15 Jan 09 Tyr and the Wolf

The woods are bitterly cold, the old hobo remarked, and I shall die out here. He stood on the slender gash of a railroad, cutting through thick pine forests so darkly green they were almost black. The clear white sky above him and the tendrils of snow that lay on the ground and about the tracks were set in contrast to the forest about him.

He had repeated this phrase–”The woods are damn cold and I’m gonna die out here”–for many years, a mantra he had crafted in the chilly mornings in the North. This old man’s summers, and even his autumns, were long past: he carried a torn and shredded backpack on his back, with no contents–a plastic bag in his left hand, twirled into tight cords of plastic to ease carrying–and a stick of pine in his right, sap still frozen, aiding him in his travels.

If he was lucky he would be able to catch a train, fall asleep to the lullaby of a rocking car. But it had been more than a decade since a train had come along these tracks, ferrying iron to Duluth. He couldn’t remember that, anymore than he could remember why he uttered his mantra. When he thought back to those times, he simply remembered iron. Dusty iron, oily iron, iron warmed by human hands, iron jumbled in a rocky puzzle in a cart, iron crushed. He had once made a trip to the foundries and smelter in Duluth to see what it actually turned into, and he did not recognize the vast geometric forms of steel, the final product of what he had pulled out of the Earth.

The old man had lost his left eye, the one he would wink at the pretty blondes in town, and couldn’t breathe right since he had started in the mines. He staggered on in a sort of limpy way down the tracks, hoping that he might find something nice at the next stop. A church function or a community thing. Maybe a young girl he could wink his empty socket at–and perhaps sound out a sinister chuckle at her scream.

Only the sandy sound of blowing snow reached the wizard’s ears and even then, the sound was drowned out by the cold and frostbite eating into his toes and fingers, his nose and ears. The biting wind seemed to find every whole in his rags. Inside, though, he felt nothing. Often his thoughts were turned to his younger days, when he was eating or drinking something warm. Those pretty blondes… But now he was blank, a one-eyed man, coughing along the way, towards the small town of Gheen, MN.

An observer would be careful to notice his plodding method, the way the staff was mostly a weight bearing him down, but at critical times it held him up. He moved forward, practically inching through space like a bipedal snail, called forward by warmth and method, food and habit. He seemed to be completely devoid of a soul, forgotten by destiny, but still the last human in this emerald wasteland.

“These words are damn cold and I’ll sure as hell die out here…”

—

Pooch was whining at the back door, scratching at the lower half of the old torn wood, the ripped plastic sheeting over the bottom window blowing in the wind. Pooch was a mutt, a mix of breeds—he looked faintly like a German shepherd, that possibly vicious look that a Nazi dog would have. But Pooch’s image was distinctly by the side of his master, young Tyler Swenson, and the dog was well-trained and friendly. He tackled Tyler all the time, not caring if the boy bruised or scratched—but around strangers he was polite and kind, respectful.

Tyler was awake, watching television, some mindless show that still was worth drowning out the sound of Pooch at the kitchen door. Eventually Pooch would come around the double-wide, looking in the low windows and scratching at the plastic screens there to be let back in. Tyler was all alone at home, 8 years old, in the fourth day of Christmas vacation: his father was at work in the mines, his mother was away on business.

Their trailer stood on a small cleared lot of land just south of County Road 905 in Gheen, Minnesota. Tyler’s dad had inherited some of this land when his grandfather had passed away and had moved a cheap trailer up here. He called it at first his “weekend getaway” from Virgina

Tyler was waiting for 10AM—the time his father let him use the phone—to call his friend to go play on an ATV. They said on the news that International Falls now had almost 4 feet of snow overnight, and that it soon might be in LOCATION too. The dry, biting part of winter was over and now the damp, thick snow was approaching. He needed to get in the last few minutes on Mike’s ATV, the rushing, roaring contraption that made him forget all else.

Pooch whined again.

—

Tyler had seen the look in his father’s eye, his face, his shoulders when he meekly told him he was going over to Mike’s to play on the ATV. The way his upper body turned from organic to stone, the way the muscles tensed to strike out. Tyler seemed to see details in his father better when he was angry at him, like the number of hairs in his goatee or the dirt on the collar of his shirt. He knew a lecture might come later, a talk about responsibility versus play and how he should be doing chores.

Mike’s parents didn’t smoke and so the moment he walked into their house, he immediately felt like he stink of stale cigarettes. Even washing right before he came over didn’t help—he still reeked of it. Their house wasn’t far from him and it wasn’t a trailer—it was a newly-built, an all-American home. Nice new siding, some cheap landscaping from Menard’s, those little solar lights. It spoke of prosperity, especially out here—it actually was the newest structure to be built in town for almost 10 years.

Tyler had met Mike at school, being the only couple of boys near in age that took the bus out to this area. Mike didn’t live a spoiled life but he had a lot of the things that Tyler did not—and Tyler possessed the confidence and strength that attracted a smart young kid like Mike. In years to come, they would be the sort of good cop/bad cop routine as friends, the nice and gentle person that women could come to when Tyler had been through them with his rigmarole and intensity.

Mike picked him up on the ATV and they headed off into the woods. They yelled at each other idly over the ATV, Tyler asking if they could go back and tear up the small lawn around the trailer. Mike might have laughed, Tyler didn’t hear him—instead he gunned it and headed

—

Mark was silently pleased when the boy went away to his friend’s house. Since he had been home for the past couple days he had not felt comfortable jerking off—the kid was getting older, now, and he was probably going to start guessing about what his father did, or worse, what his mother did.

She was due to come home and give Mark some two grand or something today, all the work she had been scraping up in the north. She had called last week and said she did some construction gig and was able to make some three hundred dollars dancing and then about the same amount meeting up with the men afterwards, behind trailers and trucks. Mark had never loved her, had never wanted her, had never even really seen her—just had done what felt good.

Then there came the brief interlude of a promised marriage, his parents scolding him, and then suddenly the entire church knew what was going on—followed quickly by Tyler, the job at the new mine, and moving out here. When Mark had suggested that she could become a dancer—there were so many new strip joints opening up out here, for the lonely truckers and miners and foresters, the north’s own Rust Belt—he never did it for the fun or adventure she had craved, this girl who once had brought the pigtail fashion into town in the late seventies.

It had all been about the money. But even that illusion had been shattered when he bought the deck and the grill, when he was able to make the payments on the trailer—it didn’t matter to him. He had no desire for material things. He wanted a mattress on the floor, a space heater, and that was it. He wanted another fix, a blowjob, and then maybe some TV. He didn’t want Tyler to have those goddamn marshallow cereals or fruit or ice cream. He sure as hell wouldn’t buy him an ATV like those fuckin’ yuppies down the road bought their son. Weren’t they the same age?

This sort of stuff got Mark worked up. He hated that kid and would need to kick him out or something. Declare bankruptcy and get him outta the house. Could he do that? He’d have to ask some of his buddies at the mine who had done things like that, get rid of the kids and the wife and just turn their lives into a wonderland of cheap beer, cheap women, no families, no worries, no problems, no nothing. Just mining, drinking, hunting.

Then he’d maybe have a chance to man-up the damn dog he bought for so much a couple years ago, try and teach him the trade of hunting and get some fresh food around here. Stupid Pooch…Tyler had named him that, and at first it made him laugh—but sometimes pets get those names that stick, and Pooch was all he could call him. Mark had been afraid when his buddies had come over that they might think something about it…especially after his woman left. But they had stopped by one night, picking up a tool or some material, and heard Tyler call the dog Pooch…and the moment had come and the moment had passed, the only thing to mark it was some extra stale adrenaline in Mark’s veins.

Earlier before he had heard the kids gun that ATV down the road, maybe the next entry in a long list of time Tyler had annoyed his father. But now he heard a car pull up, and against the drone of the engine heard a car door open and shut. He scratched himself.

—

The snow began to fall hard and fast as he entered the town of Gheen. The old man thought of pickles—of canning and jarring, of preserving and the foul, bitter foods that came out of the canning jars.

“Esther made this today with her mother, y’know, she just wants me to buy her a house in the company village and settle down with her.” The old man said it out loud, a verbatim copy decades old of what he had told his friends in the mine. “If they give you any of this food and you eat it, you’ve got to propose then. If they get you hooked on their cookin’ you’ll want everything from their kitchen.”

The lunch room was a bench and a collapsible aluminum table off the side of the shaft elevator. They were only on the third floor of the iron mine, sitting and eating lunch, and the old man’s face was smoother, more blond, less like paper and craters. He imagined Esther then as he did now—Scandinavian perfection, all quilts and canning and crosshatch and sweaters. Her summer dresses, blowing in the humid breezes of Minnesota…

“Yeah guy, I hear ya. My wife did the exact same thing, could’a sworn she cast a spell on me. She gave me the kicker, a slice of strawberry rhubarb, no ifs and or buts about it. I hada marry her the day after.” The men laughed. They all died within 15 years. Except for the old man, plodding along. His lung kept pumping, even though they were filled with chilly air. Gheen, Minnesota: drawn forward by the promise of food that he tricked himself into smelling, almost as thick and cloying as the scents of the county fair that same year, when he had asked Esther to marry him.

—

Tyler had known it would snow earlier that day—the low-hanging sheep’s wool colored clouds promised that the first layer of snow in northern Minnesota would be thick, at least two inches. He could already imagine the trees weighted down with the pounds of precipitation, how the way everything sounded would change when the snow absorbed it.

But right now the ATV echoed through the woods, the sound of the engine reverberating off the empty trees and glades. Tyler was driving, Mike taking care to not grab ahold of his friend and instead gripping to the black cargo holder of the ATV in the back. Birch, pine and skinny oaks whipped past, their branches pruned by the searching wind and frost.

“Tyler, you pussy, take it off the trail!” Mike called out.

Tyler whipped the ATV off the dirt course, plunging into the scarce underbrush and trying to navigate around the larger trees and bushes that would either stop or get caught on the ATV. He stood up taller to see around the foliage and felt a bump as the ATV went over a dead log. The brief sensation of weightlessness, and when the ATV thumped back to the ground he noticed the snow was falling.

It was the first snow, falling straight down, stilling even the harsh winter wind. Looking around in near disbelief—was it disbelief? He had seen lots of snows before—he saw a small clearing he would come to stop at and maybe wait for enough to fall to hit Mike with a snowball.

The engine purred and puffed, snow accumulating on the fiberglass of the ATV, melting at the hot points. Mike was pissing in the other corner of the glade, and Tyler was holding out his tongue to take a taste of the first snow. Smacking his lips like it was a turkey feast, he looked at the small pile of rocks, a farmer’s cairn at the edge of the clearing.

It seemed strange to him, that a farmer would come this far into the woods to dispose of rocks when he could just throw it at the edge of the forest. He heard Mike zipping up, start to walk back to the ATV. Tyler felt that sensation of weightlessness again, the sensation of flying that humans should never feel, as he looked at the small pile of rocks, so unobtrusive and uninteresting. Barely worth mentioning over the trees that towered above the young men.

Mike called out to Tyler that it was his turn to ride, and Tyler turned back to the ATV to hop on and ride back to Mike’s for hot chocolate and maybe some snack. Mike’s parents always had food around the house to munch on, unlike his place—canned foods, food in boxes, food that required fresh eggs or milk to make, which was never around.

After the ATV had left and the snow swirled in its wake, clumping together on the leafy group, it continued to fall onto the cairn of rocks. The topmost rock, a yellowish limestone deal was scored with ancient markings and runes, never spoken in the glade again after its first cutting, now never spoken in the rest of the world. Snow settled into the lines and corners of the cracked runes. This would probably be the old record’s last winter, being cracked and crushed by ice when the snow melted in a few weeks. Almost a thousand had passed since the last human had came here and marked his way, and now another thousand would come as its existence as dust and fragments.

Far away, the old man stuck out his tongue and tasted the first snow of the winter.

—

The old man had stopped next to the trailer park, leaning and breathing heavily. The man had walked past a new house, the first new thing that he had seen in a long time. It was a fancy A-frame, built snugly into the trees. But the fresh landscaping, quickly covering with the heavy snow, really gave it away. It broke the man from his reverie, made him sweat, made him think about how the conversations he had had with his friends had ended 15 years later, when the last was gone. When finally his pension evaporated and Social Security was still almost 5 years away.

A woman was walking out of a trailer, covered in a brown jacket and wearing tight, tight jeans. She glanced at him, like a woman in the city might, and looked away—very citylike indeed—and then she looked at him again, the queer site of the old man standing at the edge of her yard, the snow falling around and on him. He must look crazy or something, but to him she was the one who looked insane. She hurriedly stuffed a few plastic bags she had carried out into her purse, pushing them to the bottom-most pocket.

She stepped into her car, which had been left running, and started to back out, the fresh snow crunching under her tires. The man had not seen her pull a napkin from her purse, wipe her hands and her mouth. As she reached into her purse, the old man saw a dog run out and try to catch her attention. She did a small kick in its direction but its enthusiasm was unabated. The woman got into the car, snow sliding off the windshield. He saw her glance back at him through the rearview mirror, the eyes surrounded by a halo of snow on the back window, and he heard the car shift gears.

Pooch ran behind the car, trying to see if this familiar woman was on the other side of the vehicle…

—

When Tyler got home he didn’t smell the spit in the air, or the blood, or the wet dog smell, or the smell of his father’s anger. He smelled the cigarettes, and saw the smoke hanging in the air. Almost resignedly he walked into the kitchen.

Blood was all over the kitchen counter and sink. He froze and looked at his father.

“Pooch got hit by a car today. He’s freakin’ out, I’ve got him tied up out back. I cleaned up his cuts and his leg but he just wants to be left alone. Where have you been all day?”

The most important thing his father had said was the last accusatory question. Tyler focused on it immediately, without conscious effort.

“Mike and I were on his ATV, out in the woods…when did it happen? Who hit him?”

“I don’t know, they drove off. Probably was down by the highway.

—

Pooch was asleep, his wounds facing down, packed into the wet, warm blankets out back for him. Tyler could see he wasn’t dead, his chest rising and falling. It was early in the morning, Tyler was in his pajamas, and in his right hand he had a new Cool-Whip container with dry dog food drizzled with bacon grease. He was going to give a present to Pooch…and while he was eating, he would chain him up.

Pooch’s second rope was starting to fray, and he knew that he’d have to chain him eventually. Looking in the messy closet near the front door, he found an old, cheap chain that Mark must’ve used before. It was sharp, uncomfortable—it was from some hardware store—but it wouldn’t fray, and Pooch would have to be focusing on something else if Tyler wanted to do this to him without getting a snip or that mad, barking laughter.

Tyler was outside. There was no wind on this day, and the compressed snow underneath his feet was icy, slick. His slippers stuck to it. He approached the dog silently, hearing the crunch beneath his feet, smelling the grease and the dog food smell. His hair was a tangled mess, a masterpiece of a sleeper who rolled around a lot in his small bed.

He was right next to Pooch now, and could see in almost microscopic detail the body of the dog, his rough features that his hurt could only bring out. Mark hadn’t wanted to spring for a vet…it’d be cheaper to get a new dog, maybe see this one off…and Tyler didn’t feel much about that. He only knew that there was something going on, some unspoken creed, of how to treat a wounded animal. Mercy killings for horses, tying up a dog, giving milk to a cat, flushing fish down the toilet.

And then a rough snarl and the sound of dog food peppering the snow and ice; Tyler fell down, Pooch on top of him, his claws digging into his shoulder and stomach. The dog was biting his face, biting and tearing, twisting its jaws to tear skin off. Tyler felt something come off of his face and the dog snapped. He reached up on Pooch’s right and pulled at the wound, the scabbed tear on his side.

Pooch snarled again and this time wrapped his jaws around Tyler’s hand. Tyler’s feet were useful now and he began kicking at the dog, blood coming down his face and front, seeing the made look in the creature’s bloodshot eyes. He felt a tear in his arm and saw, almost in slow motion, blood drops falling to the snow, mixing with the dirt Pooch’s back paws had dug up.

And then suddenly Pooch was gone and there was pain, immediate and sudden torture. He fell over and hard Pooch biting something, crunching something, felt almost as though a spring’s flood was flowing through his arm. He tried to move his arm and failed, and a wail escaped him. His hand was gone, gone, gone…a stringy ligament or tendon trailed on the snow while Tyler writhed, splashed with steaming blood.

Tyler did not see or hear the old man approach, nor did Pooch, intent on his prey like a wolf. His feet were black after shoeless weeks in the North, his backpack was all but gone, save the straps that held his shirt and jacket in place. The staff was worn down to a nub at its bottom. The man suddenly, athletically, crossed the snowy yard.

The stick hit Pooch’s back and cracked in two. Pooch yelped and dropped Tyler’s hand, a lump of gore: the old man put his hands to the dogs throat as it thrashed and pressed, like pressing a cart throttle button in those ages, heading up to the surface again… It was just like the end of a shift, the end of another day in the deep dark of the North. Pooch’s eyes bulged and his claws scraped against the papery skin of his killer.

Tyler was in shock. He had seen a grey figure jaunting towards him, clearly attacking Pooch, but it was like watching from the far end of the tunnel. The figure was howling something, holding the heavy dog by its neck, strangling it—the legs were kicking, the claws were scratching, the jaws were working—and, mercifully, Tyler blacked out, his handless arm stretching away from him.

The old man threw the dog across the yard, hearing it smack the fence and fall to the snow. Blood and mud covered his hands, while bright, bloody rips in his pale skin looked like tiny, organized ribbons on his flesh. Pooch struggled to stand up the old man closed in. He grabbed Pooch’s snout, opened his mouth and set his aged foot upon it, got a better grip on the dog’s muzzle and pulled as hard as he could.

The claws dug into the man’s foot, and for a second almost broke him from his murderous reverie. He was barely even aware of Tyler on the ground behind him, of the snowy surroundings, the water dripping from Tyler’s trailer. In his mind he was still on the train tracks, impervious to the cold and the loneliness. The squealing of Pooch was cut off with an unearthly sucking and cracking sound as his lower jaw came apart from his skull, the eyes of the dog bulging and suddenly realizing, with almost sentient clarity, how it would die.

The old man stepped back, staggered, removing the mandible and gore from his bare foot. Pooch squealed and ran into his dog house, the fence, finally running with his head along the ground, coming to stop at the end of a bloody line, a gory meteor strike on the ground. Tyler was passed out, and the old man stretched and looked over at him. Could he bind the wounds? Did he know about 911 or resuscitation?

His Esther came to mind, the day that she had died. What had he done then? Was that the first day he had entered the otherworld himself, that strange world he was locked into in his mind? Time seemed to stop and go in a slow reverse, as he relived these memories of his youth, almost the memories of another person. He stumbled and picked up the boy, thinking he could walk to the house at the other end of town, the nice new one he had seen.

—

As melting snow dripped into the runestone, sealing in the long campaign of weathering, Tyler lay in a Duluth hospital, next to the old man. His hand was bandaged and he slept, peacefully, the nurse having given this child maybe a bit extra codeine than he needed, just to put him to sleep.

Mike and his family had visited more than once, his parents talking about how they couldn’t get a hold of his father, how they would take care of it, they would help. Tyler felt strange, being the sudden object of their attention, and felt that strange weightlessness when Mike had looked at his arm and the white bandage that covered the stump. He had looked in awe, in respect—the same way Tyler had looked at the ATV when he first saw it, the Playstation, the nice house with siding.

The old man slept as well, bandages around his feet, hands, stitches across his upper back where the doctors had removed a spot on his skin. The nurses had been amazed at his state—weighing barely more than the young man—the black spots of frostbite and the red marks across his body a testament to the ages. They weren’t even sure

Pooch was dead, his body being buried in the backyard of the trailer. Mark was gone, trying to find his wife, calling her incessantly on his cell phone since the police had come to the trailer. What would child abandonment and neglect matter if they had looked in his room, or checked the garage? If they had found the little plastic bags of pills and fine-coated dust?

When the runes were carved on the rock, the warrior who had left his mark was fleeing from a band of natives, ones who had better furs and boots for the thick snow. Lighter, for pursuit. The plants had paused their growth with this strange, thick snow so late in the spring—and he fled the burning of his little fort. He would mark his name on the rock and the year on the rock; his name glorifying Odin and the year written anno Domini.

It had been many years since the Vikings had ceased believing the ancient myths, but he muttered a quick prayer to Asgard as he fled the grove, smelling the burning fort and homes on the air, the images of the slaughter of his small outpost in his mind fresh and crisp. The chase would be short, as he had no boots for the snow, and the heavy chainmail he wore bore him down. But still he thought of Odin, and Thor, and Tyr, and asked them to protect him from the savages, from the natives, from the wolves.