Death Kit (39 page)

“What happened?” whispered the heartbroken boy.

“Oh, in the end, he chickened out. A bunch of softies got their way. But since some of the boys was so riled up and wanted to do something, we passed the hat, so we could shut the manager up with some dough afterward, and shot your big hairy old man and old lady instead.”

This was the story the Wolf-Boy, crying as if there were no end to his tears, related to Diddy. Blew his nose. Then went on.

Shortly after this unspeakable revelation, Hiawatha ran away from Lyndon the sword swallower, from the circus, from everything. Started by leading a tramp's life, riding the rails. But found that too sociable. Gradually mastered the regimen of a precocious hermit. Found shelter in isolated caves, ditches, mountain ravines, and abandoned shacks outside small farming and ranching communities—in Nebraska at first, in Colorado later, finally in Arizona. A life that proved more to his taste.

What an unutterably sad fate, Diddy thinks in the dream. And feels the tears streaming into his eyes, too. Only for the Wolf-Boy? Or for his own dishonorable isolation as well?

But the Wolf-Boy's tale has an even more terrifying sequel. It began after more than a year of wandering, when Hiawatha was just sixteen. And concerned his appearance; and all the depths—historical, biological, psychological, spiritual—with which appearances connect. Up to his early teens, had looked like any other American boy. Shorter than most boys his age, but the doctor who traveled with the circus had allayed Hiawatha's fears. Delayed maturity, an uncommon but by no means unnatural condition: though rare, it's entirely normal biologically for boys to reach puberty as late as the age of eighteen. Nothing to worry over. Indeed, something he might be grateful for one day: the odds were that he'd be a very tall man. Understandable that when, at sixteen, he noticed hair had begun growing on his face, the boy was elated. Even though he hadn't added so much as an inch to his height in the last three years. Hiawatha was living at this time in an abandoned miner's shack in northern Arizona; his subsistence mainly wild berries and small game that he had learned to trap and, sometimes, managed to catch with his bare hands. Immediately after joyfully examining his face, as well as his chest, armpits, arms, back, groin, and legs, the boy set out for the nearest highway and thumbed a ride into Flagstaff, the nearest town. Where he stood on a corner by the entrance to a movie theatre until he'd panhandled enough money in nickels and dimes to buy a razor and blades at a drugstore. Then hitchhiked out of town and returned to his shack. And shaved himself.

It was after shaving that first time, the Wolf-Boy explained to Diddy, that he realized something was wrong. Discovered his face to have a tough hirsute layer underneath the finer hair he'd razored off, all of which grew back within an hour anyway. Hair not only in the ordinary places—lower cheeks, the chin, above the upper lip—but all over his face. On his forehead, for instance. On his upper cheeks. And on the sides of his neck, below his ears. Not to speak of the thick furry tufts sprouting all over his body. Only his palms, the back of his knees, and the instep of both feet were spared.

In short, Hiawatha Shaw was turning into the Wolf-Boy. Nothing he could do to halt the process. An irreversible, if delayed, metamorphosis. Already—ever since Lyndon the sword swallower's cruel and gratuitous revelations—afraid of people, of their masks, of their unlimited capacity for betrayal, (now) nature's sequel to little Hiawatha Shaw had the very strongest reasons to shun all human company. Though he'd always been a light sleeper, he trained himself to sleep during the day and go out only at night. To run away whenever he heard the sound of a human voice.

Thus he has lived, he told Diddy, until this day. Four years. And was (now) just twenty years old. Diddy was glad to be told the Wolf-Boy's age; he couldn't have guessed it from his appearance. Although extremely short, just under five feet tall, the Wolf-Boy had powerful thick arms and legs. Usually dressed in cast-off clothes that he recovered from trash cans or found abandoned along the highway; on Sundays wore his better clothes, what he'd been able to steal from the laundry lines of small ranches. His belly filled with food stolen from the kitchens of ranches and with picnic leftovers. It was the leavings of picnics—generous and varied fare, the Wolf-Boy told Diddy—that had been keeping him alive for the past year.

His latest home, for over a year: a cave, once occupied by a mountain lion but abandoned (now), in Sabino Canyon, which lies in the foothills of the Catalina Mountains just outside of Tucson. The canyon, a spectacular site even in natural surroundings that are rarely less than beautiful, was a favorite weekend picnicking place for families and couples from the town. From his deep niche in the face of a seventy-foot cliff, the Wolf-Boy would look down on them; listen to their laughing and joking, their transistor radios. Watch how, after putting away a huge lunch, grandparents doze in the shade and couples go off by the stream to neck and high-school boys toss a football around. The Wolf-Boy both longing for, and recoiling in dread from, that kind of easy human fellowship which he, too, had once known. Sometimes people would set up their feast at the very base of his cliff, so that he could look directly down on them, a distance of about fifty feet. And, thanks to the canyon's remarkable acoustics, could hear every word they said. There was little danger he'd ever be discovered. The sheer rock face of the cliff offers only slim, widely spaced footholds. The climb dangerous enough to discourage amateurs, but not so high or really dangerous to intrigue the professionals.

Only once in the year he'd been living in the cave did one of the picnickers seriously attempt the cliff. She was a tall, skinny girl about twelve or thirteen years old with long black hair; wearing sneakers, blue jeans, a red checked shirt, and a fringed leather jacket probably bought at the tourist store on the Pima Indians reservation south of Tucson. From a thong around her neck hung an aluminum whistle, which the Wolf-Boy had observed her using that hot afternoon to summon her dog, a terrier whom she called Lassie. The girl couldn't have any inkling of the dangers of the ascent; obvious to the Wolf-Boy, anxiously peering down, that she was neither an experienced climber nor even particularly well coordinated. But she doesn't fall. Ignorance, pluck, self-love, and a total absence of height phobia were bringing her safely up the side, panting and grunting. She's scaled the first twenty feet. Takes a wretchedly uncomfortable pause; the spiky rock she's grabbed for support is bruising her palm, drawing blood. Then resumes her climb. The Wolf-Boy held his breath. For she was, quite sensibly, making directly for his cave. A natural resting place, nearly three-fourths of the way to the top, and the only one on her entire route.

Diddy is getting restless, just listening. How will this story end, happily or sadly? Doesn't want to be forced to imagine a body lying, broken, smashed, on the rocky floor of the canyon. The Wolf-Boy tugs at Diddy's sleeve, trying to reclaim his attention. When has he had such a listener before? Listen.

Diddy sucking in his breath, as the Wolf-Boy continues his reminiscences.

The girl's still scrambling upward, hand over hand. Drawing closer to the Wolf-Boy's lair. He's begun to panic. What would he do when she gained the slanting ledge of rock at the threshold of the cave and hauled herself up, when she actually saw him, saw what he looked like? As she would in several minutes. Could he imitate the roar of the absent mountain lion, scaring her away before she actually reached the cave? Probably. But if he frightened her too badly, she might lose her precarious balance and tumble all the way down to the base of the cliff fifty feet below.

Closer and closer. The Wolf-Boy's hairy integument streaked with sweat, from his small forehead to the soles of his moccasined feet; the furry sheath for his small alert head flattened down, parted in many places, by the rivulets of sweat. Indecision, one of the last surviving endowments of his waning humanity, collided with terror. Squatting on the cave floor, the Wolf-Boy chewed at his upper lip with his neat tiny fangs, then compressed his lips tightly. Torn between humanlike compassion for the girl's probable doom and the healthy animal's mandate that he look after himself.

The Wolf-Boy doesn't want to be an animal. Envies the superior suffering of human beings. Diddy had noticed him earlier, while he talked, delicately, nonchalantly, crossing his hairy knees. What a child he is, Diddy thinks. A pretend-child. Like a big floppy doll.

Doesn't want to be an animal, but he has no choice. Terror so buffets his smallish body the Wolf-Boy fears he'll burst, his hairy seams split open. Then let out the beast (now), of his own accord. Instead of having it ripped from him. As a casualty of nature, he's nothing. But as a real animal, the Wolf-Boy may even yet become the Wolf-Man.

His good angel mortified, the Wolf-Boy prepares to kill. Accepts the imminent death of the youthful intruder who means him no harm. But just at the last moment, when, jaw already agape and with humanlike tears seeping down his hairy cheeks, the Wolf-Boy was about to spring to the mouth of his cave and deliver a ferocious lion's roar, he was saved. Both were saved. Probably thanks to Lassie, who'd been barking unhappily for the last ten minutes, the girl's parents had just raised their heads from the wicker food basket, looked around them, then looked up and noticed where their youngster had gone to. Hastily rose to their feet. Began shouting, crying, begging her to come down this instant and not to do this to them. Frightening them to death! How could she? A reprieve for the Wolf-Boy. No one wants to be a murderer, if he possibly can help it, right? Diddy's not so sure.

But is the girl going to obey her parents? Will it occur to her to be disobedient, to place her own self-esteem over her parents' self-pitying anxiety for her safety? Yes to the first, no to the second. She's only a child, too. Children all. The climb is called off; and also the danger. As he shrank back into his cave, the Wolf-Boy hears the girl's labored breathing only a few feet beneath him. Hears her sigh, which was for her ears alone; her childish alto muttering, “Oh, hell!” and then the loud voice fired down at her parents, “Okay! Okay! Wait a minute! I'm coming.” The Wolf-Boy's jaw went slack; and the mountain lion's roar, the shout of the future Wolf-Man, fell backward, unheard, into his gut. Knees like grass.

Diddy confused. Forget about the girl. What course of events would have been in the Wolf-Boy's best interests? No one should be burdened with inventing his own nature from scratch. No one should be asked to decide whether he's good or bad.

Later, in attendance at a florid desert sunset, the Wolf-Boy invited Diddy to share a pipeful of some dried weed that grows all over the Catalina foothills. The Wolf-Boy unburdened himself some more. Diddy could hardly believe it, but the Wolf-Boy swore to him that this incident with the black-haired girl, whom he'd seen only once and not talked to, who had never seen him, was an almost unbearably intimate experience. Hadn't been so close to another human being for years. (Now) a memory he treasured, fed from. For months afterward, used to conduct long conversations with her in his head about sorrow and joy. Usually while he is just falling asleep in the cave. But sometimes when he ventured down into the canyon, after midnight and everyone had long gone. To forage in the wire trash bins for discarded food. To sing to himself and revel in the canyon's echo. To bathe in and drink from the stream. Or when, waking early, just before dawn, he descended the cliff and went for a walk in the foothills outside the canyon. To be able to run, to turn cartwheels, to howl at the moon, to surprise small gray ground-moles in their dwellings and rip them apart with his precise white teeth.

“The closest I've been to anyone in years,” repeated the Wolf-Boy mournfully. Diddy and he are sitting cross-legged on splintery bare rock at the mouth of his cave. “I mean, until you came along.”

Diddy so strongly moved by the boy it's like a physical pain. How can one bear such suffering? Unendurable just to know that sorrow on this scale exists—much less, to suffer it. Is there anything he can do for the Wolf-Boy? thinks Diddy in the dream.

Then, either because he feels embarrassed at his show of feeling or just suddenly mindful of his duties as a host, the Wolf-Boy excuses himself and goes into his cave for a moment, a little way, returning with two cactus pears for their dinner. “It's all I have,” he says simply. “Try one. They're good. I didn't like the taste at first myself. But you get used to it after a while.”

Diddy accepting the heavy green globe, still studded with tiny thorns, from the creature's outstretched hand. “Don't stick yourself,” says the Wolf-Boy. “Here, give it back for a minute. I should have cut those things off first.”

(Now) the Wolf-Boy has gone to get a knife to peel the cactus pear for Diddy. But he—a handicapped waif—shouldn't be waiting on me, Diddy thinks. I should be helping him.

But maybe Diddy isn't filled with generous compassionate feelings only. Maybe he's also wondering what creature, animal or human, and if animal, what sort of animal, will be returning in a moment. With a knife.

Everything becomes dark (now). But that's all right. A natural interval, since what comes next would properly be titled Part II of the dream. In the first part, the Wolf-Boy and his personal history occupy the center of the stage. Diddy merely a sympathetic auditor; hardly convinced sometimes that he's present in the dream at all. The dream more like a movie he was watching, or a story he'd read once he was remembering. But in the second part, Diddy has taken up firm residence in the dream. His feelings lodged at the center. The Wolf-Boy becomes in his turn an even more silent, shadowy, and finally indeterminate figure. Diddy can't tell if that's because the Wolf-Boy's shape is continually altering. Or for another reason.

For he recalls this part less well. All Diddy usually retains from the second half of the dream are fragments of acts. And a sequence of his own tormented thoughts.