Episode 2 – Spooner Doesn’t Howl, It Blows

THE WOLVES OF SPOONER DON’T HOWL, THEY BLOW

OR

I CAN HEAR YOU HOWLING BUT YOU CAN’T COME IN

 

Lowell woke up to see the neon light flashing outside of his hotel room (his ‘suite’ Murray had termed it). He had slept clear through the day…again. He looked at the beige phone sitting on the horizontal dresser and right on cue, it rang. His legs, still miserable from his long drive, barked as he swung them around and off of the bed. He stretched a long arm out and its paleness shot through the darkness of his room. He brought the receiver up to his ear a little too quickly banging it off of his head, causing him to yelp a little.

“Well that’s certainly an interesting greeting.” It was Murray.

Lowell paused for a moment, his ear was ringing a bit. Regaining his bearings, he said, “Why are you calling me Murray? It’s not even three forty a.m.” It was an old joke of theirs and Lowell could hear Murray’s sighing laugh. It was good to have a true friend, someone you’d killed a thing or two with…

“Hey buddy, I know you’ve got work to do but I think your dope, your information from Chicago, I think it may have been wrong pal.” Murray said this with a high degree of deliberate consideration.

“Ugh, you’ve got to be kidding me,” said Lowell.

“No, I’m sorry, but I’m afraid I’m not kidding in the slightest.” And Murray truly was sorry. “Has this been happening again?” he asked.

“Ugh, yeah, you know, it’s just part of the deal. You get somebody new in there and suddenly…” Lowell stopped. His frustration was not something he needed to dwell on. What he needed to dwell on was Murray’s information. He paused.

“Yes, I understand, and I knew you’d want to know right away,” Murray filled in the space left by Lowell’s silence, the way a good friend might. “You’re close friend…very close. But it wasn’t Hayward, no, I’m afraid it wasn’t Hayward at all.” Murray stopped, it was Lowell’s turn to greet the silence with words.

“Don’t tell me,” he said.

“Yes. I’m sorry friend. It wasn’t Hayward, it’s…”

“Spooner,” they said together.

“And Spooner doesn’t howl,” said Murray.

“It blows,” answered Lowell. As he slipped into his shoes, grabbed his cigarettes, his fedora, and slammed shut his case, Lowell stammered, “Fill me in.”

Gary was not an easy scare. No, he had lived in the woods right off of Bass Lake his entire childhood and the darkness and waves of shadows curling under the terrible trees lining that bottomless lake, they’d never frightened him. The waves crashing into his parents’ boathouse under the claps of a thunderstorm, they had never scared him. The inept and completely lost losers from Minnesota coming over to his pristine lake in Wisconsin every weekend during the summer and acting like they’d never caught a panfish before, well, they had scared him a little…

But right now, Gary was terrified.

He’d gone out for one of his evening runs, a light jaunt of three or four miles, nothing unusual for him. He was six foot four and weighed one hundred and eighty pounds; running for him was easier than walking. And he was a biker too. Not a motorcycle rider…but a bicyclist of a truly high skill. Hundred mile races were nothing for him, even now that he was approaching the age of fifty. Though one would never guess his age. He still had the face of a nineteen year old. Except, perhaps, at the moment. For at the moment, despite all his training, his breathing, his miles and miles of breath control…he was screaming at the top of his lungs. And he was wishing. Oh how Gary was wishing he had taken his bike for a spin rather than his legs.

His legs! His legs were out from underneath him and Gary knew he was flying, or rather, he was falling, and he was going to land as if he had taken his bike out–he was going to land hard!

A branch ripped through his skinny shirt. It did a nice job of ripping through the skin around his ribs too. Gary felt warmth spread over their spiny outlines. His right knee met a rock and went backwards through his leg. Gary screamed as the flesh of his leg erupted and volcanoed out a plume of bone, a smoke of blood. Gary’s left arm flung outward until his shoulder chopped into a tree trunk. His body spun, his useless right leg trying desperately to keep up with his torso. Gary felt real terror, real fear, and he wondered why he hadn’t stayed at his nice, safe, childhood lake. He wondered why he had ventured to the wilderness of the north, like Hayward, like…Spooner. And then Gary’s forehead met a rock much bigger than the one which had kissed his right knee and Gary wondered no more. Staring up at the north star as it peaked through the canopy of the forest, Gary was unsurprised to hear it again, quite unsurprised to hear…the howling.

 

II

HIS HAIR WAS PERFECT

 

”Christ almighty that was funny!” howled Lon.

“Oh my God! Wasn’t it just?” yelled L.T. Who then started howling too.

“I think that bushy haired peckerhead really hurt himself!” said Claude, but the words were hard to understand as he was laughing so hard he could barely get them out coherently.

“Oh sweet Jesus, sweet, sweet Jesus!” Mal shouted. “That was really something!”

The four men were each holding their stomachs in laughter and pain, they weren’t much for running and they’d each done their share tonight. They were also snorting, snorting their beers through their noses as they tried to contain their chortles without much luck. The beer, cold and frothy, poured out their noses and ran into the hair draping their faces, matting it down, like dogs in a communal bath.

They had rendezvoused at the agreed upon clearing in the woods, just a short hundred yards up from where the bushy haired peckerhead Gary had passed out after his futile attempt at escaping the pack.

“Did you see that pogo stick’s face?” asked Mal. They all had. And even though the four men were sweating profusely, and even though they had beer sticking to their precious and quite beautiful coats of hair, even though their fat, blood swollen faces were bleating cruelly, they looked considerably better than pogo stick Gary.

“I didn’t even know a body could twist thataway,” said Lon.

“That’s because they can’t, stupid!” said L.T.

Lon growled at him, looking ferociously serious. L.T. eyed his pack member right back. Their eyes held one another closely and then, slowly, in wonderful unison, rose up to find their mother, the moon. L.T. and Lon howled at her, howled at her unending grace, her unending beauty, her unending…power. Mal joined in too. Finding his mistress through the trees, Claude puckered his lips as they escaped the wet fur and now all four of them were singing that terrible, wind carried song. Yes, the wind had found their triumphant tones and now it ushered them out through the branches where they sprang from bough to bough and echoed for miles through the woods which surrounded the camping town of Spooner, surrounded it and connected it to its more refined, but equally fearsome cousin, the tourist city of Hayward.

Hayward, Wisconsin, where at just that moment a man named Lowell was just getting out of his reasonably adequate car and stretching his miserable legs. The same north star and the same moon looked down upon Lowell as he entered the Safe Haven convenience store and gas station where he hoped he might see his old friend Murray, who he had not seen in quite a goodly time.

 

III

THE BIGGER THEY ARE, THE HARDER THEY ARE TO BLOW

 

     Aimee was cruising, outrunning the setting sun. She had just sprinted across the old wooden bridge at the bottom of Whistlestop Creek and was two miles from her beloved father’s hand built cabin. Despite the considerable hill she still had left to run up, she’d be there in less than fifteen minutes. She had been training hard, pushing herself to excellence on the trails crisscrossing the ancient woods surrounding that cabin. Without so much as a pause, she started her ascent up Whistlestop Ridge. Noting the simple orange tints slowly crawling across the almost fluorescent green of the early fall leaves, she could feel the sun beginning to hide behind the western bank. The sturdy gray and brown trunks lining the east side of the path whirred by as a guide rail. To her left a tremendous drop off was developing and at its bottom was the Whistlestop River, banging itself against the rocks painting its shallow shores. There was still a hint of the summer heat in the air but autumn’s crispness had replaced August’s heaviness. In a few weeks she’d been running her first marathon, and this was her last real long run. She felt the power and the control in her legs. Her lungs, they seemed to be barely inhaling. She was really going to do it, she was really going to run her first marathon! The very idea of such a thing shot excitement through her and she felt she might fly right up the ridge all the way to the Whistlestop Lookout! Bursting with confidence, bursting with the grace of a doe at dusk, she never heard them coming.

Almost trampling down the bank of the ridge, she caught a glimpse of a hairy brown shape! Her panicked eyes fixed hard upon it, she missed the hairy paw reaching out from behind a trunk as it snagged one of her Japanese running shoes. Crying out, Aimee, much the same way Gary had been, was launched. Also like Gary, Aimee did not land very well. Her left shoulder dug itself into the path and her legs banged against rocks and roots. Looking up, Aimee saw yet another paw, this one with long yellow claws.

And then she saw nothing.

 

…

 

Claude was pacing back and forth. He was not nervous. He was excited. As many males do at such moments, he rubbed hard against the other members of his pack demonstrating and reinforcing their bond. Each of the other pack members did the same and, as before, there was a strange mixture of growling, laughter, and howling. They were getting better at this, getting better at the hunt.

The excitement of the hunt (and the beer) provoked in Mal another common reaction and he dutifully marked his territory, first with urine, and then with bodily scents. The other pack members followed suit. Unlike most wolves, they were not overly afraid of fire and so their urine and gaseous outputs mixed with the smoke and the beer and the sweat and the blood, to create a kind of smog known only in the great north woods of Wisconsin. The four of them were onto something, onto something they thought rather special. It had been Lon who’d come up with the idea, and this had not been surprising because while it was rare for any of these pack members to do much in the way of thinking, Lon was almost always the leader, almost always the Alpha.

They’d been sitting in the Good Morning Cafe one awful morning, sipping their bloody Mary eye openers and waiting for their eggs and sausages, anticipating the upcoming opening day of yet one more fruitless hunting season when Lon had suddenly declared that he was done with the usual, done with the sitting in a deer stand waiting for prey to walk up looking for corn it had been finding there for three months. He was done with drinking beer all morning while sitting in a cold duck blind trying to remember to shoot up and away, not down and towards. He had slapped his great paw down on the table and he’d yelled, “When’s the last time any of you ate a bass?”

The three men had stared at him. The summer was over and hunting season was upon them and he wanted to talk about bass?

“Hey Lon,” said Claude, “Maybe lay off the vodka a little.”

“Yeah Lon,” echoed L.T., “You’re not making any sense.”

“Bass?” was all Mal could manage.

Lon let out a blood curdling shriek of a laugh and slapped the table again. The others were certain he’d finally lost it, finally succumbed to the craziness of the north woods.

“Yes you stupid whelps–bass! Bass! Bass! Bass!” Lon was yelling now and all of the other would be hunters were interrupting their drinking of vodka and feasting of farm goods and staring at the barking fool in their small town jungle.

“Keep it down man,” said L.T. worriedly.

Lon smiled while knitting his considerable eyebrows into both a question and a suggestion. “No…it’s not ‘man,’ L.T. It’s…wolves.”

The others stared at him as he sat there grinning. “First it was bass and now it’s wolves Lon?” asked Mal.

“Yes gentlemen, wolves. Wolves, wolves, wolves.” Lon’s eyes were wicked and bulging, the transformation had already begun. The other three canceled the rest of the order, paid for their beverages and ushered their transforming alpha out of the cafe, the wooden door slamming shut behind them. Standing around their trucks, which none of them ever used as trucks but always just as cars, they waited for the completion.

His eyes wide and bloody, his nose snorting into a snout, the hairs of his hunting beard standing on end, Lon spit as drool came dripping from his incisors. “We love catching bass right? They put up a fight! They jump! They leap! They thrash! They run! They fight! They fight! They fight!” He was shouting. “But we don’t eat them. We don’t kill them. We throw them back. And then we do it all over again!” He was gleeful with terror and yet the moon was nowhere in sight.

“So we’re going to go bass fishing Lon?” asked Claude, stroking a can of beer. “It’s a little cold for that, and I’m not even sure they’re still in season.”

“No you moron, he’s not talking about bass fishing! It’s almost deer season,” said Mal with too much confidence.

“Well how are we going to throw a deer back after we’ve shot it?” asked Claude, who then added, “You’re the moron.”

L.T. was the one who had started puzzling it out and he said, “You’re both morons. He ain’t talking about bass and he ain’t talking about deer. I think he’s talking about something else. Ain’t ya?”

“Bears?” asked Claude. “You can’t even fit a bear in a boat L.T.! Now, who’s the moron?” He spit his beer at L.T. for emphasis.

Lon ignored all of it and pulled the three of them toward him into a crude huddle, whispering, “No, we ain’t hunting deer and we ain’t fishing for bear and we ain’t gonna shoot no bass and we’re all morons because it’s taken us this long to figure out that we’ve been doing this all wrong all along! We don’t need no food, we all have forty pounds of venison in our freezer leftover from the last three years! Everyone does! We’re morons because we catch bass because they’re hard and they’re tough and they’re mean and they…fight! But now, now we’re going after the best prey of all, the most clever, most diabolical, most devilish creature God ever made!”

The three of them looked at Lon, and Claude desperately wanted to tell him that there just weren’t that many fox around any more but before he could embarrass himself further, Lon froze him with a deadly gaze. Lon’s eyes were calm now, his manner sedate and practiced. The hunter hungry and readied for the chase, he said to them seductively, “We’re going to hunt man fellas. We’re going to hunt man and we’re going to do it as wolves.”

 

NEXT EPISODE: I SEE A BAD LON RISIN’ or THE WOLF WHO CRIED…WOLF?