The Wolfman

by Nicholas Pekearo

  Behind the house was a basketball hoop hammered onto the outside wall. There must have been kids inside. I told the man to stop, and he did, but not soon enough. A bright light shone down into the yard—a motion detector. Someone would see us soon enough.

  “Please don’t kill me,” the man said. “I didn’t do nothing.”

  “Bullshit,” I said softly. “You just answer my questions or it’ll be over before it begins. I could shoot the wings off a fly if I wanted to, so you just be nice and still.”

  The man swallowed.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Mickey,” he said. “Mickey Hanson.”

  “Mickey. I’ve been waiting a long time to meet you.”

  “Man, I don’t even know who you are. I don’t have any money.”

  “Don’t play stupid,” I said. “I know who you are.”

  “How?”

  “Motherfucker, don’t you read the papers? You’re the Rose

  Killer.”

  “Who? Me?”

  “What did you do to cloak yourself?”

  “What?”

  “Just answer the question.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  I raised the gun to shoulder level and took it in both hands. I knew that I would land on my ass, firing such a piece as that Magnum. The man began to cry.

  “Please don’t kill me,” he said.

  “What made you invisible?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “What was with the church break-ins?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Have you ever been to the state of Maine?”

  “No, man, I swear …”

  The smell of urine filled the air. That, coupled with the look in the man’s eyes, told me he was probably telling the truth.

  Damn it.

  “Why were you following her?” I asked.

  “I wasn’t following nobody.”

  “Now I know you’re lying.”

  I pressed the gun into his forehead. He shook.

  “I just … I just wanted to say hi.”

  “Bullshit. You are a sickie, ain’t you? Just not my sickie.”

  “I’m not a sickie.”

  “Stop lying.”

  “I swear. Every once in a while there will be underwear out on a line, and I’ll have a look, but that’s it. It’s not my fault …” Up on the second floor of the house, a light went on. “Shut up,” I said. “Quick, take off your shoe.”

  “Which one?”

  “Just do it.”

  He took off his left shoe and tried to hand it to me. There were no laces, and the heel was so worn down I almost felt sorry for him.

  “Put that fucking thing down. I don’t want your stinking shoe. Give me your sock. I want it.”

  “There’s no money in there,” the man said.

  “I want the sock, I said. Give me your fucking sock.”

  With shaking hands he slid the scummy sock down his ankle and held it up to me like a peace offering. There were holes in it. I took the sweaty sock with my left hand and stuffed it into my back pocket. There was something else in the pocket, I didn’t know what. Then I remembered—Anthony’s photographs.

  “I got your sock now, motherfucker,” I said.

  “Take it,” the man said.

  “Oh, I took it, man. It’s mine now. But remember this, you fucking sickie: I own your life now, man. I won’t forget you. And if I ever see you in this town again I’m gonna shoot the balls off you and stuff ‘em down your throat.”

  The man swallowed again.

  “Okay,” he said.

  “Now get the fuck out of here.”

  The man took off like a shot in the night. In a second’s time, I couldn’t even see him anymore.

  This was another mark against me. I’d be striking myself out of the game soon enough if I couldn’t help it. Up high, the window opened, and a middle-aged man in glasses looked down into his illuminated backyard. There I was with a loaded gun in my hand. I smiled and waved.

  “What are you doing down there?” he said.

  “Defending the public,” I responded before disappearing myself.

  When I got home that night, I dropped the keys on my makeshift coffee table, checked the four locks on the door, then checked all the windows. Everything looked fine, so I started the shower going.

  As I was undressing, the phone rang. I pulled my pants back up, went into the living room, and stared at the phone. The gun was next to it. I picked up the phone.

  “Hello?”

  “Getting home kind of late, aren’t you?”

  I hung up. Whoever was calling me was also watching me. This wasn’t good. It was the kind of thing that made you want to drink.

  SEVENTEEN

  Midnight on Carpenter Street. Yet again. With the clock rolling over, it was now June 3. One week to go, and the police were doing no better than me when it came to getting the Rose Killer off the streets.

  The front door to Mama Snow’s opened. Leon stepped out with a cup of coffee in his giant hand. He crossed the street and came over to my truck. I lowered the window and took the cup.

  “Nothing?” he asked in a deep, tremulous voice.

  “Nope.” I took a sip, then said, “You know, if you and I put our heads together, we’d be unstoppable. You should help me.”

  “I don’t know you, and that’s the way it’s going to stay.”

  “Because you say so, or they do?”

  “Because I say so.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Still, for a vampire, you’re all right. Thanks for the coffee.”

  Leon smiled and walked away. He was a man of few words, but he knew what I was doing out there.

  I drank the coffee in one gulp. I was exhausted, had been running myself ragged since this whole affair started. By four, when Alice stepped out, the coffee had worn off, and I was tired. I guess that’s why I didn’t do such a good job of following her home as I usually did. At a red light I was stupid enough to pull up right behind her, no car in between.

  When she got to her building, I was still driving right behind her, not thinking. She stopped short, and I almost drove into the back of her car. Before I knew it she had gotten out of the Honda and was standing outside my driver’s-side door.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” she said.

  “Oh, hi, Alice,” I said, doing a poor job of pretending like I had just run into her out of the crystal blue. “What’s going on?”

  “Are you completely stupid, or just when it comes to following someone?” She was genuinely upset. “I guess this is why I haven’t seen you around at the house for a while. You were too busy being every other fucking place I was.”

  “I wasn’t following you, Alice, I …”

  “What?”

  “I was just driving you home.”

  I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  “Marley, do you think I haven’t noticed your truck lately?”

  “… Have you?”

  “Yes, Marley. I see your stinking truck in my dreams. I don’t like being followed, especially since Josie died.”

  I sighed. “That’s why I’ve been following you, Alice.”

  “Well, I don’t need your help, okay? How did you know where I live anyway?”

  “It’s a small town. I’m sure you know where I live….”

  “I don’t, and I don’t want to know. This is a total invasion of my privacy.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I just don’t know what else to do. I don’t want anything to happen to you….”

  “Stop right there,” she said. “Don’t keep talking. I don’t want to hear what you have to say.”

  “Alice, please …”

  She stuck her finger in my face.

  “If I see this truck again, I’m going to call the police,” she said, her voice loaded with venom. “This is sick.”

  “It’s not sick,” I said.

  “It’s
scary. This is just plain fucking creepy.”

  I thought I was beyond having my heart broken, but that’s what it felt like. She began to walk back to her car, but I called her back.

  “Alice, wait.”

  She came back to my window. I opened my dash and took out the Magnum. Her eyes grew wide, but then I took it by the barrel and held it out the window.

  “Take it.”

  “I’m not taking that, Marley. What the hell are you doing with that thing?”

  “I’m not doing anything with it. I want you to take it. Please.”

  “This town doesn’t need a vigilante, Marley. Put the gun away.”

  “Take it,” I said, hard. “I was doing this for you, no one else. If you don’t want me around, fine. But it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be safe.”

  She reluctantly took the gun.

  “I … I don’t like it when people cross lines,” she said. “I don’t know what kind of fantasy you have going in your head about you and me, but I don’t want any part of it. There’s a time and place. This is my real life. You’re not in it.”

  “Fine,” I said. “But be safe. Keep your eyes open. While you still have them.”

  I peeled away.

  The way Alice spoke to me, it felt like a betrayal. It was impossible for me not to think of my mother.

  When I came back from Vietnam, she wasn’t there to meet me at the train. As you know, I was labeled a burnout, unfit for service. I was the sole survivor of my entire company. They had all been killed—ripped apart—and Charlie Company had found me wandering the jungle naked, incoherent. The only dressing I had was my tags. They tried to ask me what happened, but I didn’t know. I didn’t remember for a long time.

  At the train station back Stateside, I was expecting people to fuck with me, because I’d heard stories from some of the guys back in California about men coming home and getting spit on, getting hit with eggs, getting red paint spilled on them, but no one messed with me. It was like I wasn’t even there.

  My friend Ben picked me up in his Thunderbird and drove me home. I was happy to be back home where the air smelled familiar, the faces were friendly, and I didn’t have to worry anymore. I had my life back.

  The house I grew up in had flower bushes all around the front, a few trees. When Ben pulled up outside, I looked at the house and smiled. It looked like a postcard. I got out with my bag and went up the walkway.

  For a second, I froze. I thought I saw someone behind one of the trees. My heart rate immediately sped up, and my mouth got dry. It was just my imagination, but it took me a moment to accept that I wasn’t in hostile territory anymore.

  I rang the bell and waited. I heard a dish break inside, and after a minute or so, the door opened. It was my mother. I said, “Hi, Mom,” and I began to cry.

  She began to cry too, and then she grabbed me and wouldn’t let go. She had lost a husband, and though I was there in her arms, she had lost a son as well. I was not the boy who had gone off to war. I had come back a monster, but I didn’t know it yet. I thought I had some kind of disease because of the two blackouts I’d had, including the one the night of the ambush. I put my stuff down in my room, and then we got in the car and went to see

  Dad.

  His grave was new and clean. The letters spelling out his name and dates were recently etched, and the edges were sharp. We put flowers down, and then, once she washed away her tears, she left me there with him so I could have my time.

  I had nothing to say. I wasn’t one of those people who went to a grave and related my problems and worries, and I could never imagine how anyone could. I turned around to see where my mom was, what she was doing. I could see her where we parked, her back turned to me. I looked down at the grave.

  “What kind of man were you to think it was good to send me out to that fucking madness?” I hissed. “They think I’m crazy. I’m having these blackouts, and I wake up God knows where, and I’m starting to think I’m crazy too. All I wanted was to have a life, and this war … It’s for nothing, Dad. I watched guys die for a fucking jungle. Why did I have to go through that? How did it build my character? I’m sorry you left Mom alone, but we’ll worry about this later. I have to see Doris. If she’ll still have me.”

  I spit on the grave and walked back to the car.

  “I need to see Doris,” I said to Mom.

  We pulled up outside Doris’s house. My mother and I hadn’t talked the whole way. I was seething, and she had something on her mind. I didn’t know what. She said, “Do you want me to wait here for you?”

  I said, “No, I don’t know how long I’m going to be.”

  “How will you get home?”

  “I’ll walk.”

  “Walk? But …”

  “I’ve done it a thousand times.”

  She was afraid. Of what?

  “Okay,” she said. “Should I make dinner?”

  “I don’t think so. I want to go out with Doris.”

  “All right,” she said.

  “What’s the problem?”

  “Maybe Doris isn’t ready to see you.”

  “You know, that’s some fucking thing to say to me.”

  “Don’t talk to your mother that way.”

  “It’s almost like you’re not ready to see me.”

  “Marlowe …”

  I got out of the car and slammed the door. She drove off slowly. I felt like punching a hole in the world.

  I jumped up the steps outside Doris’s house, just like I always did, just like I’d dreamt of doing since the day I left home. In that moment, I realized how lucky I was that I had made it home at all. Thousands didn’t. Doris’s mother, Gladys, opened the door.

  “Oh, Marlowe!” she said, and she hugged me like I was her own son.

  “Hey, Mrs. Moran. How are you?”

  She rushed me into the living room to shake her husband’s hand. He was happy to see me too. An American flag was up on the mantel, along with a picture of me, and a prayer tucked into the frame. I almost cried seeing that these people had prayed for me.

  After a few seconds of pleasantries, Doris appeared at the top of the stairs and our eyes locked. She smiled, instantly shed tears. I ran to her, and she ran to me, and there, on the middle of that staircase, the loving embrace that I had been waiting for so long had become a reality. We kissed, and only then did I feel like I belonged. Only then did I feel like I had survived the war in Vietnam.

  She had been working at the Coleman Building as a typist, just to put money aside for when I came back. I had a savings. We were going to go off and find a place to live, maybe even go to college.

  Up in her room, Doris saw that something was upsetting me. She said, “Honey, what’s getting you down?”

  I said, “Nothing, just something my mother said. She said you might not be ready to see me.”

  “Oh, that’s a terrible thing to say,” said Doris, her voice going way up high. “I’ve never been happier than right now. But your mother … she’s been through a lot, what with your dad and all. But they were acting strangely after you left.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, you know how I was always making pies for your mom and dad, and I promised not to stop doing that while you were away? Well, I was doing that. Every Sunday I went over there with a fresh pie, and I talked with your momma in the kitchen, but after a couple of weeks, she said I shouldn’t come around anymore. That it wasn’t necessary, and, well, I haven’t really seen either of them since. When I’d spot them at the market, they’d pretend they didn’t see me, but I know they did.”

  I knew it was truth.

  “Let’s not worry about that now,” I said. “Let’s go out tonight. Just you and me.”

  “Oh, Marley, I’d love it!”

  “Great. I’ll pick you up on the bike. If it still runs.”

  “God,” she cried, “I’m so happy you’re back.”

  We kissed. I buried my face in her hair and whispered, “I want to marry
you, Doris.”

  “I know,” she said. “That’s why God brought you back.”

  I walked home. Once I got there, I went right up to my room without saying a word to my mother. Years later she would tell me that she had waited for me in the kitchen with my father’s gun that day. She was going to put me down right when I came in, then take herself out, but she lost the nerve.

  I changed into my old clothes and went down to the garage to check out my bike. I removed the tarp, poured some gas into it, checked it out. It still purred, so I took it out and rode around town till it was time to pick up Doris.

  That night, she and I made love in the woods, and her body should’ve tasted sweeter than anything I’d ever known, but there was a part of me, a sincere part of my core being, that must’ve died or gotten itself blown out in combat, because everything I did felt a little more cold and dead than it ever had before. I did not yet know about the beast, but something bone-deep inside me felt wrong, alien, sinister. Staring down at Doris, her pale skin glowing white in the starlight, I almost felt like I had to protect her. Not from anything on the outside, some presence among the trees, but from myself. There was this little voice inside of me crying out in alarm. If I was at all intelligent, I would have listened.

  Again, I thought of my father, and how I wished he was still around so I could blame him for that dead part inside of me, and hit him hard across the jaw for it.

  I got home after two in the morning. My mother was still up, smoking in the living room. She said she needed to talk to me. “About everything,” she added.

  “Will that include how you two brushed off Doris while I was gone?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Great, let’s hear it.”

  She stamped out her cigarette and leaned forward on the couch.

  I said, “We’re going to get married, you know. That was always the plan.”

  “I know,” she responded. “But there’s a lot you don’t know, and a lot you need to understand before you start trying to make a life for yourself, Marlowe. There are things that I need to say to you that I never in a million years thought I’d have to say. This was something your father, God rest his soul, was supposed to speak to you about, but …”