The Wolf Read Online Free PDF

those who prefer to go it alone. I made a quick leap from checkers to chess and learned to compete against myself, using books about the masters of the game as my guide. It is a practice I’ve kept to this day, except now I use it to plan strategies and moves against a range of ruthless opponents.
    I was a baseball fan, listening to the games during the season, anticipating the moves made by the managers of both New York teams, preferring National League ball to that played in the American due to the strategic in-game decisions required. I studied the stats in the morning paper, checked a player’s on-base percentage against the opposing pitcher’s hits-to-walk ratio, attempting to evaluate who had the greater chance to succeed, and look for reasons behind it.
    I was a member of the school track team. I was a long-distance runner, choosing to compete against a clock as opposed to an opponent. I ran just about every day, regardless of weather. I loved the sounds of my sneakers bouncing off a dirt road.
    With my father away, I spent a great deal of time with my mother. In the early evening, we sat in the living room and listened to the radio, tuned to an Italian station broadcasting news from a country she missed every day of her life. I would sometimes read to her from an assortment of books—some borrowed from the library, others in Italian, sent to her by relatives in Naples. I never understood the extent of her ailments and I couldn’t guess at the pain she felt, but all I needed to know I could observe—my mother was sick and would never get better and I was there to offer comfort in any way I could.
    It was a safe, simple existence, both within our home and around our neighborhood. I was too young to think much about what I wanted to make of my life, if there was indeed a place for me outside the Bronx. Few of the older kids from the area ventured far and all seemed to find work that required a uniform—military, police, fire, sanitation. I wasn’t sure if that would be the direction I would seek, but I don’t think I would have minded.
    All that vanished the summer I turned thirteen.
    On July 4 of that year, while other kids were in playgrounds or on rooftops waiting for the fireworks to begin, I was on the second floor of our home, at my mother’s bedside, watching her draw her final breaths, her ravaged body giving in to the incessant demands of a disease without any quit. My father gripped one of her hands and I held tight to the other, listening as my mother strained to speak. “I’m sorry,” she said in a painful rasp. “I’m so sorry.” She closed her eyes and let her head tilt to one side.
    My father was not an emotional man. The day after we buried my mother, the only woman he would ever love, he left to drive a sixteen-wheeler packed with oil drums to a factory in Missoula, Montana, expecting to return in less than a week. He left knowing I would be responsible enough to go to school every day and return home to a dinner left for me by our neighbor and my mother’s best friend, Filomena. My father always treated me more as an adult than my years would indicate. There was a feeling of mutual trust between us that neither would betray. It’s a weakness, I know, but one that can be forgiven between a father and a son.
    On his return trip from Montana, somewhere on the curving roads of the Pennsylvania Turnpike, my father’s truck swerved to avoid hitting two deer standing too close to the right-hand lane. The truck jackknifed and skidded for more than a quarter of a mile, the cabin crashing against the side of a guardrail, my father’s body blasting through the windshield, landing head first against the base of a tree. He was pronounced dead at the scene, a victim of two innocent animals and a faulty seat belt.
    But I knew better.
    My father had driven those roads for years and knew of the large number of deer who congregated along the curves of that stretch of 76. He would always move his truck