Little Wolves - By Thomas Maltman Page 0,67

beside the bathroom sink, and after rinsing his face and combing his hair and beard, he got into his truck and drove to town.

Trinity Lutheran had the classic clapboard siding of a country church. It stood as a remnant of another time, a whitewashed vision of the past that Grizz’s family had a role in preserving as much as any of them. His great-grandfather had donated the land the church was built on, and Grizz’s name was still on the membership rolls, though he had not darkened the door of this place since Jo’s death.

He pulled up out front, parked his truck against the curb, and climbed the steep concrete stairs. The heavy oaken door groaned when he squeezed the handle and yanked it open. From inside a stained-glass window on one side showed Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemene, his face upturned in prayer. Roads curved through the countryside behind Jesus, leading to a hill with three crosses, and Grizz stopped to trace the pathway with his fingers, as he had done when he was a boy. Early evening light leaked through the rosy glass to touch him where he stood.

The anguish on Christ’s face made him think of Seth. When he was thirteen Seth went through a stage where he slept with his lights on. At night Grizz heard him grumble as he twisted in his sheets and strove for sleep and it sounded to him as if there was another voice in there, a lower timbre, a voice like footsteps crushing leaves. Seth cried out because his bones were stretching inside him, his muscles lengthening, even the bones in his face shifting. Black hairs sprouted around his mouth and under his arms, and a rash of blackheads and acne spread on his face and back, sores that wept when he scrubbed them. Grizz had forgotten how much being a teenage boy hurt, the strange aches and pains, but when Seth got sick, throwing up after meals, refusing to get out of bed in the morning, Grizz knew this wasn’t ordinary growing pains.

In the examining room, the nurse had paid the boy compliments as Seth sat up on the papery sheet without his shirt on, his back and chest blotched with acne. “Such a fine young man,” she said, winking in Grizz’s direction.

“You play football?”

Seth mumbled his response.

“He doesn’t like organized sports,” Grizz offered for him. “He doesn’t like taking instructions.”

Seth slumped on the table, his head down, not looking at either of them. He’d quit the team the year before, just stripped off his padding and helmet and walked right off the field without looking back. He’d been fast. The best runner in the school, but the coach said he was a negative influence on the others.

“That’s too bad,” she said, before leaving the room.

“Why are we here, Dad?”

“We need to know for sure.”

“They won’t be able to do anything. They couldn’t for Mom.”

“You don’t know that.” Grizz ran his hands along the seam of his jeans, looked away. “They’ve made advances since then.” Jo hadn’t ever complained. He wasn’t even sure how much the lupus hurt her. She took her pills and went to bed early when the flare-ups were worst. Sometimes, when she snapped at him for smelling of the barn, for the way working with cattle seeped into his skin, under his nails, he told himself it was the lupus, the pain of being eaten up from the inside out, speaking.

“They call me freak at school.”

“Don’t pay them any mind.”

Grizz knew this was bad advice. Ignoring bullies only made them grow worse, inventing more devious methods of inflicting pain, verbal or physical, to draw a reaction, but when he looked up he saw Seth was studying him, his eyes curious. “How did Mom live with it? You never talk about her.”

Grizz had always had a hard time talking about Jo. He thought about what to say now, not wanting to describe her illness. Sometimes Seth smiled his small secret smile because there was music inside him when he was alone in his thoughts. And Grizz had to turn away, the familiar expression reminding him too sharply of the boy’s mother. Seth’s hand for drawing, his fancy-flighting, his desperate capacity to love the wrong things: all this he inherited from her.

“She wanted a baby more than anything,” he began. They talked awhile longer, the two of them in the examining room, not looking at one another. He told Seth about how his mother liked old