A Wolf at the Door

Geraldine opened the door and looked out at the wolf standing on the front porch. It was a large wolf, wild, and there was no way it could have knocked on the door. Still, a knock had roused her from her nap, she had crossed the living room floor to open the front door, and there it stood: the wolf. Its teeth were bared, its ears pinned back to its head, and a low growl emanated from its throat. It was a horrifying sight, but before she felt fright Geraldine felt confusion. How could this wild wolf have found its way here, to Forest Park, a residential neighborhood in West Baltimore? It was no place for wolves, certainly not for wolves of this size or ferocity. In her fifteen years in Forest Park, Geraldine had seen foxes and racoons, and once she had found a large buck standing on the front lawn, but a wolf? It was absurd. She had a hard time believing it, though there it was.

She looked first one way, then the other. There was no one around to testify to the presence of the wolf. She turned away to close the door, unwilling to put up with this foolishness, but that was when the animal, the beast, lunged toward her, its mouth opening much wider than seemed possible. She saw its reddish gums, its sharp yellowed teeth, the red tunnel of its throat, and she felt the darkness descend all around her—was the wolf really swallowing her whole? She felt a strangeness along the edges of her body, a viscous squeezing, pressure against her head and sides, and then she was somehow looking through the wolf’s eyes, seeing everything the way a wild animal would. She felt a kind of hunger she had never felt before, a will to destroy, to eat the whole world until it was broken down inside her powerful guts. A frightening yet oddly familiar feeling.

She was left with the afterglow of that sensation when she opened her eyes from her nap and heard the knock at the door a second time, louder now, more insistent. It was an echo of what had just happened in what she told herself had to have been a dream—though it had felt more real than any dream she’d ever had. She walked across the living room floor toward the door, resting her hand on the doorknob an extra beat before opening it. She refused to be afraid—Geraldine was not a fearful woman. She fully expected the wolf to be standing on the other side of the door, though another part of her knew who it was, who it had to be, knocking on her door like that. Richard.

And it was Richard, the brother who was five years her junior. He had never had any patience, even when they were children, and what patience he’d once had had raveled out after years of drug abuse and bad, and she meant bad, relationships. Mutually abusive. Now he stood on Geraldine’s porch wearing all navy blue—loose navy blue pants, a navy blue jacket over a navy blue t-shirt, even navy blue New Balance sneakers.

“Richard. What do you want?” Too groggy for niceties. And that feeling from the dream... it was still with her. Muted now, but there.

“You called me.”

“Mm. I must have dozed off.”

“Must have.”

Though only five years separated them, they seemed to belong to different generations. While Richard clung to his youth with a tenacity that would have been admirable if it didn’t make him foolish, Geraldine had already crested the hill and was over it.

She couldn’t recall calling Richard but knew she must have, and she gradually remembered why she must have and led him down the stairs, toward the street. The yard of the house was generous, but the landlord didn’t care for it well. Now the yard was covered with rotting leaves under piles of melted snow. It was very cold out, and Geraldine wore only the sparkly silver slacks and white top with the elaborate bow at the bust she had put on earlier that day to drive to the shelter where she volunteered. A holiday party. She had brought four different kinds of cookies.

She had been volunteering at the shelter for only a few months but already felt like part of the community. They welcomed her by name. She loved it there, though she also loved being able to leave.

“Well,” she said. “There it is.”

The car was a Centro Lobo she’d purchased less than a year earlier, a simple black sedan that had caused her undue pride when she first bought it. It had replaced her twenty year old battered Subaru. For a few months the new car had been pristine, a sleek black vehicle she cleaned at the Sudsville every Sunday after church. Then she had come out of the grocery store one morning to find the passenger side of the car scraped up. It had been like someone had run a cheese grater across her own face; it had hurt that much. But that was the sin of pride, and she refused to pay the deductible that would have been charged had she contacted her insurance company.

She found a way to live with the scrapes. It was possible to ignore them if she parked the car a certain way. Then, a few weeks ago, someone had driven by on the street in the middle of the night and smashed her two driver’s side windows out. For three days she’d driven with cellophane taped over the windows, flapping everywhere she drove, until finally she’d had the windows repaired. Richard knew a man who worked on cars on the spot, and he charged only three quarters of what the official places would have. She had paid him less than her deductible.

Now this.

This was a broken grille. Looking at it made the feeling from her dream, the world-eating feeling, vibrate at the edge of her perception.

The deer had leapt out of the woods by the side of the road as she was driving back from the shelter that morning, giving her no warning. There was a stretch of woods between Forest Park and the shelter, an urban wilderness as deep as urban wilderness got, tree trunks growing thick. There was nothing she could do but scream and brace for impact. Wham. She’d hit the flank of the animal, which skittered on the wet road before hobbling back into the forest from whence it came. For some reason (probably shoddy workmanship) the airbag of the Centro had not deployed, and Geraldine had bashed her head against the windshield. At least she was pretty sure that’s what happened. The windshield appeared uninjured, but she remembered being hurtled forward, and then she remembered settling back in the driver’s seat and looking around her. She did not remember the moment of impact, but that didn’t mean it hadn’t happened. Her head hurt and her thoughts were cloudier than usual. So there was that.

“It looks like you were lucky,” Richard said, crouching to inspect the damage.

“Oh really. Lucky?”

“Yeah. Lucky. It’s just the grille. Radiator’s fine. Airbag didn’t even go off. I can get you a grille from a junkyard. Replace it myself for two hundred.”

Geraldine nodded and hummed deep in her throat. If Richard was charging her two hundred, that meant it would cost him ten, if not less. She figured it was a handy way to give Richard money without him having to ask for it, but she hoped it wasn’t going to be used for whatever drug he had moved onto now. Coke, heroin, oxy, meth. She was pretty sure he’d gone through every one. She’d let him live with her for three months, about five years ago now, and still regretted that decision. Never again. He had stolen from her shamelessly. He’d shown up at the house at two or three a.m., making a lot of noise, yelling into his cellphone at his abusive girlfriend of the moment, and it was a respectable house. She had apologized to her neighbors and kicked him out after the allotted three months were up. He’d never asked to come back, but he sometimes asked for money.

She looked at the thick gray and tan hairs embedded in what remained of the grille. Blood dotted one corner. She wondered if the deer had survived and felt a swelling of hunger, as if she wanted to pursue that poor animal, hunt it down, fall on it, and eat it raw, starting at its tender neck. She imagined blood spuming into her open mouth, then shook her head. That was an image out of another mind, somehow, not hers. She remembered the wolf that had stood at the door in her dream and the way he had eaten her whole.

“I’ll get the grille today, be back tomorrow morning to put it in. You’ll have the money?”

“I’ll have the money, Richard.”

“You okay?” he asked her. She realized she had been staring at the fur embedded in the grille. She turned to her brother and smiled.

“Don’t I seem okay?”

“I don’t know. I guess.”

They hugged, and Richard left in the old Subaru beater she’d given him for nothing when she bought the new car. Nothing was what it was worth. Now there was a hole in its muffler and it rattled loud down the street.

She often hated Richard, often acted as if he was not her brother. They’d grown up on the edge of Edmondson Village, near the cemetery. She had stayed out of trouble, while he dove headlong into it. When she was ten their mother started leaving her in charge of Richard, and sometimes she felt as much like a mother to him as a sister. At first, he had minded her, but by the time he was ten there was no controlling him. He ran wild. She had no idea what he really did in the streets.

As soon as she could, she’d gone away to Morgan State, right across town but far enough that it felt like another world.

Sometimes she felt like Richard’s failed life, and it couldn’t be classified as anything other than that, was her fault. She should have been stricter with him, should have figured out a way to make him mind, should have tied him to the chair in the living room if it came to that. Should have saved him from himself. She still remembered when she had found him in the cemetery at six o’clock on a winter evening. It was already dark. Her mother had sent her out to fetch him, and she hadn’t really expected to find him, but something had led her into the cemetery. He was so drunk he was curled up on top of a pile of his own vomit, barely conscious. He was ten years old then, and she was worried that he was going to die. Back at the apartment their mother had stripped Richard and bathed him, like she did when they were babies, then put him in a sweatsuit and held him on the couch, running her fingers over his forehead. Geraldine had felt more jealous than she’d ever felt in her life.

After Richard left, she went inside her apartment and lay back down. She didn’t like to nap during the day, but she was still so tired. When she woke this time, she couldn’t remember her dreams but still felt the strange earth-eating feeling of a wolf. She saw a package of lamb steak defrosting in the sink. She didn’t remember getting the meat out of the freezer, but she must have taken it out right after returning to the apartment following the accident. She tore into the plastic, seasoned the meat with peppercorns and sea salt. Some of the blood got on her fingers and she found herself licking it off.

She turned on her stereo, an old system with a CD player, and put on the Ohio Players, listened as she grilled the lamb, then sat at the table and scarfed the meal down, though it couldn’t properly be called a “meal.” She was used to being alone now. She had been married for only two years. It had been a good two years. Roland had always been so sweet and kind to her. They had even tried to have children, or at least she had. She’d not been all that surprised when Roland came out of the closet and left her and, despite the pain they had both endured, they were still friends. He was much happier now. She couldn’t say the same, but that was no one’s fault.

The steak was not enough, and Geraldine found herself rooting around the refrigerator. There were angus burgers in the freezer, and she fried one up and ate it, sat feeling deeply satiated, listening to an old Mahalia Jackson CD, one she hadn’t listened to in years. It sounded good but wild, the great woman’s voice rising and rising and never cracking. “Didn’t It Rain?”

She felt as if the music was warring in her soul with the feeling that had been with her ever since she’d woken up from her nap, the mad hunger. She would not nap the next day, that was for sure. Maybe she would never nap again.

She dressed in her velour sweatsuit, purple with white piping up each leg, settled in the living room with a blanket to watch her programs, a drama featuring a multicultural cast, a comedy, the news, treated herself to a hot toddy, then went to bed early.

She found herself crossing the bedroom at early o’clock, two or three a.m., fuzzy slippers afoot. It had to be Richard again, knocking at this time. She was disappointed in him but not surprised. He was probably going to try to get the two hundred dollars from her early so he could buy whatever he thought would soothe his soul. He was going to look gruff, unshaven, and angry, all rent up the way he got when his need grew too great. She was surprised Richard had never spent time in prison. Maybe that was what he needed. She had contemplated it in the past: ratting on him, but the no-snitching ethic she had grown up with had gotten into her psyche and could not be dislodged.

She put on her disappointed face as she opened the door. But instead of Richard, it was the wolf, returned. No, it was another wolf, one that looked related to the first. It was bigger, maybe, or sleeker, or its eyes were a different color. It was the mate of the first, maybe. They locked eyes, then the wolf turned and walked slowly down the stairs. It stood on the walkway waiting until Geraldine had put on her coat and hat, changed out her fuzzy slippers for snow boots, and walked outside after it.

The walkway was almost frozen solid, and Geraldine walked cautiously. The wolf circled her, its huge paws spreading on the ice. On the second floor of the house she heard Marian’s dog, Snowball, barking loud and frenzied, and she felt bad for waking the whole neighborhood up.

She opened the door of the Lobo for the wolf. It climbed into the passenger seat and sat like a good dog while she got behind the steering wheel, put her seatbelt on, and drove across town. She remembered how she had felt yesterday morning when she was heading to the shelter. It had been clear and cold and she had felt good about everything. She was going to bring four different kinds of cookies to people in need. She didn’t think of them that way—at least she tried not to. They were just people. Anyone could be in their position. She herself could be in that position, though she never had been. She had earned her degree at Morgan and had worked for the city ever since. She had moved up, level after level, and was now able to save money. A considerable amount. She could buy a new car if it were that important to her. She noticed now, as she drove through the darkness, a hairline crack in the windshield where she must have hit her head. She didn’t remember it from earlier. She turned to look at the wolf in the passenger seat, expecting it not to be there, but the wolf looked back at her, its mouth open, a warm gamy smell emanating from between its yellow teeth. Its gums were black.

She parked the car on the side of the road where the urban wild grew thickest. In the dark it seemed even thicker. She popped the hazard lights on and opened the passenger door for the wolf. It— it was a “she,” she noticed— started sniffing the broken grille and the roadside. The trail of blood seemed to shine with a kind of phosphorescence. She could smell it, too, a rich iron-drenched scent. She followed the wolf into the woods. She was able to move faster than before, her muscles supple. She felt her limbs carrying her forward, the trees appearing before her then passing behind her. She navigated around them with unerring accuracy. There was nothing to fear here, only things to eat. She was an apex predator. She was the king of the woods. And she was hungry.

They came upon the injured deer in a copse several miles into the woods. It lay on its side breathing heavily. It was a beautiful, injured thing. Its ribcage rose and fell. Its black nose was wet and shone in the moonlight. They descended onto it as one, rending muscle from bone. She heard the deer make a sound she’d never heard before, a kind of existential cry, carrying a fear of death she didn’t know wild animals possessed. She felt the blood warm on her neck and chin, and she exulted in it.

In the morning she woke in bed, sun shining through the blinds. The velour sweatsuit she wore was encrusted with blood and she could smell the rich scent of carrion coming from her own body. She had smelled dead deer in the woods before (not that she went into the woods often) but not a recently dead deer. It had a sweet musk to it. She buried the bloody sweatsuit under a pile of dirty clothes in the laundry basket and took a long hot shower. In the bathroom mirror, her face seemed to have narrowed a fraction. Her eyes held a steeliness they hadn’t had before.

She made extra eggs, extra bacon, and extra toast, and she was not surprised when she looked out her front window and saw Richard at work replacing the grille on her car. He was no mechanic, and he would do a poor job, but she didn’t particularly care.

When he was finished, he knocked on the door and she let him in. He treated her house like a guest who had once been a tenant, looking around with a proprietary air. He tucked into the eggs as if he hadn’t eaten in days, a distinct possibility. She looked at him, trying to determine if he was high on something, or coming down from something, or trying to get off of something, but she had no idea. Some of the people at the shelter were addicts, too; she realized she afforded them a kind of grace she didn’t afford her own brother. She assumed their addictions were not their fault, while, to her, his was his and his alone.

When he was almost finished with the eggs, he sniffed and looked around.

“Damn. What is that?”

“What?”

“That smell?’

“I don’t know what you’re referring to.”

“There’s a smell in here. God…”

He shook his head, finished the meal, sipped his coffee. She could tell he was trying to ignore the smell but was unable to. She handed him two hundred dollars in twenties, and he shoved it into his pocket without looking at it. He had never tried to break into her house. He had stolen things without remorse when he was living with her, but they were always small things, things she wouldn’t miss. He knew where she kept her money and could have cleaned her out if he’d wanted to. He could easily have come in and stolen everything.

“I love you, Richard.”

“Where the hell did that come from?” he said, looking at her. The words seemed to shake him as much as the smell did.

“I just wanted you to know.”

“Oh. Okay. I love you too, Sis.”

He left, well-fed, the two hundred dollars in the pocket of his navy blue pants. She wondered what he would do with the money.

All day she waited for the wolf to appear at her door, for them to go out again, hunting down their next prey, but it didn’t. It didn’t come back the next night or the night after that, and after a while she realized that it had been a one-time thing. She was worried about the state of her soul because the events had been so real. It had not been a dream but a spiritual truth.

While she watched her programs, while she made large meals that she would freeze, while she cleaned her apartment, she would wait for that feeling again. She ached for it.

She attended Richard’s funeral wearing black slacks and a black blouse with an elaborate bow at the bust. He was dressed in a navy blue button-up shirt and dark blue jeans, and he resembled a doll. He had ODed on fentanyl and been found in the Subaru a few streets over from where they had grown up. There were many attendees at the funeral, dozens of people Richard’s age and younger, but Geraldine didn’t know a single one. At least three women carried on as if they had lost husbands. Or fathers.

She thought about what it meant to be strong, what it meant to be part of a family, part of a pack.

He was buried in the cemetery outside Edmondson Village.

When the next accident occurred, when the Centro was finally totaled, it was almost exactly a year later. It had snowed the night before. Then it had rained, and the rain had cleared away the snow, but the morning was cold and icy. She was bringing a bag of her old clothes to the shelter. She planned to spend time with some of the women she had become close with since she’d started volunteering. There was Gladys, who looked fifteen years older than her, with her toothless grin and wrinkled face, but was in fact the same age. There was Theresa, who liked to play Yahtzee and cheated like a snake. There was Albertine, who had frizzy white hair that stuck straight up like Don King. Geraldine looked forward to seeing them and was possibly a little preoccupied as she drove.

The car coming toward her on the road swerved to avoid another car sliding in from a side street, and then it was spinning, coming straight toward her. Geraldine found herself smiling, felt her eyes go hard like two brilliant pebbles, felt the hunger to break and eat the entire world come back and course through her. She waited for it with all her muscles tensed. Whatever happened, she was ready for it.

Jamey Gallagher lives in Baltimore and teaches writing at the Community College of Baltimore County. His collection, American Animism, will be published in 2024.

Published January 15 2023