Immortal Lycanthropes (5 page)

“I’m your parents now, dumb-ass! You don’t know how hard this is! I don’t know what to do with these kids in December when they have to go home, and then they tell all their friends I don’t have no school. I can’t let them go, but I can’t keep them here another year. And then you have to show up, and you can actually talk normal . . .”

It suddenly occurred to Myron that Mr. Rodriguez was under the impression that the school year started in January, and he began to laugh.

“You won’t think it’s so funny when you’re at the bottom of the river,” Mr. Rodriguez was shrieking. He jumped up and began to tremble all over. Myron was scared; he could feel every hair on the back of his neck, where Mr. Rodriguez had picked him up, begin to tingle. Suddenly he remembered feeling this way before. And at that moment a bison came bursting through the wall. Its great head smashed into Mr. Rodriguez and sent him flying to one side. The bison skidded into a bookshelf, and a set of hardcover Time-Life books came tumbling down onto its back. When it turned around, Myron had already darted out the hole in the wall and was running through the rain.

The wind and the driving rain made it hard to see, but Myron was fairly certain that a bison had managed to burst back out of the house and was in pursuit. He could feel it in his hackles. A bison was probably faster than a boy, he figured, so he deliberately headed for the copse of trees he’d passed a couple of hours before. He could hear the bison snorting and the thundering of its hooves close behind him, and he practically dived into the thick tangle of birch branches. Scrambling through the copse, he lit out at an oblique angle to the direction he’d entered, and was soon dodging between the rusted-orange chassis and engine blocks. It was hard to see in the rain, and a black tire, camouflaged against the ground, caught Myron’s foot. He went head over heels and was fortunate to land on nothing harder than the deep mud. He was breathing hard, and, in the precious seconds he spent prying himself out of the ground, he could sense his lead evaporating. Indeed, no sooner had he begun to run than he could hear the metallic clanging of a bison ricocheting off the upside-down body of half a minibus. Myron’s mud-sodden shoes were making their own noise, a grotesque sucking sound with every step.

“A cheetah, a cheetah,” Myron tried, but in vain. He remained a biped, and the bison was gaining.

But there ahead were the railroad tracks, and between him and them the broad ditch. Myron pitched down into it, through the filthy morass at the bottom, and began to mount the far side. Surely a bison would not be able to follow. Maybe Benson could turn into a man and climb around in ditches that way, but, frankly, Myron figured it was better to be pursued by a man than by a solid ton with horns. All these hopes flashed through Myron’s mind in the moment he scrambled up the side, but then, with a palpable burst of air pressure, a train came whistling by, less than a foot away. It was a freight train, and boxcar after boxcar sped past, with no end in sight. Myron was cut off.

“All right, it was a nice race, but you’re trapped now.”

Myron turned at the sound of the voice. There, separated from him only by six feet of ditch, stood, naked, the man who had terrified him in Westfield.

“What do you want?” Myron asked. The din of the rain and the hammering rails meant that he had to shout to be heard.

“The boss is curious about you. So you’re coming with me to meet him.”

“Is he going to hurt me?” Myron asked. The train was still going, still rumbling past.

“What do I care?”

Myron was desperate to keep Benson talking. Once the train was gone, maybe he could start running again. “How did you find me? What did you do with my parents?”

“You don’t have a choice in this, you know,” Benson said. And taking a step or two back, and then forward, he launched himself across the ditch, landing close to the speeding train. In the mud he slipped for a moment, and Myron caught his breath, but Benson righted himself. He was now standing right in front of Myron.

“Is it true,” Myron asked, “tell me first, is it true that we’re immortal lycanthropes?”

“I don’t know, or care, what they told you, but I can kill you, you know. I can gore you.”

“But you’d have to gore me, right? You can only kill me in animal form.”

Benson put his hand out. “Make this easy. Just give me your hand, and we’ll go back to the car.” Benson’s face, and his hand, lit up for a moment as a bolt forked across the sky.

Myron at that moment launched himself sideways, directly at the train. He bounced off the side with a horrible squelch, landed back on his soggy sneakers, tottered a moment, and fell directly back against the train. This time he happened to fall between cars, and with a series of cracks and a great outpouring of blood the front of a boxcar slammed into him. He fell down, as loose as a rag doll, gushing blood, but he stayed where he was, stuck on the coupling, as the train dragged him away. Benson stood wet and dumbfounded. Myron’s limp body was out of sight by the time the thunder sounded.

“He’d make a good boy for our business,” said Smith,
 musingly.

Martin shook his head.

“It wouldn’t do,” he said.

“Why not?”

“He wants to be honest,” said Martin, contemptuously.

 “We couldn’t trust him.”

Horatio Alger,
Rufus and Rose

Shoreditch, Pennsylvania, was founded as a mining town, and tried, when the coal ran out, to reinvent itself as a manufacturing town. The broken windows of factories and the innumerable corrugated tin shacks, many collapsed into lean-tos or stacks of tin sheets, offered the evidence of this plan’s failure, and of a chronology of decay. A Heinrich Schliemann of the future would find the layers of this Troy, the layers of splendor and squalor, coexisting and overlapping—with squalor, as it always does, gradually taking over. And there in Shoreditch central stood the Grand Lafayette, four glorious stories of memories of better times, or at least better times for some. The doorman still dressed like an Austro-Hungarian admiral, and the remaining crystal prisms in the grand chandelier still twinkled in the high cracked ceilings of the lobby. The Grand Lafayette had in its day been a swank hotel, then a swank convention center, then a swank apartment building, and if it had seen better days, so have we all, and it was still the swankest place in Shoreditch.

In the penthouse of the Grand Lafayette sat a rather dusty apartment crammed to the gills with curios and knickknacks. An art deco version of an Egyptian woman, five feet tall, balanced a lamp on her head, all hand-cast in bronze. A stuffed impala’s head, one glass eye long since having fallen out, overlooked a life-size pair of ceramic dalmatians and a score of tiny angel statues, Manchurian vase-ware, glass kittens, monogrammed letter openers in gold leaf (fanned out into an “attractive display”), Hopi kachina dolls, and one wind-up singing bird. The carpets were exquisite, Persian, and threadbare. On the walls hung faded satin-cut silhouettes in tarnished frames and pre-Raphaelite maidens in gilded frames; over the windows hung thick flowered curtains. A large sepia globe that still maintained the memory of the Polish corridor had proved to be hinged, and it hung open, revealing inside a collection of whisky bottles, half full; or perhaps, in Shoreditch, half empty. Several other bottles had clearly been emptied recently, and were scattered around a leather easy chair. In the leather chair sat, passed out, a woman in late middle age, barefoot, a velvet dressing gown tied around her and a cigarette, smoldering between her fingers. Two other partially smoked and still glowing cigarettes had been put out in an open nearby jewelry box, the kind that played a tune when the lid was up. It was still tinkling away when Myron Horowitz eased through the penthouse door. He sat unseen on the ottoman and waited in silence. He’d gotten good at waiting. The woman was black, her wrinkled skin very dark, and the dressing gown, like the chair, was red.

After a few minutes, the jewelry box stopped, in the middle of a measure. The woman started, leaned over, ground her cigarette in the box, and then held it up to wind it. Partway through, she stopped. Slowly, she began to lift her head.

“What song is that?” Myron asked.

The woman shoved hard with her feet, and the chair tipped over backwards. Springing up on the far side of the clattering chair was no woman but an enormous gorilla, its lips pulled back to display yellow fangs. The sight might have been terrifying, except the gorilla was ludicrously wearing a dressing gown, now ill-fitted to simian proportions.

“Arthur and Alice sent me,” Myron said.

The gorilla lifted the fallen chair upright. Suddenly a woman was wearing the dressing gown again. She tugged it back into place. “You must be Myron Lipschitz.”

“Myron Horowitz.”

“Well, that’s a little better. How did you get in here?”

“The doorman didn’t say anything. No one thinks a kid like me is up to trouble, as long as I keep my back to him. And the door to this apartment was unlocked.”

The woman darted to the door, opened it, bent down stiffly to grab some shoes, drew them into the room, and locked the door.

“What,” Myron asked, “do they shine your shoes if you leave them outside?”

“No, but they used to, forty years ago. I guess I just put them out on instinct and forgot to lock up behind me.” The woman groped around on the floor for a glass and began to fix a drink from the bottles in the globe. “Hair of the dog. You want some?”

“I’m just a kid.”

“Suit yourself.” She stirred the concoction with a letter opener.

“Um. Are you Gloria?”

“Maybe. How’d you find me?”

“I had a talk, a while ago, with Arthur and Alice, and I’ve gone over what they said a million times in my head since then. And one thing I remember them mentioning was a Gloria in Shoreditch.”

“And then what, you just wandered around town until you got that prickling sensation in your nose?”

“I get it on the back of my neck. But yeah. It took me three days.”

Gloria gave him the once-over. “You don’t look like you’ve been sleeping on the street.”

“I stole these clothes from a Laundromat this morning. And it’s too cold to sleep on the street, I’ve mainly been in garages.”

“Laundromat, huh? You’re okay. Anyone resourceful at expropriation is okay in my book. So what else did Arthur tell you about me?”

“Nothing much. All I know about you is that you’re a friend of theirs.”

“I’m a friend of Arthur’s, not Alice’s. Remember that, you can’t trust her.”

“I can trust Arthur, though, then?”

“Well, no, not really.” She began to laugh, at first a little and then increasingly hysterically, until she choked on her drink. When she was done, she said, “You do look like you’ve been hit by a truck.”

“It was a train, actually. Look, I have a lot of questions for you.”

Gloria closed her eyes and tilted her head back. “Ask ’em. I’ve got all night.”

“You can’t have all night, it’s almost noon.”

Gloria jumped up and ran over to the window. She shuffled when she walked, like an old woman, but Myron remembered the few moments when she was a gorilla, and how differently, how fluidly she had moved. She was now pulling open the curtains, and when the noonday sun struck her in the face, she closed her eyes and gasped. Her pupils, when she turned back around, were contracted into pinpoints.

She said, “We’ve got to get out of here.”

“Okay, let’s go.”

“I can’t go out the front, they know me.”

“We could just stay here,” Myron suggested.

“No, the owners might be back at any minute.”

“You . . . don’t live here?”

“Of course not, look at this place! It’s bourgeois tacky!”

“That’s a nice painting,” Myron said, pointing over at the corner.

Gloria was gathering up some things and throwing them into a sack. “That’s not a painting, that’s a print.”

“No, it’s not. Prints have the name of the museum on the bottom.”

“Faith, Myron! What are you? Are you a bat or something?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“Okay, go through the lobby. I’ll meet you out on the street, around the corner. Do you have any money on you?”

“No.”

“Okay, I’ll meet you anyway.” She turned back to the window. “I hate doing this in daylight,” she said.

And then a gorilla was shucking off the dressing gown. With the sack over her shoulder, she jumped out the window.

Gloria was dressed when Myron saw her again, and she kept looking behind her. “I hate doing that,” she said.

“In daylight. I know,” said Myron.

Gloria turned back to the boy. “You’ve got a mouth on you.”

Myron was suddenly embarrassed. “I guess I do. I didn’t used to.”

“Okay, let’s get some money and then go to a diner and get some coffee.”

“Get some money how?”

And then for twenty minutes Myron stood on the curb while Gloria accosted passersby and asked, in his name, for spare change. “A deaf mute, permanently maimed by an exploding stove! Please have a heart! The shoddy Japanese manufacturers refused to pay him a cent! The explosion claimed the lives of his parents, and the poor little crippled orphan will never see them again!” Soon Myron legitimately began to cry, and that didn’t hurt the game at all. After twenty minutes, Gloria dragged Myron across town to a diner.