Sleight of Hand

by Peter S. Beagle

  Garrigue glanced up at the darkening overcast sky. “Cut it close again, moon coming on so fast these nights. I keep telling you, Jean-Marc—”

  Arceneaux was already limping away from the rear of the car, having opened the trunk and taken out most of the grocery bags. Still scolding him, Garrigue took the rest and followed, leaving one hand free to open the cabin door for Arceneaux and then switch on the single bare light in the room. It was right above the entrance, and the shadows, as though startled themselves to be suddenly awakened, danced briefly over the room when Garrigue stepped inside, swung the door to, and double-locked it behind them.

  Arceneaux tipped the bags he carried, and let a dozen bloody steaks and roasts fall to the floor.

  The single room was small but tidy, even homely, with two Indian-patterned rag rugs, two cane-bottomed rockers, and a card table with two folding chairs drawn up around it. There was a fireplace, and a refrigerator in one corner, but no beds or cots. The two windows were double-barred on the inside, and the shutters closing them were not wooden, but steel.

  Another grocery bag held a bottle of Calvados, which Arceneaux set on the table, next to the two glasses, deck of cards and cribbage board waiting there. In a curiously military fashion, they padlocked and dropbolted the door, carefully checked the security of the windows, and even blocked the fireplace with a heavy steel screen. Then, finally, they sat down at the table, and Arceneaux opened the Calvados and said, “Cut.”

  Garrigue cut. Arceneaux dealt. Garrigue said, “My littlest grandbaby, Manette, she going to First Communion a week Saturday. You be there?” Arceneaux nodded wordlessly, jabbing pegs into the cribbage board. Garrigue started to say “She so excited, she been asking me, did I ever do First Communion, what did it feel like and all….” but then his words dissolved into a hoarse growl as he slipped from the chair. Garrigue was almost always the first, neither understood why.

  Werewolves—loups-garoux in Louisiana—are notably bigger than ordinary wolves, running to larger skulls with bolder, more marked bones, deeper-set eyes, broader chests, and paws, front and rear, whose dewclaw serves very nearly as an opposable thumb. Even so, for a small, chattery white man Garrigue stood up as a huge wolf, black from nose to tail-tip, with eyes unchanged from his normal snow-gray, shocking in their humanity. He was at the food before Arceneaux’s front feet hit the floor, and there was the customary snarling between them as they snapped up the meat within minutes. The table went over, cards and brandy and all, and both of them hurled themselves at walls and barred windows until the entire cabin shook with their frenzied fury. The wolf that was Arceneaux stood on its hind legs and tried to reach the window latches with uncannily dexterous paws, while the wolf that was Garrigue broke a front claw tearing at the door. They never howled.

  First madness spent, they circled the room restlessly, their eyes glowing as dogs’ and wolves’ eyes do not glow. In time they settled into a light, reluctant sleep—Garrigue under a chair, Arceneaux in the ruins of the rug he had torn to pieces. Even in sleep they whined softly and eagerly, lips constantly twitching back from the fangs they never quite covered.

  Towards dawn, with the moon gray and small, looking almost triangular because of the moisture in the air, something brought Arceneaux to the barred window nearest the door, rearing once again with his paws on the sill. There was nothing to see through the closed metal shutters, but the deep, nearly inaudible sound that constantly pulsed through his body in this form grew louder as he stared, threatening to break its banks and swell into a full-throated howl. Once again he clawed at the bars, but Garrigue had screwed down the bolts holding them in place too tightly even for a loup-garou’s deftness, and Arceneaux’s snarl bared his fangs to the black gums. Garrigue joined him, puzzled but curious, and the two of them stood side by side, panting rapidly, ears flattened against their skulls. And still there was no hint of movement anywhere outside.

  Then the howl came, surging up from somewhere very near, soaring over the trees like some skeletal ancient bird, almost visible in its dreadful ardency. The werewolves went mad, howling their own possessed challenges, even snapping furiously at each other. Arceneaux sprang at the barred windows until they shivered. He was crouching to leap again when he heard the familiar whimper behind him, and simultaneously felt the brief but overwhelming pain, unlike any other, of distorted molecules regaining their natural shape. Coming back always took longer, and hurt worse.

  As always afterward, he collapsed to the floor and lay there, quickly human enough to curse the weakness that always overtook a returning loup-garou, old or young, He heard Garrigue gasping, “Duplessis…. Duplessis….” but could not yet respond. A face began to form in his mind: dark, clever, handsome in a way that meant no good to anyone who responded to it…. Still unable to speak, Arceneaux shook his head against the worn, stained floorboards. He had better reason than most to know why that sound, that cold wail of triumph, could not have been uttered by Alexandre Duplessis of Pointe Coupee Parish.

  They climbed slowly to their feet, two stiff-jointed old men, looking around them at the usual wreckage of the cabin. Over the years that they had been renting it together, Garrigue and Arceneaux had made it proof, as best they could, against the rage of what would be trapped there every month. Even so, the rugs were in shreds, the refrigerator was on its side, there were deep claw-marks on the log walls to match the ones already there, and they would definitely need a new card table. Arceneaux pointed at the overturned Calvados bottle and said, “Shame, that. Wish I’d got the cap back on.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” Garrigue shivered violently—common for most after the return. He said, “Jean-Marc, it was Duplessis, you know and I know. Duplessis back.”

  “Not in this world.” Arceneaux’s voice was bleak and slow. “Maybe in some other world he back, but ain’t in this one.” He turned from the window to face Garrigue. “I killed Duplessis, man. Ain’t none of us come back from what I done, Duplessis or nobody. You was there, Rene Garrigue! You saw how I done!”

  Garrigue was hugging himself to stop the shivering, closing his eyes against the seeing. Abruptly he said in a strangely quiet tone, “He outside right now. He there, Jean-Marc.”

  “Naw, man,” Arceneaux said. “Naw, Rene. He gone, Rene, my word. You got my word on it.” But Garrigue was lunging past him to fumble with the locks and throw the door wide. The freezing dawn air rushed in over the body spilled across the path, so near the door that Garrigue almost tripped over it. It was a woman—a vagrant, clearly, wearing what looked like five or six coats, sweaters and undergarments. Her throat had been ripped out, and what remained of her intestines were draped neatly over a tree branch. Even in the cold, there were already flies.

  Arceneaux breathed the name of his god, his loa, Damballa Wedo, the serpent. Garrigue whispered, “Women. Always the women, always the belly. Duplessis.”

  “He carry her here.” Arceneaux was calming himself, as well as Garrigue. “Killed her somewhere back there, maybe in the city, carry her here, leave her like a business card. You right, Rene. Can’t be, but you right.”

  “Business card.” Garrigue’s voice was still tranquil, almost dreamy. “He know this place, Jean-Marc. If he know this place, he know everything. Everything.”

  “Hush you, man, hush now, mind me.” Arceneaux might have been talking to a child wakened out of a nightmare. “Shovel out back, under the crabapple, saw it last time. We got to take her off and bury her, first thing. You go get me that shovel, Rene.”

  Garrigue stared at him. Arceneaux said it again, more gently. “Go on, Rene. Find me that shovel, compe’.”

  Alone, he felt every hair on his own body standing up; his big dark hands were trembling so that he could not even cover the woman’s face or close her eyes. Alexandre Duplessis, c’est vraiment li, vraiment, vraiment; but the knowledge frightened the old man far less than the terrible lure of the crumpled thing at his feet, torn open and emptied out, gutted and drained and abandoned, the reek of her
terror dominating the hot, musky scent of the beast that had hunted her down in the hours before dawn. The fear, Damballa, the fear—you once get that smell in you head, you throat, you gut, you never get it out. Better than the meat, the blood even, you smell the fear. He was shaking badly now, and he knew that he needed to get out of there with Garrigue before he hurled himself upon the pitiful remains, to roll and wallow in them like the beast he was. Hold me, Damballa. Hide me, hold me.

  Garrigue returned with the rusty shovel and together they carried the dead woman deeper into the woods. Then he stood by, rubbing his mouth compulsively as he watched Arceneaux hack at the hard earth. In the same small voice as before, he said, “I scare, me, Ti-Jean,” calling Arceneaux by his childhood nickname. “What we do to him.”

  “What he did to us.” Arceneaux’s own voice was cold and steady. “What he did to ma Sophie.”

  As he had known it would, the mention of Arceneaux’s sister immediately brought Garrigue back from wherever terror and guilt together had taken him. “I ain’t forgot Sophie.” His gray eyes had closed down like the steel shutters whose color they matched. “I ain’t forgot nothing.”

  “I know, man,” Arceneaux said gently. He finished his work, patted the new grave as flat as he could make it—one good rain, two, grass cover it all—and said, “We come back before next moon, clean up a little. Right now, we going home.” Garrigue nodded eagerly.

  In the car, approaching the freeway, Garrigue could not keep from talking about Sophie Arceneaux, as he had not done in a very long while. “So pretty, that girl, that sister of yours. So pretty, so kind, who wouldn’t want to marry such a fine woman like her?” Then he hurriedly added, “Of course, my Elizabeth, Elizabeth was a fine woman too, I don’t say a word against Elizabeth. But Sophie…. la Sophie….” He fell silent for a time, and then said in a different voice, “I ain’t blame Duplessis for wanting her. Can’t do that, Jean-Marc.”

  “She didn’t want him,” Arceneaux said. There was no expression at all in his voice now. “Didn’t want nothing to do with him, no mind what he gave her, where he took her, never mind what he promised. So he killed her.” After a pause, he went on, “You know how he killed her.”

  Garrigue folded his hands in his lap and looked at them.

  So low he could barely be heard, he answered, “In the wolf…. in the wolf shape. Hadn’t seen it, I wouldn’t have believed.”

  “Ripped her throat out,” Arceneaux said. “Ma colombe, ma pauv’ p’ti, she never had no chance—no more than him with her.” He looked off down the freeway, seeing, not a thousand cars nor a distant city skyline, but his entire Louisiana family, wolves all, demanding that as oldest male he take immediate vengeance on Duplessis. For once—and it was a rare enough occurrence—he found himself in complete agreement with his blood kin and their ancient notions of honor and retribution. In company with Garrigue, one of Sophie’s more tongue-tied admirers, he had set off on the track of his sister’s murderer.

  “Duplessis kill ma Sophie, she never done nothing but good for anyone. Well, I done what I done, and I ain’t sorry for it.” His voice rose as he grew angry all over again, more than he usually allowed himself these days. He said, “Ain’t a bit sorry.”

  Garrigue shivered, remembering the hunt. Even with an entire werewolf clan sworn to avenge Sophie Arceneaux, Duplessis had made no attempt to hide himself, or to flee the region, so great was his city man’s contempt for thick-witted backwoods bumpkins. Arceneaux had run him to earth in a single day, and it had been almost too easy for Garrigue to lure him into a moonshiner’s riverside shebeen: empty for the occasion and abandoned forever after, haunted by the stories of what was done there to Alexandre Duplessis.

  It had taken them all night, and Garrigue was a different man in the morning.

  After the first scream, Garrigue had never heard the others; he could not have done otherwise and held onto his sanity. Sometimes it seemed to him that he had indeed gone mad that night, and that all the rest of his life—the flight north, the jobs, the marriage, the beloved children and grandchildren, the home—had never been anything but a lunatic’s hopeless dream of forgetfulness. More than forty years later he still shuddered and moaned in his sleep, and at times still whimpered himself awake. All the blood, all the shit…. the…. the…. sound when Ti-Jean took that old cleaver thing…. and that man wouldn’t die, wouldn’t die…. wasn’t nothing left of him but open mouth, awful open mouth, and he wouldn’t die….

  “Don’t make no sense,” Arceneaux said beside him. “Days burying…. four, five county lines—”

  “Five,” Garrigue whispered. “Evangeline. Joyelle. St. Landry. Acadia. Rapides. Too close together, I told you….”

  Arceneaux shook his head. “Conjure. Conjure in it somewhere, got to be. Guillory, maybe, he evil enough…. old Fontenot, over in St. Landry. Got to be conjure.”

  They drove the rest of the way in near silence, Arceneaux biting down hard on his own lower lip, Garrigue taking refuge in memories of his wife Elizabeth, and of Arceneaux’s long-gone Pauline. Both women, non-Creoles, raised and encountered in the city, believed neither in werewolves nor in conjure men; neither one had ever known the truth about their husbands. Loups-garoux run in families: Arceneaux and Garrigue, marrying out of their clans, out of their deep back-country world, had both produced children who would go through their lives completely unaware of that part of their ancestry. The choice had been a deliberate one, and Garrigue, for his part, had never regretted it. He doubted very much that Arceneaux had either, but it was always hard to tell with Arceneaux.

  Pulling to the curb in front of the frame house where Garrigue lived with Claude and his family, Arceneaux cut the engine, and they sat looking at each other. Garrigue said finally, “Forgot to fish. Grandbabies always wanting to know did we catch anything.”

  “Tell them fish wasn’t biting today. We done that before.”

  Garrigue smiled for the first time. “Claude, he think we don’t do no fishing, we goes up there to drink, get away from family, get a little wild. Say he might just come with us one time.” Arceneaux grunted without replying. Garrigue said, “I keeps ducking and dodging, you know? Ducking and dodging.” His voice was growing shaky again, but he never took his eyes from Arceneaux’s eyes. He said, “What we going to do, Ti-Jean?”

  “Get you some sleep,” Arceneaux said. “Get you a good breakfast, tell Claude you likely be late. We go find Duplessis tomorrow, you and me.”

  Garrigue looked, for a moment, more puzzled than frightened. “Why we bothering that? He know right where we live, where the chirrens lives—”

  Arceneaux cut him off harshly. “We find him fast, maybe we throw him just that little bit off-balance, could help sometime.” He patted Garrigue’s shoulder lightly. “We use what we got, Rene, and all we got is us. You go on now—my knee biting on me a little bit.”

  In fact—as Garrigue understood from the fact that Arceneaux mentioned it at all—the bad knee was hurting him a good deal; he could only pray that it wouldn’t have locked up on him by morning. He brought the car back to Noelle, who took one look at his gait and insisted on driving him home, lecturing him all the way about his need for immediate surgery. She was his oldest child, his companion from her birth, and the only one who would ever have challenged him, as she did now.

  “Dadda, whatever you and Compe’ Rene are up to, I will find it out—you know I always do. Simpler tell me now, oui?”

  “Ain’t up to one thing,” Arceneaux grumbled. “Ain’t up to nothing, you turning such a suspicious woman. You mamere, she just exactly the same way.”

  “Because you’re such a bad liar,” his daughter replied tenderly. She caressed the back of his neck with a warm, work-hardened hand. “Ma’dear and me, we used to laugh so, nights you’d be slipping out to drink, play cards with Compe’ Rene and your old zydeco friends. Make some crazy little-boy story—whoo, out the door, gone till morning, come home looking like someone dragged you through a keyho
le backwards. Lord, didn’t we laugh!”

  There had been a few moments through the years when pure loneliness had made him seriously consider turning around on her and telling her to sit herself down and listen to a story. This moment was one of them; but he only muttered something he forgot as soon as he’d said it, and nothing more until she dropped him off at his apartment building. Then she kissed his cheek and told him, “Come by for dinner tomorrow. Antoine will be home early, for a change, and Patrice just got to show his gam’pair something he drew in school.”

  “Day after,” Arceneaux said. “Busy tomorrow.” He could feel her eyes following him as he limped through the lobby doors.

  The knee was still painful the next morning, but it remained functionally flexible. He could manage. He caught the crosstown bus to meet Garrigue in front of Claude’s house, and they set forth together to search for a single man in a large city. Their only advantage lay in possessing, even in human form, a wolf’s sense of smell; that, and a bleak awareness that their quarry shared the very same gift, and undoubtedly already knew where they lived, and—far more frightening—whom they loved. We ain’t suppose to care, Damballa. Bon Dieu made the loup-garou, he ain’t mean us to care about nothing. The kill only. The blood only…. the fear only. Maybe Bon Dieu mad at us, me and Rene, disobeying him like we done. Too late now.

  Garrigue had always been the better tracker, since their childhood, so Arceneaux simply stayed just behind his left shoulder and went where he led. Picking up the werewolf scent at the start was a grimly easy matter: knowing Duplessis as they did, neither was surprised to cross his trail not far from the house where Garrigue’s younger son Fernand lived with his own wife and children. Garrigue caught his breath audibly then, but said no word. He plunged along, drawn by the strange, unmistakable aroma as it circled, doubled back on itself, veered off in this direction or that, then inevitably returned to patrolling the streets most dear to two weary old men. Frightened and enraged, stubborn and haunted and lame, they followed. Arceneaux never took his eyes from Garrigue, which was good, because Garrigue was not using his eyes at all, and would have walked into traffic a dozen times over, if not for Arceneaux. People yelled at him.