So the wolf killer tells me to follow him into his backyard
By Emma Holland
So the wolf killer tells me to follow him into his backyard.
He tells me that wolf tracks are bigger than dog tracks, and rotates a shovel into the garden bed.
To bury something or to dig something up, you begin the same way.
He points at a chemtrail and smiles, and I wonder if he is trying to distract me.
When the hole is made, he gets down on his belly and turns his head to look up at me.
He says there’s something to see, and I lie down, belly down, on the grass next to him.
He reaches into the hole and taps on something hard.
“It’s still here,” he says, and then pushes his hands into the earth and stands back up. I turn my head and look at him standing above me.
“Go ahead,” he says. “It’s still in there.”
I reach my hand into the hole and tap one finger on something hard at the bottom.
He begins to walk away, so I get up and begin to follow him toward the shed.
“Cover it back up,” he says. “You don’t just leave it.”
I kneel beside the hole and shuffle the dirt back over whatever he was checking on.
I find him in the shed, putting the shovel in the rafters.
I sit on a stool and brush dirt off my knees.
He rifles through his pockets.
“There’s a joke in here somewhere,” he says.
“I’m hungry” I say.
He fishes a coin out of his pocket, and I follow him back across the yard to the covered-up hole, where he presses the coin halfway into the dirt.
“What do you have?” he says, and I dig my hand into my pocket and pull out some coins and drop two quarters on the dirt.
He gets up and points at a plane flying low, going east.
I’m distracted by the sound of music coming from the house, and I lead as he follows me from the backyard into the house.
We eat salmon at the kitchen table, and partway through, he urinates with the door open.
“I like to piss outside,” he says, “but the smell of urine keeps animals away.”
I eat the fish on my plate and ask him why the dog doesn’t wear a collar.
“There’s a collar in here somewhere,” the wolf killer says, and reaches his hand into the long fur around the dog’s neck and rattles the tags hidden deep in the dog’s fur.
I wash the grease off our plates and piss with the door open, while the wolf killer sits at the table feeding scraps of fat to the dog with his fingers.
The dog licks the wolf killer’s palm and laps his tongue between the wolf killer’s fingers, and the wolf killer laughs.
“There’s a joke in here somewhere,” he says.
He switches the radio to a baseball station.
It’s the bottom of the fifth.
I drink a glass of water from the tap and I look out the window at the backyard.
The grass looks neat, and from this angle, I can’t tell where the hole had been.
“Don’t worry,” he says, “it’s still there,” noticing me looking.
“What is?” I say, pretending I wasn’t looking.
“Your 50 cents,” he says, and laughs.
Emma Holland is a girl that lives on Henry Street.