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6.

My father was silent for most of the ride home. The day had turned dark, heavy cumulus clouds that threatened more rain collecting overhead. The heater on the old truck spat tepid air at us, losing a futile battle with the drafts from the floorboards. I turned on the radio and spun the dial until it tuned in to a classical station that I knew my father wouldn’t object to. Mahler’s fifth symphony was playing, and I closed my eyes and tried to let it lull me to sleep, but I could feel the electricity coming off my father, static that filled the cab. My own mood was equally sour, my birthday spoiled by Heidi’s unwelcome prodding.

We were almost back to the cabin when he hit the steering wheel with his fist, jolting me alert. “She said they were phasing out the zine rack,” he said, his eyes fixed on the road before us. “ Zine. I hate that word. Equating Libertaire with the rest of the crap on that rack, comic strips and music reviews. They didn’t sell a single copy of the last issue, can you believe that? Not a one! And someone had jammed a piece of gum between the pages of one copy and placed it right back on the rack.”

“Which essay? Maybe it was the reader’s commentary on your argument. A material metaphor about the stickiness of the subject.”

He threw me a look. “She gave the copies all back to me and declined to take the new issue. They’re clearing out the rack to make room for a new technology section. Apparently the internet ”—he spat this word out, as if it were poison—“is more interesting to them than political philosophy and intellectual debate.”

“Ugh. The internet,” I said knowingly, although I still had only the vaguest understanding of what that was, mostly based on the snide articles that I came across in The Wall Street Journal . (“About 15 Million People Troll the Internet, a Study Finds.” Or “Wall Street Whiz Finds Niche Selling Books on the Internet.” And so on.)

“ So long as the machine process continues to hold its dominant place as a disciplinary factor in modern culture, so long must the spiritual and intellectual life of this cultural era maintain the character which the machine process gives it, ” my father said darkly. “Thorstein Veblen. He saw all this coming. The replacement of psychological health with inhuman computer logic. Our ruin is impending, unless we do something drastic.”

We were passing the cut in the forest again, and when I turned to look at the sabotaged bulldozers I saw that two men in orange vests had the side of one of them open, working at the engine. I battled a queasy sensation as I realized that the workers would be back at it tomorrow, or the next day, and the new power lines would go in whether we liked it or not.

“Inevitability is the most important foe to fight,” my father liked to say. But as we drove past the waiting coils of cable, I couldn’t stop myself from wondering if that battle was ever winnable. Instead, the image of my father sneaking down in the dark to put sugar in the gas tanks was dredging up a different and wholly unwelcome word: futility. And then I felt guilty for having let the word into my mind at all.

Because of course my father was right , he had to be . I’d read all the books he gave me—Marx and Mao, Rousseau and Paine—and so I understood the teleological basis of his world philosophy. The world was going downhill, industry and technology were making men rich and lazy and self-destructive; and only radical, revolutionary leaders like my father would divert us from disaster. Sabotaging those bulldozers was just a skirmish, I reassured myself; we could still win the war.

Looking back now, can I blame myself for believing this? After all, I was a very good student, and I’d only ever had one teacher.

—

We were almost to the cabin when he slammed on the brakes. I jerked forward, almost hitting the dashboard with my forehead. A shape was lying just ahead, blocking the road to the house. It was an animal carcass, its fur so matted with blood and mud that it took me a long minute to realize it was the grizzled old wolf that hunted in the meadow. Samson . Three hunchbacked vultures were already circling nearby, eager to get first crack at their lunch.

My father got out of the car and went to stand over the body of the dead wolf. I watched as he prodded at the carcass with the toe of his boot. Then he grabbed it by one of its paws and dragged it through the mud to the edge of the road, heaving it toward the bushes. The vultures, undaunted, pressed in closer. He picked up a rock and threw it at them, then turned and climbed back into the truck.

He sat, staring through the windshield for a long time, before starting the truck again.

“How did he die?” I asked.

“Someone shot him.”

I wondered who had done this. Could it have been the workmen in the cut, getting revenge for their ruined bulldozers? But how would they even know that this was our wolf? More likely it was a nearby farmer, protecting his livestock, and the wolf had slunk back to our property to die. That kind of thing happened all the time in Montana, especially to an old wolf that didn’t have a pack to hunt with anymore. I knew I wasn’t supposed to feel attached, any more than I felt attached to the chickens whose necks I so casually wrung for our dinners. But the idea of the old wolf being eviscerated by vultures left me feeling oddly bereft.

When we got home, my father went straight to his study and closed the door, locking it behind him. After a few minutes, I heard the television go on. I picked up an empty canning jar and pressed it to the door to listen. Through the wood I could hear a news anchor commenting on the elections that had just taken place the previous week. (The results— yet more fools in charge —had sent my father out to the woodpile with his axe, stormy-eyed and silent.) Louder than the television, though, came the syncopated rattle of my father’s Smith Corona. I could hear his fingers striking the keys as if he were trying to punish them.