Storymania - Wolf In Janie's Shadow by Wolfa

Wolf In Janie's Shadow
Wolfa

Auburn Hill was a small town, almost picturesque, with the sticky-sweet coating of cute-ness that dulls the mind and twists the mouth like a foul taste. It was not a bad town, really. It was a Good American Town. There was an ice-cream store and a dusty Eckerds and a rather out-of-place K Mart. It was the kind of town where everyone went to one church, and everyone went on Sunday. The "downtown" area of Auburn Hill was small and mostly painted an odd, cartoonish shade of peachy pink. None of the buildings went above two stories and wherever there was a large expanse of bare wall a mural had been painted on. The murals were all depressingly similar; depicting oxen and ploughs and horses pulling wagons and gloomily dressed settler-type people.
    It was the kind of town where, in the Veterans' Day Parade, everyone's grandfather marched or wheeled, proudly wearing their old WW2 uniforms and waving captured Japanese flags. It was the kind of town where every family had a father and a mother, and every family had children, and every family had a dog, maybe a cocker spaniel or a Jack Russell or possibly even a golden retriever. People from the city came down for weekend-trips here, to fish in the quaintly named Raccoon River or rent ponies for a trip up Auburn Hill, the tame little hill for which the tame little town was named.
    And in the town of Auburn Hill, on the 16th of May, there was born a little girl named Janie, who had two loving parents named Roy and Mandy and a big brother named Scottie and a golden retriever named Buddy. She had washed-out blue eyes and pale brown hair that was perfectly straight and freckles on her nose. She went to church and sat on her mama's lap and never made a fuss.
    But Janie did have one habit that was distressingly unusual; she claimed to have an imaginary friend. And not even a proper little-girl imaginary friend named Cindy or Ruthy or Rebbeca, Janie's imaginary friend was some kind of animal. When Janie got older, to the age of beginning school and speaking rather better, she told her nervous parents of the Thing. No, it didn't have a name. No, it wasn't a doggie like Buddy. And no, it wasn't imaginary, it was invisible, and it wasn’t her friend, it just followed her around. When pressed, Janie revealed that it was "sort of like a collie, with like a collie face, but not so furry, with more brown and grey and stuff, wif bigger ears." She described it as a wolf.
    The Invisible Wolf, as her parents thought of it, the horrifying and demonic creature that shadowed their daughter, faded away and was soon forgotten, and then her parents forgot it, too, and the years passed quietly.

Jane sat on the top of Auburn Hill and watched the sun set, slowly. The sky put on a brief, half-hearted show of dusty pinks before reverting swiftly to the faded, yellowish tones that usually accompanied the sunset in Auburn Hill. It was Friday, and so there had been no pony-riding families by. She had the hill to herself. It was near the end of August, and the heat radiated down in horrible, slow waves, driving the people of Auburn Hill indoors. Jane took advantage of the heat to seek solitude. She hated the people of Auburn Hill. Well, not hated, as much as feared. She feared them and feared that she would become them. Jane had seen it, seen the realization of the American Dream, and she feared it with a gnawing, consuming dread. To finally Own a House and have a Good Job and Get Married and Have Kids and Pay Off The Mortgage -— she could feel the bile rising up in her throat at the thought of it. It was a good life, and a solid, respectable, decent life, but the defiant, horrified little voice at the back of her mind screamed at her that it was her life, and if she wasted it she might not get another one. And it whispered to her, frozen in the grip of the night's massive paw, that what if all the church ladies were wrong, and instead of bright lights and loved ones and romping eternally through fantasy land there was only cold and dark and alone, alone forever, with nothing, nothing, nothing to see and no eyes to see it with.
    When the light of day drew on, hot and bright and logical, Jane thought, in a rather cynical way, that the typical description of Heaven sounded a little too much like lying around sniffing the White-Out all day. She was not Godless, but she was not really a Good Protestant Girl, either. She was just Herself, whoever that was.
    She sighed, trying to banish thoughts like this from her mind. She was just feeling the Call again, tugging insistently at the root of her being. She always felt the Call, come fall time. She had felt it before she could give it name. It pulled at her, pulled at her bone and brain and heart, making a sort of juicy ache behind her teeth and drawing her forward, as the salmon are drawn in spawning season to the waters that gave them birth. She did not know whence the Call came, but the ache had grown stronger over the past few years, until she no longer trusted herself. Sometimes, when her family vacationed in a strange place (like three hours away at Uncle Henry's), the Call would seize her feet and she would wander aimlessly, hopelessly, trying to chase it down. She did not know whence it came or why, but she knew that she felt it whenever the air was crisp and the angle of the sun just so and the wind tasted a certain way. She felt it now, faint but insistent, echoing from the place where the sun rose in the morning, tugging gently at her soul and just behind her teeth. She closed her eyes in the sudden cool breeze and saw a wolf running through a distant forest, white legs blurring as it raced over the leafy debris of fall. Her wolf, embodiment of her strangeness.
  She thought once of vast Suburbia and of driving minivans and Being Successful (which, as far as she could tell, entailed living in Suburbia until she died forgotten in a nursing home, having done absolutely nothing of worth in her brief, too-short lifetime). Jane thought of college, next year. After she graduated from college, all that was left to her was the business of Being Successful.
    Jane made a decision then, and then she walked down the path on Auburn Hill and went home. She kissed her parents goodnight and patted Rudy, aging son of the dearly departed Buddy, on the head before climbing the stairs and going to bed. Later that night she left the house on Maple Street and walked downtown to the bus stop, catching a bus into the city.
    The August air carried a hint of chill and the faintest taste of faraway lands.

She lived in a motel for a few days. She had money saved up. The police had no business following her, they patiently explained to her frantic parents, because she was no longer a minor. One night, as Jane walked to the motel from her new job in a small restaurant, a man offered her something. Jane hesitated, and then agreed. He gave her a phone number. She met him there again the following day, and went back to the motel a satisfied customer.
    A week had gone by, and Jane's parents had received no word from her yet. They finally convinced the police that a search was necessary. After all, she could have been kidnapped. The police went to the city, first, checked out the bus stations and talked to the cops in the city, who cooperated. Then, they went to the airport. Jane's parents had told them that she had money saved up. They might find her, or someone who had seen her, there.

Jane was, at the moment, sitting in the terminal, eating a salad in a cardboard tray on her lap and reading a cheap copy of Hannibal, bought from the little airline bookstore. The ink smudged under her fingers whenever she touched the page. It was beginning to get on her nerves. A little ways down she could see a man in an official-looking suit playing with a cute little beagle DEA dog, wearing a green nylon harness. And a little ways down from THAT, she could see . . . three policemen talking to airline security. She choked on her lettuce and stood up quickly. They were showing the airport security a photo. Jane crumpled the tray and strode hastily to the garbage can and threw it away. She stuffed Hannibal into her battered backpack, nearly ripping the back cover off, and dug out her boarding pass. They hadn't called her number yet, but at least she could go stand by the gate. They called her number after what seemed an eternity, and Jane stepped hastily into the grey-walled tunnel that led out to the plane. She stepped on. Seat G, row 17. Aisle. Wing. Ask a stewardess to help you stow your luggage. Be advised that it is cold at the destination.
    Jane sat down, nervously knotting her hands, and feeling the aching, juicy tug at the back of her teeth, the cold strange echo calling her away. The skies outside the window, which she could just barely see from her seat, were a flat, unearthly pale grey. She shivered. Blue skies, you always knew what they were about, but grey skies, especially nearly-white ones like this, and especially with the cold, off-season wind blowing . . . they could do anything.

The police had caught up with her at last. They were sure of it. They knew it. There was a woman at the front who had seen her, and some people in the salad bar. The police went to find out what plane she was on. The told the woman at the computer her name. The woman checked, and the police were well satisfied. This was one missing person who was not going to get any more missing. She was getting found, right now. She had been found.
    "There is no ticket for anyone of that name, sir."

Perhaps it is true that a small-town girl named Jane Cooper, with an old dog named Rudy and two loving parents and a brother named Scott and a partial scholarship to a community college left that airport. But the police never caught up with her, and the girl of that name died quietly when the Lufthansa plane lifted off into the emptiest of skies.
    Marguerite Baptiste flashed her French passport at the airport in Frankfurt, and smiled stupidly and shook her head when the woman asked her a question. Ne parle pas. Marguerite Baptiste stuffed the ripped English book back into her bag and walked away, into the airport and then into the street, with the new air filling her lungs, tasting of faraway places. The ache was clearer now, and the Call pulled at her feet, but she knew that now, at last, she was free to hunt it down. Marguerite Baptiste had bought her freedom for two hundred dollars and a driver's license photo.
     She didn't know what lay ahead of her now, and the uncertainty was so beautiful that it made her want to believe in Gods again. The girl who died had always known what lay before, but Marguerite Baptiste's future was fluid and unreadable. Perhaps she would go … south, she could take the train and get off at one of the small steps, and she could walk and wander through the wild tracts of land. She could sleep in the wilderness, and when Winter came, she wasn't above sleeping in airports and train stations. And then someday, maybe she would find a village, or a city, and make her niche… she had heard somewhere that in all of Germany there remained only eight wild wolves. Well. She had her whole life in which to find them, now.
    As she walked away her all her life before faded quietly into nothingness, as a dream in the harsh light of morning. She dived with joy through the shadowy cracks in the modern world, and disappeared forever.
    There was ever a wolf in Janie's shadow.