The Wolfman

by Nicholas Pekearo

  His casket was closed, but I pictured him. I know that his wife helped him tie his tie every morning because he hated doing it. I think she would have insisted on being the one to do it for him one last time when they were dressing the body. I now knew that was the kind of woman she was.

  Anyway, being at Wild Oaks got me thinking about my own father, roasting in hell, as he must be.

  My old man fought the Nazis in the Second World War. A few years after, my father settled down with a woman named Rosemary, and then I came along, as did my brother, Jeffrey. My little brother lived only a week and a day.

  My childhood was fine and dandy because my mother was kind and my father was a war hero. My grandfather, Jacob Higgins, amazed me with more stories from the Great War than I could shake my tiny fist at. Everything was aces.

  My grandfather died when I was eight years old. He was ninety-nine years old, but he looked great and still had a swagger to his step like Robert Mitchum. What had finally done him in was a car accident. A head-on collision with one of those fast and fancy foreign cars that had begun to spring up on the roads, like the kind James Dean had died in. After that, the mood around my childhood home changed. The folks got a lot quieter than they were known to be. The reason, of course, was that my father had assumed the mantle of the beast.

  The curse of the wolf had started with my grandfather’s father, a man who lived to be a hundred and fifty (or thereabouts), and had passed down the bloodstream, father to son, so when Jacob Higgins bit the bullet, my father became a werewolf. He knew it was coming. The curse had not been kept a secret from him like it had been with me. I had no idea that anything like this could happen outside of a Lon Chaney movie.

  My father’s secret didn’t interfere with our home life too much, save for the silence and secrets I could almost taste, hanging in the air like dandelion spores, but once a month, my daddy would disappear, and I never knew where he went. He was a bus driver, but I never felt it would be good to ask why such a job required business trips on a regular basis. I think there was a part of me that believed, or at least wished, that he was a government agent, like in the Jimmy Cagney movies.

  I was in high school as the whole situation in Vietnam was going down. A lot of older kids from my neighborhood were being sent back in caskets, and as a token of the nation’s appreciation for the lives of the young, the grieving parents were given folded flags. My best friend Ben’s brother got killed over there.

  I had no intention of ever going to war with anybody. My concept of war was hitting someone with a piece of metal I boosted from shop class and that was about it. Wars lasted as long as it took to hold a grudge and for a teacher to turn his head.

  I wasn’t politically active, which was kind of looked at as a sin by certain people, but everything that was going on in the world hardly seemed to me to be my problem. I mean, I wanted to play baseball. I’d picked up the passion for it from the television, then Little League. I was the best first baseman my high school had ever seen, and I had big dreams for myself, all of which included Doris, the greatest girl who’s ever lived. The girl of my dreams.

  Whatever I did, I wanted her with me. There was no way I was going to go overseas to some godforsaken country no one had ever heard of. There was no way I wasn’t going to go pro and have Doris hanging off my arm like Marilyn Monroe, telling jokes and making the whole world wish they were me.

  Doris was amazing. She was funny, smart, had silky brown hair done up like the hot wife from The Dick Van Dyke Show, and had legs that wouldn’t quit. I mean, she was so much more to me. She was everything I could’ve ever hoped for. Just kissing her made me feel like there was nothing else in this life I could ever think to do beyond that moment. But then I got drafted.

  I wanted to run. The prospect of being a deserter didn’t mean anything to me, even if it meant I could never play baseball in the major leagues. My dream up to that point, as far-fetched as it was, was to win the World Series—and I wanted to be a goddamn Pittsburgh Pirate doing it.

  However, if denying my part in the American War Machine would destroy the possibility of living that dream, then so be it. I wanted to pack a bag, pick Doris up on my bike, and hit the road. I didn’t care, so long as I had her with me. That’s how much our life together meant to me.

  I talked with my father about it. He was the man I respected most, and I was proud to be his son. We went out back of the house where we had these flowering bushes, and a couple of trees. In one of those trees hung a tire from a rope. When I was a little kid, I was always on that thing. I even read on it. The course that life was steering me toward sucked—how one can be purely happy out back of the house and then be forced to dwell in a blood-drenched war zone. It hardly seemed like this was the way the world was supposed to be. It just didn’t seem fair.

  “Dad, I don’t think I can go,” I whispered.

  I didn’t feel good saying such a thing to my father. He had been a soldier raised by another soldier. It would’ve been so much easier to just take off with Doris and not tell anybody. That’s what I should have done.

  “I don’t want to die. Ben’s brother died, and I’m not about to end up like that.”

  “You sayin’ you’re better than that dead boy?” he said.

  “Of course not, but no one deserves to die over there.”

  “Son,” he said, “I ain’t going to tell you what the government likes to say, because most of the time it’s bunk, but there are times in life you gotta play by other people’s rules, no matter how crazy they are, just to get by. It ain’t fair, but that’s the way it is.”

  “So I should throw my life away to play by someone else’s stupid rules?”

  “It may not be right, what’s happening over there, but the fact that it’s happening cannot be denied. Taking off may be what you want to do, but there would be real-world consequences you’d have to face after making the decision to run.”

  “I can live without baseball,” I said bravely.

  “A lot of people wouldn’t want to hire a draft dodger. A lot of people wouldn’t want to hire a woman who runs with a draft dodger. A lot of landlords may not want to rent to you. You could end up in jail, doing hard time. They got a unit out there in the FBI that hunts down little men like you who take off. There are kids out there getting two-year, five-year sentences for doing what you’re talking about doing. How would being an ex-con affect the rest of your life? What would happen to Doris? Even if you never got picked up, what about the strain that could come between you from running?”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “Trust me, it’s possible. Misery makes it very easy for love to feel like hate.”

  “So you think Doris and I would be miserable?”

  “I wouldn’t want to speculate,” he said. “The decision is up to you.”

  Little did I know that he could’ve cared less about the happiness she and I created just by being around each other. He just wanted me to die before he did.

  My brother, Jeffrey, had died as an infant. He wasn’t even a distant memory to me. Jeffrey was something that made my parents uncomfortable when his name was mentioned. With no more children to carry on the bloodline, the curse would be broken, and he would be the last. Dad wanted to be the last one. That’s why I never knew the family secret—about the evil that lived inside me, biding its time—until it was too late. He wanted me to die without being tainted by that secret, and the best way for that to happen would be to get myself killed in a rice paddy a million miles away with a belly full of lead and a stained picture of my love tucked inside my helmet, just like how my father had tried to die in combat, and his father before him.

  So I went. I spent a few months in training, and just over four months in the shit before they shipped me back with discharge papers. They said I was certifiable. In 1971, mental breakdown was the reason for a full half of all the medical evacuations from Vietnam. I was nothing special.

  Letters came from Doris regularly. I wro
te to her once that she didn’t have to write so often, but her letters never ceased. I never received a word from my father. I didn’t know that I had been written off prematurely. That’s the kind of guy he was, a fucking werewolf. All things being equal, he could have lived to be two hundred years old. But he didn’t. He died under the wheels of a bus at the bus depot. A day later, I was shot by a sniper in the jungles of Vietnam. Had my father been standing in a different place, he would have gotten what he wanted. He would have been the last one. I would have died in combat, but instead I became the healthiest man alive.

  When the service for Danny was over, it started to rain. Everyone got up to go to their cars, huddling in groups under large black umbrellas.

  I went over to Pearce’s wife. Martha had a big heavy cop in dress uniform on each side of her. They had her held up under her arms, like she was a drunk who couldn’t go on anymore, and they were leading her to one of the long black cars.

  When I approached, they gave me a look like I was a field mouse that had stumbled into their yard, and they were the big dogs. I didn’t want to get in a situation with them, which was apt to happen, me having the face that I have, so I approached with a friendly wave.

  “Mrs. Pearce,” I said, extending my hand for her.

  She didn’t take it.

  “I was wondering if I could have a word with you for a minute.”

  She looked away, said, “No, I can’t talk,” in a low, guttural voice, like any music that had existed inside her had died with her man, and the way she said it, I knew it was true. But I had no choice. She had to know how much he loved her, and I had to know where he was on the night that Judith Myers disappeared.

  “I swear, Mrs. Pearce, I just …”

  “Hey, guy,” said one of the cops at her side, “did you hear what she said?”

  “Yeah, but …”

  “I don’t want to hear it. Back off, her fucking husband died.”

  Mrs. Pearce wailed at the insensitivity.

  “Ma’am,” I said, “please.”

  “Leave me alone,” she cried, “all of you.”

  She broke the grips of both men and hurried down the gravel road toward her waiting car. The two cops looked at each other, and then looked at me.

  “Thanks, asshole. You see what you did?” said one of them.

  “Yeah,” said the other. “Why don’t you go drop dead?” They stormed off.

  Under my breath, I said, “I’ll give that a shot.”

  When I called Pearce’s home number that evening, a cop answered, and I hung up. A moment later, my phone rang. I figured they had caller ID over there, and she was calling back to see who it was. I picked up the phone.

  “Hello?”

  Silence. Then a man’s voice. Very soft.

  “I know what you did.”

  “Who is this?”

  A shallow breath, then the line went dead. I slammed the phone into the cradle.

  My roots to the town were dead and buried, and I really had no reason to stay. In fact, staying would only make things worse, if not for me, then most certainly for someone else. But then, no matter where I went, someone would have to die. There was no alternative to that short of my own death, and suicide, obviously, was not in my repertoire. But if I left right away, I reckoned it would only bring about a suspicion surrounding my sudden disappearance, and I didn’t need anyone looking for me. I had to do something.

  The Rose Killer was still out there, whoever he was. He was the first person I had sent the wolf after who managed to make it through the night. I was concerned that the wolf was no longer under my control, but I was somewhat convinced that something had gone horribly wrong that allowed the target to live.

  The only person who would know was the killer.

  I didn’t know what could possibly have gone wrong. Was it something internal in the beast, or something the killer could have done to throw the beast off? And if that was the case, was it intentional, or was it some cosmic snafu? I had to know his secret so I would never again kill an innocent man.

  I was tempted to take the easy way out, to select another target for the next full moon. Someone easy, like some scumbag already in jail. But that would’ve been evading the issue of whether or not the beast could be as trustworthy as it once was, and further,

  I needed to know what its weakness was.

  I came up with my plan of action.

  I had to get the Rose Killer. I had to try again. Not only for myself, but for Pearce and all those girls who weren’t around anymore.

  Before the last full moon, I had been able to acquire a lot of information about the killer thanks to Pearce, but now I was on my own. Anything I hoped to learn from that point on would not be privileged information. It would be filtered through the media first before it got to concerned citizens such as myself. Real information would be scarce.

  I needed to do some digging on my own. Just like Nancy Drew. I wasn’t a sleuth, but to get to the bottom of all this, I had to put my neck out there a lot more than usual. I didn’t like it, and try as I might, I couldn’t get the wolf to relinquish any more of its memories from the night Pearce died.

  If the police caught the killer, the wolf could’ve just busted into his cell and took him out, lickety-split. It would have no problem doing that. After all, it had gotten us out of one, once.

  If, by the grace of God, I was the one to catch him, I would be tempted to kill him. For all my big talk I had never actually killed a man. Never wanted to. I would have to turn him over to the authorities, or kidnap him. Maybe question him myself. Tie him to a chair in my house so the next time the moon came up, he’d be right there. However that bastard evaded me would be known once I had his memories.

  I decided that after the next full moon, Evelyn would no longer be my home. I knew that much for sure. I had outlived my welcome. Maybe I would be Steve Rogers again, somewhere a thousand miles away from that place. With the proliferation of background checks and all the fancy computer stuff that the federales were coming up with, I wasn’t sure how hard it would be to reinvent myself again. A new identity, a new voice, a new home town. Maybe Steve Rogers wouldn’t have been such a sweet idea at that point. He was probably on file somewhere. Jerk Jerkenson had a nice ring to it.

  But all this was wishful thinking. It assumed that I would be successful in taking out the Rose Killer. If I sent the wolf after him again and it failed again, Evelyn would be the last place I ever lived, because I would be dead. I’d find the balls to do the world a favor.

  So the way I figured it, I had three weeks’ time to save my own life.

  FOURTEEN

  The following day I took the hunting knife that belonged to the trucker out from under the sink and inspected it. Since it had been in my possession I’d never closely inspected it. I had no reason to, but I had such a bad feeling about the guy that Alice’s mother had been shacking up with—the kind of feeling that used to mean something back when I could trust myself—I wasn’t sure if it had been a murder weapon or not.

  I let the kitchen light shine off the knife’s edge. I was looking for blood, but didn’t see any. I knew the cops, with their liquids and fancy lighting, would be able to detect even the most minuscule speck of blood, but I didn’t have these gadgets at my disposal.

  I washed the knife off, which might have been stupid if I was worried about evidence, but my fingerprints were on it. I couldn’t have that. Holding it with a paper towel, I wrapped it in a rag and dropped it in a manila envelope. With a marker, I wrote out the address of the Evelyn Police Department and left the space for a return address blank. After that I slapped on a bunch of stamps. I would drop it in a mailbox on the way to work with a note that stated I, a concerned citizen, had found the knife in Applegate Park. Hope it proves to be useful in your endeavors. With love, Jerk Jerkenson.

  I got in the truck, cursed it to life, and headed out. The knife went into a mailbox three blocks south of where I bought my morning papers.


  When I got to the newsstand, there was a crowd gathered around. This, I thought, is not a good sign. I pulled to the curb and left the engine running. I had the exact change for the two local papers and a copy of USA Today, so I broke through the milling people, dropped my nickels and dimes on the counter, and ran out with the three newspapers.

  Behind the steering wheel, I looked at the front page of the Harbinger and gritted my teeth. “Another Woman Missing,” it read.

  The sonofabitch was still close by.

  I read the articles in the kitchen at work. Luckily, it had proved to be another slow and rainy day. It seemed to me that since Pearce died, the rains hadn’t stopped, just took a break every now and then to get people’s hopes up so they could be crushed again.

  While the article in the Harbinger was quick to point out that this woman’s disappearance and the fact that there was a killer loose was merely coincidental, it couldn’t stop itself from sounding like she was already dead. Maybe if the missing woman hadn’t been a prostitute, they wouldn’t have been so quick to write her

  off.

  The thing with hookers going missing is that it happens more often than anyone cares to realize. The law would be quick to state that hookers are not the kind of people who develop deep ties to their communities, that they don’t have to worry about getting oodles of mail, and they usually don’t have a million house-plants and pets to take care of. That they tend to be transient by nature, going where the work is. But it cannot be denied, a hooker is easy to commit the perfect crime against. And if not for the Rose Killer, the story of a missing prostitute wouldn’t have even made the papers.

  I could only thank my lucky stars that it wasn’t Alice. I was frayed enough as it was. If I had lost her too, I think it would have sent me over the edge. This, though, was a small consolation. I recognized the woman, and she sure as shit worked out of Mama Snow’s house. Her name was Josie Jones.