The Wolfman

“Great,” he said. “I’m an asshole.”

“A fucking asshole.”

I put my apron on as Abraham seemed to slither past the counter and into the bathroom. A moment later, I heard him through the door losing what sounded like a hundred dollars’ worth of used booze the hard way.

When he came out of the bathroom, he wiped his eyes with his fists and said, “Jesus Christ, man, I’m making up for sins from a past life this morning, you know what I mean?”

“Me too,” I said. “I’m working with you.”

“Cold motherfucker,” he groaned. “That’s what you are. You mind if I crash in the kitchen awhile? Just to rest my eyes. I can barely see.”

“Moonshine does that.”

“C’mon, man …”

“There’s no fucking way I’m working that counter, Abe. I did it once and nearly killed a man. I’m not doing it again. I don’t care how bad you feel.”

“It’s Sunday morning, man. I’ll be golden before anyone comes in, I swear.”

I thought for a second, then nodded. I was too nice sometimes. “In light of the mercy I’m showing, you still think I’m a cold motherfucker?”

“Man, you’re like a turd in the snow.”

Abraham took a chair from one of the tables and dragged it back into the kitchen through the double doors. He made some noises one would expect to hear coming from a circus tent, and then he fell asleep. I poured him a cup of coffee and set it down by his foot. I then went and made a cup for myself as well.

It might have been unwise to leave the restaurant unattended, but I didn’t care. I wasn’t paid to stand behind that counter. If anyone came in I’d know it because there was a long window looking out into the restaurant, and I’d wake Abe up by any means necessary. Until then, I took my stack of newspapers into the kitchen and got to reading. Behind me, Abraham didn’t so much snore as labor for each inflammable breath.

Reading the papers was a daily ritual of mine. Information was a crucial thing for me. There was a very specific kind of article I was looking for in all those different papers. Big-city politics didn’t mean a whole hell of a lot to me, nor did world affairs. I realized back in ‘Nam that nothing was ever going to change, that the same mistakes were going to be made over and over and over again for the rest of time because that’s just how people are made, I guess. You can have all the revolutions and protests you want, I don’t care. They say history repeats itself, and I suppose that’s just as true as anything else ever said, so I paid these articles no mind. I read the same ones when I was young, and I’d read them again when I was old and silver-haired.

What interested me were the smaller atrocities, the everyday miseries. Who was it—Lenin, I think—who said a million deaths is a statistic, but a single death is a tragedy? It’s true, man. The murders are what I read the papers for. The deaths. More specifically, I always kept an eye out for unsolved murders.

I didn’t get off on the stuff—I’ll swear on a stack of Bibles to that fact—but it was more like I had made misery my business. After all, I was the wrath of God. Wrath of God. Pleased to meet you.

I had begun reading as many daily papers as I could get my hands on around the time my mother died in 1981. I inherited this slightly creepy habit from one of my victims. You see, the wolf doesn’t just kill, it claims. It’s not just that the memories of the deceased become my memories; their traits become mine as well. I guess it’s like when people get some kind of organ transplant and they develop a taste for a certain kind of food they never liked before. All of a sudden they’re addicted to fish or chocolate because the person whose liver or kidney or heart they had couldn’t get enough of the stuff.

There was a time in my life when this was very hard for me, inheriting other people’s wants, their needs. This was back when I used to feel guilty about being what I am, when I felt as if I was losing my own identity every time someone got killed. One of the wolf’s many victims had been a paranoid, reading all the papers every fucking day, but unlike so many other idiosyncrasies, I’ve allowed myself to keep the newspaper routine up all these years because all I have to do is find one unsolved crime in the paper, and then I have someone to send the beast after when it comes around to that time of the month. You see, I can’t ever stop it from killing, but I can at least keep it from killing people who don’t have it coming. That right there is turning two negatives into a positive.

I always started off the paper sessions with the Harbinger and the Post. After that, I went through the different newspapers for all the different towns based on how far they were from Evelyn. On this day the front pages of the two local papers were dedicated to what was dubbed “the Horror at the Mill.” Some poor slob got his hand taken off by a saw over at the lumber mill all the way out west of town. That’s what headlines consisted of in a town like Evelyn, and I could live with that, too.

Out in the restaurant, I heard the bell above the door jangle.

I kicked Abraham’s foot, and he stirred.

“There’s a guy out there,” I said. “Get to it.”

“Take care of him, man. Please.”

“Fuck you,” I whispered.

“Howdy, Marlowe,” called the man in the restaurant.

I turned and recognized the tall, lanky blond man in the suit and tie as one of the regulars, a guy named Brian. He worked over at the life insurance place around the corner.

“Howdy, Brian,” I said.

“You’re open, right?”

“Yeah, pretty much. What do you need?”

“Just a coffee to go.”

“Would you mind getting it yourself?”

“Are you serious?”

I nodded.

Brian went behind the counter with baby steps, as if he were a cat burglar. I hated the interruption, but he was at least funny to watch through the long window in the wall. He poured himself a cup of coffee without getting burned, and then he dropped a pair of quarters on the counter.

“You don’t have to do that,” I said.

“Sure I do,” said Brian. He held up the cup of coffee in a salute, then went back out the door.

“He’s a good guy,” said Abraham.

I lit a cigarette and blew smoke in his face.

“If I have to talk to one more person today because of you, I’m going to burn you with this cigarette.”

Buried in the back pages of the Harbinger was a short article about Crazy Bob. Crazy Bob was a trucker who lived not far from me. He must have been a big fan of getting arrested, because he did, a lot. When I first came to town he had just stolen an eighteen-wheeler and driven it into the river. He figured if he stole enough trucks, he’d be able to make a dam and flood the town. I guess that was around the time he lost one of his jobs. The article in front of me stated that he’d gotten picked up again, for breaking all the windows at a hardware store. He apparently had angermanagement issues. What sparked this latest incident off was the fact that they had given him a Canadian penny.

When I finished the two local papers, I placed them in a new pile on the floor. I picked up the Edenburgh Gazette—the major paper for our closest neighboring town—and dropped it on the counter in front of me. At this point, Abraham got up off the chair, but instead of going to work, he went to the bathroom and didn’t come back.

I put my hair back in a ponytail with a rubberband, ran my fingers through my handlebar, and got myself good and hunched over the pale counter.

Edenburgh was the kind of town where they wrote about the cats stuck in the trees, and if the cat happened to have some unusual talent, or if it had one good eye or something, then it was front page news over there, but on this day there was something just a touch more interesting: A local church had been broken into. The poor box was stuffed and intact. Nothing had been taken, and nothing had been vandalized.

A few pages after that, there was an even more interesting article. A seventeen-year-old girl had disappeared.

That, I thought, could be something.

A flash of light from outside the restaurant caught my eyes. I craned my neck through the space in the wall