The Wolfman

A fly landed on my hand. I blew it away. “Come back later,” I said.

I rummaged through the ankle-high mess and came up with the keys to my house, but that wasn’t all I was looking for. There were some things in that room that I needed to take with me—the definite signs that I had ever been there in the first place.

I picked up the bloodied clothes that had burst off of me the night before and found my skull-and-crossbones belt buckle under my torn-up pair of jeans. It was caked in blood, but still in one piece. I’d had the belt buckle for years, and truly dug it. It was coming with me. Everything else was reduced to rags. Everything went in the bag, like the busted handcuffs and my wallet and the pictures I’d carried around so long in my back pocket, but not the rifle, which went over my shoulder. I took the tape out of the video camera. It had been a long time since I’d seen a good show.

Last, I found John Raynor’s torn pair of pants and went through the pockets. God was smiling down on me, because his cigarettes were dry. I lit one up, and then fished out his car keys.

I ran across Old Sherman Road in all my naked glory and got in the Mach 1, then drove it as deep into the woods as I could. I emptied out the trunk and everything from the backseat, and dropped it all just outside the shack. When I was done, I used my old pair of underwear to wipe down the doorframe and anything else I might have touched. My blood was technically all over the place, but there was nothing I could do about that.

Having everything in one spot was my good deed for the federales. I was only sorry I couldn’t wrap a bow around the whole fucking building. I lit another cigarette, got in the car, and took

off.

I got home just short of six o’clock in the morning. I was half expecting to see a cruiser parked outside the place, but the coast was clear.

I made a pot of coffee and jumped in the shower to wash away the blood. As I combed my hair in front of the mirror, I touched my chest. The night before there had been two bullet holes in it. Not anymore. I wondered where the bullets went.

Over a bowl of cereal, I watched the tape that John Raynor had filmed the night before. When the strip of old rug came off the window, I saw myself change. I’d never seen it before. Now I was not only seeing it on film but I was reliving the Rose Killer’s perception of it as well. I wasn’t just getting a show; I was getting a double feature.

Anthony got off the floor as the wolf took its first lumbering steps toward him, and he tried once again in vain with the latch on the door. The wolf threw a clubbing blow into his back, and he doubled up. The camera tipped over. The wolf then swatted him against the wall, and he sank to his knees. As he screamed, the wolf pinned his arms against his chest and proceeded to gnaw slowly at Anthony’s face.

Before long, the killer passed out, and it was at that point, in which he no longer had a face to enchant with, in which his eyes hung like shining ornaments from their ruined sockets, in which he was no longer responsive to pain but lost somewhere up in his primordial brain someplace just short of death, that the wolf went on and took him apart.

Once he was dead and scattered about like the rags of my clothes, the wolf sauntered up to the camera, crouched down, and looked into the lens. With a deep breath it fogged up the lens, then roared, as if to say, “There you go.”

It then raised its hand beyond the scope of the camera’s eye, and turned the machine off. Watching that, I smiled. It was good to be a team again. But I destroyed the tape all the same.

After I finished my cereal and coffee, I put the bowl and mug in the sink. I would not have the chance to wash them. I went through the house gathering up my most treasured possessions—Doris’s night-light, the one picture of her I had left, the eagle feather my mother had given me and which was my burden to carry for the rest of my days, my old leather jacket, the naked-lady ashtray, clothes, the Proust I hadn’t finished reading—and loaded the trunk with them, then put the trunk in the backseat of the car. There was nothing else in the world I possessed.

I dressed in a clean set of clothes—jeans, cowboy boots, and an old flannel shirt—and locked the door behind me. I no longer had a home. And I no longer had a name. It was time for me to disappear. It’s what I was good at.

I remember leaving home like it happened yesterday. I remember pounding on my mother’s front door, begging her to let me in. She finally did. I hadn’t seen her in weeks, not since I left in a huff and moved into that fleabag motel on the other side of town. Doris had come over to my room the night before with a travel bag. In a couple of days we were going to get on the bike and head out west toward the ocean. We were going to get married along the way.

My mother answered the door in her bathrobe, her graying hair up in a bun, bags under her eyes the color of bruises, like she hadn’t slept since I came back from the war. I was hysterical, shaking, crying, and she carried me over to the couch and sat me down.

In a calm voice, she asked me what happened. I told her. “Doris is dead,”

I said, weeping.

My mother lit a cigarette and blew smoke at the ceiling.

“You blacked out, didn’t you?”

“How do you know?”

“By any chance,” she said, “did you see the full moon last night?”

I saw an image of hell flash across her eyes. “What does that mean?” I asked.

“Son,” she said, a tear sliding down her face, “you should have died over in that godforsaken war.”

“What was Dad supposed to tell me?”

She started it off with, “Well, Marlowe, you’re not like other boys,” and it went downhill from there.

She told me about my bloodline, how my great-grandfather had been a bounty hunter, how he had gone after an Indian who was called “the Mad Wolf.” The Indian was said to be deranged and possessed of supernatural powers. He had left whole villages in ruins. My great-grandfather killed the Indian, but his life was cursed from that day forward. When he died, his son inherited the curse. Down the line it went, till it got to me. She told me why Dad went away once a month the way he did—so he wouldn’t kill his family.

“Marlowe, the life you wanted could never be yours, even if Doris were still alive. Your father and I knew that because we went through the same thing. When you went to Vietnam, we were truly hoping you wouldn’t make it, just so you wouldn’t have to go through what he went through, and so Doris wouldn’t have to live the kind of life that I’ve had to live. That’s why we pushed her away. So she could move on. But it’s too late for that now, isn’t it?”

“This can’t be happening,” I cried.

“You should have died overseas. Doris would still be here….”

“No. Doris is dead because of you. You instigated this whole damn thing. You drove me away. You didn’t warn me, Mom. You let us go.”

“Would you have believed me? I couldn’t … How could I say these things to my boy? It should have ended with your brother….”

“What do you mean?”

“Jeffrey didn’t die,” she said. “Your father killed him. Just took him out one night and didn’t come back with him. I didn’t want to know what he did. He was going to kill the both of you so it could end with him, but after he did your baby brother, he couldn’t go on and kill you too. He was too weak. He loved you too much. He loved Jeffrey too, but he thought the both of you would be able to go off together. He was supposed to tell you about the curse. But he couldn’t. He wanted to spare you this pain. You were supposed to die over there, Marlowe. Why didn’t you die?”

“Mom, this isn’t right….”

“It’s not,” she said. Then: “There’s only one right thing left to do. This has to end with you.”

She left the room and came back with my father’s loaded revolver. She handed it to me by the barrel. “Take it,” she said. “Do what needs to be done.”

I took the gun. It was heavy in my hand. Something inside me told me she was right. I should have just ended it, but I didn’t. I couldn’t.