nose was literally buried in the paper, a long, bony snout that ended in a wet, black nose. Old, stained fangs protruded over his lower lip. His ears were proud, furry, stiff, his scally cap shoved back between them. One of those ears swiveled toward Saunders, like a satellite dish revolving to lock in a signal.
Saunders looked back at his own paper. It was the only thing he could think to do.
The wolf didn’t look at him directly—he remained behind his paper—but he did lean in to him and speak in a gravelly bass. “I hope they bring the dinner trolley through. I could do with a bite. Course, on this line they’ll charge you two quid for a plate of lukewarm dog food without blinking.”
His breath stank; it was dog breath. Sweat prickled on Saunders’s brow and in his armpits, a hot, strange, disagreeable sweat, not at all like the perspiration he worked up jogging on the treadmill. He imagined this sweat as yellow and chemical, a burning carbolic crawling down his sides.
The wolf’s snout shriveled, and his black lips wrinkled to show the hooked rows of his teeth. He yawned, and a surprisingly bright red tongue lolled from the opening, and if there had been any doubt in Saunders’s mind—there hadn’t been, really—that was all for it. In the next moment, he fought with himself, a desperate, terrible struggle, not to issue a soft sob of fear. It was like fighting a sneeze. Sometimes you could hold it in, sometimes you couldn’t. Saunders held it in.
“Are you an American?” asked the wolf.
Don’t answer. Don’t talk! Saunders thought, in a voice he didn’t recognize—it was the shrill, piping voice of panic. But then he did answer, and his tone was his own: level and certain. He even heard himself laugh. “Hah. Got me. ’Scuse, do you mind if I use the bathroom?” As he spoke, he half rose to his feet. He and the wolf were in chairs that faced a spotted Formica table, and he couldn’t quite stand all the way up.
“Right,” said the wolf. He said it “Ro-ight,” had a bit of a Liverpoolian accent. Liverpudlian, Saunders corrected himself mentally, randomly. No, Scouse. They called it Scouse, which sounded like a disease, something you might die from after being bitten by a wild animal.
The businesswolf turned sideways to allow Saunders by.
Saunders edged past him toward the aisle, leaving behind his briefcase and his eight-hundred-dollar overcoat. He wanted to avoid making contact with the thing, and of course that was impossible—there wasn’t enough space to get by without his knees brushing the wolf’s. Their legs touched. Saunders’s reaction was involuntary, an all-body twitch. He flashed to a memory of sixth-grade biology, prodding the inside of a dead frog with tweezers, touching the nerves and watching the feet kick. It was like that, a steel edge pressed right to the nerves. He could keep the fear out of his voice, but not his body. Saunders believed that one atavistic reaction would be met by another, and the wolf in the suit would lunge, responding to his terror by grabbing him around the waist with his paws, opening his jaws to sink his fangs into Saunders’s belly, hollowing him out like a skinned pumpkin: Trick-or-treat, motherfucker.
But the wolf in the suit only grunted, low in his throat, and twisted even more to the side to let Saunders past.
Then Saunders was in the aisle. He turned left and began to walk—walk, not run—for coach. The first part of his plan was to get to other people. He hadn’t worked out the second part of the plan yet. He kept his gaze fixed straight ahead and focused on his breathing, just exactly as he’d been taught in Kashmir, way back down the long and winding road. A smooth in, drawn through parted lips. A clean out, puffed through his nostrils. I am not going to be killed and eaten by a wolf on an English train, he thought, quite clearly. Like the Beatles, he had gone to India as a young man to get himself a mantra and had come home without one. On an unconscious level, though, he supposed he had never stopped yearning to find one, a single statement that resonated with power, hope, and meaning. Now, at sixty-one, he had a mantra he could live by at last: I am not going to be killed and eaten by a wolf on an English train.