Little Wolves - By Thomas Maltman Page 0,16

while he licked a crumb from his lip. Clara held up her left hand to her chin, as though contemplating something, to show her missing fingers. The old man swallowed hard and coughed. He gulped boiling coffee from a Styrofoam cup and, wincing, looked away. Most men didn’t ask about the hand; they shuddered to imagine it touching them. She was damaged goods, and that’s all they needed to know. Clara leaned forward, pressing her advantage. “Which granite pit do you mean?”

So many of her father’s stories featured this missing mountain, a sacred, healing place. If she could find it, she would find the place where she was from. Knowing this would root her. A part of Clara felt as if she had opened the door that day and received the obliterating blast from Seth’s shotgun, scattering bits and pieces of her true self all about where they could never possibly be gathered together again. She needed to get right before this baby came.

WELCOME TO THE COUNTRY

Logan had already been up for an hour by the time Clara came downstairs. He sat alone at the dining room table, leaning on his elbows, his blond hair dark with sweat. He was wearing a T-shirt, skimpy Lycra shorts, and tube socks pulled up nearly to his knees. Logan didn’t turn his head to wish her good morning when she entered the room, but he kept his attention fixed on the rain outside, muttering something—a prayer?—under his breath.

She had come downstairs wearing only a blue terry-cloth robe. She wanted to get a cup of coffee and then head upstairs to soak in a bath and write some more, but spotting Logan changed her plans. “I’m going to fry some eggs,” she told him. “Want any?”

Logan startled at the sound of her voice. Then he shook his head without turning her way. “I can’t eat so early in the morning, especially not after a run.”

Clara crossed the room and touched his damp face with the back of her hand, feeling the Braille of his boyish beard. “You need to eat something,” she said. Above his hollow cheeks, his eyes sank into their sockets. Day by day, Clara was growing rounder while her husband shrank, as if she were one of those spiders who feeds on her mate, drinking in his juices until he’s only a sack to lay the eggs in. What a terrible thought. She was having such thoughts these days. Clara knew Logan was fasting in the mornings again, heading straight over to church and starting his day by kneeling before the altar, his hunger a punishment for not having the answers his congregation required. Perhaps it was wrong of her to tempt him with fried eggs, but looking at him now—her pale, handsome husband with his knobby knees and receding hairline—a motherly tenderness welled in her. “What were you thinking about here, sitting in the dark?”

“Satan,” he said, glancing her way and smiling ruefully.

“Oh, is that all?” She pulled over a chair so she could sit beside him.

“Feels strange to say aloud. Sort of foolish.”

Was it? She knew Logan loved the story of Martin Luther battling the devil in his last days, flinging a book across the room and reminding Lucifer of his baptism. What was God without the devil, heaven without hell? Though he considered himself a modern seminarian, quick to point out that accounts of demon possession in the Gospels were likely manifestations of mental illness, Clara knew that he also believed in the devil. That the devil was active in this world made Logan’s work urgent.

Clara put her hand over his. “Tell me what you saw.”

“I don’t know exactly,” he said, squirming in his chair, edging deeper into the cushioned seat, “except that I was up in the pulpit looking out over my parishioners when I spotted him. He was ordinary looking, just a guy in a dark suit, but with eyes he took away my voice. I tried to speak, but it was like there were hands”—Logan paused and massaged his throat with his free hand—“choking the words. The congregation knew something was wrong, but I was alone up there. No one even noticed him there except for me. The devil there, smiling.”

“How awful.” His hand beneath hers was cold, as if the rain had soaked straight through him on his morning jog. She wondered if Logan’s telling of the dream was also meant to rebuke her for not being in church last Sunday. She knew exactly