Jim Shepard - Kiss of the Wolf

Todd didn’t answer. Father didn’t say anything. He could hear a little buzzing on the line.

“I don’t know if it’s right for me. I don’t know if I should be doing this,” Todd said.

“Oh, come on,” Father said, surprising him. “You had months to think about this. Now you don’t know if it’s right for you?”

“I guess I shoulda called earlier,” Todd said. He was so dying to get off the phone he did knee bends where he stood, swinging his free hand around.

“Just give it a shot,” Father said. He sounded irritated.

Todd tried to figure out what to say next.

“You don’t know if you’re gonna like it till you give it a try,” Father said.

Todd did a knee bend all the way to the floor. He put his free hand on top of his head.

“You do one or two, you decide you don’t like it, you can quit with my blessing,” Father said. “All right?”

“All right,” Todd said. He closed his eyes. It was just like the sacrilege about Communion. “All right.”

“Wednesday night. Seven o’clock,” Father said. “See you then.” He hung up.

Todd turned the receiver around in his hands and put the earpiece against his forehead. He hung up. He could have said it was a mortal sin on his soul he was worried about, and that he’d confess it later, and then later he could have made up something.

He wandered into the upstairs bathroom and sat on the toilet in despair. The phone rang. On the second ring, his mother got it downstairs.

Back in his bedroom, he stood next to his extension, waiting, afraid to pick it up. The click would give him away. But he had to know if it was Father Cleary. He eased up the receiver.

It was Bruno. He didn’t notice the click.

Bruno said, “I’m not gonna give it up. I am not gonna give it up. I told her, ‘If there’s anything to find out, I’m gonna find it out.’ I am on the case. ”

“Todd, get off the phone,” his mother said sharply. He hung up immediately.

Outside, somebody emptied what sounded like a load of rocks into a garbage can. Todd sat on his bed and folded his hands and looked at the phone, his legs, and Audrey, curled again onto her back, snoring, her incisors still showing.

In strangolagalli, you lose a man in your family that’s it, you wear black the rest of your life. I have a great-aunt over there still in mourning; her husband died in 1944.

Sandro says this’ll kill one or both of them, meaning the Monteleones. He thinks they’re gonna go to pieces. I tell him maybe the husband. Maybe Tommy Senior. As for Lucia, are you kidding? She’s the kind of woman, if there were no fronts on her kitchen cabinets, her kitchen would still look neat.

I was thirteen when my father died. He died in August in a heat wave. We sat under the grape arbor he built in the backyard and received the family. One of us had to keep running around the front to get the people arriving, because our doorbell didn’t work.

It was the kinda bell you couldn’t hear when you rang it, so you didn’t know if it was broken and you should knock, or if you should wait to see if anybody came, or what.

My mother was in black. It was so hot the asphalt was soft, and she had a black sweater on. I remember flies around her head. She watched us kids play in the tomatoes. It was so hot in there among the stalks you could hardly breathe. And you got the pesticide powder from the leaves all over your hands.

The family gathered around the big cement table, and she sat off by herself. Everyone paid their respects, but nobody wanted to crowd her.

She dabbed at the top of her forehead with a napkin. She watched people come and go. She asked how we could play so hard in the heat, and made us come out of the tomatoes and sit in the shade. She said we were pazza. With her dialect it sounded like pots. She said even the animals knew better.

The grapes were in, and we ate them off the vine while we sat there. You had to be careful in the big clusters for spiders.

My sister squeezed the skins so that the centers would pop out. Then she ate just the skins.

What I never told anyone was that the week my father died I dreamt he was asking me to go get medicine for him — he couldn’t get out of bed — and I wouldn’t. And he looked at my face like he knew that I would’ve gone for my mother.

That was my secret while I sat and ate the grapes.

Poor Lucia. Perry she was proud of, but Tommy — you know. Tommy was the first.

How do we get used to this? That’s the secret. How do we do it?

My mother thought here in America the big problems were always just about to get worked out. Polio, TB, influenza, bad roads, prejudice. Someone was off somewhere making new medicines, working out the answers. Our job was to sit tight and hope it happened in time. God protected babies, drunks, and the United States.

In bad times, like when my younger sister got sick with the influenza that killed my baby brother in Italy, my mother would sit in her chair in the kitchen and close her eyes and name the villages surrounding Strangolagalli. Bovile, Ciprano, Monte San Giovanni, she would describe them to herself. We’d tiptoe around the house while she talked about orchards, terraces, and fountains.

When my father died, we waited for her to do that, and she didn’t.

She was spotty about Mass afterwards. When the priest would finally see us, he’d take us aside to see if we were okay. What were we going to say?

I was there when he finally cornered her. She’d managed to avoid him for a little while. He told her something about God’s will, and she quoted back to him an old Calabrian saying: that God was in charge of everything, but the devil was in charge of the timing.

I was raised mostly by my aunt and uncle. They’re dead, too. My mother, when she went out, it was to pick up something for dinner. My father had a little den and used it.

He was apparently a massive pain in the ass even before they crushed his legs. He got a little money out of that, but how much was compensation then? He hung around the house and listened to the radio and complained. He covered his legs with a blanket even in the summer, and I had to tuck it back in when it slipped off. He drank Old Sunnybrook, this rye that took the print off coasters. The label said, “Takes the wrinkles out of your face and makes your asshole smile.” No lie. Look it up.

My aunt told me when he died, “Your father just was never happy, you know? He just never figured out how to be happy.” We’re standing there at the grave site, and she tells me that.

I was fifteen years old. I felt like telling her, If we knew how to fix that, we’d all be in clover.

My aunt, the one that died, she was best friends with Lucia.

Tommy I knew from when he was a little little kid. He ran a paper-route scam from the time he was about eleven. He’d come by and collect twice for the same week, once from the father, once from the mother. He’d wait until one or the other was out.

My aunt had him figured out early, starting writing down his visits on a pad near the phone. The first time she caught him, she said, “I don’t think so, Tommy,” and he knew enough not to push it. The second time she took him by the hair and brought him inside and showed him the list. She said that at that point he said — his head all twisted around, she’s still got him by the hair, eleven years old — that it was his feeling, in a case like this, that the customer was always right.

One thing you had to say about Tommy: this was no lazy guy. This was a young man who could operate. You woke him 6:00 A.M. Christmas morning and put him down in East Dipstick with seven cents, and by noon the next day he had somebody by the balls.