Free Hunger of the Wolf by Stephen Marche Page A

but Max didn’t care. A kid brother’s refusal doesn’t count.
    â€œSome of us have real jobs, Max, and we have to work our way through the day. We make real money,” Dale insisted.
    Max was flush from six months in the northwest country. He pulled out a wad of bills. “This isn’t real money?”
    â€œThat’s wild money,” Dale replied.
    â€œMoney’s money.”
    â€œThe idea that you think money’s just money shows that you don’t know the first thing about money. Like saying women are just women.”
    â€œYou make my point for me, brother.”
    â€œThere’s won money, money you can’t lose, money for jam, money for bread . . .”
    â€œEnough.”
    â€œBorrowed money, earned money. Stolen money, money that’s due soon, insurance money . . .”
    â€œWhy don’t we go out and find out how many different kinds of women and money there are.”
    Dale was as helpless as anybody with Max. The man’s body rolled with the strength of a boy who knows he’s nothing but a boy. Dale threw an arm around the shoulder of the rollicking world and strolled into the night. He could enjoy the faces for one night, couldn’t he? He could pretend to be one of them, laughing when they laughed, angering to their anger, galumphing along with the booze and the show they were all pretending to enjoy in the name of a kind of mischievous fellowship that was actually hiding in plain sight.
    *  *  *
    Following the next full moon, Dale woke sick in the cage as usual except that Kitty was staring back at him through the bars. She was silent. Her eyes were black. This was no dream.
    â€œI’m pregnant,” she said.
    Life fell over Dale in delicate nets, nets by the thousands, secret nets, invisible nets. He let them fall. He had seen what escape meant. The mangled throats of colored girls. Blood pooling in the corners of their lovely ears like the blood on the dinner plate, her skin the shade of marzipan, the judgment of whatever justice the world could dream. No, no, much better to let the million nets descend like veils and hide from mirrors. Cage yourself so that you need not be caged. One final lesson: Everything that happens in life means you have to make more money.
    He crept to the basement for a snort of the bad rum he kept in a wedge of the colliery, and found his brother, oddly anxious, already drinking the stuff out of a teacup with no handle. He ought to have been shocked but he wasn’t. Naturally he wouldn’t be granted even the moderate pleasure of rotten solitude to nurse his grievances. The bitterness would not allow him even to slink away.
    â€œLook at us,” Max said, grinning wide. “We’re just like Dad. Anything but that, am I right?”
    Dale took the dishandled cup from his brother like a morose chalice. “I wish we were like Dad.”
    â€œYou want to be a barber?”
    Dale drank the sick-at-heart rum. “He was a better man than you or me. He helped with a mortgage. He left a house half paid for. What are we going to leave? You’re going to leave your raggedy-ass bones on some slab of forgotten prairie.”
    â€œSpeak for yourself.” Max took back the teacup.
    â€œWhat have you got to say for yourself?”
    â€œWhat have I got to say for myself?”
    â€œThat’s what I asked.”
    Before Max could speak, overhead, the laughter of Kitty and Marie like a limping, outstretching siren healed back to silence. Max grinned stupidly, hurled back his head, and howled.

TWO
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T he party smelled of cocaine farts. Leo had to explain it to me: When the middle-aged rich kids gather to huff cocaine at a time in their lives when they are no longer restrained by thousand-dollar-a-night limits, their nascent paunches relax, their relaxed anuses open, their opened inhibitions dissipate, and their dissipated shame dissolves. The lamb with peapods