They Never Wanted a Female Gamma, So I Built the Pack That Beat Theirs novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Discarded

In the old VFW lot a bartender, a diver, a foreman, two twins and a girl with a dog become the Culm Bank pack, and Ilona is waiting at the cemetery gate at dawn.

"I'm not taking anything," I said.

"I just walked out of a supper."

"That's what I said," the bartender said.

"They say."

She dropped the cigarette and ground it out under a work boot.

She was maybe forty-five, thin as a rake handle, with a cough she tried to swallow before it came up.

"Eight of us were put out of Black Diamond this year," she said.

"Nobody asked where we'd go.

"You didn't put out any of us, Zosia.

"You buried half of us.

"You buried my husband.

"You read his name like it mattered."

I did not know what to say to that.

I said, "That's the job."

"It's not the job in this town."

She pushed off the fender.

"Dusk tonight, the VFW lot on Main.

"Bring your shovel if you want a hat to hang it on."

I went to the hospital first.

My father lay propped against two pillows in a ward bed with the curtain half drawn, his big shoveler's hands gray on the blanket.

He had been a barrel of a man.

Now the robe hung off his shoulders and his forearms were thin as kindling.

He was awake.

He looked at the shovel in my hand and closed his eyes.

"You took it down," he said.

"I took it down."

"Good."

The word was a croak.

"Thirty years it hung there.

"Never once did Baran take it down himself.

"Good."

I sat on the edge of the bed.

"Papa, why did they do it?" I said.

"They said girl.

"They said the Crown.

"Tomas has sat on my porch since he was six.

"Why?"

My father opened his eyes.

They were my eyes, brown and tired.

He looked at me for a long time, and I saw a thing in his face that I did not understand, and he did not let me see it for more than a moment.

"You were right to leave," he said.

"That's all I'll say."

"That's not all you'll say," I said.

"It's all I'll say today," he said, and turned his face toward the window.

The nurse came in with a tray, and I knew I had been dismissed.

I stood up with the shovel over my shoulder, and I walked out past the nurses' station.

I had never in my life been so angry at a man I loved.

At dusk I drove to the VFW lot on Main.

The sodium light had come on above the Legion bar, and an old Buick was parked crooked across two spaces.

There were six of them waiting, and a dog.

I knew them all by their stones, so to speak.

I had stood at the graves of their people.

The bartender leaned on the Buick's fender, smoking again.

Beside her stood a woman in her forties with wet hair, in bare feet on the asphalt, in a man's flannel and cut-off jeans.

She was the strip-pit diver, the one they called the Mermaid when they called her anything.

Black Diamond had dropped her when her lungs went bad.

A very old man in a miner's cap sat on a folding chair with a dented lunch pail on his knees.

He had run the Number Six slope for thirty-one years, until the pack decided a foreman who could not shift fast was dead weight.

Two young men in matching Eagles jackets stood a little apart and argued in whispers, brothers from Mahanoy, with the same stubborn jaw.

One of them had a limp.

Black Diamond called them the twins, though there were three years between them, and had put them out for being too small to run in the Moot.

And at the back, on the bumper of a rusted Subaru, sat a girl of nineteen with a black-and-white border collie lying across her feet.

She had her hood up.

She watched me with wide, wary eyes, and the dog did not take his eyes off me either.

"That's all of us," the bartender said.

"Seven, with you.

"Eight if the dog counts."

"He counts," the girl said.

I stood in front of them with the shovel planted in the asphalt.

I did not make a speech.

I had never made a speech in my life.

I said, "I don't have a pack."

"No," the foreman said, and spat.

"Nobody has.

"They put us out one at a time.

"We figure you know what it's like to have your name struck."

"I do," I said.

"Black Diamond has the land and the Alpha's line.

"I have a shovel."

"A shovel's a hell of a thing," the foreman said.

"Built this county with one."

The diver took a step forward on her bare feet.

"What's the rule?" she said.

I had not planned a rule.

I looked at the eight of them, at the dog and the cough and the limp and the lunch pail, and the thing came up out of me whole.

"The rule is, I take any wolf the old pack dropped," I said.

"Slow, old, small, sick.

"I don't care.

"Nobody gets left behind."

I heard how it sounded.

It was the oath I had sworn on the strip-pit bank, at eleven, with my hand cut.

I had not meant to say it.

The bartender looked at me for a long moment, and then she tipped her head back and howled.

It was a raw, cracked, human-throated sound, coming up out of that cough, and it hit the sodium light and broke apart.

The diver followed.

The twins.

The old foreman, last, in a rasp like a rusty hinge.

The girl with the dog put her hood down and let hers go high and clean, and the dog sat up and sang with her.

I did not howl.

I stood there with my father's shovel and my hands shaking and let it go over me, a vote in the only language that counted.

A truck turned off Main and slowed at the lot's edge.

It was the Alpha's black pickup, Baran written in gold on the door.

I knew who was driving it before it stopped.

The engine idled.

Tomas sat behind the wheel with the window up and his hands at ten and two, looking at the eight of us, at the shovel, at me.

He did not get out.

He did not roll the window down.

After a long moment the truck pulled away.

The bartender spat on the asphalt where it had been.

"Pig," she said.

I said nothing.

I was thinking that I had seen his face in the dashboard light, and that he had looked like a man at a funeral.

I told myself I did not care.

I drove home alone, to my father's empty kitchen, and in the morning I was back at the cemetery before light to open a grave for the Number Six slope's widow.

At the gate, in the gray before dawn, stood Ilona Baran.

She wore her black church coat and gloves, and her silver hair was pinned tight.

She had no driver and no car that I could see.

She had walked up the hill.

"Zofia," she said.

"Come home.

"And I will forgive you."

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