Saint Peter’s Wolf Page 16

  “You really believe all that rubbish about the fangs. I thought of you as a scientist—”

  “It’s impossible. I know that. They are only some old teeth.”

  “So what’s the matter, Stan. Why are you so upset?”

  Stan put his hands over his face, and shook his head, a picture so distraught I went to his side and put my hand on his shoulder. “I just am. I don’t know. I’m worried. Maybe I’m a fool.”

  “Maybe foolish. Never a fool.” I recognized that Stan was a good man, who sensed things that would never occur to a duller-witted person. I wondered if I would be able to do what he was doing, confront a friend with a monstrous doubt about the friend himself. Stan was not a coward.

  “I’m taking the whole family back to Chicago for the holidays,” he said. “I need a rest.”

  “You’ve been working too hard,” I suggested.

  He nodded.

  “Good! What a great idea,” I said, too heartily.

  Stan shook his head again. “It was some kind of animal. The thing that killed the couple. There are puncture wounds that can only be teeth.”

  “No wonder it’s been on the news.”

  “The media hasn’t gotten that bit of information yet. I’ve done a little work for the coroner’s office, identifying snapped-off knife blades, unusual threads found on strangulation victims, any number of antique, curious instruments of death. I once identified a screwless bolt from a captain’s chair. It had found its way into an insurance salesman’s cerebellum. A friend beat him to death with the chair, and burned the chair.”

  “Some friends are like that.”

  “I’ve heard most murder victims are killed by someone who knows them.”

  “Maybe the couple in the park knew a bear.”

  Stan smiled, grateful to hear even a thin joke. “Anyway, I called a friend at the coroner’s and they say it was without a doubt a gigantic animal of some kind, and the prints match up with others they’ve found in various locations in the City.”

  “Various locations?” My mouth was dry.

  “Yes, there was another incident. I’m vague on the details, but you might get a phone call.”

  Stan, I thought, why do you have to be right so often? Why couldn’t you be wrong once in a while? This man was alive to every possibility, kept fresh by his love for his wife and his children, his ever growing house, his love for the Mendocino hills. He was health itself, I thought; such men are dangerous. I could not lift my teacup. Tea would have splashed everywhere.

  “A woman was raped by something horrendous. The lab doesn’t know what to make of any of it.”

  I managed the cup to my lips and sipped.

  “They need some extra psychological advice. She’s at UC Medical Center, out of her mind completely. You’ve done work like that in the past.”

  “Often.” Eager to distract him, I continued, “Once, I hypnotized a kidnapping victim for a description of her abductor.”

  “Did they catch the kidnapper?”

  “It was a hoax. The mother talked the daughter into it, so they could get publicity and get the estranged dad to up his child support when the kid was found safe.” I added another cube of sugar. “So maybe this is a hoax, too.”

  Stan tried to smile. “Maybe, but I don’t know. I don’t know who would eat someone’s intestines as a hoax.”

  Mr. Porterman told me of a dream. In this dream a figure followed him through a parking lot which, while it was full of cars, was devoid of people. What followed him was a wolf, but it was a wolf with the eyes of his father.

  “It was one of the worst nightmares I’ve ever had as an adult. I was looking forward to what you might say about it.”

  The dream was uncannily like my own dream. Here I was, trying to deny that my life was crumbling by going about my routine, and bland Mr. Porterman had dumped a shovelful of his steamiest subconscious into my lap.

  I struggled to do my usual dance: what do you think it means?

  “I really want to hear what you have to say. Please, Dr. Byrd.”

  I adjusted my tie. “Hasn’t there been some talk of wolves in the news?”

  “Wolves! Good Lord—more than that. Some sort of monster wolf ate two people in Golden Gate Park, and raped a woman. That’s all people are talking about. The most recent news is something really amazing. The woman who was raped, attacked, or whatever you can call it in a case like this. They did semen tests, and it turns out the semen wasn’t human at all. Lupine. She was raped by a wolf.”

  The world was transparent for a moment, the carpet, Mr. Porterman’s pale face, my desk, all nearly invisible. Behind and within every object I could see the real world: night. “I try to avoid the news.”

  “I don’t blame you. You know what I think the dream means?”

  I encouraged him to tell me.

  “It’s a primal fear—fear of my father, and, more particularly, fear that my father might eat me. I think all this wolf news stirred up some fear left over from my infancy.” He opened his hands as if to say: how did I do? “A fear from the past,” he added.

  “I think that some day before long you won’t need to see me any more, Mr. Porterman. You are developing some real insight into yourself, a sort of psychological acuity that I admire.”

  “You’re getting bored with me,” said Mr. Porterman, suspicious for a moment.

  I smiled, my most reassuring, nonverbal clue that what a client had just said was beyond, or beneath, comment. I had, though, become very fond of Mr. Porterman.

  “Why, if you think about it, was the parking lot full of cars but had no people at all?” mused Mr. Porterman.

  “That’s a striking detail. It certainly makes the dream more troubling.”

  “I think because no one sees this creature. He’s there, in our daily, and nightly, lives. But the cops don’t catch him. Nobody really gets a look at him. He doesn’t live in the same world as human beings.”

  “But this part of the dream would seem to be—”

  “Not about my father trying to eat me. I know. It’s directly about that monster wolf.”

  I shifted in my chair. It occurred to me that the time would soon come when I would be unable to sit here like this, listening to people. My voice betrayed none of my feeling. “Do you really suppose there is such a creature?”

  “I’m a skeptic. But something happened to those people. I suppose you think”—he smiled, hopefully—“that it’s some sort of collective delusion.”

  “A subatomic flash from the collective psyche?”

  “I don’t think so. I live near Golden Gate Park, off Nineteenth. I walked up there the other day, and they had yellow chalked outlines around the place where the bodies had been, and yellow outlines around the black patches of blood, and there was a lot of it.”

  Tina stayed late that evening, “setting up the files,” she said. Indeed, I had several new clients, one or two of them clients who had left Orr during recent months. But she kept glancing my way, and when she came into my office to hand me the mail she let her left hand rest lightly, just briefly, on my wrist.

  I had several fears. I could take each one out, like a bright jewel, and balance it in my mind. There was the fear that I would be gunned down. I knew how that dog must have felt, crawling with two lead stones in its hindquarters, its bowels swelling with blood.

  Another fear was that I would hurt someone I loved or someone I once loved. This would cause me sharp remorse, and yet I felt that I would always know what I was doing during the nights Out There. I was relieved that Stan was leaving town for a few days, because I had mixed feelings about Stan. But I was fairly confident that I would harm no one I considered a friend.

  Tina would not leave me alone with my fears. She kept brushing against me as she passed, and when at last it was time to go she gave me a look that verged on resentment.

  I was about to leave the office when Dr. Eng called from the Medical Center. She was a woman with an efficient manner, and a ge
ntle voice that disguised a mind like a drill. They were seeking a consultant in a very difficult case. Surely I must have heard of it. Several other professionals had been called in, because it was hoped that some sort of description of the assailant might be formed if the patient could be both sedated and induced to talk simultaneously.

  “I really don’t know how I can help.”

  “But you have experience in such matters. We can use you.”

  I wanted to say: please don’t ask me to do this.

  On Christmas Day I walked with Johanna to Land’s End and watched the surf.

  And that night I ran again, this time feeding on several cats. It was easy work, running through the dark with my ears flattened, earth streaming beneath me, branches snapping with my weight as I leaped to run down yet another quarry.

  I bounded through the cool night with more-than-human joy.

  Twenty-Three

  Eileen Ashby opened the door and let me into the house which now seemed to echo at every whisper. She was calm, but it was not the calm of someone who had anticipated this day for years. She seemed weary, and as if all feeling, all thought, was a burden to her.

  “I’m so sorry,” I choked.

  She was a strong woman, and even in her trance of grief saw that her sorrow could only reawaken my own.

  She had taken on some of her brother’s dignity. She had always been like him, but I could only see it now.

  She left me briefly, and when I was alone I felt how truly foreign to us a house is. The chairs, the carpets, the hammered copper vase, were all inert objects. In their unfeeling lumpishness they were almost enemies to the spirit. Without the presence of a human being to love the walls, a house was a wood-and-plaster prison.

  Eileen reappeared. “He wanted you to have this. It was one of the last things we discussed.”

  She pressed into my hands the small Italian she-wolf. I clasped the bronze, unable to begin to form my thanks. While Dr. Ashby was alive, he had given me cause for faith. Humans were frail, and cruel, but they knew how limited they were, and in this they achieved a glory. How else could a human being conceive of beauty, like this small wolf, except by knowing that it is a beauty a man cannot possess?

  Most men. One man alive did possess such beauty.

  Her teeth were bared to warn away the faltering step in the forest. She had young, and she would kill.

  It began at the cemetery in El Cerrito. Eileen was tall and pale, her face within the black veil nearly fading into a phantom. The winter day was warm, the sun igniting the green grass, and only in the shadow of trees did the cold slip through the body.

  Dr. Ashby had known the finest minds, and the cemetery was crowded. Photographers kept a respectful distance. There was a congressman, and a university chancellor, and two Nobel laureates. In the distance was San Francisco Bay, and the elegant lines of the Golden Gate Bridge, and the waterbugs of tankers surging west.

  The service was simple. Even the Lord’s Prayer seemed created for just this afternoon. Perhaps I should have been surprised that Dr. Ashby had elected such a traditional service for himself, but Ashby had always been beyond me.

  As we all began to leave, car doors thudding, engines starting up, Dr. Page, my old psychiatrist friend, took my arm. It was a grievous loss, he said, and I agreed, and then we could say no more, enjoying each other’s companionable silence. Since it was he who had told me of Dr. Ashby’s stroke, I felt events fold together sadly but neatly.

  Then my future began.

  Dr. Page took my arm again, and said, “There’s Orr.”

  The conspiratorial tone he used should have alerted me, but I was not thinking quickly.

  “If I were you,” said Page, “I would see a lawyer.”

  Orr was very blond in the sunlight. I thought, for the first time: he must dye it.

  “He’s been telling lies about you, Byrd.”

  Orr was smiling down at a covey of women in black and gray. His teeth flashed.

  I must have asked a question, because when Page continued, he said, “He says you’re under investigation for some sort of crime. FBI, or some other organization like that. He’s vague. Obviously doesn’t know what he’s talking about. But he tells everybody.”

  The carefully tended lawn made a crisp, ungrasslike crinkle under my black shoes.

  “He won’t shut up about it. At the tennis courts, hosting out-of-town guests at the Fairmont—everywhere. Says a big investigator out of Washington is after you. Hints at falsified tax documents, plagiarism. Rolls his eyes and says you’re in trouble.”

  “He used to be my friend.”

  “People who don’t know you, or who don’t know you well …”

  I tried to make a nonchalant remark, but it came out like a cough. “He hates me. Cherry still cares for me, and I’m beginning to take away his clients, even his secretary. I think he may get over it. But this … He has no cause to do this.”

  Dr. Page weighed his next words. “I used to play tennis with Orr every Tuesday noon.” He pressed the lawn with his black shoe. “You can learn a person’s character by playing a game with him. Orr is a spiteful man. He wants, and he gets. Anything not a part of that sweeping movement angers him. He isn’t really very complicated. That’s why he’s considered such a good therapist. He finds understanding easy. It isn’t—I imagine he’s wrong much of the time. But he thinks it’s easy, and he seems to convince his clients.”

  He looked me in the eye as men rarely look at each other. Dr. Page, competitive and detached, was not an especially warm man but he was, I saw, a good psychiatrist. “He’s trouble, Ben. He’s uttering slander. If I were you I’d break his jaw. Or sue his ass.”

  I was trembling, and not only my fingers. The large muscles of my thighs, my hamstrings, even my bones, were humming with a powerful emotion. It was so strong I could not recognize it for a few heartbeats, as a man might not recognize the sound of an avalanche.

  It was anger. It was the anger I had felt toward Orr for a long time. But it was not the clumsy anger of a man. It was a bright, nearly joyful desire for blood. Here in this naked afternoon, I found myself smiling.

  I had a surprise for Orr.

  Dr. Eng wore a white lab coat. She was courteous and offered me a cup of coffee. It was the sort of courtesy a matter-of-fact professional adopts to keep from seeming blunt.

  “I really would like to begin,” I said, meaning that I would really like to get it over with.

  Dr. Eng was pleased. She whisked the door open and hurried along beside me. “The other consultants have done no good,” she said.

  “So I’m the bottom of the barrel.”

  “I remember your work. You are high on my list, Dr. Byrd.”

  Earlier that morning I had read the contents of the manila folder in her hand, the pages held in place by a metal tongue. The various scrawls had been familiar. I knew all of the consultants. They were all very capable, although naturally some were definite in their diagnoses, and others tentative. The word “trauma” occurred in all of them, modified by various adjectives, “profound” and “severe” among them. As in many psychological workups, these gifted people were, in elaborate syntax, stating the obvious. I doubted I would be more successful than they had been. What brought me here was partly a residual sense of duty. But mostly, almost entirely, it was raw curiosity.

  I wanted to see the woman I had raped. A man with any humanity left would not have walked down this green-tiled corridor. I felt, still, quite human. But I was like a radiation victim, or a leper: the disintegration was deadly but painless. I did not fully realize even as I straightened my tie in the reflection of a glass door, and admired my looks in passing, that I was a monster.

  The patient had passed through a stream of psycho-sedatives. Ataractics had not soothed her from her wide-eyed terror of everything that moved. The hydroxyzines, the meprobromates, the thioxanthenes had all danced against the armor of whatever had captured her. She had not experienced even a minute of normal
sleep, not even a moment of normal unconsciousness. Scopalamine, often used as a truth serum, had been as effective as soda water.

  She had cringed from all nurses, babbling, unable to respond to any individual. Family and friends meant nothing to her. She had ignored everyone, except to cringe from them. I knew all this from the history. But what I did not know was what sort of woman I had chosen as my night-mate.

  What, I wondered, did she look like?

  We paused outside the gray door. Dr. Eng surprised me by putting her hand on the knob and waiting. “I don’t like to visit her,” she said.

  I must have raised an eyebrow.

  “I have never seen anything like it,” she added.

  As soon as the door was open a sound like gagging reached the corridor. The room was too warm. There was the bleached scent of linen and antiseptic.

  A woman in a classic straitjacket of beige canvas gnashed at the air. Her hair was bound to keep it out of her face, but what I had not been prepared to see was the sight of her salivating, drooling, glistening with spit, and with tears.

  I had expected her to cringe at the sound of our steps, and she did. Grunting, she fought away from us, and then rolled her eyes back at me. The sound she made then is the worst sound I have ever heard a human utter, a scream so horrendous both Dr. Eng and I found ourselves frozen in place.

  The scream was endless, deafening. It was more than a scream. It was the cry of a psyche torn in two.

  And it was directed at me.

  We did not speak again until we sat in a conference room. Dr. Eng put the folder on the table with unsteady hands. We both sat, and she plucked a pen from her breast pocket. She let it fall to the table, and only then looked at me. “She’s never done that before. Not a scream like that. Never before.”

  “It looks as though, after a preliminary examination, I really won’t be able to work with her very well.”

  Dr. Eng considered me. “She’s getting worse.”

  My desire to make light of it should have warned me. I was not merely using humor to defuse an ugly experience. I was, profoundly, without compassion.