Hunger of the Wolf Read Online Free Page A

carpeting that my mother hated because it was so hard to vacuum remained thick and white. I lay down in the stale regret I was indulging so thoroughly that year. There seemed to be no end to the end of innocence.
    In a nook off the living room, a small well-lit space with a deskoverlooking the lake, the painting surprised me. Sitting on a pile of books, leaning against the cracked wall, The Wolf by Paul Klee. I picked the canvas up to assure myself that it was no reproduction. He must have bought it from Leo and Kate. My wonder infused with doom: The painting must have taken the same ridiculous flight as myself, the same five-hour car ride. I was holding a concatenation of paint and canvas worth several million dollars.
    An envelope peeked out from a large leather folio of Audubon’s Birds of America . It was the letter George wrote to Ben in the eighties about his struggle to uncover their origins. All the personal papers, the private history of the Wylies, the record they kept to help each other through their inherited sickness—I found them tucked inside other books, in furniture crevices, inside a blue trunk that served as an ersatz coffee table. I had fled my hometown to gain an education in the world, but the education I sought, a glance into the hidden workings of the machinery, had been there all along. I discovered the basement too, its dirt floors scarred with claws and a large cage fitted with chain leashes.
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    I left the painting in North Lake. I took everything else, every paper I could suss from the nooks and crannies of the Wylie cottage, back to New York in their blue trunk. Sneaking out the material without my mother noticing was embarrassingly adolescent, but adolescently delicious as well; forbidden cigarettes and forbidden knowledge are always the best kind.
    The miniature Wylie archive I had purloined filled the shouty Portuguese basement. In the morning I would spread out the diaries and the letters and the photographs and the newspaper clippings that I arranged into a vast map to a subterranean geography, and in the eveningI would fold up their secrets like a tablecloth, delicately fearful that a crumb of significance might tumble off. The presence of Wylies gave my subterranean life the thrill of a secret, the secret history of how money became everything. Stealing up to the street to eat, or to fulfill the conditions of some gig, I could anchor my drifting self to the blue trunk. I only wanted to be back with them, in my dark room. The Wylies had always been my unspoken fascination. The job of a writer is to monetize fascination. I was broke and alone but I had them.
    If I could uncover their story, I could sell their story, and if I could sell their story, I might have something like a future in New York. Every story is a little miracle. You make it out of nothing and you sell it for money.
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    The Mounties declared Ben’s death a hunting accident. His nakedness was easy to explain, at least to the professionals. In the final stages of hypothermia, the body often senses warmth as the blood ebbs into the core. Many hypothermic deaths end with naked corpses. Coyotes or a bear may have dragged off his clothes, or wolves, who would have buried the clothes. Even if Ben Wylie had been murdered, if somebody had wanted to kill him, that somebody was far away. The official cause was death by exposure. Everyone seemed to agree, without bothering to look too closely, that the wilderness had killed him.

T he mills of Champlain, Pennsylvania, now lie crumpled beside the brown sludge of the Monongahela River but for a hundred years they spat hot prosperity, rolling in iron and coke and manganese to be turned by the brawn of thick-tongued men on twelve-hour shifts six days a week into steel. Carnegie and Frick sold Champlain’s rolled steel for a penny a foot. In the middle of this grubby miracle, somewhere around the beginning of the twentieth century, the