Lava Falls by Lucy Jane Bledsoe

Author:Lucy Jane Bledsoe
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780299318581
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press

Wolf

I wasn’t exactly happy with Jim wanting to change his name to Anatoly, but I tried to roll with it. Change is good in a relationship, right? That was the whole reason we went to Yellowstone in the first place, to zest up our marriage, have a little fun, do something new.

I didn’t think we needed an overhaul, though. Nor did I think the change needed to bleed outside our marriage. But after the first trip to the park, he started asking our neighbors to call him Anatoly. It was embarrassing.

“Been reading our Dostoevsky, have we?” said our next door neighbor Clarence, pleased with himself for thinking he’d dredged up a literary reference. The other next door neighbor, Walter, narrowed his eyes, assessed, and then shrugged, neither agreeing nor disagreeing, pretty much just dismissing. I imagined both of them telling their wives, Cathy and Shawna, and having a good laugh on our behalf. Little did I know back then that I needn’t have worried about the neighbors, that we’d soon be selling the house.

Still, in the beginning, I tried to find the humor myself. My complaints for the thirty-plus years we’d been together clustered around sameness, a hazy boredom that occasionally drifted through our otherwise happy marriage. So a new name? Why not? It didn’t occur to me that it might signify an entire identity change.

Anatoly means east or sunrise. Fitting, I suppose. But how did he know that? Had he been researching wild names before we even visited the park and met the wolf watchers? I heard him tell them his name was Anatoly that very first morning. He removed his mitten and thrust out his hand, and the reluctant recipient of his greeting ignored the hand but nodded when Jim said, “Anatoly.” Barely awake, I decided I’d misheard, that Jim had probably only made some obscure joke the other man didn’t get. I got back in the car and unscrewed the thermos lid, poured myself some coffee.

The ranger had told us that the wolves were most active at dawn and dusk, and that the best way to view them was to look for the cluster of people beside the road with viewing scopes. It was the dead of January, but sure enough that morning as we drove out the northern park road and entered the Lamar Valley, we found seven people in one of the pullouts, standing with alert expectation in front of fat cylinders on long legs.

Clouds obscured the stars. The sky was black and the snow a deep lavender. We parked our Ford Fiesta next to the fleet of SUVs, and that’s when Jim introduced himself as Anatoly. Forgive me for repeating that moment; it’s the part of this life shift I can’t explain. The name must have come to him in the way dreams lay out whole stories we don’t even know exist in our unconscious. A wild name, Anatoly, parked in the recesses of Jim’s psyche, perhaps for years, waiting for the right mix of circumstances to surface.

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