The Wolves of Third Clan

by Matt Rogers

  Chapter 10

  “You two have got to quit doing that” I heard Trudy say in a scolding manner.

  “Hey, I didn’t do anything, Mistress” George responded.

  “Not this time you didn’t but don’t for a second think we don’t know who’s idea it was back at the dumping ground” she replied.

  The dumping ground, I assumed, was the final resting place for poor old Peter North .

  “Not true, we were both in on that one” he replied.

  “Hold on, hold on, that was all your idea, George” I heard Phillip say.

  “What? No it wasn’t, I distinctly remember you saying…”

  “Boys!” Trudy yelled.

  “Yes, Mistress” they responded.

  “Shut up!”

  The two very powerful and very murderous Werewolves went immediately quiet. If the world ever came to its senses it would immediately ban all males from holding any power of authority over the public good; women are just inherently better at it. Maybe it’s because of their lower testosterone, maybe because they’re born physically weaker or maybe it’s because they’re more level-headed but, whatever the case, there should be a law stating any man running for a position of higher governance should be immediately castrated and then, if they still want to run, more power to them.

  “Johnny?” I heard Vivian say.

  I saw no reason to respond.

  “I know you’re awake.”

  Okay, response required.

  “Yes, Vivian?”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Are we in the boat?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are the others in the boat?”

  “Yes, we’re all here. Trudy, Phillip and George are right over…”

  “Not them.”

  “Oh, you mean the others?”

  “Yes, the others. If I open my eyes are they going to be lying next to me?”

  “Um… okay, hold on a second there…”

  I could hear the movement of liquid-soaked body parts and was relieved I’d asked the question because I wasn’t sure how my heart would respond to opening my eyes and seeing the faces of Bob and Steve staring at me from the boat’s floorboard.

  “Yuck!” I heard Phillip exclaim.

  “What?” came George’s response.

  “His eyeball came out.”

  “Oh, you big baby, just stuff it back in.”

  “Aw, man.”

  “What?”

  “It popped.”

  That one statement got me off the floor so fast I don’t believe I consciously did it. It’s one thing to lie there with eyes closed and pretend the outside world doesn’t exist; it’s quite another to do so if there’s human eyeball-goo around you.

  The floorboard of the pontoon boat was a disgusting mess with brown, wet clay from the bottom of the lake muddying up the waterproof carpeting. Other little items were lying around like seaweed, pebbles and moving crawfish.

  “Eww” I said staring at the miniature lobsters with horror and revulsion.

  “What’s wrong, Johnny?” Trudy asked.

  “I think one of them has a tongue.”

  “Oh, hold on” she said and then did something which shook the very foundation of my world.

  I, like most my half of the species, hold women in the highest regard and therefore maintain certain perceptions of them which are as concrete in my views as they are utterly unobtainable in the real world. In my warped view of the world women don’t do certain things I know full well they do; they don’t belch, they don’t use the toilet, they don’t pass gas and they never, ever, snatch a human tongue from the claws of a hungry crawfish and jam it back into the maw of the poor mute it was previously attached to.

  “Hey, Johnny, you okay?”

  “Yes, Phillip, I’m just peachy.”

  “Peachy?”

  “It means ‘fine’.”

  “Okay, cool, then can you give me a hand here?”

  The ‘hand’ he was referring to was quite literally a hand or, more precisely, the left arm of Steve.

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “No. Hey, don’t worry, it won’t bite.”

  I hesitantly moved toward the appendage Phillip indicated, bent down, grabbed its pinky with my index finger and thumb and…

  “Aaaaagghh! Get it off! Get it off!”

  … screamed like a school girl at a haunted house when the thing grabbed back.

  “Okay, okay, calm down now. I’ve got it, Sweetie” said Vivian in the soothing manner of hers as she pulled the clammy thing from my grasp.

  “Calm down? That thing’s still alive!”

  “No it’s not, Sweetie.”

  “Yes it is! It just grabbed me!”

  “It’s not alive, at least not in the way you think” she replied.

  “And what way would that be?”

  “It’s not thinking, it’s just reacting.”

  “Just reacting? Okay, calm down, Johnny, you’re just seeing things” I said to myself out loud in front of four other people who were looking on with complete amusement at my antics.

  “What are you four grinning at?”

  “You, Sweetie, you’re just so cute when you get all riled up” purred Vivian.

  “Really? Cute? Me?”

  “Sure, you. Now do me a favor and grab a leg over there.”

  I wonder if women understand the power they have over men. We will, and have, gone to war over them for no other reason than having them say things like ‘You’re cute’ or ‘You’re adorable’ when we know quite well we’re no such thing. But males are morons and thus easily distracted so I walked over to the three-foot extremity, picked it up by its ankle and brought it over to the vivacious Vampire all the while trying to ignore the kicking and shaking the thing had been doing since I lifted it from the floorboard.

  “Okay, Johnny, good job. Now I want you to jam the leg back into Stevie-boy here, okay?” said George indicating the torso he was putting together like some macabre Mister Potato Head.

  “Okay, here?” I indicated by placing the upper half of the thing against a gaping hole in the torso which previously was Steve What’s-his-name.

  “No, Johnny, that’s where his right arm goes.”

  “Oh, sorry, it’s my first time.”

  “And you’re doing splendidly” said Trudy as she looked up from twisting Bob’s right leg so his foot would be facing forward.

  It took about fifteen minutes to sort out the body parts by trial and error since both men wore the same standard salesman suit of blue but after a little bit of work we had two life-sized ventriloquist dummies sitting on their haunches against the side of the boat.

  “Are they just going to sit there and stare at us?” I wondered aloud.

  “For a while, yes” said George.

  “What are they doing?” I asked because you could hear something going on inside them.

  “Re-animating” he said.

  “What does that mean?”

  “The parts with energy are recombining.”

  “Recombining? You mean they’re growing back together?”

  “Yes, some of the parts will, some won’t.”

  I don’t know what I was going to ask next. I remember I was going to ask something but then Bob wrinkled his nose.

  “What the…? Did you see that?”

  “Yes, Johnny, I’m standing right next to you” replied George.

  “He just… He just…”

  “Okay, Bob here’s got a little bit of brain activity; anything with Stevie-boy?”

  “Hold on, it looks like… maybe… oh, nope, never mind… just a crawfish” Trudy said as one of those creepy looking shellfish crawled out of Steve’s right ear.

  “What’s going on here?” I asked.

  “We’re waiting to see if there’s any life left in these two. If so, we can…” began George.

  “Whoa! Hold on. We’ve got tongue action” said Phillip in a surprisingly exuberant voice
.

  The four of them appeared to get excited about then and I don’t know why but I felt a little giddy-up in my step also. Maybe it was because I was blood-bonded, maybe because their mood was infectious or maybe it was because we were all pulling for the two previously dead, shot, dismembered and drowned sales guys to just pull on though that minor little setback in life.

  “Alright, let’s get them back to Johnny’s place” said George.

  “Huh? What? Hold on a second there.”

  “We need a place to go so we can find out what these two know” George said.

  “Why my place?”

  “Well, we can’t go back to the office and Bloody Mary’s is out.”

  “But these guys are…”

  “Dead?” he tried to help.

  “Wet” I answered.

  “What, are you worried about getting your security deposit back?”

  “Yes, there’s a chance I could get it back.”

  “There’s no chance.”

  “What are you talking about? It’s not bad.”

  “It’s bad” said Trudy.

  “Sorry, Sweetie” said Vivian.

  “I don’t think it’s bad” said Phillip which sadly reinforced the other three’s side.

  The waters of a lake on a Texas summer day are very soothing to the soul when aboard a boat gliding silently along except for the soft hum of the inboard motors turning the propellers which produce a soft wake for the eye to see and ascertain where one had come from.

  “I wish they’d quit doing that.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Blinking.”

  If you choose the proper time and day you can have the vast expanse of water all to yourself, eliminating the need for outer concentration to ward off potential boating hazards and allowing for inner contemplation to hopefully further one’s understanding of his or her place on this great, big, blue-marble of a planet.

  “Okay, I wish they’d go back to the blinking thing.”

  “It’s a natural reaction to the submersion.”

  “Well, they don’t need to look at me while they’re doing it.”

  “Everyone drools, Johnny.”

  Clear skies, calm waters and a stiff breeze are what I heard all sailors wish for when heading out to sea. We had clear skies and calm waters but, unfortunately, we had virtually no wind save two.

  “My God they smell!”

  “They were down there a long time, a lot of gases build up.”

  Large seafaring ships need deep hulls in order to keep them afloat and upright during the sometimes violent and vicious storms Mother Nature throws at them. Because of this they also need harbors in which to dock those behemoths of the oceans, harbors deep enough to handle the hulls, hulls which are not necessary for lake-riding watercraft.

  “Shore, George.”

  “I see it.”

  “You might want to slow down then.”

  “Why?”

  The captain of a ship is the master of his vessel, the ultimate authority while at sea and nothing less than a mutiny can change the fact. Many lives have been saved because when push comes to shove decisions must be made and the person at the top must have the power to make those decisions stick even if they seem contradictory to passenger safety.

  “Wheeeee!” screamed a Vamp.

  “Ride ‘em cowboy!” screamed a Wolf.

  “Son of a …!” screamed I.

  Momentum is an inherently natural thing to understand; something moving takes a little time to stop. We perceive this in our everyday activities and prepare accordingly in order to make the transition from movement to immobility as seamless as possible; if we didn’t?

  “You okay, Johnny?”

  “No, I’m not okay, you rammed the boat onto the shoreline at full throttle.”

  “I wanted to save us as much distance as I could so we wouldn’t need to carry Bob and Steve so far.”

  “Well, if that was your intention then very good job.”

  “Thanks.”

  “George?”

  “Yes, Johnny.”

  “Get Bob and Steve off me!”

  Entrepreneurs run a very high risk of failure not because their ideas aren’t worthy but because they generally involve the public’s use of those ideas.

  “Mr. Joe?”

  “Hello, Miss Vivian. Did you have a good time?”

  “We had a great time, Joe, except for one small problem.”

  Large boats which get beached on a shoreline are a difficult thing to correct because they involve a unique set of problems which must be overcome; namely, how to get a heavy object off a soft surface. If a boat were to be grounded on pavement it wouldn’t be hard to move; get a crane or forklift, drive up to the boat and lift it away. Shorelines are different because the ground is soft. The soft ground doesn’t allow heavy machinery like a crane or forklift to get close enough to lift the boat because the equipment’s tires would sink into the Earth.

  “Great! Just great. What are you going to do now?” I asked George.

  “Shove it back into the water.”

  “Shove it back in the water? How? The thing must weigh well over…”

  “Philip?”

  “Yes, George?”

  “Can you give me a hand?”

  “Sure.”

  “You two are making a mistake. There’s no way the two of you can…”

  They shoved it back in the water.

  “See, Johnny, it just needed a little push.”

  “Okay, I’ve got to give it to you two, that was amazing. I mean, I knew you were strong but…”

  “It’s the Werewolf blood. You see, if you were born a Wolf you’d be able to…”

  “Uh, Phillip?”

  “Yeah, I know, I’ll quit mentioning the Wolf thing but sometimes…”

  “The boat, Phillip.”

  “What boat, Johnny?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Exactly? What does exactly have to do with…”

  “Oh my God, the boat!” screamed George.