Little Wolves - By Thomas Maltman Page 0,60

of woodland nearest the river to see if they could chase anything up. The last time, as evening fell, their father passed his flask around. Grizz refused, but Wylie tried a few sips, wincing when the whiskey hit his throat. Their father roared. “Look at him,” he said. “Shit. The boy’s getting a taste for it.”

Both Grizz and his father were big men, broad shouldered. Only sixteen years old then, Grizz already had hair on his chest. Wylie, three years younger, was small and wiry, a dark-haired serious boy.

When Grizz said nothing, his father slapped him in the mouth. “Answer me when I talk to you.”

Grizz swallowed his blood and rubbed his chin. His father usually didn’t hit them like this when they were out on the hunt. The slap, the ringing sting of it, caught him off guard.

“You aren’t going to cry, are you? Big blubbering baby. I heard about you in town. They’re all talking about you and that little girl. She’s just a child in pigtails for Chrissakes.”

“She’s in high school, same as me. Shut up about her.”

His father slapped him again, harder. Grizz tasted his own blood, and he spat it out.

“They better just be stories, boy. She’s not for you.”

“This sure tastes good, Pop.” Wylie spoke up, playing the fool. “Better than Coca-Cola.”

“Damn straight. You’re more a man than your pussy older brother.”

Wylie pretended not to hear. “I feel it right down to my toes.”

He laughed, took back his flask. “Save some for me.”

The three walked home following a slough. The heat of the day buzzed in Grizz’s skull, and he was sweating inside his coveralls, drowsy from waking up before dawn. Grizz and Wylie came along one side, their father on the other, a small canyon of fetid water and cattails between them. Grizz dreaded what was going to happen when they got home. No animal blood spilled out here meant blood would be spilled in the house. Gail, the boys’ distant mother, had wires in her jaw to support the bones that had been broken. Her nose still sat slightly crooked on her face. Grizz wouldn’t touch liquor, not at that point in his life, seeing what it did to his father, but the old man was already corrupting Wylie, turning his spirit dark.

Grizz walked slowly, his brother weaving from the whiskey, when the biggest buck the Fallons had ever seen rose up from the water where it had been hiding, belly deep in the mud. Years later, standing on this mountain with a dead man’s gun in his grasp, Grizz could still see it.

His father reacted instantly, the butt of his twelve gauge finding a groove in his shoulder, his finger squeezing the trigger. It didn’t matter that the boys stood on the opposite side. It didn’t matter that if he missed he would have killed one of them. All this he realized later. What he remembered came in fragments: Wylie going down in the grass, Grizz raising his own shotgun, sweat stinging his eyes, the form of the deer blurring, the shadow of his father on the other side. He pulled the trigger over and over, jacking out spent shells into the grass around him, the gun slamming against his shoulder.

When he was done shooting, he saw the buck as it bounded away, each leap covering twenty feet, a beautiful stag with a massive rack of antlers, the trophy deer their father longed for, with enough meat to smoke and make into sausage to feed them in lean winter months. The buck stopped at the edge of the woods and looked back at Grizz as if to share the joy and surprise of still finding fire in his veins.

Smoke spiraled from his gun. Wylie stood again, wiping his mouth on his sleeve. He’d been bent over vomiting up the whiskey. “Did you hit it?”

Grizz shook his head, his mouth dry. The opposite bank, where their father had stood, was empty. “Wylie,” he said. “You wait here.”

“Where’s Pop?”

Grizz slid down into the murky water of the slough, the shotgun held above his head. Wylie called for their father, but there was no answer. The muddy water sucked at Grizz’s boots, and it took all his strength just to cross the slough and climb the slick canary grass on the other bank.

Dermot Fallon was not difficult to find. He was still alive, his body shuddering, the grass flattened all around him. The slug had burrowed into his belly, and he was trying to