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  Kiss of the Wolf

  A Novel

  Jim Shepard

  for Aidan

  JOANIE

  We are responsible for the bad things that happen to us. My best friend during my two years of college, Mary Mucci, she used to say that all the time. Her boyfriend was a Christian Scientist—we all have our crosses to bear—and he talked like that. Her mother had a stroke, her little sister drank, and she developed this spinal thing, and the way they saw it, she wasn’t off the hook for any of it.

  When I told my mother that Gary was history, the first thing she said was, Oh, my God, come over here, bring Todd, stay the night. The second thing she said was, What’d you do?

  I took a week off at school. They understood. Nancy covered some of my classes. It was like maternity leave: abandonment leave. For a few weeks I was excused as lay reader at the church.

  I talked to Father Cleary. My mother’s idea. I told him the same thing I told her. I had no idea, this woman’s name had never come up, things had been more or less fine between us. Shock to Joanie. Out of the blue. You think you know someone, etc.

  The lies I told them are the lies I tell myself.

  So now I sit at my desk and go through my address book. It’s not a pretty sight. Whole letters of the alphabet are empty. Not just Q’s and X’s, either. Where’re the F’s? Where’re the J’s? I don’t know anyone whose name begins with J? Some letters have, like, on a whole page, one uncle listed. I sit here with a new daily planner, amazed at the white space.

  Shopping, sitting around, going to Mass, I feel pitiful. I should: I look pitiful. I’m heavier, got circles under my eyes. When I went back to school to finish the year, my kids knew. Every day was agony. I was being pitied by high school kids. Even now I get looks, like I’m walking around with a sign that says, I’m alone, I’m unhappy, don’t be mean to me.

  Now it’s like people see me and say, What’s the opposite of envy?

  I’ve gone out a little since. Though then I feel guilty: that’s even less time with Todd. He’s still a kid, and even on the best days he’s alone most of the time. I’m not the kind of mom to sit him down for a heart-to-heart over a plate of sugar cookies. Now he’s getting his father’s talent for shifting rooms to avoid people. Somebody comes over, he’s like a ghost: whatever room you’re in, he’s not. Sometimes I imagine a light like a little moon that won’t let us stray too far apart, a safety light he can carry in the dark when he’s alone.

  What do I say to him that’ll help, that he can take with him, that’ll save him from trouble? What kind of advice that he wouldn’t formulate for himself?

  What do I offer in place of his father?

  Sometimes I want to get out and away from everything so much I think about a time Todd was playing outside and the dog couldn’t get to him, was stuck inside with me, and the way she stood there and would not give up, the way she gave me, over and over, that pure, insistent whine and that look at the door, like that was all she wanted.

  I’m Catholic. I still have the little Nativity scenes and peekaboo Blessed Virgins from the spelling bees. When I don’t sin, I forget all about it. When I do, I remember.

  The family’s helped. My mother, too, though she’s a pain in the ass. I feel bad for her. She keeps at it, keeps up her end, manages to have fun, even though the way she sees it, life’s a series of setups and disappointments. You can tell from the way she looks at things: the house, the addition they never put on, my father. Poor Nina’s family is too good-natured, pays its bills on time, never cuts corners, always grabs for the check, gets kicked in the ass for its trouble. Poor Nina just makes things worse for herself. And it’s true: it annoys her that she annoys people. She’s mostly sad, but her sadness reminds everybody else of hostility. When she says to me, Your father’s too good-hearted, it doesn’t sound anything like a compliment. I’m one of my mother’s disappointments, too, now. I’m just beginning to realize that.

  NINA

  I give her credit. She’s married twelve years, she finds a note—a corner of another piece of paper, she showed it to me—under the dial thing on the phone. They have to make new arrangements, he’ll call from out west. She said to me when she told me, “Ma, new arrangements.”

  What do you do? The house was paid for and she had the job at the school. No one was going to starve. So what do you do? Help her out, little things here and there. Get her to get a lawyer after him. For a few weeks they ate over. I cooked extras, lasagna, stew, you could freeze it, it’d keep for a while. We cleaned. She was never one for a clean house, but she wanted his stuff out. He wrote a letter from wherever he was, said he’d send for his things. She said he could send for whatever he liked, it’d all be out on the street. Which is where it went. She had boxes full of his crap on the curb. Bicycle outfits, sweaters, magazines, pictures in frames, baseball gloves. When you looked into the box, you saw things like playing cards and rings at the bottom. It was hard on Todd, so we tried to get her to stop, but she got wild, so we gave up. Todd sat on the front porch and watched her lug stuff out until Sandro made him come inside. Before he went, he took a few things out of the boxes, to keep. Sandro let it go. What are you going to do: take things out of the kid’s hands?

  People in cars came from all over Connecticut, stopped and poked around and picked out what they wanted. Maybe two people came to the house to see if it was all right. We pleaded with her to save some stuff or at least have a tag sale, but forget it, she didn’t want to hear it. Some wedding stuff she left in the attic. That was it. Finally Sandro took three boxes of what was left to the Salvation Army. Todd was so upset watching it go that I felt bad for Sandro.

  It was a sin.

  You just try and convince everybody it’s not the end of the world.

  You feel bad for the kid. What’s he know? What’s he supposed to make of all this? And for her.

  She says, “Ma, I feel bad for you. This’s all been hard on you.” That’s the kind of heart she’s got. I tell her we all have our crosses to bear. Her father and I were lucky: she never got into drugs, did okay in school. Was never too wild. The Ciufolos, they were dealing whatever they were dealing years before they got caught. Now their mother visits them up in Danbury prison. And poor Mrs. Palasino, she’s raising a grandson, the parents took off.

  Joanie’s husband wasn’t gone two days, Bruno Minea was over here, asking how she was. Mr. Bacigalupe, I call him. I said she was fine, thanks, and however she was, she wasn’t receiving visitors. She’s pretty, she’s still got her looks, so every ragazzo in town’s gotta sniff around, and every one of them thinks, you know, this is damaged goods, anyway. It’s like I told her: in Filene’s Basement you don’t handle the clothes the way you do upstairs. We were over the DeFeos’; Bruno sat next to her the whole time. He’s had his eye on her twenty years; twenty years he hasn’t had a good thought about her. They go back all the way to Blessed Sacrament. You see the look on his face around her we used to see from the dogs around the butcher’s. I told her, with him sitting right there, just like my mother told me: when he’s talking to you, you keep a volto sciolto pensiero stretto—an open face and a closed mind.

  For a while she was feeling better. So what does she do? Her husband tells her to fly to Chicago, they need to talk. She flies to Chicago. Todd was up all night, every night. He stayed with us. Every five minutes: when were we gonna hear? Sandro almost went out of his mind. So they talked, nothing happened, she came home. The poor kid, he was a wreck. Joanie didn’t say anything for a few days, then she came over, sat with me here in the kitchen, and cried. She said, “Ma,
what’d I do wrong? What’d I do?”

  I didn’t say anything. But I wanted to tell her this story I remembered, from back in Italy: this guy worked the land for this baroness and lived a long way from her. One day she sent for him, said she wanted to see him. So he walks this whole way to see her, and when he gets to the gates of the villa, there she is, way off by the house. And she makes a sign for him to stop where he is. And she looks at him through this telescope she has, just looks at him, him standing there at the gate holding his hat. Then she waves her hand, bye-bye, bye-bye, and sends him away.

  TODD

  My dog’s name is Audrey. She’s half Irish setter, half beagle. When we tell people that, they always look at us like, half what and half what? But she is. She’s a little bigger than a beagle, and her coat’s red like an Irish setter’s. My dad got her for us, upstate. He named her after Audrey Meadows from “The Honeymooners.” She was free. She’s nine years old. She had growths on her side, but the vet said they didn’t mean anything. He cut one off. She has white hairs on her muzzle, from stress.

  I want to go to lacrosse camp this year, but I probably won’t. My mom doesn’t even know I want to go. I don’t have a stick or anything, but I borrowed a friend’s and really liked it. I watched the NCAA championships on TV. Princeton won. I was rooting for Syracuse.

  School’s been over for two weeks. In gym we did crab ball, which was good but hurt your hands. We finished gymnastics. I was good on the rope climb, once I got used to the way it swayed near the top. I was a star on the springboard. I was best on the pommel horse. I sucked on the uneven parallel bars. Which is a girl’s thing.

  I live alone with my mother.

  We see a lot of my mother’s parents—Nina and Sandro, I call them. My friends say, God, you call your grandparents that? I go, Yeah. That’s their names. My father’s parents we hardly ever see. I guess they’re ashamed.

  When my dad left, he left a note on the phone. That was it. He mighta snuck into my room and said good-bye or something, but I don’t know. I’m a light sleeper. He sent me a letter that was two pages long once he got out to Colorado, but it was not real informative. I sent him back this card I made of Audrey flying an F-16 and hanging a paw out the canopy. Audrey was saying, “WHEN ARE YOU COMING BACK?” He wrote and thanked me like that wasn’t a serious question.

  The day I got his letter I watched cable twenty-three straight hours, nine in the morning to eight in the morning, still my record. My mom was a wreck. I saw the strangest ending to any movie ever. The movie was called Half Angel. There’s a good gangster and a bad gangster. At the end the good gangster goes to kiss the girl, and right in the middle of it his friend starts this gross story about this other gangster who kills everybody. His friend goes, “Yeah, Bugs himself was drooling with the lust of slaughter.” That’s exactly what he said, and the movie ends like that. I watched it twice, at 1:00 A.M. and 4:00 A.M., because I couldn’t believe it.

  A few weeks after my father left, my mother and I had a fight. We had more fights than that, but this was a big one. I broke about seven things in my room, and my mother kicked open the door. She broke the lock. It was like martial arts or something. Later she said, “When did you ever have it so bad? What did we ever do to you?” So I said, “Okay,” and told her about the time we went to Moodus Lake to look at the property they bought and never did anything with. We went there like once every three years to prove to ourselves we still had it. We never used it. Where our part was, the water was all weedy and gross, like a swamp, and there was no driveway in—you had to walk through the woods—and not even a good place to camp. We all went up there, and they went off to talk to the owner of the land association or somebody and told me to lock the doors and not let anybody in and wait where I was. Where was I going? We were pulled off this dirt road in the middle of the woods. One side of the car had like smashed branches up against the windows. I just sat there. They couldn’t find him. It was like they were gone forever. Then they couldn’t find the car. They took the wrong trail or something. It got dark. I was in the backseat. I had the radio on. I thought it’d be good for them if I ran the battery down, and then I thought that was stupid, because we’d all be stuck here when they got back. Even so, I left it on. And the disc jockey or whoever must’ve put a stack of records on the turntable and gone away, because something stuck, and the station played “Down in the Boondocks” like fifty times in a row. The guy announced it once, and then it just kept coming on. I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t change the station or turn it off. I kept thinking the next time the guy would come in and stop it. I wanted to see if he’d apologize, or what. I don’t know what happened. Finally I got too scared for the battery and turned it off. I could still hear the song in my head. It was pitch-black, and there were all these cricket sounds and rustlings. I spent some time closing my eyes and checking out those circles and gray things that float around behind your eyelids. I thought, They don’t even have a flashlight. The song coming back was worse than the sound of the woods: Down in the Boondocks. I sang it, though that was the last thing I wanted to do: “‘People put me down ’cause that’s the side of town I was born in. I love her, she loves me, but I don’t fit in her society.’” Then I heard them calling, and I turned on the headlights, and they found me.

  BRUNO

  Three guys walk into a bar. Roof collapses, kills ’em all. Turns out they had cancer.

  Hard Luck stories. Poor Me stories. Isn’t It Sad stories. Isn’t it sad I had to do what I had to do? I looked the other way during kickbacks, I put less in the Sunday envelope, I hit my kid and now he’s got this stutter, my husband left me and I had to raise my three blind girls alone. Bruno, Bruno, poor Elena, poor Lucia, poor whoever, poor me, no one should have this much trouble. Bruno, Bruno, you’re so hardhearted. Isn’t it sad? I say, You got trouble? Too bad, my condolences, deal with it. There’s no trick to this. I’m not here as a therapist. This guy Darwin on TV had it right: you got too many legs, a fin out to here, teeth smaller than Harvey across the rock, you’re not gonna make it. And what is that? What? Bad luck? You pray all your life you don’t get luck like some people get. Guys with no eyes, guys whose whole families go down on some boat, guys who’re vegetables, get fed off a tray. People say, Bruno you wouldn’t be so hard it happened to you—I say, My father came over here, he was fourteen years old, knew four words of English—four—worked on the highways going in upstate for three days and a back-loader dumped a load of shale where he was standing, crushed his legs. Guy called, “All clear?” and my dad waved and stood there. My mother died of this simple thing because some Mick doctor couldn’t find his ass with both hands and a diagram. I’m forty-two years old, never got married, I’ve gone broke twice. Started up from nothing twice. Now I sell cars. You think I like selling cars? My life is a bowl of roses selling cars?

  I came here, started working in the off-season. Everything was down. Sales were down. The economy was down. Inventory was down. Spirits were down, morale was down, the shade in my office was down. The desk they gave me, the drawers didn’t open. They probably figured, Guinea, he’s not gonna write anything, anyway. They told me I couldn’t use the coffee machine. I hadda go across the street. You imagine this? Bruno, it’s only an eight-cupper. Oh, I didn’t realize. You know what it’s like, you’re humping to sell the car, Gee, Mr. Dickhead, would you like a cuppa coffee? Okay, well, we’ll have to go across the street, see, because I got this disease and they don’t let me touch their fucking coffeepot. Gas shortage, oil shortage, money shortage, no beans for the soup: just the time to be selling ocean-liner Buicks in Bridgeport. I’m brand new at this, standing there in my—I got one suit, I change the shirt and ties day to day—and guys’re coming in without a pot to piss in, just looking for transportation, and I’m pushing station wagons with power sunroofs. Four doors you can land planes on. The whole world’s selling little Nip cars to Yupsters at eighty-percent markups and I’m selling V-8s to cane-dragging Sanka-sucking cottont
ops. But I sold. I sold to everybody. I sold to morons. I sold to kids. I sold to widows with bad eyesight. I sold to sharpies. I sold to Puerto Ricans. I sold to mulignons. I sold to family. I got my coffeepot. I drink their coffee now.

  You don’t think I cut corners? You don’t think I did what I had to, to move inventory? You don’t think I lied to people? You don’t think I cheated people? Before we had a name for it, before we called it anything, we did it.

  So now I hear, Bruno, you been lucky. You been doing good lately. Lately kiss my ass lately.

  Bruno, you’re not for her, leave her alone, she’s had too much trouble.

  Listen to this: I am the guy for her. I am the guy.

  Bruno, she lost her husband. Hey, she lost her husband. Worse: the guy ran off and left her. She’s alone in the world. She’s gotta raise the kid by herself. It’s tough. Bruno, she doesn’t need you around, complicating things. I told her what the loan sharks used to tell me on Kissuth Street: Hey, I’m not here to observe your problem. I’m here to enlarge it.

  Joanie and I go back to when we were kids on North Avenue. We go back to Blessed Sacrament. Years later, I told her I was the guy, when we were still kids. She put her hand right up to touch your mouth when you were talking. You could taste her.

  What do I want from her? What are my intentions toward her? The days I don’t see her, the days I don’t hear about her, I draw her picture on the wall.

  PART ONE

  Todd was getting confirmed. Confirmation made him an adult in the eyes of the Church. At the ceremony, Joanie tried to remember her own confirmation but couldn’t. She squatted in the pew and thought dull and repetitive things like, Do I really have a son old enough to be confirmed? The bishop read Todd’s name out of sequence, the only mistake he made all day. Back at home, Todd changed into play clothes and took off for parts unknown while Joanie napped away the rest of the afternoon. The whole thing seemed like an official transition to something more unpleasant.