The Wolfhound

I awoke when the sky had been colored a light tinge of pink. My sister Donna had already awoken, and sat at the kitchen table, wearing her small eyeglasses and Cinderella pajamas, pretending to read the National Geographic and actually sipping at a cup of coffee.

“You’re not supposed to drink that,” I said, reaching for the mug, but she withdrew it and waved her hand in a perfect imitation of my mother, who had been dead for almost a year now. “It will stunt your growth.” This was something my mother would never have said.

“I like it,” she replied with the lofty air of a debutante, and took a rebellious sip; her small nose crinkled with disgust and her tiny shoulders wrapped adorably back around her neck. I couldn’t possibly be angry with her.

“Alright, but only one cup,” I sat down on a wooden chair next to the kitchen table and began lacing up my running shoes. “What are you reading?” I asked her.

She shrugged. “I don’t know. I like the pictures.”

“Yeah? Which one is your favorite?”

She closed the magazine “I like this one.” The front cover bore a photograph of a girl with stunning green eyes wearing some sort of red robe; the headline read “ALONG AFGHANISTAN’S WAR-TORN FRONTIER.”

The image drew me in hypnotically; her eyes were hard with life, but I didn’t think they were cruel. She looked angry, but mostly frightened, terrified, in fact. The ink glimmered glossily in the early morning light.

“She looks sad,” my sister said matter-of-factly. “I think she’s pretty.”

“Why do you think she looks sad?”

But my sister only shrugged. I smiled and kissed her on the forehead. “I’ll be gone for a while. Dave should be back in a little bit. Will you be alright by yourself?”

“Mm-hmm,” she said, and had another sip of her coffee.

“Okay,” I said, smiling at her. “You be good.”

“Bye Patrick!”

I left the farmhouse, exiting into the broad expanse of relatively unkempt lawn that I now own. I turned back once and saw my sister in the window watching me walk down the driveway, her red t-shirt and Cinderella pants pressed up against the picture window. I thought of the girl on the magazine, and I looked away.

The early morning fog famous to northern Virginia curled around my muscles while I stretched. I heard the soft cooing noise of an owl, settling down towards another slumberous day.

Abruptly I found myself gripped with the type of memory that occurs with a stimulation of the senses; maybe it was the way the sunlight barely touched the rocks, or the way the tendrils of mist touched my cheek, but suddenly I was seven years old, wearing a backpack and waiting for the school bus to arrive. I woke up every morning at 6:30 and the bus always came at 6:52 or 6:54 — I could’ve set my watch by it. I remember craning my head in the darkness, watching for the headlights to appear in the gloom. One time I missed it, and I had to go back to the house —

Close my eyes. Blink and breathe. I don’t want to think about it, but my therapist says I need to face these memories as they are triggered, no matter the content.

I had gone back into the house after missing the bus to ask my mom for a ride into town, but instead I went by the barn where my father was separating pregnant ewes from the ones who had given birth. It had been a month since my father’s return from the war, and I still thought of him as a mysterious novelty. He was not having an easy time with the sheep; our dog Snuffy, who had never worked well with the animals, ran around barking chaotically. I watched my dad from behind the gate; he was shouting at the dog Goddamnit Snuffy — go by GO BY!

He said worse things than that, and then the dog came close to my dad, distracted by the mass of panicked ewes, and I saw my father in a single move grab Snuffy by the throat and flip his little body to the ground, shoving the back of the dog’s head into the hay. He said something to the dog but I don’t remember what. When he let go, Snuffy laid on his back limply, exposing his stomach the way domestic dogs will do in a way to garner sympathy and live to fetch another day. My dad stepped back, and then he kicked Snuffy harder than he ever had before, directly into the ribcage, and the dog squealed with fear and pain. Then my dad kicked him again, and he squealed again and tried to run away but my dad kicked him until he stopped trying to crawl away, until my dad just screamed and cursed while kicking a corpse. I didn’t make a sound; I never told my mother. I don’t know why I never told anyone about that.

“You doing alright there Pat?”

My neighbor Dave, who stood by his mailbox, shook me from my reverie. Dave lives a quarter mile away and is my closest neighbor. Dave is sixty-six years old a retired schoolteacher and a widow of three years. He watches my sister for me when I go running, something I am extremely grateful for. “Yeah, Dave — I guess I’m just putting off this run, ha.”

“Oh yeah? How far you going today?”

“Shooting for eighteen miles.”

“Jesus!” he said, removing a stack of letters and a newspaper. “Well you be careful. Is the little one up yet?”

“Yes, brewed up her own coffee as well.”

He laughed. “Why your mother taught her that little skill, I’ll never know.” Close my eyes. Blink and breathe. Dave is the only person who talks to me about my mother; he brought my sister to the police the night of her death.

“I’ll make her some of my pancakes,” Dave said thoughtfully.

I smiled. “She’ll like that. Why don’t you stay for dinner later? She loves it when you do that.”

“Certainly. I’ll bring over a six-pack and we can shoot the shit on the porch — a college boy’s got to get his beer, even if he ain’t in college right now.” Dave is the only person who talks to me about my education as well. “You have a good run — I’ll leave a bottle of water for when you’re done.”

“Thanks Dave,” I said, and waved him goodbye.

The first mile is always wonderful, easy, whereas the second mile hurts, constricts, makes me want to stop. The third mile is a little better, the fourth mile a little better, and then they are all the same. After nine miles I have always been running. There was never an initial step, original breath, or a single, strong instinct that inspired me to move in the first place. I feel as if I am like God, with no beginning, and no end. I am not exhausted. I have too far to go to be tired, I have forever to run, on and on and on.

I like to run long distances on gravel roads because I feel safer there than on pavement. Eventually the sounds of passing cars become insignificant to me; I hear only the echoes of my inhalations and the rhythm of shoes against rocks. It would be too easy for some impulsive idiot to clip me from behind without me realizing until I lay on my broken back in the ditch in murky water, gazing up at the sky and thinking about what might have been. So I run on gravel roads, mostly.

I started running because my therapist said that exercise would be good to relieve some of the stress of dropping out of college and being thrust into the single parent role. The running did seem to help; I slept deeper and the memories were triggered less and less frequently by my home.

I had been hungover when social services called me — how fucked up is that? I could barely comprehend what they were saying Please don’t worry, we have your sister, she’s safe, when can you come to see her? I think she needs to see you.

I didn’t understand any of it except the fact that I needed to understand it. They weren’t telling me everything. I never even thought to ask where my parents were. No one told me what my father had done to my mother until I had returned to Virginia and Dave met me at the courthouse, slowly telling me in jarring terms the bloody aftermath of my mother’s murder. I collapsed quivering into his arms. My sister wouldn’t speak of what she saw that night to me — she still won’t, but her child psychiatrist says she has opened up through other treatments. I think Donna will be all right as long as I stick around a few more years.

I went to visit my father in jail once, about three months after it happened, because I needed his signature on some form turning the property over to me. We stared at each other through the glass as if it wasn’t there.

“Just sign it,” I said. “It will make this so much easier.”

“You know I’m sorry, don’t you? It got out of hand. I didn’t mean for it.”

Close my eyes. Blink and breathe.

“It doesn’t matter.” He didn’t move. “Come on, dad.”

“It got out of hand. I never meant to hurt her. You don’t know how bad it gets. You think you’re mad at me? You don’t know anger.”

“Dad, please…”

“How’s your sister? Is she doing okay? I worry about her. I love —“

I slapped the glass with the palm of my hand, not hard but with enough force to make a loud sound. “Shut up and sign the fucking paper.”

“You need to understand —”

“I don’t understand, dad. I’ve never understood. Sign the paper… for her sake…”

He took the paper and signed it, but his hands were shaking, and when he pushed the pen back under the glass he started crying loudly.

“For Chrissake it was an accident — it was an accident… please Pat, please…”

The next day, I went for a ten-mile run, and afterwards I could no longer see the smears of his weeping. The runs just kept getting longer; I want to run a marathon in a few months.

I’m at around fifteen miles at this point. I’m not tired. I’m beyond tired, in that gray area between morning and night, where things don’t change, where everything is all the same. I must sound like a maniac — you can’t understand all the things I mean unless you’ve been there before, down that empty dirt road, beyond the physical capabilities of your body. A robot in the countryside.

I always get goofy during running; part of my nonsense lies in my isolation. I always run alone out here on these back roads; I don’t really know anybody else that lives out here. The houses are all tucked back down long driveways into trees that hide the activities of every person. Out here, the wilderness runs wild and civilization keeps a gun cabinet. Not many people come out, and I like it that way; I like running alone. My therapist says its best if I take my running time alone, where I can be briefly away from Donna and her needs. More importantly, I need to be away from people who know what happened in my family but don’t talk about it, so the truth sits hanging just above our conversation like some terrible, hulking demon. Time heals all wounds, they say — these runs in the countryside take a long time.

Sixteen miles now, pound, pound. I’m fucking tired. I’m golden as shit. These are the kinds of thoughts that run through your mind when you run; crazy thoughts. The runner’s high starts deep into the run; you say the strangest things. You laugh but it’s casual. When you run the senseless things rise to the surface and take some sort of form before dissipating like the sweat from your skin evaporates into the air.

I pass by the Marlow place. I’ve never seen the Marlow place or met Mr. or Mrs. Marlow, but I know it’s their house by the placard on the little green mailbox placed at the end of the driveway. A large, black wolfhound is standing there; his back hunched and fur perched upwards. His lips are pulled so tight over his teeth that I can count every single one of them. He isn’t barking, and that scares me. I slow down, and finally stop. Fear is a drop of blood in still water – first it sits, and then it spreads in waves, eventually coloring the entire container. I feel my fear as an almost physical thing, but in a run, its just fuel to burn, and by God it burns well.

It snarls, and then the great black thing is moving, and I am running in the other direction. I’m really running — without form or thought, just going, running faster on fear than I ever could have on determination. But he’s coming — I’m certain of that now, and after sixteen miles, I don’t know how long I can keep this up. I think he’s running on some fuel too — some primitive drive of fury or hunger or spite.

“GO HOME!” I scream, as loud as I possibly can. “GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE! BACK OFF!” I keep shouting as loud as I can, but nobody is coming.

Suddenly I am crashing, the gravel tearing into my face and arms; the world is rolling around me; the sky is earth. I thrash as fast as I can but I still feel a searing pain in my left ankle as the wolfhound’s jaw makes contact. I’m making small sounds now, frantically kicking and struggling.

As the dog yanks on my ankle I suddenly see my father above my mother; he is screaming at her in some rage about something, pulling her backwards, away from my sister and I, who are staring dumbfounded. My father returned from the war with an instinct I couldn’t understand — something animal, something that consumed him at the oddest times.

I slash out at the dog with the side of my arm; he catches my elbow in his teeth and bites down even as the momentum of my flesh pushes him backwards. I am struggling to my feet but my left leg no longer seems able to support any of my weight. Blood is running down my arm and the wolfhound is snarling. He gains a foothold and I fumble forward, and the wolfhound goes for my face.

I cross my forearms and close my eyes in anticipation, and then, in the midst of the attack and my runner’s high, I see Donna looking at the cover of National Geographic and drinking coffee. The green-eyed woman knows of the existence of violence in this world as well as my sister — I cannot die.

His teeth are at my lips, my cheeks while I try to push him away — and then suddenly I feel something inside my hand; a piece of rock from this gravel road, a larger chunk that escaped the truck and my wrist moves of its own accord with my last bit of adrenaline. I’m not thinking. It is crashing down, smashing into the skull of the wolfhound. I’m screaming, I’m swearing. He snarls, draws back and I bring down the rock again, harder this time on his head; the wolfhound crumples, now whimpering, lying on his belly, and I bring the stone down again, and again, until it no longer whimpers.

I stagger to one knee, barely able to balance. I’m smiling. My vision is red from the blood that has engulfed it. The wolfhound lies before me, twisted now, bloody itself. The wolfhound is dead, and I am alive.

I’m walking away from the wolfhound — I’m crying, and it feels so good. Then my quivering legs give out; I’m weeping in the gravel, not looking at the thing I have destroyed. I only destroyed it because I thought it would destroy me.

Soon Dave will come to find me, but I’m different now, and I can’t say why. The wolfhound died because I had to live.

I can hear my own breathing; it’s loud, strained, more from the exertion of my sixteen miles than from the pain. Instinct does not become evil unless it is misdirected, but some instincts are more powerful than others. I’m waiting for Dave; I don’t close my eyes.