John Darnielle - Wolf in White Van

I looked back over at the TV; everybody had their eyes firmly fixed on the guest, who was holding up more records by so many rock bands. He said the problem was everywhere, it was epidemic. But at that moment all I could see was the wolf in the white van, so alive, so strong. Hidden from view, unnoticed, concealed. And I thought, maybe he’s real, this wolf, and he’s really out there in a white van somewhere, riding around. Maybe he’s in the far back, pacing back and forth, circling, the pads of his huge paws raw and cracking, his thick, sharp claws dully clicking against the raised rusty steel track ridges on the floor. Maybe he’s sound asleep, or maybe he’s just pretending. And then the van stops somewhere, maybe, and somebody gets out and walks around the side to the back and grabs hold of the handle and flings the doors open wide. Maybe whoever’s kept him wears a mechanic’s jumpsuit and some sunglasses, and he hasn’t fed the great wolf for weeks, cruising the streets of the city at night, and the wolf’s crazy with hunger now; he can’t even think. Maybe he’s not locked up in the back at all: he could be riding in the passenger seat, like a dog, just sitting and staring out the open window, looking around, checking everybody out. Maybe he’s over in the other seat behind the steering wheel. Maybe he’s driving.

I swept all the old medication bottles from the counter into a plastic bag, and I meant to throw them away, but I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to because … for a lot of reasons I didn’t want to. As I put them into the bag one at a time I kept coming up with more reasons not to toss them out: casually, like I was trying out excuses. No reason seemed to hold its weight for long. I just couldn’t throw the medications away, was the end of it. I tied a knot in the bag and I placed it back in the cabinet I’d been cleaning. I pushed it back a little ways, thinking to put it out of view, but then I thought better, and I looked at it for a minute before closing the cabinet. There was plenty more to clean. Old cleansers and rags by the dozen under the sink, canisters leaving rust rings on the contact paper. No shortage of things still left to do.

I caught Vicky looking at my face in the light — I was sitting at my desk with some old pictures I’d dug out from an unmarked box. Me and my grandma running with geese somewhere. The zoo, I guess. Or on vacation. I wasn’t sure.

If I’m in a bathroom out there in the world someplace I’ll catch the glint myself on the raised ridges on either side of my mouth area, the dully shining skin. “Pretty bad?” I said.

“No, now, no,” she said, with a little catching laugh in her breath. “You know I work doubles on weekends out at Loma Linda, though.”

“No,” I said. My conceptions of people’s outside lives are pretty crude: basic, two-dimensional stuff.

“I do, I do,” she said. “Anyway, my sister’s friend works reconstructive. They had somebody like you in there just last week.”

Our eyes met. This doesn’t happen for me often, with anybody. It felt so naked. I tried to stay with it, to be present for it, to see where it would go.

“They can do so many things now, honey,” she said, returning her eyes to her work. She was prepping some swabs for my cleaning. “It’s a lot they can do since you first got hurt.”

“I–I know. I talked to them about it a couple years back.”

“How long ago was that?” she said, her gaze back on me, pretty steady. You forget how well people know you, when they know you.

I opened a drawer on the left side of my desk, the personal business side, which doesn’t see a lot of traffic. I moved some stuff around and found a few brochures. One was even from Loma Linda. Imagine.

Vicky looked them over. “They’re in their own building now,” she said. “This one is from when they were still over in the main surgery building.” The western desert gives way a little. Marsh gas? Some smell on the wind. DON FACE MASK. TRACE BACK. CONTINUE DUE EAST. DIG SHELTER.

“Anyway,” she said, “you could call them,” and she swabbed my cheeks with some glycerine on a compress, so gentle it barely stung at all.

“It’s your grandmother,” Dad said on the phone after we’d finished up our opening moves today. “Last night she — she died last night.”

When you shoot yourself in the face with a Marlin 39A, one thing you don’t think about is what your father will tell his mother when it becomes necessary to tell her something’s happened. My grandfather on my father’s side had been dead for over a decade; he had a heart attack one day in the supermarket. I’d overheard my dad explaining it to Mom after he came home early from work. “The aisle was empty, it was early,” he said. “He was lying there for — for a little while.” I was twelve; they took me to the funeral at Oak Park and I stood quietly imagining what the screams would sound like if the coffin lid sprung open and something crawled out.

Grandma stayed on alone in the giant house where my dad and his brothers had grown up. When, eventually, the climb up the stairs got to be too much, she moved downstairs, and the second floor became an accidental museum commemorating the last day anybody’d lived there. I used to hide out up there when we’d visit and try to get lost in the dusty, abandoned feeling of a place where nothing ever happens.

What they told my grandmother after the accident was that I had been in a car accident and that everyone else in the vehicle had been killed. This was an important detail, because lots of people get into car accidents and come out basically OK. They break arms or they get concussions, and maybe they get brain damage and can’t remember things like they used to. But they don’t look markedly different, unless maybe their face hits the windshield and the car catches fire and everybody else inside gets burned to death. These were two of the details my father had asked me to memorize in case Grandma ever asked me about the accident and to mention if she did. “She’s not going to ask you to talk about it, I know she won’t,” he said. “But in case she does.”

One of the therapists I had to go to later on tried getting me to talk about why I was angry at my parents, and I’d say I didn’t think I really was particularly angry at them except maybe at my dad for making me lie to his mother. I only had one grandma left; it felt wrong to tell her stories. “Is there anything earlier?” she’d say then, and I’d shake my head no: the main thing is having to lie to my grandmother. “So if that’s the main thing,” she said, once, “what are some of the other things?”

It gets to the point where you almost want to make something up just to keep them happy, to keep from being the person who makes them feel like they’re wasting their time. But I try to be honest always. It’s important to me.

“There aren’t really any other things,” I said.

In the early days there hadn’t been anybody my parents weren’t going to sue. But they would have needed my cooperation to go after anybody besides the gun people, so that’s who they settled on: the gun people. Most lawyers would have strung them along for a while, I think. But the one they did find, in the Yellow Pages, was a good guy, and he told them point blank that nobody was ever going to get a dime from the gun people. That was the end of that idea. He told them their legal money would be better spent on somebody to negotiate with insurance companies — somebody who knew that accidents happen, and that that’s what insurance is really for, after all. Accident : this was the great gift, free and clear, that the Yellow Pages lawyer gave my parents when they called him. He did also say that they might have a case if they wanted to sue whoever’d originally sold my father the rifle, though.