Hotter Blood: More Tales of Erotic Horror

WOLF IN THE MEMORY Stephen Gresham

Into the classroom walks our new music appreciation teacher and she winks at me. Of course, winks come in about as many shapes and sizes and models and horsepowers as new cars, so you have to know a little more about this particular wink: first of all, it was slow and deliberate, not a fast, flashy meaningless one that a mature woman can toss out at just anybody. No, this one had style and substance and yet was somehow delivered at full throttle. From that very first day of class, I knew that this woman had something special in mind for me; never did I see that distinct wink offered to anyone else, not even to Starkey Conway, our resident stud.

Her name was Miss Lavenia Wolf — "one '/' instead of two," she purred — and that one "f" was something Starkey later translated to mean "one fuck daily," but who of us listened to Starkey? Well, we did, but only because he was seventeen and still in the eighth grade and tall (I was the only guy as tall) and muscular in a street-fighting sort of way and, most important of all, experienced with women. Older women. Those sixteen and older, though how much older than that we were never able to determine. But I digress. Back to Wolf. She had black hair, the kind romance novels describe as the color of a raven's wings (I, for one, have never seen a raven in Alabama, but I can assume they're as black as a crow), and, of course, it was long and softly framed a pale, pouty face that reminded me of… well, a pudgy Natalie Wood, and in 1961, sweet Natalie was driving adolescent boys bonzo with every film — heck, I think I fell in love with Natalie back in that weird movie about Santa Claus, and she must have been about ten years old in that one, just a pup.

Wolf was certainly no pup. She had dark, hungry eyes. Smiling eyes. And the smile in those eyes was always connected to the right side of her mouth, her lips moving always in concert with the twinkle or glimmer in her eyes. Never one without the other. She had a cute nose, and her lips were almost too thin to be seductive, but you see, that's the point of this recollection. The woman wasn't simply sexy; no, hardly the right word. She was… okay, I'll get to what she was and how what she was led me to the most excruciating decision of my adolescent phase.

I wouldn't say she had a super figure. She wasn't a classic, not Playboy centerfold material, but she was nice. Very nice. Rather small breasts complemented by ample hips and the beginning of a potbelly — definitely not regulation Playboy centerfold stuff, and yet… maybe it was her legs that saved the day, I don't know. They were a touch muscular, especially in the calf, and the swell of her skirt that first afternoon testified to fulsome thighs, their promise delivered more than adequately when she perched upon a piano stool and talked about the coming nine weeks. I swear I can't recall much she said. Neither can my two best friends, Chick and Mance. They were there, too, on that warm September afternoon nearly thirty years ago. They, however, were not aware of how on that day Miss Wolf had proffered me a «gift» (henceforth in this narrative to be capitalized — «Gift» — affording it the proper respect), one for which I shall always be eternally grateful.

We had all dreaded the class until Miss Wolf positioned herself atop that stool, crossed her legs, smiled, and said, "I plan to have some fun with you fellas. So how about not forcing me to have to get after you and spoil the good times."

She propped a heavily powdered chin on her knuckles and cocked one eyebrow saucily — no, not quite Natalie, but dang close. You could tell right then that she could use her sexuality to discipline us anytime she needed to. We were flies in her web — yeah.

The next thing about that first meeting I recall is the way she strode before each of us derelicts (as if we were soldiers lined up for inspection) and asked us to sing the opening lines of "Sand in My Shoes." When she halted before me, she winked again. A hot shout of embarrassment burned in my throat, and she said, "What's your name?"

Three heartbeats later, I remembered. "Dyson, ma'am. Dyson Bonner."

She bit softly at her lower lip and said, "Let me hear the range of your voice."

Sounds innocent, huh? Well, when she said it the way she did (coupled with that wink and that bite), she might as well have said, "Drop your jeans and let me see what you have." My voice cracked on every syllable. Thank goodness everybody else had pretty much the same experience so that the laughter was passed around in equal portions.

Music appreciation was the last class of the day, and after that first day, Mance, Chick and I gathered in Chick's bedroom and took inventory. Obviously they had not been affected as powerfully by the demeanor of Miss Wolf as I had. Chick, whose father was a Baptist minister, sat as usual on his bed thumbing through the lingerie section of the Montgomery Ward catalog, ogling at women clad only in bras or girdles or slips or some combination thereof. Though Chick was normally reserved and soft-spoken, when he had that catalog in his lap his eyes glazed and he would stare at those women the way a dog on a chain stares at freedom. He would whistle and snort and howl and suck disgustingly on his tongue and thrust it rapidly between his lips — then he would turn the page.

Mance, who possessed more philological curiosity than Chick, would often sit at Chick's desk attacking the dictionary, asking me how to spell such words as «cunnilingus» and "fellatio." In 1961, such words were (to Mance at least) frustratingly suppressed from inclusion in most dictionaries, but when he did succeed in finding a dirty word, Mance would read the definition loudly and with much passion, followed by a throaty, infectious, boyish laugh.

On that particular day, he was reading a sex manual he had spirited away from his older sister.

"Listen to this," he exclaimed, rocking in the chair as if on the verge of an orgasm. Thereupon he read aloud the directions to the female sex partner, who, during intercourse, was coached to whisper, "Oh, honey, you're really giving it to me tonight."

We all laughed. What else can you do when you're so horny you don't know the time of day? At that point I tried to elevate the proceedings ever so slightly, remarking upon our music appreciation class and sharing my assessment of the new teacher.

"Miss Wolf is very… erotic," I said. The word just slipped out.

Chick frowned. Mance's mouth fell open, and he reached for the dictionary.

"Howja spell that?" he queried.

"E-R-O…" I stopped. Tiny bubbles of spittle had formed in one corner of the questioner's lips, and the underwear voyeur looked no less dumbfounded. How could they possibly understand? Miss Wolf had ceremoniously presented me the Gift of the erotic. Or was it that she herself was the very eidolon of eroticism? Was the Gift mine for the taking — no strings attached — or would I somehow have to earn it? Was the Gift actually a "Grail," thus requiring me to advance upon some perilous quest or arduous pilgrimage? The mystery of it all gave me a headache, but my heart and hormonal areas were not the least bit confused.

To Mance I said the only sensible words to cover the moment: "Never mind."

The mock splendor of an Alabama September made passage into the gloriously real splendor of an Alabama October, and Wolf — she of the Gift and/or Grail-appeared each day of the week to coax song from our pubescent vocal cords. And in a splendor all her own she would sit upon her throne (a.k.a. piano stool) and casually allow one of her black, wickedly spiked high heels to lose contact with the floor. At such times my crude brethren would often be mindlessly engaged in guessing what color panties she was wearing that day. Not me. I saw what she was up to, though, admittedly, I had to fight hard not to become thoroughly transfixed by the subtle movement of that high heel as she inched her nyloned foot free from its leather housing, letting the spike heel dangle.

Oh, my.

Perhaps nowhere in the pages of the history of eroticism has such a gesture been properly described. Nor can I describe it. But the tightness in my jeans wordlessly voiced my appreciation of the moment. Wondrous to me was the fact that she knew that I knew that no one else in the class fully appreciated the erotic ritual of that dangled high heel. More than that: There was no need to ask for whom that heel dangled — it dangled for me.

Alas, though, a Grail legend would not be a Grail legend if a venerable truth were not evident: For every Fair Damsel living only to offer the Gift of the erotic to some adolescent knight sans armor, there is a counterbalancing creature known as the Hideous Damsel — and Soldier Junior High School, Soldier, Alabama, was no exception. Opposite Lavenia Wolf in my dreams skulked Mrs. Eudora Hoagland, my English teacher. I sensed that were it possible for her to lay her sausage-link fingers on my Gift — as if it were a delicate, crystalline globe — she would have most gleefully dashed it to the floor, where Mr. Rydel, the janitor, would have swept its splinters and shards in with the other school-day dust and detritus.

Hoagland's favorite ploy was to delay me after class, drape her meathooks on my shoulders, and say, "Don't keep company with Starkey or Mance or Chick. Your job is to keep the right company."

My job? My job? What in the hell did she mean?

Then she would tighten those menacing fingers onto the thin rods of my clavicles, and I would imagine them breaking under her brute force like the bones of a small bird. I never failed to shudder when she touched me like that. A Hideous Damsel, yes. But worse. A genuine psychopath. This woman, I constantly reminded myself, could kill. The death-washed gray of her eyes told me that she wanted to. Needed to.

Halloween soon approached. Good thing, too, because aside from the daily dose of the erotic administered by Miss Wolf, the body of the school year was showing signs of jaundice. Our junior high football team (of which I was a member — wide receiver, though we lacked a quarterback capable of throwing me a pass) accepted its winless state so willingly that our head coach stormed home at the half of our third game and did not return until game six. After games there were dances which became moribund within thirty minutes. I did try to kindle a romantic fire with Tressie Sue Gimbel, one of the cheerleaders, but it was no use. How could Tressie's teasing flirtations compete with Wolf's archetypal eroticism? I mean, can a lady finger make as much noise as a cherry bomb? Is a BB gun as powerful as a cannon?

So there was Halloween and a school party put on by the PTA and starring the teachers and even our skeleton of a principal, Mr. Johnston. Naturally, Mance, Chick and I shunned such an unpromising mise en scene, opting to chase about our small town raising as much hell as possible. By mid-evening we grew bored enough to hurriedly don some makeshift costumes — Chick dressed as Satan, Mance as a pirate, and I as a vampire — and hustled to the junior high gym where the first person I saw was Tressie garbed as Snow White. What a tease!

But then I feasted my eyes on Miss Wolf.

Never have I seen such a comely witch. Never has black taken upon itself a neon jangle as it did flowing from the tip of her tall, peaked hat to the hem of her ankle-length gown — with her bare feet gracing the gym floor, each toenail screaming a red that I have yet to find on the color spectrum. Her lips were painted the same color. And I was enthralled.

Wolf was manning (why isn't there a word "womanning"?) the apple-bobbing caldron and the touchy/ feely display supposedly of dead body parts. You've seen the stuff I'm sure: peeled grapes for dead man's eyes, cold cooked spaghetti for brains, etc., etc. Nothing sui generis. Or so I thought. The apple-bobbing caldron was a huge crock pot that was blackwashed appropriately; the apples were buoyed in a gray, sudsy concoction that reminded me of dishwater.

As I observed from an oblique angle, Mance breathlessly exclaimed in my ear, "Nipples. Nipples." And he danced a little jig which I recognized as endemic to Mance. His southern drawl is so pronounced that I thought he said, "Naples, Naples," and I wondered why he was talking about Italy. Then I chanced a look at the front of Wolfs gown and I experienced a flash of intense white light, something of the nature of what folks encounter near death — a glance at Heaven I guess you'd call it. At that point I must have made my way to the caldron, probably lurching more like a zombie than gliding sinuously like a rakish vampire.

Wolf smiled at me. She hooked a brilliant red fingernail toward me and then reeled me closer. Closer to those hardened nipples and red lips and the Gift. She leaned forward — I smelled her perfume and my right leg went numb — and she whispered, "I like vampires."

"Oh, yes, ma'am," I said quickly. "So do I."

If memory serves me correctly, I hung around, occasionally bobbing for apples (temporarily losing my paraffin fangs) and smiling vacuously at Miss Wolf. The night wore on; ten o'clock — PTA quitting time — drew near. I had lost track of Mance and Chick and had nervously chewed through my waxy fangs when Miss Wolf, having dismissed some dorky seventh graders, cocked an eyebrow and said, "Would you like to put your hand in my special box?"

In times of extreme stress, the rushing of blood in the body of a thirteen-year-old boy has a geometry all its own; the heart pumps thunderously, in defiance of all laws of physics and physiology.

Hot blood.

She took my hand. From a shelf apparently below the Tupperware container of cooked spaghetti she lifted a shoe box with a fist-size hole in one end. There was a lid on the box so I couldn't see what was inside — more peeled grapes or spaghetti, I guessed.

I was wrong.

She pushed my hand within the opening and my fingers brushed a silken maze of materials — nylon, cotton, and powder puffy things. I started to jerk free, but she held my arm until my knuckles pressed against the nipple end of a balloon filled with warm water.

I believe I gasped. Somehow through the roar in my ears I heard Wolf's soft, apologetic laughter. I tried to act cool, but over Wolf's shoulder I noticed that Mrs. Hoagland had been watching from her sentry beneath the basketball goal.

She was frowning.

In that moment she became a vampire hunter stalking me with the sharpened point of an ash stake, hungry to plunge it into my heart. Hey, I'm serious. I'll never forget the look of hatred in her eyes. She hated Wolf (Jealousy? Envy?). She hated me. She hated my Gift. Even across the gym floor, her eyes whispered threateningly. I caught their vicious sentiment: "So you like to put your hand into strange boxes, eh?" they seemed to say. "How would you like it if I put yours into a paper shredder? Or a bear trap? Or a tank of piranhas?"

You get the idea.

Her eyes also had a few choice words for Wolf: "I'll have your job, bitch. I'll find a way to put your tit in a ringer."

The gym reeked of Hoagland's perfect hatred.

Her actions struck me as motiveless malignity. But whatever it was, it worked. She had me scared. My Gift was in danger.

And yet the Halloween episode — the "shoe-box gambit" as I came to call it — had taught me an important lesson about the erotic. It went something like this: At the pulsing heart of the erotic is mystery. Throw in surprise, too. Mystery and surprise. And fear. They guaranteed that a certain energy would always be available to anyone who had been given the Gift of the erotic. What did it all mean? Hey, I was just a kid, but I think I came to realize that the erotic — Wolf-style, at least — meant that I might live life more "livingly." That is, if Hoagland didn't castrate me first.

But through it all the Gift was growing. It had a secret life, and only Wolf and I knew about it, and that, of course, made me feel terrific, and I continued to feel terrific until a few weeks of November slouched by. November. Some poet has called it the month of the drowned dog. He's right.

November was a month of tension crowned by a mixture of disappointment and hope. Here's what happened. At the suggestion of Mrs. Hoagland, the eighth-grade boys were paraded, once a day, into the auditorium where our emaciated principal would stand before us, tottering as if buffeted by some inner wind, and lecture us. And show us films — films supposedly on the facts of life. Not only that, but on two occasions, the Reverend Finebaum of the First Methodist Church was asked to address us on morality. Chick, of course, just about turned into a pillar of salt at the thought of his father possibly being asked to speak to us. And what was this charade designed to do? Answer: rid us at once of our alleged foul language, purge us summarily of our dirty thoughts, and exorcise forthwith our demons of sexual obsession.

Naturally it didn't work.

About all it accomplished was to give Mrs. Hoagland a month's worth of jollies, make the girls snootier than ever, make Chick's face break out, and provide a new list of words for Mance to look up. I survived by dwelling constantly upon Wolf and the Gift. However, one day even those saving graces appeared to have forsaken me.

Seems like it was the day before Thanksgiving break, Wolf had us practicing for the Christmas program scheduled for three weeks hence. We had been singing our little throats raw in the days preceding, straining to make "Silent Night" sound like… well, like "Silent Night." Starkey was up to something. Before class he passed around this mimeographed poem, a sort of parody, which began, "On the night before Christmas ole Santa was humpin' everything in the house." Starkey had written the entire poem himself and threatened to pound anyone who laughed at it. Starkey the poetaster. Oh, well. I didn't think much about it — just a stupid poem, the kind adolescent boys usually adore — but then Wolf perched herself on her throne and it appeared that Starkey was going to show her a copy of his poem.

He approached her sheepishly. Our motley group collectively held its breath. My heart slowed — maybe even stopped, I'm not sure. What I was sure of was that Wolf would scorn such drivel and such affrontery. A true woman of the erotic would not acknowledge such prurient nonsense.

Wrong.

"My father would love this," she mused.

Starkey's face lit up like the lights on the football field. Then Wolf glanced up at our group and realized we knew the text of the poem. She raised a cautionary finger and smiled.

"Now fellas, no one else must hear of this. I could lose my job. This (she held up the poem) is just between me and all of you. The girls and the other teachers mustn't know a thing about it. Will you promise me that?"

Some of us dully nodded, and then Starkey stepped in front and shook his fist.

"If any of you nerds squeal about this I'll punch a lung out of you. Get me?"

We did.

I couldn't look at Wolf. God, was I disappointed.

Class seemed to last about three days. I was so depressed that I sang "Joy to the World" as if it were a dirge. I never once all the hour let my eyes meet Wolf's. When the bell rang, Mance, who was in such a tizzy I thought he might wet his pants, whispered to Chick and me, "Can you believe this? Geez, can you believe this?"

Chick was of the opinion that Miss Wolf's tenure at Soldier was inexorably doomed — well, he may not have used those exact words.

My friends waited breathlessly for my response to the shocking developments.

"I don't give a damn," I said, the lie scalding my tongue.

We started to split. Basketball practice was scheduled to begin at four o'clock, but Miss Wolf held me back, requesting that I try on one of the new choir robes for the Xmas songfest. As frostily as possible, I agreed to stay. The robes were hanging in the mammoth closet near the door of the room, a multipurpose closet where Mr. Rydel stored janitorial supplies and where Starkey boasted he had made out with numerous girls and Randy Tyburn's mother, a recent divorc6e; he had further hinted of having cornered Wolf there for a passionate exchange or two. You can believe what you like.

In the closet, Wolf switched on the single naked bulb. Then she smiled at me.

"Boys and their dirty poems — so silly, aren't they?"

"Yes, ma'am" stuck in my throat.

I slipped into one of the robes. She stood close to me as she zipped up the front of it. God, she smelled so good.

"It fits okay," I said, straining to be businesslike.

She stepped back, cocked her head to one side, and winked. As she helped me out of the robe she said, "You're not like the others, are you?"

"No, ma'am. I mean… yes, ma'am."

I didn't know what I meant. I hurried from the scene, but I felt better. Yeah, much better. The Gift had not been shattered. Only threatened. I would live to face another December — just had to stay clear of the Hideous Damsel.

Of course, every good story of the erotic should reach a climax. The big moment — make that the Big Moment — occurred the evening of the Christmas program. In passing, I'd like to mention that while Mrs. Hoagland suspected something was up in Wolf's class, she, much to her chagrin, could not ferret it out, a fact which gave me immense pleasure. I believe Wolf secretly delighted in the situation, too.

Anyway, before the program began, Wolf asked me to help her move the piano to the gym, and I obliged, foolishly insisting that I wheel it all by myself. Well, I wrestled that beast to the gym, but it almost turned me into a soprano. With a wink and a playful touch of a long red fingernail to the tip of my nose, Wolf said "thank you," adding a request for me to assist her again afterward. No problem.

As you might expect, our part of the program left something to be desired. Have you ever heard of an entire singing group completely forgetting the lines to the second half of "The First Noel"? Performance amnesia or something. Suffice to say, the Vienna Boys' Choir would receive no serious competition from us. I felt sorry for Miss Wolf. But you know what? Our screw-ups didn't seem to bother her. She appeared to enjoy the evening, going so far as to joke about it as I rolled the piano back to the music room once the program had drawn mercifully to a close.

"I'm real sorry we sang so poorly," I told her as I opened the closet door and began to take off my robe.

"Please don't think a thing about it. I enjoyed working with you fellas."

She had slipped in behind me; I was standing beneath that single naked bulb when I heard the closet door softly close. To be honest, I didn't give a second thought to it because the damned zipper on my robe had stuck halfway down.

"Would you mind unzipping me, Dyson?" Wolf purred.

No problem.

Her robe had a zipper in back, so she turned and lifted her long black hair and, fingers trembling just a bit, I zipped away… and saw a mile of silken bare flesh and felt its warmth radiating outward. I'm afraid I didn't stop unzipping until I nearly reached the bottom of her spine — I guess I kept thinking I would see some article of clothing before then.

But I didn't.

She spun around and stepped out of that robe like a butterfly emerging from its cocoon in a speeded-up nature film. Clad only in a black garter belt and hose and those marvelous spiked heels, she smiled, bit her lip softly, and winked at me.

Oh, Lord.

And I thought: what if Mance and Chick could see me now? Now. Here. My Gift surrounding me like a huge, glass bubble.

"I would like very much for you to touch me," she said.

What could I say?

I distinctly remember that she took my hand and guided it toward her. With her other hand she switched off the light. And the darkness roared in my ears. I touched something — it might have been her breast, but then again I was so deeply in shock it could have been Mr. Rydel's plumber's friend. Her lips brushed the corner of my mouth and produced a tingle I can still feel during the middle of a sleepless night.

Then we heard it: the voice of the Hideous Damsel.

"Lavenia, are you here?"

We tensed. Waited. I prayed I wouldn't faint. I promised God I would never spell another dirty word for Mance if He got me out of this. Like most of my deals with God, this one didn't work out.

Light rushed in with a thunderous whoosh — the way it does in horror movies these days. But this was no movie. No fantasy. No hallucination. It was the real thing. And I was in real trouble. And real scared.

Hoagland had a nest of snakes in her eyes. When she focused on us, her face transformed into that of a dragon. I could feel the heat from her breath as she stood there, motionless, staring. I actually prayed that she would say something; that look was scaring the holy shit out of me.

Then she wiggled her fingers.

The sight of Hoagland's fingers was more terrifying than anything ever conjured up by H. P. Lovecraft or Stephen King. And she was coming toward us, those fingers raised.

This gorgon had killing on her mind.

I stepped protectively in front of Wolf. She cowered against my back like a frightened animal. The scent of her fear wafted over my shoulder, her skin goose-pimpled. Her breathing was low and raspy.

I decided to challenge the would-be murderess.

"We were helping each other with our robes," I stammered. But her eyes burned holes in my words, and her hands continued drifting at my throat. Was she going to strangle me?

Behind me, Wolf whimpered, "Please, Mrs. Hoagland."

"Shut up!" the Hideous Damsel screeched.

Then she lowered her hands and picked up one of Mr. Rydel's wooden-handled mops, raised it to eye level, and snapped it in two. The snap sounded like the report of a rifle. I sucked in so much air that my lungs stitched fire.

What followed knocked the top off my scale of terror.

Hoagland took one half of the handle, its splintered, razor-sharp point gleaming whitely in the shadows, and elevated it so that the deadly fang was directed at my face.

Oh, Jesus.

I could imagine that hideous frog-sticker being thrust into my eye socket or into my stomach. Or my groin.

She leaned close. The tip of the mop blade rested against that soft flesh just under my chin. I couldn't swallow. Hell, I could barely breathe. Sweat ran in rivulets down my cheeks, mingled with stinging tears.

And Hoagland whispered menacingly, "This is not your job."

She pressed the mop tip and it ever so slightly broke the skin. To an innocent observer the wound would have appeared to be a shaving nick. Nothing more.

Wolf whimpered «Please» again, and I started to pray.

Then one of those medievallike miracles occurred.

Somebody came shuffling down the hallway outside the music room. I never knew who it was, but they quite likely saved my life and Miss Wolf's.

Sometimes I wonder how so many people in the days following came up with so many different accounts of what happened. Truth is, I became a celebrity of sorts in the time leading up to the school board hearing. On my locker someone taped two small signs; one read, "Closet King"; the other, "Bonner Bags Wolf."

Mance and Chick hounded me unmercifully for details and — get this — Starkey Conway suddenly wanted to be pals. In addition, Tressie Sue Gimbel began to look at me with one eye of disgust and one eye of embryonic lust.

But, mostly, the closet scene had a downside: Mr. Johnston called my parents. Mom cried. Dad frowned. Two or three times he started to say something, yet found that he couldn't. I like to think maybe he understood.

I had a series of bad dreams in which Hoagland killed me and stuffed me in a Hefty bag. I couldn't report her because it would mean tarnishing my Gift. Besides, she had as many goods on us as we on her.

A week later, the Inquisition was held.

God, I was scared. Rumor had it I might be expelled from school or kicked out of the state or sent directly to Hell — or maybe all three. As I entered the principal's office, I saw that Miss Wolf was seated by a window staring off vacantly. I ducked quickly into the conference room, and adult heads — like something out of one of those horrid Greek myths — swung toward me. There was Mr. Johnston, Mrs. Hoagland, and four other sort of faceless adults. They directed me to sit down.

Mr. Johnston got right to the point. He said no one was blaming me. Whew — I breathed more easily. There would be no firing squad or guillotine or, apparently, expulsion. But then something weird began to occur.

They began to catalog, in some detail, various complaints against Miss Wolf, and I got the strangest sensation that I had been transported back to Salem in the days of the witchcraft trials. They were defaming Wolf; worse yet, they were besmearing my Gift. I could barely hold my tongue.

Then questions were fired at me from all sides like machine-gun rounds: "What went on in that closet? What else has Miss Wolf done? Don't you think it's your responsibility to bring this immoral woman to justice?"

My head swam. My neck ached from glancing from one adult to another as if I were watching a tennis match.

"What do you have to say for yourself?" they demanded.

"I won't give it back," I announced frantically.

There was silence. Almost funereal silence. Mr. Johnston's skeletal face seemed to leer at me.

"Give what back? Did Miss Wolf give you something?"

"No. Yes. I won't tell you."

Mrs. Hoagland — the Hideous Damsel was in her element — leaned forward to deliver what she must have felt would be the deathblow to my defense of Wolf. I pressed my fingertips nervously into the soft skin beneath my chin.

"Dyson, it's your job to tell us. Be a young man. Do your job. It's your job to tell us what that woman did."

My job? My job?

The words, outlined in blood, pulsed in my thoughts, intensified by some inner strobe light.

Shaking, nerves roller-coastering, I stood up and pushed away from the table. And I shouted, "I quit!"

I heard my voice echo behind me as I scrambled out the door. I slowed by where Wolf was seated; she glanced up at me. Know what she did? Yeah, you guessed it: She winked at me.

After I crashed through the school doors, I leaped onto my bike, and as I pedaled away the anger and frustration began to dissolve, and I reached deep into my thoughts and held the image of my Gift and felt the residue of the mystery and anguish and horror of growing up. But I pedaled faster and faster and faster. And it felt good. Yeah, real good.

Y'all might be interested to hear that the Hideous Damsel — dear ole Mrs. Hoagland — murdered her husband. One day she just snapped, and that snap led to another, because she snapped his neck one morning when he disregarded her request to take out the garbage.

Guess he wasn't doing his job.

Well, I never saw Miss Lavenia Wolf again. Never heard where she went or what became of her. Now, years and years later, I've learned that Nature's central fire can grow cold on a man. At such times you need a glimpse of the erotic, a darkness that roars, and a touch of Wolf in the memory.