Sometimes the Wolf

PROLOGUE

THE BIG MAN STOOD in the cold watching the road. He wore an orange vest over his buttoned shirt and held a traffic sign in his hand that he flipped from time to time as he passed the minutes watching the road and waiting. Behind in the night a single blinking orange light marked his silhouette, causing his shape to shift and glimmer against the pavement on which he stood. There was the sound in the distance of jet planes landing and taking off, the high wheeling cut of their engines overhead as they made their turns through the clouds, dropping out of the air a couple miles away and moving earthward.

He had never been on a plane and all he could think of as he stood there was the way the wings seemed to drift open, the flaps bent down like a bird coming to rest on a lake. His mind taken back to a time forty years ago when, as a boy, he had sat out in the prairie grass watching chevrons of snow geese land on a pond in the Palouse. So many of them that the water appeared white as their feathers and the sound of the birds calling to each other deafened him.

He was half turned on his heels when the headlights broke from around the corner of the road and lit him full. The road fenced in on one side with the creep of blackberries and on the other by a stand of oaks that had long since lost their coverings. The dry rasp of leaves heard from within the stand any time the wind moved. He tried to remember what he was meant to do but it didn’t come to him and he stood there in the middle of the road holding the sign. The car now drawn closer and the lights bathing his jeans in an unnatural shade of mercury blue.

There was no one around and as the car came to a stop he stepped forward and watched the window come down. “Construction?” the driver asked.

“Just up the road. Shouldn’t be more than a few minutes.”

With a flick of his hand, the driver brought a watch free from his shirtsleeve and checked the time. He wore a suit jacket and black pants. A black cap rested on the passenger seat with a shiny plastic half bill. He leaned forward on the wheel and looked toward the rounded curve of the road, where above at the bend the planes could be seen landing. He turned and looked behind him down the road from which he’d come. When he turned back around, he said, “It’s late for construction.”

“Best time,” the big man said.

The driver looked up the road again. “Is there a detour? Some other way to get through?”

“You can go down the way you came but it will take you just as long. Maybe longer.”

The driver leaned back in his seat and let the air out of his lungs in a long exhale. Somewhere in the oaks the leaves were moving again but there was no wind. And the driver, who sat slumped in his seat watching the road, heard only the hum of the car’s engine and the soft putter of the exhaust.

“Hello,” a voice said.

The driver turned and looked up not at the big man but into the face of someone much skinnier. His face hollowed out beneath the eyes where his cheekbones protruded in smooth orbs, the shadows beneath filling the length of his face all the way to his chin. The driver opened his mouth to respond but felt only the hard crack of metal come across his chin, and then on his forehead, repeated again and again.

When the skinny man brought his hand back from within the car it resembled a red candied apple. Rounded and shiny with blood. The black butt of a pistol visible at the base of his fist.

With the door open and the car still running, they carried the driver around to the trunk and placed him inside. The big man, who was still thinking about snow geese, had already thrown the vest and sign to the side of the road.