The Loop Page 5

  Wolf recovery had long been a political football but lately all the goals seemed to have been scored by those politicians who opposed it. As the wolf population grew, so did the controversy surrounding it. The more incidents like this there were, the harder it became to argue for more tax dollars and manpower to handle them. Dan had seen his budgets cut to the bone. Now even the bones were going. Sometimes, in an emergency, he managed to shuffle someone from another job for a month or two or borrow a research student or one of the volunteers they used down in Yellowstone.

  The trouble was, this was more than just a trap-and-collar job. Hope could easily turn out to be the most severe test yet for the whole recovery program.

  With the town’s deep hatred of the wolf and the fact that the media were already making a meal of it, whoever Dan sent in wouldn’t simply have to be good at trapping and tracking wolves. He, or she, would have to be a skilled communicator, sensitive to local feelings yet strong enough to stand up to bullies like Buck Calder. Biologists with such an array of talent were hard to find.

  The Cessna reached the end of another eastward run and Dan turned it once more and, as it tilted, looked down to see the town of Hope laid out like a surveyor’s model. An eighteen-wheeler cattle truck that looked small enough to pluck with your fingers was pulling out of the gas station. The bends of the river flashed like chrome between the cottonwoods.

  Dan glanced down at the fuel gauge. There was just enough juice for one more pass, then they’d call it a day.

  This time he flew directly over the Calder ranch where a few cattle stood out like black ants on the sunbleached grass. A car was winding its way through the hills toward the Hicks place. Another damn reporter, no doubt.

  Once they reached the forest, he flew lower, as low as he dared, the tree and canyon tops skidding away crazily beneath the plane’s shadow. Then, just as he was lifting the nose for the final climb, he caught a glimpse of something up ahead, a pale gray form slipping out of sight over a rocky ridge. His heart leapt and he looked at Rimmer and knew he’d seen it too.

  Neither one of them spoke and the ten seconds it took to reach the place seemed much longer. Dan swung the plane out to one side and dipped the inside wing as they crested the ridge and they both peered down its far side where the animal had gone.

  ‘I got him,’ Rimmer said.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Just going into the trees by that long slab of rock.’ He paused. ‘It’s a coyote. Real big fella though.’ He turned to Dan and gave him a consoling grin. Dan shrugged.

  ‘Time we were headed home.’

  ‘Yep. Looks like a job for the trap man.’

  Dan put the Cessna into a final turn and the sun dazzled briefly through the windshield. Then he leveled the wings and set course for Helena.

  And somewhere below, in a wild place that was still a young man’s secret, the wolves heard the drone of the plane’s engine fade and die.

  5

  Helen Ross hated New York. And she hated it even more when it was ninety-four degrees and the air was so humid you felt like a clam being baked in traffic fumes.

  On her rare visits here, she always resolved to approach the place like a biologist, to observe the behavior of the curious species who trod its sidewalks and try to deduce why some actually seemed to enjoy its relentless glare and blare. But she always failed miserably. And after a customary moment of childish exhilaration upon arrival she would feel her face rearrange itself into a defensive cynical scowl.

  The scowl was firmly in place right now. And sitting at the cramped table on what the restaurant manager had laughably called the terrazzo, by which he meant the dustily hedged display pen out on the street, Helen poured another glass of white wine, lit another cigarette and wondered why the hell her father always had to be late.

  She searched for his face among the lunchtime crowds along the sidewalk. Everyone looked impossibly cool and beautiful. Tanned young businessmen in linen suits, jackets tossed with studied nonchalance over one shoulder, chatted to women who all had perfect teeth, legs a mile long and probably several Ivy League degrees apiece. Helen hated them all.

  The restaurant was her father’s choice. It was in an area called SoHo which she had never been to and which, he said, was the chic place to live. It was full of art galleries and the kind of stores that sold just one or two exquisite items, exquisitely lit amid acres of space, patrolled by assistants who had stepped straight from the pages of Vogue. They were uniformly thin and disdainful and looked as if they might well refuse you admission simply on aesthetic grounds if you had the nerve to venture inside. Helen already didn’t like SoHo. It was even written stupidly.

  It wasn’t that she was, by nature, mean-spirited. Quite the contrary, she lived her life normally at the danger end of generosity, prepared to give the benefit of even the most doubtful doubts. Today, however, several factors had conspired, along with the city and the weather, to put her out of sorts. Not least among them was that she was about to turn twenty-nine, which seemed to her a colossal, quaking milestone of an age. It was the same as thirty, only worse, because at thirty at least the crash had happened. Once you were thirty, you might as well be forty or fifty. Or dead. Because unless, by then, you had a life, you almost certainly never would.

  Her birthday was tomorrow and, barring divine intervention, when it dawned she would still be unemployed, unmarried and unhappy.

  It had become a ritual that her father took her out for a birthday lunch, no matter where either of them was living at the time, which was usually several hundred miles apart. It was inevitably Helen who did the traveling because her father was always so busy and still under the impression that as she spent most of her life in the back of beyond, coming to the city was a treat. By the time the event came around every summer, Helen had quite forgotten that it wasn’t.

  A month in advance, an air ticket would arrive in the mail, with details of how to get to some fashionable restaurant, and Helen would phone around and fix up to see friends and get excited. She loved her father and their birthday lunch was about the only time she ever got to see him nowadays.

  Her parents had divorced when she was nineteen. Her sister Celia, two years younger, had just gone away to college and Helen was studying biology at the University of Minnesota. Both girls came home to Chicago for Thanksgiving, and after the meal, their parents pushed their plates aside and calmly announced that now their job of bringing up their children was done, they were going their separate ways.

  The marriage, they revealed, had been wretched for years and they both had someone else with whom they would rather live. The family home would be sold, but the girls would, of course, have their own rooms at the two new homes that would replace it. It was all being done rationally and quite without rancor. Which, to Helen, made it infinitely worse.

  It was devastating to discover that a household she had always assumed to be, if not exactly happy, then only averagely unhappy, should all along have secretly sheltered such misery. Her parents had always rowed and sulked and needled each other with countless petty vengeances; but this, Helen had assumed, was the kind of thing, surely, that everybody’s parents did. And now it turned out that all these long years they had loathed each other and suffered each other’s company only for the sake of their children.

  Celia had behaved perfectly, as Celia always had and always would. She wept and went and hugged them both, which made them both weep, while Helen looked on in amazement. Her father had reached out and tried to rope her in as well so they could all weep together in some ghastly communal act of absolution. She dashed his hand away and screamed, ‘No!’ And when he begged her, she screamed even louder, ‘No! Fuck you! Fuck both of you!’ and stormed out of the house.

  At the time, it had seemed a reasonable response.

  Her parents appeared to believe that not getting divorced earlier constituted a permanent, indestructible gift to their children, and that the illusion of having had a happy childhood was as go
od as the real thing. Their true gift was a starker and more durable thing by far.

  For Helen had never since been able to rid herself of the notion that she was to blame for all the mutual pain her parents had endured. It couldn’t be more clear. Had it not been for her (and Celia, of course, but since Celia didn’t much go in for guilt, Helen had to generate enough for both of them), her parents could have ‘gone their separate ways’ years ago.

  Their divorce confirmed her long-held suspicion that animals were infinitely more reliable than people. And, on reflection, it seemed no coincidence that around that time she had begun to develop a passionate interest in wolves. With their devotion and loyalty to each other, the way they cared for their young, they seemed superior to human beings in almost every respect.

  Ten years had allowed her feelings about the divorce, if not to mellow, then at least to mingle with all the other doubts and disappointments with which Helen had since managed to fill her life. And except on rare, uncharitable days, when the world itself seemed swept by a bleak, recriminating wind, she was pleased her parents had at last found happiness.

  Her mother had remarried immediately after the divorce came through and now lived a life of golf, bridge and apparently galvanic sex with a short, bald and hugely attentive real estate agent called Ralphie.

  It turned out Ralphie had been her Someone Else for six years. Her father’s Someone Else didn’t see out six months and had since been superseded, over the years, by a string of Other Someone Elses, each younger than the last. His work as a financial consultant (what exactly that meant, Helen had never managed to figure out) had taken him from Chicago to Cincinnati to Houston and from there, last year, to New York City where, this summer, he had met Courtney Dasilva.

  And this was the other main factor that had helped render Helen’s mood today less than ebullient. Because this coming Christmas, Howard and Courtney Dasilva were to be married. Helen was about to meet her for the first time.

  Her stepmother-to-be, so her father had told her on the phone last week when he’d broken the news, worked for one of the biggest banks in America. She was also, he said, a Stanford psychology major and the most drop-dead gorgeous human being he had ever laid eyes on.

  ‘Daddy, it’s wonderful. I’m so happy for you,’ Helen had said, trying to mean it.

  ‘Isn’t it? Baby, I feel so . . . oh, God, so alive. I’m dying for you two to meet. You’ll adore her.’

  ‘Me too. I mean, meet her.’

  ‘Is it okay if she joins us for lunch?’

  ‘Of course! That’d be . . . wonderful.’

  There was a short silence and she heard him clear his throat.

  ‘Helen, there’s just one thing I ought to tell you.’ The voice was suddenly confiding, a little tentative.

  ‘She’s twenty-five years old.’

  And there she was, a block away, locked onto his arm, her great mane of black hair bouncing and shining in the sun as she strode beside him. She was talking and laughing, a talent which Helen had never mastered, while her dad just beamed like a king and subtly scanned the faces of passing males for any trace of envy. He seemed to have lost about thirty pounds and had a different, shorter haircut. Courtney was wearing a no doubt hugely expensive black linen shift with a wide red belt. Her high-heeled sandals were red too and made her taller than he was, which was about five-ten. Her lips were painted to match the belt and the shoes.

  Helen was wearing a dress too, her best in fact: a mud-colored cotton print dress, bought two summers ago at The Gap. She briefly considered crawling under the table.

  Her father saw her and waved and pointed her out to Courtney and Courtney waved too. Helen quickly stubbed out her cigarette and as they arrived outside the dusty hedge of the terrazzo, she stood up and leaned over it to give her dad a hug and, in so doing, knocked the table so that the wine bottle toppled, emptied itself over the skirt of her dress, then rolled off and shattered on the floor.

  ‘Whoa there!’ said her father.

  A waiter torpedoed to the rescue.

  ‘Oh God, I’m sorry,’ Helen wailed. ‘I’m so stupid.’

  ‘No you’re not!’ insisted Courtney and Helen almost snapped back, What the hell do you know? I’ll be stupid if I want.

  Her father and Courtney had to go around and in through the door of the restaurant to get out to the terrazzo, so Helen had a few moments, with some rather too intimate assistance from the torpedo-waiter, to dry her dress. He was on his knees in front of her, rubbing her thighs with his cloth. Everyone was staring.

  ‘That’s fine, thank you. That’s fine, really. STOP!’

  Mercifully, he did and disappeared and Helen stood there damply, shrugging and grinning like an imbecile at the people at the neighboring tables. Then she saw her father and cranked her face into what she hoped resembled a smile. He opened his arms and she let him hug her.

  ‘How’s my baby girl?’

  ‘Wet. Hot and wet.’ He kissed her. He was wearing cologne. Cologne! He stood back, pinning the tops of her arms so that he could inspect her.

  ‘You look fabulous,’ he lied.

  Helen shrugged. She had never known how to react to his compliments. Nor anyone else’s, come to that, not that she got that many. Her father turned to the lovely Courtney, who stood to one side, looking warmly on.

  ‘Baby, I want you to meet Courtney Dasilva.’

  Helen wondered if they were expected to kiss and was relieved when Courtney held out a tanned and elegant hand.

  ‘Hi,’ Helen said, shaking it. ‘Great nails.’

  They matched the belt, the shoes, the lips and, probably, the underwear too. Helen’s own nails were like a trucker’s, all stubby and chipped from working all summer in the kitchen at Moby Dick’s.

  ‘Why, thank yooou,’ Courtney said. ‘You poor thing, is your dress ruined? Howard, honey, we should go buy her another. There’s a great store just around—’

  ‘I’m fine. Really. Actually, I always do it, to cool off. And if we run out of wine I’ll just wring some out.’

  Howard-honey ordered champagne and after a couple of glasses Helen started to feel better. They talked about the weather, New York in the heat and about SoHo, where Courtney, of course, wanted to get a loft. Helen couldn’t resist asking her with a straight face what she was going to keep in it, Christmas decorations or what? Courtney patiently explained that loft, in this context, meant a sort of large apartment.

  The waiter reappeared and told Helen she wasn’t allowed to smoke which, considering they were sitting alfresco on the terrazzo breathing traffic fumes, seemed less than logical. It was disappointing too because she had already noted Courtney’s disapproval and wanted more. She had only just taken the habit up again after quitting for seven years and drew perverse pleasure out of being the only biologist she knew who smoked.

  They ordered. Helen went first, opting for the fish terrine then a heavy-duty pasta number to follow. Then Courtney said all she wanted was an arugula salad with lemon juice, no dressing, and then her new, svelte father, who had already confided, with a proud pat of his stomach, that he went crack of every dawn to a gym where all kinds of famous people worked out, ordered the striped bass, grilled, no oil, no sauce, and nothing to start. Helen felt not just a klutz but a glutton now too.

  While the waiter heaped a mortifying amount of spaghetti carbonara onto her plate, her father leaned nearer and said,

  ‘Guess where we’re getting married.’

  Helen wanted to say Vegas maybe? Or Reno, or wherever it was you could get divorce papers out of a machine the very next day.

  ‘I have absolutely no idea.’

  ‘Barbados.’

  He took Courtney’s hand and Courtney smiled and kissed him on the cheek. Helen wanted to throw up.

  ‘Wow,’ she said instead. ‘Barbados. Wow.’

  ‘But only if you promise to come,’ said Courtney, wagging a long red nail at her.

  ‘Well, sure. I’m often cruising around down
there, so why the hell not?’ Helen saw a flicker of hurt in her father’s eyes and told herself to stop. Be nice, for heaven’s sake, just be nice.

  ‘You pay, I come.’ She beamed at them both and went on, ‘No, seriously, I’d love to. I’m really happy for you both.’

  Courtney seemed touched. She smiled and her eyes went all watery. She probably wasn’t so bad, thought Helen, although why she should want to marry a man more than twice her age was a mystery. For heaven’s sake, the guy wasn’t even rich.

  Courtney said, ‘I know stepmothers are supposed to be like the wicked Queen in Snow White or something—’

  ‘Right!’ Helen cut in. ‘But give it time, you can grow into it. I mean, hey, you’ve already got the nails.’ She boomed with laughter. Courtney smiled uncertainly. Helen poured herself the last of the champagne, feeling her father’s eyes on her. He and Courtney had already switched to mineral water. Klutz, glutton, why not drunken bitch too?

  ‘You’re a biologist,’ Courtney said. Boy, she was trying hard.

  ‘I wash dishes. Or used to wash dishes. I quit last week. Technically, at the moment I’m, as they say, “between jobs”.’

  ‘“Available.”’

  ‘That too.’

  ‘And you’re still up on Cape Cod?’

  ‘Yup. Stranded on the Cape. Good a place as any to wash up.’

  ‘Why do you always put yourself down so much?’ her father said. He turned to Courtney. ‘She’s a brilliant wolf biologist. This PhD thesis she’s finishing is ground-breaking stuff.’

  ‘Groundbreaking!’ Helen scoffed.

  ‘It’s true. Your supervisor said so.’

  ‘He doesn’t know a thing. Anyway, that was three years ago. By now the whole species has probably evolved into tree-dwelling herbivores.’

  ‘Helen lived among them in Minnesota for a number of years.’

  ‘“Lived among them.” Dad, you make me sound like Mowgli or something.’

  ‘Well, you did.’

  ‘Not “lived among”. You hardly ever got to see the damn things. I just did research, that’s all.’