Wolf looked at him with puzzled eyes that shifted like strange kaleidoscopes from hazel to orange to a muddy red. He held his hairy hands out to Jack, and then Hector Bast stepped up behind him and clubbed him to the floor.
“Shhh, Mr. Jack Parker,” Gardener whispered in his ear, and Jack felt the needle sting his upper arm. “Just be quiet now. We’re going to get a little sunlight in your soul. And maybe then we’ll see how you like pulling a loaded wagon up the spiral road. Can you say hallelujah?”
That one word followed him down into dark oblivion.
26
Wolf in the Box
1
Jack was awake for quite a long time before they knew he was awake, but he became aware of who he was and what had happened and what his situation was now only by degrees—he was, in a way, like the soldier who has survived a fierce and prolonged artillery barrage. His arm throbbed where Gardener had punched the hypodermic into it. His head ached so badly that his very eyeballs seemed to pulse. He was ragingly thirsty.
He advanced a step up the ladder of awareness when he tried to touch the hurt place on his upper right arm with his left hand. He couldn’t do it. And the reason he couldn’t do it was that his arms were somehow wrapped around himself. He could smell old, mouldy canvas—it was the smell of a Boy Scout tent found in an attic after many dark years. It was only then (although he had been looking at it stupidly through his mostly lidded eyes for the last ten minutes) that he understood what he was wearing. It was a strait-jacket.
Heck Bast: “He’s waking up.”
Sunlight Gardener: “No, he’s not. I gave him a shot big enough to paralyze a bull alligator. He’ll be out until nine tonight at the earliest. He’s just dreaming a little. Heck, I want you to go up and hear the boys’ confessions tonight. Tell them there will be no night chapel; I’ve got a plane to meet, and that’s just the start of what’s probably going to be a very long night. Sonny, you stay and help me do the bookwork.”
Heck: “It sure
Sunlight: “Go on, Heck. And have Bobby Peabody check on Wolf.”
Sonny (snickering): “He doesn’t like it in there much, does he?”
“The hellbound rarely care much for the machinery of salvation,” Jack heard Sunlight Gardener say. “When the devils inside them start to die, they go out screaming. Go on now, Heck.”
“Yes sir, Reverend Gardener.”
Jack heard but did not see Heck as he lumbered out. He did not as yet dare to look up.
2
Stuffed into the crudely made, home-welded and home-bolted Box like a victim of premature burial in an iron coffin, Wolf had howled the day away, battering his fists bloody against the sides of the Box, kicking with his feet at the double-bolted, Dutch-oven-type door at the coffin’s foot until the jolts of pain travelling up his legs made his crotch ache. He wasn’t going to get out battering with his fists or kicking with his feet, he knew that, just as he knew they weren’t going to let him out just because he screamed to be let out. But he couldn’t help it. Wolfs hated being shut up above all things.
His screams carried through the Sunlight Home’s immediate grounds and even into the near fields. The boys who heard them glanced at each other nervously and said nothing.
“I seen him in the bathroom this morning, and he turned mean,” Roy Owdersfelt confided to Morton in a low, nervous voice.
“Was they queerin off, like Sonny said?” Morton asked.
Another Wolf-howl rose from the squat iron Box, and both boys glanced toward it.
“And how!” Roy said eagerly. “I didn’t exactly see it because I’m short, but Buster Oates was right up front and he said that big retarded boy had him a whanger the size of a Akron fire-plug. That’s what he said.”
“Jesus!” Morton said respectfully, thinking perhaps of his own substandard whanger.
Wolf howled all day, but as the sun began to go down, he stopped. The boys found the new silence ominous. They looked at one another often, and even more often, and with more unease, toward that rectangle of iron standing in the center of a bald patch in the Home’s back yard. The Box was six feet long and three feet high— except for the crude square cut in the west side and covered with heavy-gauge steel mesh, an iron coffin was exactly what it looked like. What was going on in there? they wondered. And even during confession, during which time the boys were usually held rapt, every other consideration forgotten, eyes turned toward the common room’s one window, even though that window looked on the side of the house directly opposite the Box.
Hector Bast knew that their minds were not on confession and it exasperated him, but he was unable to bring them around because he did not know what precisely was wrong. A feeling of chilly expectation had gripped the boys in the Home. Their faces were paler than ever; their eyes glittered like the eyes of dope-fiends.
What was going on was simple enough.
