by Virginia Watts

Short Story published by The Broadkill Review

Elias Wolf is a perfect name for a vampire, and the Elias Wolf who lived in my hometown of Putnum, West Virginia, certainly looked the part. Tall and rail-thin. Lustrous, black hair tapping his shoulders. Skin earthworm pale. Dark brown eyes. The kind of dark that hides pupils and can make it hard to know if a person is looking you in the eye or not, though our Elias looked everyone in the eye. And like all the Wolf brothers, he had unusually long teeth. He might have looked the part, but Elias wasn’t interested in anything with a strong heart coursing blood around. He was only interested in things that were already dead.

Elias flunked out of my high school class by choice. I still saw him at school, though, because he would saunter through the school’s main doors mid-morning, make himself comfortable on one of the library’s sofas and read all the daily newspapers back-to-back. When we happened to be in the library together, we would talk about the top headlines of the day. Elias knew a lot about the world outside of Putnum. He was a brilliant guy. I had a tragic crush on him I kept buried inside my chest like a second rib cage nestled under the one I was born with.

Freed of the annoyance of formal education, Elias embarked on a full-time career tuning cars at his brother’s filling station. In the evenings, he strolled along the side of Bald Knob Road, stabbing the earth at regular intervals with one of his grandfather’s walking sticks like Moses parting the Red Sea. If a person wanted to leave Putnum and go anywhere else, you turned either left or right onto Bald Knob Road. It was the only four lane road we had.

Everyone in Putnum was accustomed to driving past Elias’s tall frame clad in a long, ivory raincoat two sizes too big for him that he’d acquired for three dollars and sixteen cents according to Meg Myers who ran the Goodwill. When my grandpa and I passed him, Grandpa would honk his truck horn four times, and I would stick my head out of the window and wave. Then we’d watch Elias in our rear views flash those long teeth of his, chuckling and saluting us. We’d laugh then too. Not at him. With him. In Putnum, people didn’t laugh at each other. It was hard enough hanging on inside the carcass of an old coal town.

One day I stayed late at school even though ominous clouds were falling like bricks on the mountain peaks encircling Putnum. As the newly elected chief editor of the high school newspaper, I thought I was special. That’s how you are at seventeen. Grandiose. I read every word of every article the staff turned in, wringing their work dry with my edits, trying to put myself on the path to be somebody someday. By the time I looked up from my desk, the clock read 4:37.

Outside, I eased my bike from the rack, the pungent smell of pine needles and chimney smoke warning me a storm was closing in. I wasn’t worried. My bike tires had deep treads. I would take the shortcut around the little league fields and picnics groves of Plum Orchard Park, even though it was a dirt path that morphed into a muddy river when it rained. That path was the fastest way home to the cozy house where I lived with my grandpa. I started peddling as hard as I could.

I made it a quarter of the way around Plum Orchard Park when thunder cracked. A jagged dagger of lightning sliced open the sky like a knife through a bedsheet. I ducked instinctively, turned my bike left to pedal up the hill toward Bald Knob Road. Grandpa never worried about me in rainstorms, but lightning, that was a different matter. A bolt struck his house once when he was a little boy. No lives were lost but everything they owned was.

When I got to the top of the hill, there was Elias, standing over something heaped up on the side of the road, wind slapping his coattails like a whip. He looked up at me as lightning split the sky open again, appearing more vampire-like than ever in such violent weather. I was glad to see him. I had missed him in the library lately. I kept getting stuck in chemistry lab, trying to figure out how I’d messed up another experiment. I hated all varieties of science.

“Hey there, Ryder Sycamore Clement,” he greeted me as I wheeled my bike over to him and tapped the kickstand down.

More thunder followed by a flash of heat lightning.

“You say that like I don’t know my own proper name,” I said, crossing my arms over my chest.

I was watching Elias blink because I didn’t want to look at what was lying still at his feet.

“I said it because you possess one of the coolest names of all time,” he answered. “Ryder. Sycamore. Clement. Damn!”

“Well, Elias Wolf, Elias Wolf isn’t exactly run of the mill. Your proper name is so grand you don’t even need a middle one.”

That made him laugh.

“There’s lightning,” I continued. “Don’t you think you should head home?”

When he shook his head and knelt in front of the body instead, I had no choice but to join him in assessing Putnum’s most recent homicide victim.

“Ah, poor girl,” Elias whispered, patting her neck gently.

An outsider would have said she was a common day, white-tailed deer, and she was, except there wasn’t anything common day about a white-tailed deer or any of the animals who shared those mountains with us. We had lots of white-tailed deer and every one of them was special in their own way. This doe was particularly delicate. She was the prettiest doe I’d ever seen. Silky, chestnut coat. The graceful limbs of a prize-winning racehorse. Shiny black nose. Impossibly long eyelashes you’d expect on a white-tailed deer.

She’d been hit in her back quarter, back legs crushed flat as hotcakes, tail ripped clean. A jagged tear across the length of her underbelly leaked a glistening, mahogany organ surrounded by a waterfall of pinky-white, iridescent intestines that reminded me of a string of bloated pearls. I could tell she was a fresh kill because her eyes, golden as a jar of local dandelion honey, were still bright and focused as if she expected to find me and Elias together on the side of that road.

“Maybe you should drag her a bit further off,” I suggested. “Need help?”

“She’s good where she is.”

Elias’s hands were bloody. He never wore gloves. He’d dragged the deer a good distance, there was a long path across the cinders on the shoulder of the road, but not far enough for my liking. I listened for the squeal of distant truck tires. DelMarco Lumber’s careless drivers had been slaughtering living things along Bald Knob Road for decades. DelMarco bused their employees in and out. Nobody local got hired by DelMarco. There was always another truck overloaded with felled tree trunks heavy as baby elephants ready to come barreling down the mountain side, headed to a sawmill in Troy or Salem, up against a deadline.

Elias’s mother had been struck and killed by a DelMarco truck driver walking along Bald Knob Road after her car broke down. Elias was eleven at the time, the youngest of the four Wolf brothers. He took it the hardest. An investigation concluded that the fatal accident had been caused by dense fog, not reckless or careless driving. Everyone in Putnum knew better.

“Let’s just drag her a bit farther,” I tried again to convince Elias. “I’ll help you.”

“I just got her positioned how I want her,” Elias answered. “I’m ready to take the pictures now. Won’t take long.”

“Well, you better hurry up, because it’s getting ready to rain really hard,” I said.

Elias stood up, took a few backward steps into the middle of the road. Stopping just shy of the solid yellow lines, he cocked his head to the side as he surveyed his handiwork. The road was still empty in both directions as far as I could see, but I thought I heard the faint sound of rolling tires coming our way. Elias walked to the right. Paused. Then to the left. Paused. Back to the right. Paused. Back to the left.

“Come on, you’re making me nervous here,” I blurted.

I couldn’t help myself. I was afraid. Elias jerked his head in my direction as if he’d forgotten I was there. Another thunderclap, a real ear drum burster. Thunder sat right on top of your skull in those mountains.

“Elias! Please hurry!”

“Okay, Ryder Sycamore Clement. I’ll wrap it up.”

I stepped away from the deer as he reached into his coat pocket for his camera. A vacationer had donated the high-end Nikon camera to the Goodwill while passing through three summers ago. It wasn’t unusual for people to make a pitstop in Putnum to see what life was like living in the middle of nowhere where nothing much was going anywhere. The camera was beat up on the outside, but it worked perfectly. When Elias asked Meg Myers if he could pay for the camera in installments, she gave it to him. All she asked was that he put it to good use.

Elias should have become a famous photographer. What he did with all varieties of dead animals was nothing short of a miracle. He had a way of propping up what remained of them, turning their necks just so, tipping their chins until the animal’s point of view sailed right out of the photo and pierced your heart. He was a true master at staging guts and gore. Sometimes too much had leaked out, and Elias would have to tuck some of it back inside the cavity. Sometimes there wasn’t enough, so he would have to reach in and pull stuff out. Somehow, he always knew exactly what to do.

“How about I take one of you with her first?” Elias asked, lifting the camera lens to his eye, walking a few steps toward the doe.

“Why would you want me in the picture?” I asked.

Elias and I both looked up at headlights bouncing toward us then. A car climbing up the mountain from the housing development outside of the main part of town where we both lived. Good news. That meant someone we knew who would give me a ride home. Elias would walk back to his house. He never accepted rides and walked in any kind of weather. I looked up the mountain toward DelMarco’s headquarters. Still nothing from that direction, but I couldn’t relax my shoulders.

“I won’t use it for anything,” Elias said. “Just gives me more practice with my photography skills, that’s all. You don’t have to if you don’t want to.”

Raindrops began falling as I walked over and kneeled behind the doe, unsure of what to do with my hands. Being a part of one of Elias’s famous animal portraits made me feel sadder than I liked to feel about what had happened to his mother, his whole family, what kept happening to our animals, what all of it kept doing to Elias, but Elias had asked me for a favor. I tucked my hands under my raised knee and gazed toward the middle of the road. When Elias clicked twice and lowered his camera, I walked to stand beside him while he finished.

I knew Elias would blow up the photograph of this pretty doe to poster size, run off a stack of copies at Goodwill in exchange for free car maintenance for Meg, and spend Sunday morning up at DeMarco headquarters plastering the posters all over their buildings and trucks. Then he’d drive his brother’s pick up out of town to DelMarco’s billboard along Interstate 379, set up a ladder, climb up and paste this poster to the billboard under the large red letters: DelMarco Lumber: Building a Solid Future Together. Elias had been making the posters for three years since he quit high school. The posters weren’t doing anything to change DelMarco Lumber’s ways as far as I could tell, but they had done Elias some good. He smiled more often now. Laughed some. And so did the rest of the Wolf family, even Elias’s father.

After his wife was struck and killed, Mr. Wolf hired an attorney, filed suit against DelMarco for wrongful death. When the case was dismissed for lack of merit, Mr. Wolf contacted state news sources and national ones like 20/20 and 60 Minutes. All kinds of newspapers, magazines, government officials, politicians, you name it. A handful of journalists arrived to interview the family and photograph where Mrs. Wolf had lost her life, but none of them ever ran the story. DelMarco was rolling in the dough. They could pay people off. When Elias started with the posters, DelMarco took the path of least resistance, simply tore them down and threw them away.

Elias began drying off his camera with a handkerchief. He was finished photographing the pretty doe.

“How’s it going at the gas station?” I asked him.

“It’s oily,” Elias answered. “How’s the newspaper business, Chief Editor?”

My heart jumped.

“Yeah, they elected me,” I said, shrugging. “Probably because no one else wanted to do it.”

That made Elias laugh. I felt proud of myself.

“Got any plans for the paper during your tenure?” He asked.

“I’m thinking about it. How about I run a story another story about your posters? The paper didn’t do anything about them last year.”

“That’s a nice offer, but I am trying to stay clear of all things Claymont School District,” he said, winking.

Four, distinct honks sounded in the air. It was Grandpa who was coming up the mountain, out looking for me. I was so lucky to have Grandpa. It has always been me and Grandpa. I was four months old when my parents died in a boating accident. I had no memory of them. I couldn’t imagine what it was like for Elias, looking down that road at those approaching headlights, knowing it couldn’t be the one person he wanted it to be, his mother out looking for her youngest son. I hung my head.

When I looked up again, the pretty doe was still watching us. She looked so alive I could envision her standing up, tossing her head playfully and leaping into the woods across the road like a ballerina. How I wished she could. Elias would close her eyes. He always did that. It was the respectful thing to do.

“You sure about not running another story about your posters?” I asked him. “They are so amazing.”

“I’m sure, Ryder Sycamore Clement, and by the way, you will be the best chief editor that paper has ever had, the best they ever will have,” he said. “You’ve got everything it takes and more.”

A lump blossomed in my throat. I tried to think of something to say that would communicate I was flattered in solely a professional way, but I couldn’t come up with anything. Thankfully, Grandpa pulled up and rolled down his truck window.

“You two look like a couple of drowned otters,” he teased, white mustache leaping up above his grin. “Elias, can I give you a lift?”

“No thanks, Mr. Clement,” Elias answered. “I’ll be okay.”

“Please?” I said. “The temperature is diving.”

“Thanks anyway,” Elias said, shaking his head, the ends of his long hair dripping steadily.

“See you in the library then?” I asked.

“Definitely.”

Elias smiled at me as another bolt of lightning split the sky and shined in his teeth. Linking his arm around mine, he escorted me to the passenger door while Grandpa hoisted my bike into the truck bed. Elias and Grandpa shook hands behind the tailpipe, then Grandpa climbed inside the cab, cranked his window shut, sighed. Elias stood on the side of the road beside the pretty doe, watching as we made a U-Turn and began heading back down the mountain.

Grandpa said,“I wish he would get his high school diploma and head out of town. Go to college. He’s so smart. He could always come back.”

“Think he will leave?” I asked.

“No,” Grandpa said.

“Why not?”

“Elias doesn’t want to let go of this place,” he said.

Even though deep down I believed the same thing about Elias, I hoped we were both wrong, that someday Elias would be able to leave Putnum for a different kind of life in a different kind of place.

When we got home, I went up to my room to change out of my wet clothes. Outside my window, the storm had passed. Across an inky sky, tinged deep purple, the celestials were beginning to wake up and wink. I searched for the moon, found a shimmering sliver. When I pulled my sweatshirt over my head, on the sleeve, the faint red imprint of Elias’s open palm, his long, slim fingers. I draped the sweatshirt across my desk chair so that when I went to bed later, I would be able to stare at Elias’s handprint in starlight.

Four years later, I am inside my college apartment at Marshall University in Tennessee, an honors student in journalism, when the strong, acrid smell of a raging forest fire wakes me from a deep sleep. There isn’t a forest anywhere around for hundreds of miles.

I hurry to the window and scan the section of main road I can see between the two dorm buildings across the street. The fibers of Elias’s long, ivory-colored coat appear illuminated from within in the milky grey of that morning, his long arm planting a walking stick on the earth’s surface every few steps. He stops abruptly, turns toward me, tips his chin up to my fourth-floor window and waves. Then his shape vanishes. I don’t remember waving back, but I must have, because when the phone rings I am frozen at that window with my hand raised in the air.

“Morning, Ryder,” Grandpa says, his voice husky. “Something has happened to Elias.”

“What?” I gasp.

“He died in a fire that destroyed all the DelMarco buildings last night and a good swatch of the forest around it. I’m so sorry, Ryder. Still smoking up there. I’m out here in the front yard watching plumes coming off the mountainside bawling my head off.”

I hang up the phone because a million bees are buzzing me deaf.

The official investigation into the fire and Elias’s death is over by the time I return to Putnum about a month later, on Thanksgiving Day. The conclusion: Elias Wolf started the fire and accidently lost his life in it too.

Grandpa has turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, and piping hot gravy ready when I walked in, dining room table set with white china, yellow roses circling rims. Ceramic pilgrims. Cornucopia of dusted, plastic fruit. How it has been every Thanksgiving of my life. The two of us sit down and begin pushing food around on our plates.

“How are your classes going?” Grandpa asks. “I can’t believe you are a senior already.”

I don’t feel like small talk. I’ve been thinking about the fire and what happened to Elias day and night for weeks.

“Elias intended to end his life,” I say. “I am sure of it.”

Grandpa jerks in his chair, sets his fork down to the side of his plate. I have never seen his mouth in a such flat, tense line, but there it is. Baggy eyes too. I wonder if he’s been eating or sleeping much. I know I haven’t been.

“You don’t look so great, Ryder,” he observes.

“I was just thinking the same thing about you.”

This lifts Grandpa’s lips a millimeter. Not a smile exactly, but he looks more like himself.

“Elias used dynamite, right?” I ask. “Elias was way too smart to do anything careless with dynamite.”

“Agreed,” Grandpa says, nodding.

“Where would he have gotten his hands on dynamite anyway?” I ask, gagging on a small spoon of buttered peas.

“A few crates were missing from that private mining operation in Chatram.” Grandpa picks up his fork again. It hovers and trembles between us. He places the utensil back down.

“There’s something else,” he says, reaching his hand across the table, blanketing my wrist, patting it four times. “I was going to tell you after dinner, but it appears we will have to face this food together another time. Elias left an envelope here for you a few days before the fire. I wasn’t here, but Frank Cowley was out behind his house at his compost, and he saw him going around the back of the house with a letter in his hand. I found it between the kitchen door and the screen.”

I shoot to my feet. Grandpa pushes his chair away from the table, walks to the kitchen for the envelope. When he returns, it seems all our movements are in slow motion.

Upstairs, I close my bedroom door, then crack it back open an inch and or so. On the envelope, Elias’s printed letters: FOR RYDER.

White dots are dropping in my peripheral vision, droves of doomed meteors. I place the envelope unopened on my bed and drag a box from my closet I packed before I left for my freshman year in college.

Inside, the sweatshirt with Elias’s faint handprint and a stack of his posters I’d managed to rescue and save over the years. Grandpa never complained about driving me to DelMarco Lumber late on Sunday evenings to check for new posters. He never asked me why I wanted to save them either. If he had, I wouldn’t have had an answer. Sorting through them again, I still don’t have one. Not exactly anyway.

So many maimed, murdered animals, posed perfectly, stare back at me: skunk, porcupine, fox, raccoon, hedgehog, wild turkey, several white-tailed deer including the pretty doe from that night with Elias on the side of Bald Knob Road. At the bottom of the box, some newspaper clippings about Mrs. Wolf and the investigation that followed her death. I place the posters and newspaper clippings on my desk, drape the sweatshirt over my desk chair, set the empty box inside the closet and shut the door.

I open Elias’s envelope standing at my bedroom window. Inside, the photograph of me kneeling behind the pretty doe. She is looking directly at me now instead of Elias. I am gazing to the side of the camera’s eye, a cold mist glistening on my cheeks. I can still hear Elias’s boots crunching back and forth over strewn gravel, searching for the best angle to capture that shot. When I turn the photo over, in Elias’s freehand this time, it reads: To Ryder Sycamore Clement. Love, Elias Sedric Wolf.

“Elias. Sedric. Wolf,” I whisper.

Sedric is nothing short of a legendary middle name, but Elias Wolf of Putnum, West Virginia, still doesn’t need a middle name. As for the “Love” part, I am sure he included that to soften the blow. He cared about me in the same way he cared about his family, his town, his mountains, all the animals whose eyes he so reverently closed. The same way I care. The reason he knew I would never let Putnum go either. I hope that thought came to him near the end – that he could count on me.

Outside, a gusty wind whistles and howls. The final leaves of autumn are letting go, falling in a familiar rhythm I recognize every year and forget about until I see it again. This night, a nearly full moon glows over the roof tops of Putnum. The distant shapes of the downtown are clear and precise, pointy top of the Methodist church steeple, domed roof of the high school, stadium lights at either end of the football field and beyond that, the back of Bald Knob Mountain rising above us all.

Copyright © 2022 Virginia Watts. All rights reserved.