Elizabeth McCracken - Thunderstruck & Other Stories

“Why not?”

“Because they will eat you. Like this.” He lunged and barked. “Let’s hear you do a wolf.”

The boy tried.

“That’s a coyote ,” said Peter Elroy in a disgusted voice. “Wolf. Listen.”

He’d been dreaming of wolves lately; he had wolves on the brain. In his dreams he couldn’t tell whether they’d come to protect him or rip him to shreds, and though he thought about telling Myra, he was worried she would say, Well, it’s obvious. Wolf equals death . She prided herself these days on how easily she could say death and dying , and Peter Elroy was mostly grateful for that ease.

No, he thought now. The wolf wasn’t death.

“Try again,” he said to the boy, but then the Young Mother poked her head into the den and said, “Could there be less howling, please?”

On her hip she balanced the little girl, who had a look of Victorian disapproval on her face. Even the girl’s dark hair looked annoyed and half-awake.

“Let’s go make lunch,” the Young Mother said to her.

“I don’t vant to. I vant to stay my Desi.”

“I’ll keep an eye on her,” said the boy.

The Young Mother looked at Peter Elroy. “Please,” he said, and meant it. Three-year-olds were worse at conversation than five-year-olds, but on the other hand they were better people. They lacked ambition. He sensed that the boy already believed himself to be the smartest person in any room.

“Down you go,” the Young Mother said to the girl, and set her on the floor. “Can I get you anything, Peter?”

“Glass of cold arsenic.”

“We’re out.”

“A glass of white wine, then.”

She looked at her watch. “Really?”

“Palliative,” he explained. He turned to the girl. “Can you do a wolf?”

“All right,” the Young Mother said dubiously, and left the room.

“Rawer!” said the girl, showing her little pointed incisors.

“Very good,” said Peter Elroy. “Extremely frightening.”

“Jane thinks she’s not going to die,” the boy offered.

Peter Elroy appraised her. “If anyone could buck the system, it’ll be Jane here.”

“But everybody dies!” the boy said, exasperated. “That’s how it works .”

“Rawer!” the girl said again.

“No, Jane. Like this.” The boy howled from his stomach. It was a good performance. “I’m not afraid of wolves,” he said when he was done.

“That’s not interesting,” Peter Elroy said. “Let’s talk about what you are afraid of. Mummies?”

“I’m not afraid of anything,” said the boy.

“Ghosts, then.”

“I’m not afraid of ghosts. I’m not afraid of pirates. I’m not afraid of lions.”

“I’m not afraid lions,” said the little girl.

“Shh, Jane. I’m not afraid of vampires.”

“I’m afraid vampires,” the girl said sadly.

“Me, too,” said Peter Elroy.

“I’m afraid volves,” said the little girl.

“I’m kind of afraid of bullies,” said the boy.

“I was a bully,” said Peter Elroy. “A man needs to be a bully, if he wants to get anything done. Your father will tell you otherwise, I imagine, but do you know what? Your father is a bully. Bigger bully than me.”

The boy frowned, his eyebrows serious. “My dad is not a bully.”

“He bullied me pretty bad. One day you’ll watch that movie and see. There’s nothing like a wolf, you know. A volf. Your father,” he said, and then he stopped. He told himself it was the morphine that was making him talk to small children like this, but he would have any day of his life: he just spent no time with children. “You must look after your parents, you know. Otherwise the wolves will eat you.”

“Will they really?” said the boy.

“Not out of meanness . It’s just their nature.”

The boy scratched his chin in a cartoon of thoughtfulness. “How do you get them not to?”

“You talk to them. Wolves are very reasonable. Do you speak wolf?”

The children shook their heads, but the girl said, “I do, a little bit,” and she measured with her index finger and thumb the little bit of wolf she spoke.

“No, you don’t,” said the boy.

“It’s all right,” said Peter Elroy, “I’m fluent.”

Eventually the Young Mother cleared the children out for lunch. She put the glass of wine on the desk, where he couldn’t reach it. “You rest,” she said to Peter Elroy. “That sofa reclines, if you’re interested.”

She had not mentioned his diagnosis, and he knew that she wouldn’t. This was the trouble with a terminal illness: you weren’t allowed to be sick, you were only dying, and nobody wanted the answer to the question How are you feeling? to be Ever closer to death, thanks .

Once she’d gone, he sat back carefully, so as not to call any of the sofa’s hardware into action. For a moment he imagined making a break for it while the children ate their lunch. He would step through the sliding glass doors and just — go. He could picture them opening the door to the den, warily at first (so as not to disturb him), then flinging it open, then looking around in shock. The strange gentleman was gone. Perhaps he’d leave his cuff links and ring behind, perhaps nothing but a cutting scent that might be either an expensive cologne or a cheap antiseptic. They’d touch the leather of the sofa where he’d been sitting. It’s still warm. He can’t have gotten far .

The truth was he wasn’t sure he could stand up off the sofa. Instead he looked at the woods, not filled with wolves but dotted with chipmunks. The trees were so slender you could see the passing traffic on their far side.

Peter Elroy, disappear? He had no talent for it. That was the problem.

Unlike Ian, whose name was at the bottom of those four posters (where was Peter’s?) but who wasn’t in evidence anywhere else in this awful, characterless house — and hadn’t Peter tried to teach Ian that character was everything? Even the children seemed to belong only to the wife, lean and dark, whatever her family background was: she was some ethnic cocktail he couldn’t pinpoint, and that irked him, he wanted to ask her what she was, but you weren’t allowed to do that anymore.

Ian Casey, the invisible man. That was what he was famous for, how he made his living: he edited out even his shadow if it fell across an interviewee, his most passing camera-shouldering reflection in a shop window. Peter could only imagine what he looked like now: heavier, the sandy blond hair grown long and sandy gray. Reclusive director Ian Casey , he was occasionally called, as though he lived in a folly at the back of someone’s garden instead of in an ugly gated community. The people in his films seemed to forget that he was there, that the microphone was live and the film was rolling. They said things they never should have, and they said them at length. He gave them enough rope. He’d given Peter Elroy enough, thirty years before. He’d said, “A story about an unlikely friendship. You and me. Just talking.”

So they borrowed a car and drove cross-country. Or rather, Peter drove. Ian didn’t know how, and besides, someone had to hold the camera. It was 1981. They’d known each other since they’d been teenagers and they’d always talked about a cross-country trip. Ian was in grad school in New York; Peter had finished his second year teaching economics to undergraduates in New Hampshire. Ian was small and fair-haired, in dirty T-shirts from fifteen years before, Dylan and the Dead. Peter favored ragtime and off-color antique jazz you couldn’t play on the radio. He pomaded his dark hair and wore cuff links and mocked.