Wolf Radio

The wolf woman called into the show Thursday afternoon. “Long time listener, first time caller,” she said over the wind rush of a rolled-down window.

“Look,” she said. “I need you to do something about the wolves outside my house.”

“This is Perennial Hour, a program about plants and botanicals,” I said. “I think you have the wrong number.”

“No,” she said. “No. You’re Succulent Susan, right? Last week, you told a woman to add lemon balm to her baby’s bottle to make it stop crying. You’ve got to help me with all these wolves. They come in the evening. They eat my mint. They dig up my squash. They come right up to the windows and look inside.” 

That stumped me. I sat back in my chair in the booth. I could hear her sucking on a cigarette. My producer rolled her eyes and wound her finger in a circle near her temple. 

If this were a mole problem, I’d have told her to fling her coffee grounds out into the grass each morning. If stray cats, I’d have told her to plant a bed of rue. 

“Call back tomorrow,” I said. “I’ll try to have an answer for you then.”

That night, during dinner with my husband, he kept having to tell me things two or three times before I heard him.

“I’m sorry to bore you,” he said, reaching far across the table to get the dressing himself. We kept the lights low because of his headaches, which he described as a railroad spike behind his right eye.

My husband worked as a data analyst at a bank, which was sometimes interesting, and sometimes not. The data, he said, revealed patterns you might not expect. Two customers might take the same action for different reasons, to different effect. It is at once intimate and detached, to see people through such a shrouded glass. Gardening is like that, too. The way a garden yellows up when it has been given too little water is the same as when it has been given too much. Changes on the outside result from a confluence of factors that have been taking place under the surface for a long time. 

He deposited the bowls into the dishwasher and wiped the glass-top stove with a wet sponge, then turned up the carpeted stairs to our bedroom. I took in the stillness which sometimes catches me off-guard, though stillness is easy to come by, here. We had no pets, no children. Our lives were spacious and out of the way of others. I put away the cups and, at the base of the stairs, I paused. I couldn’t stop wondering about the wolf woman, wherever she was. 

At the top of the stairs, the dusk light crept through the thin curtained windows, the gravity of the bedroom, the evening. I turned away from it, easing into my chair in the study, pulling books down and poring through them, muttering wolves, wolves, until my husband nudged me in the morning, his coat folded over his other arm. He was a tall man with brown eyes and a bright face, humor always there beneath his thick features, as if his last name were something playful, like “Dunklee,” which it was.

———

She called at the same time, though it didn’t sound like she was driving.

“Where are you now, ah—” 

My producer shrugged.

“Wendy,” she said. “I’m on my back porch looking out over the farm.”

“That sounds lovely.”

I pictured her leaning against the post, a shed or barn beyond it.

“They know I stay back here a lot. They creep up behind the silo, keeping it between them and me. That’s how they get so close. What’ve you got for me?”

“Globe thistle,” I declared. “Plant a ring of globe thistle around the area you want to protect. Leave no gaps, no holes wider than a foot.” 

It would be a lot of work, a lot of digging. But she didn’t complain like I expected her to. She thanked me and hung up, and for the rest of the afternoon, I answered callers through a fog.

———

“I could have said anything, I don’t know,” I told my husband over a Greek salad.

“Do you think she’s pulling your leg?”

I didn’t. There wasn’t a trace of bullshitter in her voice, and after ten years on the radio, you get pretty good at picking up on that.

“You’re worried about her,” Dunklee said. 

I sat back from my plate. How oddly right he was. I was terrified she’d never call back.

“I just wonder what’s going on, wherever she is,” I said. “Whatever’s making those wolves do this.”

We put the dishes away. We only ran the dishwasher every few days; that’s how long it took to dirty up enough dishes for a full load. The house wasn’t large, but we were small enough that a vast portion of it was always being unused.

Upstairs, my husband lay in bed behind a book, one leg crooked out from under the cover. The dark walls, the paper shades of the lamps, the sun-shaped mirror above the Cherrywood bureau—they seemed as strangers to me, as if a remote part of me had woken up that had never been here before and recognized nothing. I dressed for bed like a pretender, cautiously, and I pretended to doze, but I kept finding myself still awake, staring at the grime of the skylight.

Sometime during the night, I got up and went to the study. You’re not supposed to be here, the air seemed to say, as I slumped into the love seat’s buttoned leather.

Are you up? I wondered to the wolf woman. I am, too.

Dunklee woke me in the morning, his silver face only half as amused as the morning before.

———

At the station, I felt myself behaving strangely, answering calls abruptly. “You should have gone Fescue, how could you think of planting Zoysia with that much shade? Next caller.”

“Blair,” my producer buzzed in, “I’m going to need you to calm the fuck down. We’re talking about grass, here.”

I couldn’t imagine never hearing from her again. If she didn’t call, I’d assume she tried, but couldn’t get through, and I truly felt it would kill me. In my mind, there were a certain number of calls I had to get through between now and the time she called, and that was true enough to get me through the day.

But at 4:30, there was still no word.

I smoothed my blue blouse as I stood up and gathered my bag, my notes from the day an empty page with a poorly doodled wolf panting in the margin.

———

My husband was surprised at how little I knew about her.

Over our spaghetti, I guesstimated her age to be in the early forties, like us.

“Does she live alone?” he asked, his shirt sleeves rolled a quarter up, his elbows on the table, a piece of garlic bread at his lips.

I hadn’t thought of it, though hope stirred in my gut that she did. “She mentioned a farm, a back porch, a silo.” 

“Oh, for grain or for corn? If it’s corn, she may live over toward Otsego.”

“I didn’t know to ask.”

What if she’s dead? I wondered, and there is no one there to find her? I felt guilty for my hope, as if by wishing it, I’d brought this fate down on her.

“Surely she has a gun,” he said. “Farm girl like that.”

“She sounds… strong,” I said. “Even when she’s afraid.”

I thought of a pair of hands throwing a square bale of hay; gripping the twine, the rough, impersonal jerk.

“My old high school principal was a farmer, who wore his cowboy boots to school with his pleated khakis,” he said. “He’d gotten kicked by a bull somewhere along the line—a total mush mouth. You couldn’t help but snicker when he read the morning announcements.

“One day, this fight broke out by the busses, and he tore out there to break it up. He was a short man. Beady eyes. You couldn’t see him but for the path he cleared. He got in to the two boys—big, football-playing boys—and man alive if he didn’t throw them apart like it was nothing. He picked one clear off the ground and slammed him on his back and put a knee in his chest.

“If he’d had a piggin string, he’d have tied that boy up. The way he looked at us, like we were coyotes closing in around him out there. When I shook his hand at graduation, his grip was a vice.”

Dunklee’s expression was one of having stumbled across a memory you didn’t know you had, much less recalled with such clarity. It was easy to forget he grew up a country person. He didn’t wear any of it on him at all anymore, not even an accent, unless he got deep into a story about those days, which he’d only done in front of me a handful of times.

———

She called again after the weekend. “Didn’t work.” 

“Wendy?”

“It didn’t work.”

She sounded rattled and tired.

“They dug all my globe thistle up, left it in a pile on my doorstep. They left one on the windowsill outside the room that used to be my son’s. A dirty paw print on my door handle. The windows to my bedroom. You could tell where they’d been licking.” 

I thought, fingering through my knowledge as if each tidbit were a file in a drawer. To deter squirrels, plant nasturtiums; to repel hornworms, plant borage. Stand near a weeping fig when your heart’s in your throat.

“You mentioned your squash and your mint—do you have foliage near your house? Boston ferns or herb beds or anything?”

I could hear her looking around in her own head, a train’s low moan somewhere near her.

“I have hedges right up next to the house. Crepe myrtles, off to the side, though they’re ate up with some bug. And ivy, all on the back.”

“Go to the store,” I told her. “Buy the strongest Tabasco you can find, along with a bottle of Indonesian fish sauce, and combine both bottles with a litre of water. Mix it well, and spray it on your hedges, your crepe myrtles, your ivy.” 

“Indonesian fish sauce,” she said. “You’re serious.” 

“I am. For good measure, you could add half a cup of cayenne pepper, depending on how mean you want to be.”

“Mean,” she said. “Yeah, okay.” 

Silence. She was waiting on me, I realized, to say something else. I felt a locking up in my throat, like burning out the clutch of my old stick shift Volkswagen. I felt her sliding away, leaving me needing something I couldn’t name, something that she had ripped from me, or, perhaps, touching a place where a thing should have been but wasn’t and hadn’t been for a long time.

———

I barely made a dent in our quiche, and I didn’t even notice when Dunklee, annoyed, left me at the table. I came to in the empty kitchen staring at my hands, my eyes dry, not knowing the time. When I got up to bed, he’d already rolled over. The ice-pack he used for headaches had slid off onto the floor, his graven face cut by shadow to resemble some primitive statue or totem. He no more dreamed than did a rock, I thought, but, no, that wasn’t fair. These flippant grudges are not of my character. Whatever was happening to her was happening to me, too. I wanted to howl up at the skylight. 

Sleep took me back to Iowa, to a morning when I’d gotten into a fight with my sister. My father pushed me against the wall so hard my spine cracked from the bottom up. His yelling, his woolly breath, tore through me, crept into me. He threw me out onto our screened-in side porch wearing nothing but the oversized t-shirt I’d slept in. The drizzling rain cast a haze across the yard, the street, the cars that crept church-ward. An old man stuck his eyes on me and I saw things in them I wouldn’t recognize until later. I followed them down to my own crotch. I’d wet myself. I’d wet myself, and all the folks driving by could see it, and the more I tried to cover it up with my hands, the more noticeable it was. In real life, my father leaves me out there until dark, but in the dream, the cars never stop passing and each one is driven by a hulking grey wolf. 

———

In the morning, Dunklee had died. I had gotten up and fixed the tea before I realized. I sat in the study and read more on irritants for mammals, until 9 o’clock snuck up on me, and I rushed up stairs to wake him for work. He felt heavy and gone when I nudged him. “Dunk,” I pleaded. “Dunk.”

The EMTs pronounced him dead on the scene. I rode in the back of the ambulance with him, holding his big flat hand. “If he didn’t wake you up, he went peacefully,” the doctor told me, then said something about a blister in a blood vessel in his brain rupturing.

“Rupturing,” I tasted it. “Peacefully.” 

The day spit me out where it had found me: in the study, the tea long cold, then the bed, Dunklee’s dent. They’d cut him out of his white t-shirt. They never gave it back to me.

It was the longest I’d gone without thinking of the wolf woman in weeks.

For the next month, it felt like I’d missed a turn and found myself in a strange town I didn’t much like, a town inhabited by people who were dead to me, who gave me directions for the price of my husband. But the road I got back on was wrong now, though it had once been right. I dreaded wherever it was leading me, but I had no better ideas for myself. 

She called my first day back in the station. When I heard her voice, it was like two hot wires touching behind my right eye. 

“No, the fish sauce didn’t work,” she said when I asked. “But it’s alright now.”

It sounded like she was chewing something. I pictured a wrinkled mouth, a toothpick. 

“Everything’s gonna be fine from here on out.”

Behind her, I could hear their rough panting.