Rick Moody - The Diviners

When dawn comes, the wolves rise up out of their satiety in a circle around the vivisected bucks. The wolves, human again, with their human clothes in tatters. There’s Devon Porter, the daughter of one of the founders of the Central Intelligence Agency and one of the best interior decorators in Greenwich, her mouth ringed with gore. Beside her is Laney Carrington, also an heiress, who seems to have torn a rather expensive gown during last night’s feast. Beside them is Laney’s housekeeper, an Irish lass called Siobhan McCallister, and Siobhan is making a joke about how venison is not meant to be eaten as sushi is eaten. The three women have a good laugh. A contractor from Norwalk, Bob Gallace, wearing an expression like he is full of worries, is dusting off Clay Goldberg, the internist from Scarsdale. Bob tells Clay he really ought to wipe around his mouth and offers him a handkerchief. Clay says, “If only venison was Thanksgiving fare. I’d take a side of it home to the wife.”

“Good point,” Bob says, and then shouts generally, “Hey, does anyone want a steak or two for Thanksgiving? I can bring out the pickup and a hacksaw.” There are a couple of laughs. “Or maybe one of the heads for the wall of your library?” They’d meant to kill some of the wild turkeys. That’s the irony of it all. This town is crawling with wild turkeys.

However, there are those in the pack who are not worrying about turkeys. They are shocked by what the camera reveals now. There was trouble last night. The adults gather by the bodies of the two fallen hunters, where the young pups are shocked by what they have done. They all agree that someone is going to have to dig graves for the two men. And yet a woman moaning nearby alerts them to another tale, just as dark. Liz Carter, the very young, newly accredited English teacher from Fairfield Academy, took the arrow that one of the hunters managed to fire off before his demise. She’s pinned against a maple, impaled at the shoulder, still bleeding.

It’s Bob who calls out, “Oh my god, Liz!”

Vanessa says to the intern, over at her place to watch, while they eat Cajun pizza, “It’s great that they’re willing to let the women fight just as violently as the men. There should be, I don’t know, bruises on their cheeks, and they should have to shake off the hurt and get back into the fray and stuff. I mean, look at her. She’s a mess.” That is, look at Liz Carter, pale, fatigued from loss of blood, but very much alive. She’s going to have to go to her English class and explain why she has a very deep puncture wound in her left shoulder. And that’s after she goes to the hospital and has a large composite arrow, only inches from her heart, removed by the region’s best surgeons. When Clay and Bob and Mike Woodwell attempt to carry her out to the road, she lapses quickly into unconsciousness.

The action cuts away to Felicia Adams, who arrives back at home, in tattered jeans and sweater, to find her lover, Edwin, waiting for her at the door. He takes one look and shakes his head with a knowing weariness.

“I’m still supposed to believe this line that you have some kind of overnight job three nights a month, and that this is what happens to your clothes every time you go to this job? This is what I’m supposed to believe?”

Felicia says, “You can believe what you want. Remember when I told you that I was a woman who had some issues? Well, one of my issues is work. One of my jobs isn’t terribly pleasant.”

“If you’re carrying on with another man, Felicia, you know it’s going to come between us.”

“I’m not carrying on, as you put it, Edwin, I’ve told you already. And if I was, this wouldn’t be the outfit that I’d be wearing to see him! I don’t have time to carry on, I don’t have time to love anyone but you and the kids. That’s all I want to do, and I can barely keep up with it. C’mon, Eddie, it’s Thanksgiving, and we don’t have any of the stuff we need for Thanksgiving dinner! We don’t have any turkey and we don’t have any cranberry sauce. We don’t have anything for the kids!”

Felicia’s disabled son, Vern (played by an actor who actually has cerebral palsy), walks, in his rickety way, into the shot. As always, he understands more than he’s saying. He says almost nothing. With his crutches, he drags along his withered legs. Felicia and Edwin lay off the fighting at the appearance of the boy with the preternatural calm.

On Eleventh Street, in Brooklyn, Allison Maiser argues that the moment is, she says, just like in Ibsen, just like A Doll’s House. That is, the moment is rich with dramatic irony. Edwin thinks Felicia Adams is a gentle homebody who works hard at the bar, but actually she’s trying to cover up that she’s just been out in the woods eating deer from the bone with a pack of wolves. Every character, Allison says, knows something that no one else knows. This is the law of the pack, which is therefore the secret of the show, that you cannot give away the secret knowledge of the group. Those who have given away the pack have mysteriously vanished or met a grisly fate. Felicia can’t tell Edwin about it and she can’t tell him about what has really been worrying her for months —

“The kids,” Vanessa says.

The intern says, “Shhhhh.”

It’s what they all worry about, the adults of the werewolf pack. That their precious kids, the towheaded snowboarding or water-skiing teens of Fairfield County, growing up with all the comforts and advantages of affluence, might turn out to be bloodthirsty animals. They might be playing Pop Warner football one afternoon at dusk, they might be at driving school one afternoon, and, to their horror, they will begin to sprout an ungainly growth of facial hair. They will dispatch three raccoons and somebody’s favorite house cat, and they will howl. The pack lives in dread of this familiar turn of events. Though the pack looks after its own, the pack wants only that the gene for its mutation should be recessive. The pack would have its ranks remain thin. In the meantime, the members worry.

Felicia is no exception. The younger boy, Vern, is just twelve, and should he become a werewolf, he will be a werewolf eaten by the others the first night out. And then there’s the older boy, Bennett. She’s so happy that Bennett is fifteen already, because fifteen is quite late to discover the lupine truth about yourself.

Back to the main action! Edwin, the boyfriend, is furious with Felicia’s meager excuses, or so it seems, and he announces he’s going out, to where we do not know. We see Edwin at a pay phone in town, where, with a furtive expression, he dials what is clearly a bad-news telephone number.

“Yo, brother. Yeah, it’s your man, E. Watson. No doubt, no doubt. Had to take care of a few things. Some obligations. Letting the heat die down. But now E. Watson is back, real deal. Look, yeah, I’m going to pay what I owe, my brother, know what I’m saying? Most certainly. Thing is, can you be fronting me? Today is Thanksgiving Day, bro; I need to bring home something for my girl or else I just cannot show my face no more. Have pity on a brother. You will get the first part of the profit, for sure, the second part will be going toward a turkey, then I will work for you for free until all is forgiven.”

Edwin has gone back to dealing? On this day of all days! He’s such an ineffective drug dealer! And there’s no doubt something horrible will transpire the minute he arrives at the house of the evil drug dealer, Alfonse Tilden, who lives in the projects over by the railroad station. (Mike Woodwell, the lineman, tangled with Alfonse last season in one of the two episodes in which no one at all changed into a werewolf.)

Now there is a commercial break.