Free Hunger of the Wolf by Stephen Marche

stern Marie and silent Kitty, and, guided by gentle Marie and silent Kitty, 17 Flora floated down to sleep on billows of sighs in the Champlain evenings. The boarding girls, wearing their heavy ambitions lightly, miasmaed the house with a silly, soft, delightful fuzz. Dale was either leaving, with the quickening scent of desperation, or arriving with the smell of train furniture and too many cigarettes on him like a cloak. He would never be a great salesman because he couldn’t forget quickly enough. The face of each housewife who brushed him out the door like a dead mouse stuck in him. The dismissive eye of the shopkeeping Arab with his whoremaster’s odor of rosewater lingered slightly too long. The general mania of the men laughing in pool halls, stuffing thick-skinned sausages into their gapped faces, stuck just a little too much. At home, in Champlain, on Flora Avenue, he relished the comforting somnambulance of the rooms that hadn’t changed much since his childhood.
    One fine judgmental Sunday, at the hour he should have been returning from church, they were waiting for him in the parlor, the room dusted every day to be used once a year. His mother beside Aunt Millie, half her size, both in black.
    â€œYou know why we are here,” Aunt Millie began. Dale perched himself on a chair designed for no one ever to sit on, and knew enough not to speak. “We want you to become respectable.”
    â€œI am respectable,” Dale answered.
    â€œYou have a job,” Aunt Millie corrected him, upholding a bare finger. “That is something. That is not nothing. But it is not respectability.”
    Dale shuffled his feet. “What do I need to become respectable in your eyes?”
    â€œA wife.”
    They were offering Kitty. The whorehouses that filled the gulleys of Atkinson as the sprawl sloped into the darkness—how many times had he slunk to and from their doors? The eyes of the women crooking their finger on the porches. Come here. Come.
    â€œI don’t have the money to marry.”
    â€œGet married and you will have to find the money.” Aunt Millie stood up to leave. “That’s how men become respectable. Marie, I said what I had to say. Now I will go.”
    Dale watched his propertied aunt waddle down the street. The neighborhood children rolled their play out of her path, warping around her black mass. His mother had disappeared into the housework. Why did he slink from Kitty like he slunk from the whorehouses? It was a fair offer. Kitty would stay with his mother while Dale sold in Atkinson. He would have two lives, one in Champlain and one in Atkinson. Which would be the reprieve? His time in the dark quiet parlors of women with their still and total judgment, or the knockabout rampage of men’s business?
    Dale slouched into the old recliner in the parlor the way a frog plops into the primordial succulence of mud. Exhausted, his mind configured and reconfigured with a welter of pluses and minuses, properties available, deals he was making and their odds. He plunged through darkness to his bedroom off the kitchen, and tumbled into bed, asleep instantly.
    Sometime later, into his oblivion, Kitty wandered. She rose over him with her shipwreck eyes and the hot midsummer of her hair. Even the ecstasieswere vague, smoothed over his body, then vanished. The next morning, the scraping of oatmeal out of the big pot woke him, and he let the impression settle at the bottom of himself. What had come into him?
    *  *  *
    Max would appear unpredictably—a vision of ragged liberty fresh from miracle or disaster—whether Dale was at home or at the MacCormack and Sons offices or on the path between. One evening he showed up after eight months’ absence to take his brother to a touring burlesque, the Chins of Chinatown from the Curtains Up Theater, where nipples were revealed, reportedly, momentarily, around the middle of the second act. Dale had work to do