By Michelle Menting
That night, the lug nut fell off my wheel, but I didn't know it yet. I felt the wobble and wave of the tires but thought it was the wind, or maybe just me. The landscape was treeless and I'd been driving ten hours by then, following our U-Haul truck moving from midland to northland, great plains to great lakes, all in one swoop. It happened so fast and it happened so slowly, the long trip on highways then interstate then highways. Somehow the two of us were the only drivers on the road. When I pulled ahead of the truck, then we saw it wasn't me growing tired, but the wheel loose and wobbling. I drove so long thinking it was me, that I was causing everything to become unstable. Maybe in that moment, I should have felt powerful, but that doubt was good doubt. Hardware failure of a kind, this time. When we took the next and only exit for miles—a gravel drive that led straight to a tavern—the sky was pink with early summer. We were on CST, mere hours from Eastern. Just before solstice, that sun stretched out well past nine. The tavern's sign creaked on rusted hinges, read "Leinenkugel" as if just one. The missing s burnt out or shot out, like a scene from some western updated for Gen-Y hipsters.
If we had been more lucid, we might not have laughed when everyone at the bar turned toward us all at once as we walked through the door, everyone staring for a full hot second. It was hot. I had forgotten that. And then they turned back, the regulars, again all at once. Maybe this was a sign of acceptance. We ordered Cokes, went outside and tightened the tire. The parking lot, I swear, was empty: no vehicles in sight, just gravel and patches of grass. For a moment: silence, except that sign creaking in the wind. But there was no wind. What I remember so clearly was the sound of coyotes howling beyond the potatoes and ginseng, across the windbreak, at the start of the forests where we were headed, our final destination, at least for a time. Wolf country, or what was left of it. Home. For me, this was a return. Summer nights as a kid, a constant sibling argument was whether the yips and croons at the moon were coyotes or wolves. Sometimes we said both. Sometimes we said loons. We wanted them to be wolves: sentinels of idyllic wilderness, what we knew, even then as children, was fading.
We'd settle for coyotes, my partner and I thought, on that night of cross-country travel. It wasn't as romantic as that. A couple leaving the bar, pegging us full of wild beast worry, told us the howling was from their neighbor's dogs up over the hills: bull terriers chained out every night. They said they'd called the authorities. "But they always give them those dogs back. They're fed and all just don't get to run free. But every night, moon, no moon, every night they howl." And then they left. Drove away in a pickup I swear was never there in the first place.
We finished our Cokes. Slowly got back into our packed car and U-Haul truck. I drove with the windows down so I could hear those wolves sing.
Michelle Menting’s flash nonfiction has appeared in New South, Punctuate: A Nonfiction Magazine, Superstition Review, New Delta Review, and Quarter After Eight, among others. She is the author of Leaves Surface Like Skin (Terrapin Books) and two poetry chapbooks. Originally from the upper Great Lakes, she now lives in Maine.