Wolf Point Read online

  In Salem, his house was immaculate. Day after day living there he had cleaned and recleaned and cleaned again. More than once he had found himself standing at the kitchen table with a dish rag in hand while he stared out the window at nothing but sky and the bulk of his thickly treed mountain, the one that rose up in the near distance and hovered endlessly unmoving over his house. His time in Salem had required him to tap a lifetime of resources. He philosophized. He told himself to live in the moment, to accept whatever it gave, to immerse himself in the experience. He tried to see things truly. He argued to himself that seeing things clearly and truly and acknowledging his situation would be the first step before he could figure out what to do next and how to move on. He was sure he would eventually move on, that his life would start up again, that it was only a matter of time. He read novels, classic and modern. He read poetry, mostly modern and contemporary. He listened to jazz almost constantly. He exercised. He was not the kind of man who was meant to live alone. Isolation was an agony to be endured, and he did pull-ups and push-ups and leg lifts. He bought a free standing gym and used it daily. He power-walked at least two miles every day, often several times that. He drank one to two glasses of wine a day, traveling north to Roanoke or south to Blacksburg to buy the best vintages. He played computer games: Myst and Doom and a dozen others, chess on the Internet, all the sports games on PlayStation 2. More than once he’d found himself at two or three in the morning working the controls of a computer game when his engagement in the virtual action suddenly ceased of its own accord and he saw himself, a man in his fifties up in the middle of the night, alone, totally engaged in an utterly meaningless virtual world, and each time it happened, he felt ashamed. And he felt something very close to shock. How did he get to such a place? How did it happen? He cleaned; he listened to jazz; he played computer games; he exercised; he collected and consumed wine; in time he got into photography, buying equipment, taking pictures, trying to learn PhotoShop; and one by one the months passed until there was more than a year’s worth of them and if anything essential had changed he didn’t know what. He was pushing his way through time like a swimmer working to cross a huge body of water.

  “We can make a fire,” Jenny said. She came out of one of the bedrooms with a white quilt wrapped around her shoulders like a cape. “There’s a great fireplace in the bedroom.”

  “Did you check the flue?” T asked.

  “That’s better,” she said, noticing the countertops in the kitchen. She went to the window, which looked out over the river. “I love the views here.”

  “It’s a great cabin.” T joined her in the kitchen. “What’s your uncle do?”

  “CPA,” she said. “But we don’t want to talk about Uncle Chuck.” She leaned against the window and watched him a moment. “You’re handsome,” she said. “You look good in moonlight.”

  “Think so? Moonlight hide my age?”

  “You’re old,” she pronounced, as if she had been considering the subject, “but you’re sexy too. You’re one of those sexy older guys it’s easy to get off on, like Richard Gere, kind of; or, no, Sean Connery. Who wouldn’t want to get down with Sean Connery? You’re kind of like that,” she said. “I bet you know it, too.”

  “You’re flattering me.”

  “I’m not,” she said. She looked down at her legs as if remembering something and then rubbed them briskly with the palms of her hands. “I’ve got to get out of these things,” she said. “Ever worn leather several days straight?” When T didn’t answer, she added, “I didn’t think so. How about this for a plan? You make a fire. Meanwhile, I get out of these pants and take a quick, cold shower. Then, when I’m done, I can warm up with you in front of the flames.”

  “Did you check the flue?” T asked again.

  She shook her head. “Think it’s a problem?”

  “I’ve got a flashlight in the Rover,” he said. “You go ahead. It’ll probably be fine.”

  She wrapped her arms around him and planted a loud kiss on his cheek. “There’s wood in the thingamajig by the fireplace.” She grabbed her backpack from the couch, clutched it to her chest, and disappeared into the back of the cabin.

  Outside, there was a definite chill in the air. It felt like a storm might be coming on. T hugged himself and put the hood up on his jacket. He hurried through the shadows to the Rover, where he found Lester in exactly the same position, with his nose in the seam between the seat cushion and back-rest. When he saw the bucket of fried chicken on the floor, he realized he was hungry. He opened the container and was amused to find half the chicken gone. He wouldn’t have thought she could eat that much, and he wondered if perhaps Lester had pulled himself up out of sleep long enough to eat a fried-chicken dinner. He imagined them both munching on cold fried chicken, wondering where the old guy had gone off to, and then Lester going back to sleep while Jenny went out to look around. Or she might just be a small girl with a big appetite. He grabbed a chicken leg from the bucket, took the Mag light from the glove compartment, and went around to the back of the Rover for his suitcase. After he finished off the drumstick and before he closed the hatchback, he remembered the emergency supplies stored near the spare tire and retrieved a blanket-sized fleece tightly rolled and packed into a clear plastic container. He pushed the guitar case aside and crawled to the back seat, where he spread the fleece over Lester.

  After lugging his oversized suitcase up the hill and laying it on the bed, he checked the flue, shining the flashlight beam up the chimney shaft. Not seeing anything worrisome— blockages of leaves, bird nests, thick incrustations of creosote— he piled three logs on top of several small pieces of kindling and pulled down a round container of matches from the mantel. To get the fire started, he retrieved the current New Yorker from his suitcase, tore out a dozen glossy pages, crumpling them into crushed balls of print, and wedged them under the soot-charred andirons. A few minutes later the fire was crackling, the first flames taking hold in the kindling as smoke pooled worrisomely for a moment before being drawn up the flue.

  From the bathroom came the sound of a running shower. Water splashed so loud and distinct against porcelain, he could almost see the blocked flow, the fat, twisting stream in the center where minerals had caked the small, concentric circles of tiny holes. He guessed the bathroom door wasn’t completely closed, and when he went quietly out into the hall, his guess was confirmed. The door was ajar the width of a man’s fist. The red light of the fire, now crackling and snapping, lit up the hallway where he stood. He backed out of the light into a second, smaller bedroom and saw, in the dark, that the bed had not been made, though a fat comforter and what looked like a pillow and sheets were stacked neatly at the foot of the matrress. He went out into the hallway again and slid along the wall into a tongue of shadow, where he saw Jenny’s reflection in a sliver of mirror. She was undressed with her back turned to him, in the process of pulling her hair behind her head and fastening it somehow. She looked to be tying it back, as if with a ribbon or a rubber band. Her arms were raised and he could see the sides of her breasts, full and weighty in muted moonlight coming from a window behind the drawn shower curtain. Half of her back was draped in shadow so that the undulating course of her spine seemed to divide her between light and dark. She had no tattoos. He thought every young woman these days was tattooed. As far as he could see, she had no moles or scars to mar the lines of her body. When she dropped her arms, having finished tying back her hair, he moved away quietly, fearing she might turn and see his reflection in the mirror watching her.

  He took off his jacket and lay down in front of the fire on the bearskin rug, looking absently a moment at the mounted head in profile: the dog-like ears, the snout and white teeth that looked sharp enough still to be dangerous. He ran his fingers though the fur and asked himself what he would do if, as appeared to be a distinct possibility, Jenny was planning to sleep with him. He hadn’t had sex in more than two years. His entire sex life these past two years had consisted of occasio
nal, boredom-induced masturbation. He seemed to have lost the ability to successfully fantasize. In his youth, his fantasies were wild. He dreamed of sex with multiple women, a woman on his back with him atop a woman on her back; sex with couples; sex with dozens; massive orgies. Fantasy after fantasy brought him to crackling orgasm. In his youth. When he woke up every morning of his life with a raging erection. Which had stopped exactly when? At forty? Forty-five? Now he woke with only the need to pee. Now his old fantasies all struck him as ridiculous and shallow. Whereas in his youth the women all moaned with pleasure as he pounded himself to orgasm, now they tended to evaporate within minutes of their conjuring, leaving him holding his halfhearted member in hand as he drifted off to sleep. Now, after seeing Jenny naked in the shower—a beautiful young woman who was apparently interested in him—he found himself more worried about actually having sex with her than looking forward to it.

  He conjured again the image of Jenny in moonlight tying up her hair, but the picture faded after a moment or two, and then he was thinking about the cover of a slim book of contemporary poetry he had purchased recently. It was a reproduction of Thomas Hart Benton’s Persephone. Snuggled in the hollows of a gnarled oak tree, unclothed Persephone’s perfect body radiates the splendid luxury of youth, while behind her an old man with thin gray hair and features twisted into ugliness by age reaches one arthritic hand toward her thigh. T pushed the image out of mind. He wasn’t old and arthritic. He hadn’t crept away from his horse-drawn cart to spy on innocent Persephone. He had picked up Jenny and her companion hitchhiking. He had delivered them where they wanted to go. At Jenny’s request, at her urging, he had agreed to spend the night in her uncle’s cabin. As for the old man’s lust in the Benton painting, about that he didn’t know. He wasn’t sure what he was doing. He didn’t know what he wanted. All he knew for absolute certain was that he preferred being where he was, in front of a fire in a cabin on the Thousand Islands waiting for Jenny to take her shower, to where he had previously been headed, which would most likely have been a generic, sanitized motel room separated by four walls from everyone else in the world.

  The sound of the shower curtain being pulled aside in the bathroom bounced out into the empty hallway, followed in a moment by Jenny’s inarticulate squeals and articulate curses— Oh, shit; motherfucker; son of a bitch —and the interrupted rhythms of water splashing off a body and onto porcelain. Then the water stopped, the curtain was pulled back, and the sound of scurrying feet preceded her appearance in the bedroom doorway wrapped in a blue towel held together by one fist at her breasts, but not long enough to cover her. She stood a moment shivering in the doorway. After the first instant’s reflexive dropping of his eyes, T fixed his gaze on her face.

  “Water a little cold?” he asked.

  “Think so?” she said, and dropped the towel as she pulled the white quilt off the bed, threw it over her shoulders, and lay down on the rugs in front of T by the fire. She pulled the quilt tightly around her, tucking the edges under her thighs and legs, and pushed her body back into T. “Put your arms around me,” she said, turning to look into his face, “before I freeze to death.” She kissed him on the cheek.

  T put his arms around her. Her head rested on his bicep as he held her tight.

  “Ummm,” she purred. “This is delicious.” She snuggled into him, molding her body to the contours of his and closing her eyes drowsily.

  T touched her bare shoulder with his cheek, and she turned in his arms onto her back and kissed him on the lips, her hand under the quilt pushing up under his T shirt and along his ribs to his chest.

  T knew what was supposed to happen next. This was the moment when he kissed her in return and then fumbled out of his clothes as he raised himself up over her and onto her and then pushed himself into her for the familiar warm rocking and thrust and moan of sex, but instead of the rising and filling and swell the moment required, he felt come over him a sense of deflation, as if his body from head to toe were going so soft it might liquefy. What he felt was sadness flowing through him, deep sadness. He leaned away from her under the quilt, making enough distance to look her in the eyes. “I don’t know what I’m doing here,” he said.

  Jenny seemed puzzled. She leaned back on her elbow and propped her head up on her hand. “What do you mean?” she asked. “What do you mean, you don’t know what you’re doing?”

  “I don’t,” T said.

  “I just— Why? Why would you—”

  “Why’s a dumb question.” She touched his lips with her finger. “I want you to make love to me. I just want you to.”

  T watched her watching him, her eyes on his eyes, and knew she was expecting him to start again, to lean into her with the kiss that would put the act in motion. He didn’t. He waited.

  “You picked us up,” she said. She sounded bewildered. “You brought us here. You cleaned up the cabin while I made the beds. You built a fire while I took a shower. Plus, I see the way you look at me. What did you think we were doing? What did you think was happening?”

  T watched the fire, where the flames were shooting up from the kindling through charred gaps in the big logs. Already a bed of red embers pulsed beneath the andirons. “Jenny,” he said, and heard his voice as a dramatic harsh whisper. He coughed and tried again. “Apparently I’m not—” he said. He kissed her shoulder through the quilt. “This is sweet, though, holding you like this.”

  “Oh my God,” she said, and she touched the back of his neck. “You’re so— You don’t want to make love to me?” She stroked the back of his head. “Is there something— Are you afraid I might have AIDS, or—”

  “No,” T said. “That’s not—”

  “Because I have condoms.”

  “Jenny,” T said. “It’s not about—”

  “I don’t have any diseases, Aloysius. Mr. Walker. I’m not a whore.”

  “I don’t think you’re a whore.”

  “Oh, please. Why wouldn’t—” She stopped and rubbed his back gently. “Listen,” she said, “don’t lie to me. You must think I’m a whore. Why wouldn’t you think that?”

  “I don’t think like that,” he said finally. “I just, don’t—”

  “Well, I do,” she said. “And now— You turn out— Oh, Jesus Christ.”

  T looked up from the fire and saw that her face was wet. “Jenny,” he said, and wiped a tear away from her eye with a corner of the quilt.

  “I feel humiliated.”

  “Because I didn’t—”

  “Because I’ve been acting like a whore,” she said, articulating each word, insisting on it. “Let’s not bullshit, please. And then you turn out to actually be decent.”

  “I’m not decent,” T said quickly. “I swear. No one thinks I’m decent.”

  “Well, you are,” she said. “And how could you not think of me as anything but some pathetic little tramp?”

  “Jenny—”

  “At least let me explain.” She sat up, wrapped herself tightly in the quilt, and slid away from T, toward the fire. She crossed her legs under her.

  Out from under the quilt, T felt as though he were the one who was naked. He experienced the loss of her warmth like a shock and actually shivered as he looked around for something with which to cover himself. He found his jacket near the foot of the bed.

  “I’ve been acting like a little slut from the moment we met,” she said. She spoke with the quilt wrapped around her. “For God’s sake, I just came in here naked and threw myself on you.”

  “You didn’t throw yourself—”

  “Yes, I did. It’s humiliating. But, please— You have to understand what Lester’s done. It’s just— It’s unbelievable, T.”

  “All right,” he said. “But I swear I’m not thinking of you as a whore or a slut or any such thing.”

  “Of course you are!” she said, and a little bubble of mucus blew up and popped under her nose. “Oh, Christ—” She pointed with her chin to where her drawstring purse lay near the bed. “Could yo
u get me a tissue?”

  T handed her the purse.

  She blew her nose and threw the tissue into the fire, where it was eaten up immediately in a bright yellow flame. “I’ve been behaving like a tramp,” she said, composed. “At least let me have the dignity of admitting it. I have been, but you have to understand, I’m terrified. I’m frightened for my life.” With those words, the tears came again. She seemed to give up on wiping them away. “I’ve been behaving badly, but my life is threatened. Lester stole money from a guy who everybody knows is a sick, murdering, torturing perv. We spent the last two nights hiding in my wine cellar, terrified, while this guy and the sick biker assholes who work for him totally destroyed my house.”

  “What? Like the Wild Bunch?”

  “The what?”

  “Never mind,” T said, realizing she probably wouldn’t even know Marlon Brando let alone the Wild Bunch. “I’m having a hard time visualizing this,” he said. “Where was your house? What do you mean bikers destroyed it?”

  “It was my mother’s house first,” she said, and pulled the quilt tighter around her. “I had just bought it in September; I had just finally gotten the money together…” She stopped a moment and shook her head, as if to compose herself and keep from crying yet again. “It’s outside of Chattanooga. It’s a small house, but it’s on five acres, which is why it was so hard to raise the money. It used to be a plantation a gazillion years ago. This is going back to the Civil War.”

  “You own a house on five acres of land?”

  “Wrecked house,” she said. “They tore it apart so bad it’ll have to be rebuilt.”