Little Wolves - By Thomas Maltman Page 0,15

the annual Longfellow Pageant. Black iron lampposts lined the main street where buildings of dun-colored brick bore the mark of previous decades, advertisements for Lee’s overalls and mugs of Sanka. Farmers wearing seed caps parked their trucks along the curb. At the pool hall, they passed rainy mornings playing a card game called sheepshead to determine who would have to pay for coffee. Know the price of beans or the weather forecast, and you might find your way into a conversation. Logan had told her that people lived in this town for twenty-five years and were still counted as strangers.

There was the grocery store, Jurgen’s Corner, and a bait shop, the Bookworm, which sold yellowing paperbacks and comic books along with supplies for fishermen wishing to ply the brown river. The town movie theater had shut down, but the marquee still advertised Red Dawn with Patrick Swayze and Charlie Sheen. Downtown also held a hardware store, two bars, and a Chinese restaurant, the Golden Dragon. Two bars and two churches made for an even balance of liquid spirits and holy spirits in Clara’s estimation. The high school and nursing home were across town from where Clara lived. On either end of the valley, where County Road 29 dropped from the prairie tableland as it sliced through town, big billboards had been erected, each featuring smiling babies meant to represent fetuses. I HAD A HEARTBEAT AT TWO MONTHS, read one, while the other, in stark black and white, admonished THOU SHALT NOT KILL.

The entire town clung to the south face of a steeply sloping hill overlooking the river lowlands, prone to flooding, where the Harvestland silos loomed over taverns and railroad tracks and mobile homes occupied by migrant workers during the pea and corn harvest at the Del Monte plant in nearby Amroy.

The town had all of these things by her accounting, but no sign of the mountain for which it was named, and this troubled her. During Clara’s first few weeks here she made a habit of bumping over county roads in Logan’s ’69 Nova in search of one. She spotted a few low green hills knobbed by granite outcroppings and spindly cedars, but nothing like the vision of the mountain she held in her imagination. The locals she interrogated proved evasive.

“Oh, the mountain,” said one codger when she asked about it during social hour in the church basement. “It’s just east of town a little ways.”

Clara nodded as if this made sense, wondering if the mountain could be little more than a glorified hill named by the homesick Germans who settled this valley.

“No, no,” the man’s brother interrupted, his mouth full of half-chewed chocolate-chip cookie. “You want to get there, you hook a left at the granite pit, head southeast down the gravel road ’bout a quarter mile. You can’t miss it.”

Clara knew who these men were because Logan had given her a church directory from a few years back with pictures from the congregation. The Hendriks brothers, Abel and Abram, were Dutch bachelor farmers who lived a few miles outside town.

Both men had bald, sunburned heads and bulbous frog eyes and puffy mouths. They wore western-style long-sleeved shirts and suede dress coats with patches on the elbows. Both sat up in the balcony along with a group of senior citizens Logan had already identified as malcontents after he roped off the balcony one Sunday, hoping they would sit closer to the front. Without a word they tore down his barrier, their sisters and wives leading the way, and climbed the steep winding stairs to sit where they had sat for generations. Gloating, triumphant. “Stiff necked as the Israelites in Canaan,” Logan groused after the service. These German Americans had endured Indian uprisings, locust plagues, two worlds wars, the Depression, a hail storm that destroyed most of the windows of the church, and an ongoing farming crisis killing their way of life. They would survive one upstart pastor fresh out of seminary trying to get them to change their ways.

So Clara wasn’t surprised these men were directing her according to landmarks they took for granted, guided by a compass she was not born with. Neither of the Hendriks brothers offered to shake her hand or introduced himself, partly because she was a young female and partly because some residents here expected her to know who they were without being told.

The Hendriks brother with his mouth full of food was also staring at Clara’s breasts, swollen because of the pregnancy,