Lone Wolf A Novel Read online

  “So what happens?”

  “I’ll get a bail commissioner down here, and we’ll take it one step at a time.”

  I nod. “Joe?” I say. “I, um, don’t really have any money to post bail.”

  “You can pay off your debt by babysitting the twins so I can get reacquainted with my beautiful wife,” he replies. “Seriously, Edward. Your job from here on in is to sit down, be quiet, and let me handle everything. No outbursts. No grand heroic efforts. Understand?”

  I nod, but the truth is, I don’t like to be beholden to anyone. I’ve been forging my own way for so long that it makes me feel totally vulnerable, as if I’ve suddenly found myself stark naked in the middle of a crowded street.

  As he stands up to find an officer, I realize what it is that I like so much about Joe Ng. “You’re the first person who hasn’t said how sorry you are that this happened to my father,” I muse aloud.

  He pauses at the threshold of the door. “The world knows your father as a brilliant conservationist and wildlife researcher. Well, I know him as the man who made Georgie’s life hell and who threw away his marriage for a bunch of glorified dogs,” Joe says bluntly. “I’m happy to be your lawyer. But I’m not doing it because of any great affection I have toward Luke Warren.”

  For the first time in what feels like days, I smile. “I can live with that,” I say.

  The holding cell in the police station is very small and dark, and faces a wall with a few yellowing posters and an Agway calendar from 2005. I’m stuck here, waiting for a bail commissioner to arrive.

  My father used to say that an animal will only feel like it is in captivity if its home feels not like a territorial boundary but instead like a cage. What’s at stake is the lack of the natural world—not the fact that the space has been limited. After all, animals have their families with them—so the only thing you’re changing, by putting wolves into captivity, is their ability to defend themselves. You’re making them vulnerable the minute you put up the fence.

  If you enrich their enclosures, though, a pack can be happy in captivity. If you play tapes of rival wolf packs howling, you force the males in the pack to bond together against this supposed threat. If you change their environment from time to time, or play multiple pack howls at once, the females have to think on their feet and make new decisions to keep the pack safe—should they divide the pack? Should they switch howls? Investigate around that new boulder? If you provide hunting enrichment, and avoid just sticking prey inside a fence (where it will be killed every time), you teach the wolves how to behave in the wild against a predator. If a wolf makes a kill once in every ten hunts in the wild, then in captivity you need to keep him guessing whether or not today’s the day food’s coming. Basically, a cage stops feeling like a cage when you can convince the wolf inside that he needs his family to survive.

  When I hear footsteps, I stand up and grab the bars, expecting to be told the bail commissioner has finally arrived. Instead, I am assaulted by fumes of alcohol long before I see their source—a drunk man being held upright by an officer. He is weaving back and forth, red-faced and sweaty, and I am pretty sure that’s a streak of vomit on his checkered flannel shirt. “Brought you a roommate,” the officer says, and he opens the metal door so that the man staggers inside.

  “Happy New Year,” the guy says, although it is February. Then he collapses facedown on the cement floor.

  I gingerly step over him.

  Once when I was around ten, I was sitting underneath the empty bleachers near the wolf enclosure at Redmond’s. Each day at 1:00 P.M. my father gave a wolf talk there to the summer visitors, but the rest of the time, it was a cool spot to hide with a book in the otherwise overcrowded, overheated park. I was not really paying attention to my father, who was in an adjoining pen digging out a pond while the wolves were relegated to another section of the enclosure. Suddenly a guy named Lark, who worked with my dad as a caretaker before he hired Walter, came back from his lunch break. He was stumbling, weaving. As he walked past the wolves, they started to go berserk—hurling themselves against the fencing, snapping and whining, running back and forth the way they did when they could smell food coming.

  My dad dropped his tools and ran for the gates, until he reached Lark and slammed him down on the floor. With his forearm against the man’s throat, he growled, “Have you been drinking?”

  My father had firm rules for the people who worked with his animals—no perfumed shampoos or soaps, no deodorant. And absolutely no alcohol. A wolf could smell it in your system days after you’d drunk it.

  “Some guys took me out to celebrate,” Lark sputtered. He’d just had his first baby.

  Gradually, the wolves calmed down. I’d never seen them act so crazy around a person, especially one of their keepers. If a human was being upsetting, like the annoying toddlers who waved and screamed from the security fence, the wolves would just lope into the rear of the enclosure, disappearing between the trees.

  My father released his hold on Lark, who rolled away, coughing. “You’re fired,” he said.

  Lark tried to argue, but my father just ignored him and walked back into the enclosure where he’d been working on the pond. I waited until Lark cursed a blue streak and stalked up the hill to the trailer to collect his belongings. Then I let myself through the safety gate and sat on the grass outside the enclosure where my father was working.

  “I don’t care that he had a few drinks,” he said bitterly, as if we had been in the middle of a conversation and he needed to defend himself. “But he should know better than to do it on the job.” He dug his shovel into the ground and upended a heavy chunk of earth. “Think about it. A drunk guy staggering around. What’s that look like to you?”

  “Uh . . . a drunk guy staggering around?” I said.

  “Well, to a wolf, it looks a hell of a lot like a calf that’s been wounded. And that triggers the prey drive. Didn’t matter that the wolves know Lark, or work with him every day. The way he was moving was enough to make him lose his identity to the pack. They would have killed him, if they could have.”

  He jabbed his shovel into the ground so that it stood upright like a soldier. “It’s a good life lesson, whether or not you ever work with wolves, Edward,” my father said. “No matter what you do for someone—no matter if you feed him a bottle as a baby or curl up with him at night to keep him warm or give him food so he’s not hungry—make one wrong move at the wrong moment, and you become someone unrecognizable.”

  That comment, of course, would become personal years later. My father had made one wrong move at the wrong moment. I realize, with a start, that after this morning he might accuse me of the same.

  The drunk at my feet begins to snore. A moment later, a police officer walks in. “Showtime,” he says. I look up at the clock and realize I’ve spent three hours in here, most of it in the quicksand of memories about my father.

  It just goes to show you: you can put nine thousand miles between you and another person. You can make a vow to never speak his name. You can surgically remove someone from your life.

  And still, he’ll haunt you.

  We are back in the same interrogation room I was in before, except now, in addition to the detective and Joe, there’s a guy with a very bad comb-over and eyes so red I would assume he was stoned if I didn’t think that was particularly risky behavior for someone who routinely works in a police station. “All right,” the bail commissioner says. “I’ve got a doctor’s appointment to get my conjunctivitis diagnosed, so let’s make this snappy. What’ve you got, Leo?”

  The detective hands him a piece of paper. “This is a pretty serious case, Ralph. It’s not just second-degree assault; the accused also interfered with the duties of hospital personnel and adversely affected the health of a patient.”

  What does that mean? I think. Is my father worse off than he was before?

  “We’re asking that bail be set at the amount of five thousand dollars with surety,” the detective finis