Tales of the City 08 - Mary Ann in Autumn

almost across the road when the all-but-soundless landscape was pierced by the hideous howl of an animal—a dog, she supposed, though, in these parts, according to Michael, it could just as easily be a coyote. They howled out of loneliness, apparently, and sometimes to celebrate a kill.
    She turned in the direction of the howl, but there were no four-legged creatures in sight, only the anonymous person from the store. She stopped long enough to see that he had also been stopped in his tracks by the sound and was facing in her direction now. He was featureless at that distance, a solitary exclamation mark against the blank white page of the road, but she felt a certain primal kinship with him, this fellow traveler pricking his ears to an ominous call from the wild. Instinctively, she raised a gloved hand to mark their shared moment, as if to say: Yes, stranger, I heard it, too.
    But he didn’t return the salute; he just stood there looking at her, perfectly still for the longest time. Then he arched his neck to the darkening sky and released a second, even more sinister howl.
    When he walked away, she began to run.
    •••
    “Y OU MUST’VE HEARD HIM ,” SHE said. “It was almost triumphant.” She was standing in the kitchen with the guys now, still panting a little, the snow still melting on her jacket. Ben was sautéing onions in a battered wok, while Michael, under Ben’s occasional instruction, was dicing a Japanese eggplant at the kitchen table.
    “Triumphant?” asked Michael.
    “You know. Like a coyote celebrating a kill.”
    Michael rolled his eyes. “I should never have told you that.”
    “You’re stoned,” she said dismissively, having noticed his vaporizer on the refectory table. It must have been the very first thing he’d unpacked. She turned to Ben instead. “You heard it, right?”
    “Sorry.” Ben tapped the scalloped yellow vent over the electric stove. “This thing roars like a blast furnace. Are you sure he was howling at you?”
    “He was looking at me, and he was howling like a werewolf. He did it the second time, I think, just so I could see that he was doing it.”
    Michael looked up from his dicing. “You should probably take it as a compliment.”
    “Really,” she said with murder in her eyes. “A compliment.”
    “Sure.”
    “Remind me not to hire you at a rape crisis center.”
    “When have you ever worked at a rape crisis center?”
    “Hang on.” Ben held up his hand like a crossing guard, silencing Michael, before turning to Mary Ann with an appeasing smile. “You should know … howling is fairly common around here.”
    “What do you mean?”
    He shrugged. “A lot of bikers stop at the saloon. They’re just tourists like the rest of us, but they can get a little … piggy sometimes about women. Some of them. Up until a few years ago, they were stapling bras to the ceiling of the saloon.”
    “Lovely,” she said.
    “To be fair,” said Michael, “it was the women who did the stapling. It wasn’t like a gang rape or something. They were totally in on the gig.”
    “Who told you that?” asked Ben.
    “Bernice.”
    “Bernice?”
    “From the county office. The one who makes that ugly shit with yarn.”
    “Oh, God, yeah.”
    Mary Ann was annoyed by this diversion, since it was clear now that her scary episode had yet to be taken seriously. “This guy seemed way too old for a biker.”
    “You haven’t seen our bikers,” said Michael.
    “ Your bikers?”
    “He thinks he lives here already.” Ben had turned to wink at her as he stirred the onions. “We humor him as much as possible.”
    “Anyway,” she went on, “he wasn’t coming out of the saloon. He was coming out of the store.”
    “Right,” said Michael. “Where he’d just bought a couple of Sara Lee chocolate pies because he’d already gotten hammered at the saloon.”
    “Okay, smart-ass, then what?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Gimme the scenario, Mouse. He spots me crossing the street in a fucking snowstorm … this silver-haired fifty-seven-year-old woman—”
    “C’mon,” grinned Ben. “You know that men still notice you.”
    “No … I don’t … I don’t know that at all.”
    “Well,” said Michael, “you still have your teeth. That counts for a whole lot around here.”
    She laughed in spite of herself. Then, because Michael had never once looked up from his chopping during this exchange, she yanked a glove from her pocket and hurled it at him. It fell short