“You’ve got to have the little boys mix the food up like this,” said Delphine to Tante, who puffed back into the house and sent Emil and Erich out to learn the routine. They appeared, strong as little bull calves in their short pants and ripped shirts, barefooted for the last weeks before school. Delphine smoothed their ragged hair into wings and crouched to their level.
“You can make some money from these animals,” she told them.
The boys nodded, bored with the idea.
“What are you going to do with your money?” Delphine asked.
They gave each other quizzical and amused looks, as though she had said something secretly hilarious.
“It could be a hundred dollars each, Markus thinks, maybe more. How much do your soldiers cost, each?”
This they knew, to the penny, and they knew how much each piece of equipment for their battlefields would cost, too, if they could get them, each horse and each cannon. Every rank of every officer was a different price, and these they recited to Delphine. Their armies were fighting wars of the last century. The officers they’d bought still reared heroically on caparisoned horses, instead of creeping belly down through mud. By the time Delphine finally made them understand that the chinchillas equaled money equaled soldiers, or lemon drops, licorice whips, and ice cream downtown at Birdy’s Drugstore, and that they would have shares in the profits equally with Markus provided they did not let Tante take over the cleaning and the feeding of these creatures, they were serious, determined, alight with calculating greed.
IN THE MIDDLE of the night Delphine shook Cyprian awake because the wild dogs were howling again. A pack of strays and leftovers, skimmed out of the town’s rich backyards, poor shacks, and middling main street shops, had banded together. Delphine had often seen them around the far edges of the butcher’s yard. Eva had pointed them out, gray shadows of every dog shape, some big and rangy and others small as whippets, a classless and breedless roaming menace led by that rogue stud Hottentot. They came around the butcher shop often, and had furtively lived off the occasional ball of guts that Fidelis flung out for them, or the forgotten mess of chicken heads nobody bothered to clean up in the tall weeds. They had never howled around the butcher’s shop. Because there was good pickings, they’d never give away their presence.
Out of town, on wild nights they rode the moon, howling themselves back to the shapes of wolves. Their song was gurgling and eerie, but without the coherence of urgent joy and sensible thought she’d heard in the voices of the real wolves, up north, where she and Cyprian had listened while camped outside a small two-bit town with no money, right before a show. She shook him awake anyway because the sound made her lonesome, and a little romantic, as it referred to their past in which there had been that single deep sexual interlude. Now he woke up, as he always did, completely alert and ready to talk if she wanted, or eat, or play cards. This was one of the nice and comfortable things about Cyprian. He liked waking up and was always obliging even in the first minutes, though not obliging in every way. Still, because she needed him and the dogs were out, howling, she said, her voice ragged, “Make love to me.”
Cyprian took his breath in sharply. He’d worried about this for a long time, wondering when she would get tired of him lying like the butcher’s dog, that’s what he’d heard it called, to sleep alongside your woman without taking advantage of her tenderness, her sex. Just the way the butcher’s dog never touches what it loves, but parks itself with trained indifference next to a juicy haunch. Knowing this time would come, he’d made his mind up to do something that he felt an ethical repugnance for — picture men. He’d even lined up the ones he’d use most effectively. Now, he mustered his collection. He summoned them. He got the picture of a pulsing throat, a chest, the whole works, and he kept the picture going, shifting, even though a breast got in the way, or her sighing voice, or whatever else. He did the act with desperation and no skill and he did it too fast, just to make sure he finished it, but then afterward he tried his best to make it up to her, to not fall asleep, but keep his hands moving, his mouth moving, until she arched under him and cried out and was dead silent.
“Delphine,” he whispered, after some time had passed, “are you hungry?”
She did not answer, and he felt sure she was pretending to sleep. But he couldn’t sleep. The whole thing made him conscious of his mess — what he called the thing that was the truest desire in his life. But it was a mess, because what was he going to do with it and where would it all end up? For sure, there was no future in living with a man. In setting up a house. He’d never heard of that, except for in the cities, and he imagined they were different than he was. They didn’t get along with regular men, he thought. All that aside, there was Delphine herself. He never talked to men the way he did to Delphine, or had such good times, or felt this sweet impulse to protect. Yet his hands in dreams fit themselves around men’s hard shoulders, and their faces, and God, the way they smelled and the way they sounded. And so much else in the deep-red world he had just summoned. Now he couldn’t help think of those things once more, and guilty at his hardness and his excitement, he turned Delphine over and began with a blind abandon to make her shudder, to make her swear in a whisper next to his ear, to make her feel the damage in his heart, to shut her up, to kill some little man inside himself angry that she was a woman, and then, when she battled him back, biting his lips and in a silent struggle pinned him, Cyprian lay back in careless luxury.
The dogs came close to the house. They seemed to howl right underneath the window. He forgot just what she was, man or woman, and felt the simple dark of lust for a moment, the ease and pleasure of being drawn out to his length in her mouth. He stroked her hair and touched her lips, tight around him, and then he lost himself, and when she was finished he put his hands on her face, smoothing her cheekbones, wiping her mouth, for some reason murmuring, “You poor thing, you poor thing,” until she began to laugh at him.
SO THERE THEY WERE, in the middle of the night, frying up a single pork cutlet, arguing how to split it, when Markus stumbled out in his little-boy shorts.
“Now we have to split the damn thing three ways,” laughed Cyprian. What had happened in the bedroom made him light-headed, he felt drunk and a stranger to himself. How had she done that, made him forget, for a second, what she was? She could have been a wolf. Now the little boy looked embarrassed at himself until Cyprian said, “Just sit down and let the table cover it.” Markus sat down grinning.
Delphine was wearing a Chinese robe, a floating brilliant red with apple blossoms on a long stem embroidered on the back, and her feet were bare. First, she held it shut, then she pinned it so she could use both hands chopping potatoes.
“We might as well just eat,” she said, and fried an onion. Put some water on to boil for chamomile tea. “After this, I’m drinking this sleep tea. It’s an herb. I’m looking for work tomorrow and I’m getting my beauty rest.”
The dogs were gone, their howling had stopped as soon as the lights went on. Roy had made a bed for himself in a small summer shack right beside the chicken coop. He’d fixed it up for himself with a little pallet set in the wall, even stuffed a mattress and dragged out an old bedspread and a pillow that Eva had given to Delphine when she told her, long ago, how they’d had to burn every single thing in the house. He had slept out there since so as not to disturb the two of them, he said. They had let him.
“Listen,” said Markus, now, his eyes very wide. “There’s something out there.”
Over the sizzle in the pan they heard it — the rhythmical growls and the sudden snorts and the high-pitched whimpers.