s doing great.”
“He might be a little lonely, wouldn’t you think?”
“A wolf?”
“Anyway, I have a friend who’s been following the wolves. It’s a passion with her. I haven’t seen her in a while …”
Eileen looked on with vague incomprehension. She wasn’t big on these lateral, associative kinds of things. He’d been through this before. Anything beyond the declarative sentence aroused a suspicion in her that a plot was afoot. And in his case there was, a plot to locate Smokie.
“You don’t look very well, Mr. Copenhaver.”
“I’m afraid I’m just hanging on. But I can’t give in to it. I’ve neglected so much.”
“You have indeed,” said Eileen. “I’m very worried for my job.”
Frank took this in, looking at her to gauge the depth of her worry. But Eileen stranded him. She didn’t exactly wear her heart on her sleeve. Frank had a split second of admiring the consistency of her out-of-fashion clothing, eyeglasses that made her as unattractive as possible, pale plastic-rimmed things that were a pure optometric solution to seeing poorly.
“You won’t lose yours unless I lose mine,” said Frank heartily.
“That’s what I mean,” she said.
“I see,” said Frank. Once he saw this all from a great altitude. His benevolence in directing his widespread world was immediately accepted for the simple fact that he was in motion and provided a kind of leadership. He had learned that people will follow damn near any moving object, but that if it falters, they will quickly move to another moving object and follow that one. He once read an essay by Robert Benchley describing a newt falling head over heels in love with a pencil eraser because it resembled something in the mind of all newts. Frank once thought of this as a very complete description of human love.
Next Frank talked to John Coleman, his accountant, the man who once crowed, “You’re a success!” at the crossing of some threshold of net worth or another. He could tell that John was even more worried. Well, Frank was worried too. In fact, he knew so much more than John that he was inclined to overreact to John’s worry. John had a deep, measured voice that he cultivated purely for phone use. He rarely used that phone voice on Frank, but now he was, candidly nattering on about a few accounting strategies — he knew Frank was not interested. Evidently, he had bumped into Edward Ballantine on the street and gotten some very aggressive questioning as to whether Frank was deliberately devaluing his estate by way of anticipating his divorce. All that was meant to say was that this was now street knowledge and, accurate or inaccurate, it was hardly a salubrious business climate.
“Frank,” he said, “I think you are perilously close to failure.” This would have had greater effect if John hadn’t used the phone voice, but it had some effect. “If a divorce is impending, then what I say is certainly true.”
Frank didn’t want to let any of these people get to him. “I think I’m coming down with something,” he said.
“That’s one way of putting it.”
“I mean a bug. I got a flu shot but this one flies below radar.”
“Failure,” said John. “It’s almost like getting killed.”
When he got off the phone, Frank tried to think about having nothing and couldn’t respond to the idea. He’d had prosperity for a good little while now and obviously it hadn’t done enough for him to form a background for terror when he contemplated its absence. He tried it on himself: “I am a failure.” Nothing.
He made himself have a productive day, getting the most important mail out and returning the calls of those who were angriest or most offended. He did not talk to the bank. He was not prepared for any more of a bottom-line view than he had acquired from John Coleman. Then he went home and went to bed. He was sick.
He woke up at about eight P.M. and was still sick, but he was hungry. He had wound up the bedclothes in a twisted confusion and he was sweating. The phone rang and it was a wrong number, some old man. He found himself trying to prolong the conversation but it was, he concluded, the result of fever confusing him about how long things took. He thought he was simply not rushing when the old man said, “Look, mister, this is a wrong number. You follow me? I can’t talk to you all night.”
“You’ve got to go,” Frank said. It was attempted wit. He hung up the phone and rolled over. There was still some light coming in through the curtain on the high window. The curtain made it gray and Frank lay looking at the gray light on his hands. He tried to pretend they were someone else’s hands. What sort of person were they the hands of? He couldn’t tell. They were just hands. He was sinking into despair.
Maybe a shower. He let the hot water run straight into his face, trying to get some feeling back. This is like twenty gallons of tears a minute, he reflected as the water surged down off his chin. He tried shampoo, half a handful of golden gel. It swelled his hair into a foaming white crown. He took a piss this way, white-headed, hot water in the face, pissing against the wall. There was this movie scene, she was blowing him in the shower, suds, hot water, some crosscutting between orgasm and the water going down the drain, various arty annoyances. Then the movie went on to something completely different.
When he got back into bed he thought, My mother and father didn’t love me. What would a psychologist say? Probably, Oh, Frank, they loved you; they just didn’t love you in the right way. I don’t buy this about love, Frank would say to the psychologist. You’re worse than an asshole blowhard artist, you psychologist. Love is the right way. If it isn’t “the right way,” it isn’t love.
He was at an abyss of self-pity and he knew it but couldn’t seem to get around it. Sick and alone. If this was a preview, it was altogether frightening. It didn’t help to be so much cleaner. And in a moment, he was back in the bathroom to throw up. Afterward, he brushed his teeth but he couldn’t get the taste of vomit out of his mouth. He tried turning on the television. He was lonely and his accountant had said he was failing. His mother and father didn’t love him. That last fish broke his fly off. Darryl showed that he was a bigger man than Frank was. Lucy would have liked him if he could have just figured out who Lucy was so that he could do something in return. “Travel agent” wasn’t much of a beginning.
He got a thermometer and lay in silence, the covers pulled up under his chin, the glass rod sticking out only an inch from his lips. He had a fever of about 103. That was a pretty good fever. He got up and put on a bathrobe and a sweater over it. He went downstairs and drank a quart of milk with a marmalade sandwich and went back to bed. His hands were sticky. He lay there trying to remember the details about the marmalade. He had read the label. There was something about Seville oranges. It was foreign marmalade, but there was something about the family who made it that he had read and this was now completely gone from his mind. Maybe he was getting Alzheimer’s disease.