Rules for Werewolves (17 page)

—and we’re just waiting, watching her between the slats of the closet as she straightens up around the house.

—That’s awesome. That’s what I wish.

—The combination didn’t work. You don’t get what you wish.

—Then I’m gonna stay in here and keep trying that combination until I do.

—I tried three times, Anquille!

—Then I’m going to try adding one to each number, like you said, and then two, and so on and so on until I get it.

—All right. We’ll come let you know when we figure out what the plan is for dealing with the maid.

—All right. I’ll be here.

—And you let us know as soon as you get the safe unlocked. Don’t open the door all the way without all of us. Promise?

—All right.

—All right.

—Do you wanna be alone?

—No.

—’Cause I don’t have to go with you …

—I don’t care.

—Well, if you don’t care, then I’m gonna go with you.

—Fine. But I don’t wanna talk shit over with you—about how things are going in the house … and my emotions and shit.

—I don’t wanna talk about how things are going with you, either.

—It sucks, though, doesn’t it?

—Yeah.

—Always being followed everywhere and watched.

—You’re not talking about me, are you?

—No. I’m talking about Malcolm.

—And Tanya.

—Yeah.

—But if you’re talking about me, I can just go back.

—No, let’s just go, come on.

Walk. Walk. Walk. Walk. Walk.

—We’re not leaving for good, are we?

—Where would we go?

—We’ll just stay at the Baxters’. And one by one as people get pissed
off at Malcolm, they’ll come over and join us. And maybe Bobert’ll come back.

—The Baxters’ was, like, two houses ago.

—I wasn’t here then.

—Now we call every place the Baxters’. I think Bobert started it.

—Yeah, well, I liked the last place, whoever’s place it was. That’s where we’re going right?

—Yeah. We’re going back to the Baxters’.

—We’re gonna start our own group?

—I don’t know. I just wanna get away from Malcolm. I hate feeling like even the people on my own side are against me.

—We were all trying to get away from bullshit like this in our regular lives. None of us is competent enough to be a waiter and make enough tips to just live like a person. So we end up bumming around. We find one another. And now we’re back at the beginning.

—I don’t wanna be worried about someone catching me doing something normal and yelling at me—I mean—something I just do without even thinking about it. Like staring out the window, looking at birds. I don’t want to worry that Malcolm or Anquille or someone is going to yell at me for compromising our safety or whatever, ’cause some neighbor is gonna look at our house and see a strange man in the window.

—Anquille’s on our side. He would be in our group—if we started our own group.

—You think so?

—Yeah.

—But what if it all happens again? I mean, if I have to worry about something normal, like looking at a bird, then I have to think about everything I do, everything I
might
do. That’s the opposite of being in tune with nature. That’s the opposite of following your instincts. And that’s the opposite of being a werewolf.

—Who yelled at you about staring out the window?

—Anquille.

—It was probably his window. He likes to claim things in a house. Weird things. Light switches.

—I wasn’t even right at the window. I was lying on a couch in the upstairs study watching a grackle in the pecan tree.

—Maybe it was Anquille’s grackle?

—He yelled at me for putting my shoes on the couch.

—That has to be it. It was his couch.

—That’s stupid. Trying to protect upholstery that doesn’t even belong to you? I told him I wanted to keep my shoes on, in case we have to run for it all of a sudden. Like if that cop came and busted us.

—And what was his answer to that?

—Malcolm stepped in and told me to do what Anquille said.

—That’s weird.

—He said Anquille had been here longer.

—We never really had a rank for longevity.

—Are you kidding me? You call things by words we don’t know. We’re on our way to the Baxters’ from the Baxters’. That kind of shit. You have all these rules about what’s
werewolf
. Malcolm just makes it official. Anquille tells me to take my shoes off his couch and Malcolm enforces it. He said me wearing my shoes was “sending the wrong signal.”

—What signal?

—If I can’t take my shoes off, then Malcolm’s not a good leader. He’s not made us safe. And no one will trust him. Not the rest of you guys, or the cops, or the neighbors.

—And what did Anquille say?

—He said, “Get your shoes off my couch.”

Houses. Trees. Grass. Birds. Clouds.

—We’re getting close to the Baxters’, aren’t we?

—Don’t
over
use it!

—What do you mean? You mean, sometimes it’s all right and sometimes it’s not?!

—I don’t know. Just shut the fuck up.

—You want me to go back?

—I told you. I don’t care.

—You don’t have to be a dick to me just ’cause Anquille was a dick to me and you’re his friend. That’s not loyalty. That’s just being a dick.

—I just hate everybody. I hate Malcolm so much I have to be a dick to you. I have too much emotion to only be a dick to the people who deserve it. I’m probably gonna transform in like five seconds and then turn on you and kill you.

—See that bougainvillea right there in front of the green house? If you make a move on me I’m going to run over there and pick up one of the bricks that make the border around the bougainvillea and bash your fucking brains in.

—See that garden hose? If you came at me with a brick I would pick up the garden hose and keep it to a length just a little longer than your arms and I would beat you with the metal tip until you dropped the brick and then I would use the hose to strangle you.

—See that recycling bin? I would pull a six-pack of beer bottles out of the recycling bin and throw five of them at your face until I backed you off from the hose and then I’d break the sixth one on the curb and cut your neck and your wrists wide open.

—While we’re pointing out all this shit, did you notice we’re just around the corner from our last Baxters’?

—So you can say it, but I can’t?

—I’ve been here longer. Haha. Just kidding. I’m trying to make a joke of it. You know. As a way to say sorry.

—Do you think we could kill Malcolm in one of those ways we just said and take over?

—No.

—Why not?

—He’s thought of all the ways we might kill him—and a hundred more, besides that. When Malcolm walks into a room he counts up all the sharp pencils and then keeps track of where they are. That’s what he’s like.

—We should make our own group.

—There’s no chance to talk to anybody about it. Malcolm is always watching us.

—We need to distract him with something.

—What is Malcolm distracted by?

—Tanya.

—Angel.

—And Peugeots. That’s about it.

—If we did make our own group who would you take into it?

—I would keep you.

—Me, too, with you.

—And I would want Bobert back.

—Can we invite Anquille, too?

—Do you trust him?

—

—I’m mean, I’m not saying you shouldn’t.

—

—If you trust him he’s fine by me. You’ve known him longer. I mean, if you like Anquille, he’s in. You, me, Anquille, and Bobert. And maybe we should have some girls, too.

—Shut up. Look.

—What?

—Isn’t that the Baxters’ house?

—Holy shit.

—Malcolm did come back and set it on fire.

—How long has your son been back home?

—You know the answer to that.

—I have to ask.

—Why? Do you have a list of questions you have to work through?

—I do.

—Did you write the questions yourself?

—I wrote them with my partner.

—I see. And she’s asking the same list of questions to my son right now and later you’re going to sit around a table like this and drink coffee and compare lists.

—I can’t drink coffee anymore.

—Neither can my husband.

—This is Robert’s stepfather?

—You know the answer to that.

—No. I don’t. I had no idea Robert’s stepfather couldn’t drink coffee.

—He’s got a tattoo, too. That sounds funny, doesn’t it? “Tattoo-too.”

—What’s it a tattoo of?

—We’re off the list now, I assume.

—We are. I’m just interested.

—Are you a big fan of tattoos?

—My oldest daughter is a tattoo artist.

—In town?

—In Tempe.

—Well, then, she wouldn’t have been the one to give it to Roger.

—Probably not.

—It’s a fish with wings.

—Huh.

—Roger says it means “to each his own.”

—Cool.

—You think so?

—If he likes it.

—He got it when he was a kid.

—We do dumb shit when we’re kids.

—I didn’t.

—When my daughter told me she was going to become a tattoo artist … I was grateful. She spent a lot of time, like Bobert, as a runaway. So “tattoo artist” was like—well, it’s an actual job. Maybe not what I would have picked for her. But she has a house and I know where she is, conceptually, at all hours of the day. When she was homeless I asked her once to go to some other town, so she wouldn’t be my problem. I know that’s a shitty thing for a dad to say. But now that she’s a tattoo artist I keep asking her to move back here. I told her I would line up every fireman and cop in town and we’d all get tattoos and she’d have business forever.

—I bet she liked that.

—She’s thinking about it. You know she used to hate cops, and now we might become her livelihood. She was addicted to meth.

—We do dumb stuff when we’re kids.

—I thought you said you didn’t.

—I married TJ and had Bobert. I mean, Robert.

—He’s gonna be all right. The thing is, it’s not just kids he was hanging out with. We think some of the gang he was squatting with, we think they’re older, and we think they might be dangerous. They set a house on fire and the only clue they left was Robert’s home address, your address. Someone spray-painted it on the side of the house, on the bricks of the chimney, so it wouldn’t burn. I think they did it on purpose to cover their trail. I think they were willing to hang Robert out to dry to protect
themselves. I mean, how long until they do something even stupider to some other kid?

—Two days.

—What?

—I’m cooperating. I’m answering your questions. From the list. Bobert’s been home two days. What’s next?

What are my options? I don’t have any skills, so I can’t get a job. I wouldn’t last a month if I struck out on my own, I already know that. No one in my family will even take my calls anymore. I think I called one too many times. If I walk into one of those agencies for homeless girls, I could probably get a shower and clean clothes, but then what? I can get a shower and clean clothes here. What’s the next step after that? The distance between where I am now and anything remotely normal seems almost infinite. And I’m scared. That’s the real truth. If I walk out that door, I won’t make it a half block before I get hit by a brick from behind and wake up with Malcolm on my back, holding me down by the neck asking me just what I think I’m doing. I can imagine that happening in the middle of the night and I can imagine that happening in broad daylight with witnesses coming out of their houses everywhere to watch. Oh, baby.

Here’s a weird idea: How long would it take us to live our lives if we could keep jumping back to any previous point and start over from there? It would take forever, right? If I had been nicer to Mike Hronek in middle school, would I have a family now? If I had just told my parents the truth about my grades in junior college, is there any way they could have helped? For some reason it seems so much easier to make the right choices in the past than it does in the present. Right now I can’t imagine how I’m gonna get out of this. It seems like the only way to escape a bunch of
freaks is to become normal. I don’t know how to get there, but I feel like I’m starting to want normal things. I look at an alarm clock and it seems like a poem about desire; there are people that want to get up at a certain hour so that they can go get something. A cup of pens next to the phone almost broke my heart the other day: Who’s calling? What do they have to say that’s so important you have to write it down? And I can’t even look at all the picture frames. I turned them all over in the master bedroom. This family’s been everywhere. They’re out there, right now, snapping new ones. I can feel it, like somebody’s pinching my stupid, sentimental heart.

I want a family. But I don’t want babies. I am a baby. I can’t feed or clothe myself, much less take care of anyone else. Everything I need to survive I have to steal from whatever kind of mother or father is around at the moment: food stamps, Salvation Army, the houses we squat in. I think every house we break into is another womb and my bad behavior is a kind of umbilical cord connecting me to my sustenance. If I start acting right and obeying the law, I’ll be cut off from everything I know how to do, from the only way I know how to get by. That’s how you get born into adulthood, you just jump out into it, kicking and screaming and crying, only you’re not naked, you’re wearing a shitty, sweaty polyester-fiber Arby’s uniform. I’d rather wear dirty jeans and a old T-shirt so thin you can see through it, and three or four flannels on top of that and a hoodie on top of that I can pull up over my head and block out all the terrible stares I get because of how bad I smell. I’ll have to wear some kind of a uniform someday. If it’s not an Arby’s uniform it’ll be one of those dull bright-orange jumpsuits from prison.