“Wolf!”
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“Jack . . . Jacky . . .”
Wolf looked at him with puzzled eyes that shifted like
strange kaleidoscopes from hazel to orange to a muddy red.
He held his hairy hands out to Jack, and then Hector Bast
stepped up behind him and clubbed him to the floor.
“Wolf! Wolf!” Jack stared at him with wet, furious eyes. “If you killed him, you son of a bitch—”
“Shhh, Mr. Jack Parker,” Gardener whispered in his ear,
and Jack felt the needle sting his upper arm. “Just be quiet now. We’re going to get a little sunlight in your soul. And maybe then we’ll see how you like pulling a loaded wagon up the spiral road. Can you say hallelujah?”
That one word followed him down into dark oblivion.
Hallelujah . . . hallelujah . . . hallelujah . . .
26
Wolf in the Box
1
Jack was awake for quite a long time before they knew he was awake, but he became aware of who he was and what had happened and what his situation was now only by degrees—he
was, in a way, like the soldier who has survived a fierce and prolonged artillery barrage. His arm throbbed where Gardener had punched the hypodermic into it. His head ached so badly that his very eyeballs seemed to pulse. He was ragingly thirsty.
He advanced a step up the ladder of awareness when he
tried to touch the hurt place on his upper right arm with his left hand. He couldn’t do it. And the reason he couldn’t do it was that his arms were somehow wrapped around himself. He
could smell old, mouldy canvas—it was the smell of a Boy
Scout tent found in an attic after many dark years. It was only then (although he had been looking at it stupidly through his mostly lidded eyes for the last ten minutes) that he understood what he was wearing. It was a strait-jacket.
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Ferd would have figured that out quicker, Jack-O, he thought, and thinking of Ferd had a focusing effect on his
mind in spite of the crushing headache. He stirred a little and the bolts of pain in his head and the throb in his arm made him moan. He couldn’t help it.
Heck Bast: “He’s waking up.”
Sunlight Gardener: “No, he’s not. I gave him a shot big
enough to paralyze a bull alligator. He’ll be out until nine tonight at the earliest. He’s just dreaming a little. Heck, I want you to go up and hear the boys’ confessions tonight. Tell them there will be no night chapel; I’ve got a plane to meet, and that’s just the start of what’s probably going to be a very long night. Sonny, you stay and help me do the bookwork.”
Heck: “It sure sounded like he was waking up.”
Sunlight: “Go on, Heck. And have Bobby Peabody check
on Wolf.”
Sonny (snickering): “He doesn’t like it in there much, does he?”
Ah, Wolf, they put you back in the Box, Jack mourned. I’m sorry . . . my fault . . . all of this is my fault. . . .
“The hellbound rarely care much for the machinery of sal-
vation,” Jack heard Sunlight Gardener say. “When the devils inside them start to die, they go out screaming. Go on now, Heck.”
“Yes sir, Reverend Gardener.”
Jack heard but did not see Heck as he lumbered out. He
did not as yet dare to look up.
2
Stuffed into the crudely made, home-welded and home-bolted
Box like a victim of premature burial in an iron coffin, Wolf had howled the day away, battering his fists bloody against the sides of the Box, kicking with his feet at the double-bolted, Dutch-oven-type door at the coffin’s foot until the jolts of pain travelling up his legs made his crotch ache. He wasn’t going to get out battering with his fists or kicking with his feet, he knew that, just as he knew they weren’t going to let him out just because he screamed to be let out. But he couldn’t help it.
Wolfs hated being shut up above all things.
His screams carried through the Sunlight Home’s immedi-
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ate grounds and even into the near fields. The boys who heard them glanced at each other nervously and said nothing.
“I seen him in the bathroom this morning, and he turned
mean,” Roy Owdersfelt confided to Morton in a low, nervous
voice.
“Was they queerin off, like Sonny said?” Morton asked.
Another Wolf-howl rose from the squat iron Box, and both
boys glanced toward it.
“And how!” Roy said eagerly. “I didn’t exactly see it be-
cause I’m short, but Buster Oates was right up front and he said that big retarded boy had him a whanger the size of a
Akron fire-plug. That’s what he said.”
“Jesus!” Morton said respectfully, thinking perhaps of his
own substandard whanger.
Wolf howled all day, but as the sun began to go down, he
stopped. The boys found the new silence ominous. They
looked at one another often, and even more often, and with
more unease, toward that rectangle of iron standing in the
center of a bald patch in the Home’s back yard. The Box was six feet long and three feet high—except for the crude square cut in the west side and covered with heavy-gauge steel mesh, an iron coffin was exactly what it looked like. What was going on in there? they wondered. And even during confession, during which time the boys were usually held rapt, every other consideration forgotten, eyes turned toward the common
room’s one window, even though that window looked on the
side of the house directly opposite the Box.
What’s going on in there?
Hector Bast knew that their minds were not on confession
and it exasperated him, but he was unable to bring them
around because he did not know what precisely was wrong. A
feeling of chilly expectation had gripped the boys in the
Home. Their faces were paler than ever; their eyes glittered like the eyes of dope-fiends.
What’s going on in there?
What was going on was simple enough.
Wolf was going with the moon.
He felt it happen as the patch of sun coming in through the ventilation square began to rise higher and higher, as the quality of the light became reddish. It was too early to go with the moon; she was not fully pregnant yet and it would hurt him.
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Yet it would happen, as it always happened to Wolfs eventu-
ally, in season or out of it, when they were pressed too long and too hard. Wolf had held himself in check for a long time because it was what Jacky wanted. He had performed great
heroisms for Jack in this world. Jack would dimly suspect
some of them, yet never come close to apprehending their incredible depth and breadth.
But now he was dying, and he was going with the moon,
and because the latter made the former seem more than bear-
able—almost holy, and surely ordained—Wolf went in relief,
and in gladness. It was wonderful not to have to struggle anymore.
His mouth, suddenly deep with teeth.
3
After Heck left, there were office sounds: the soft scrape of chairs being moved, a jingle of the keys on Sunlight Gardener’s belt, a file-cabinet door running open and then closed.
“Abelson. Two hundred and forty dollars and thirty-six
cents.”
Sounds of keys being punched. Peter Abelson was one of
the boys on OS. Like all of the OS boys, he was bright, personable, and had no physical defects. Jack had seen him only a few times, but he thought Abelson looked like Dondi, that homeless waif with the big eyes in the comic strips.
“Clark. Sixty-two dollars and seventeen cents.”
Keys being punched. The machine rumbled as Sonny hit
the TOTAL key.
“That’s a real fall-off,” Sonny remarked.
“I’ll talk to him, never fear. Now please don’t chatter at
me, Sonny. Mr. Sloat arrives in Muncie at ten-fifteen and it’s a long drive. I don’t want to be late.”
“Sorry, Reverend Gardener.”
Gardener made some reply Jack didn’t even hear. At the
name Sloat, a great shock had walloped him—and yet part of him was unsurprised. Part of him had known this might be in the cards. Gardener had been suspicious from the first. He
had not wanted to bother his boss with trivialities, Jack figured. Or maybe he had not wanted to admit he couldn’t get
the truth out of Jack without help. But at last he had called—
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where? East? West? Jack would have given a great lot just
then to know. Had Morgan been in Los Angeles, or New