Rules for Werewolves (24 page)

—You don’t get to control how I understand things. That’s what I’m fucking talking about! You even want to tell me who means what with their words. You think you’re like her interpreter or something. My heart is my fucking interpreter.

—Tanya speaks for herself.

—Yeah, well, she means shit to me.

—Then leave.

—I did. I left and I found us a house. And now you’re all here.

—We can’t live here.

—We can. No one’s going to bother us. The neighbors are terrified.

—We can’t even go back to the old place.

—We’ll move on.

—Nobody will move with you. They’re not gonna like this.

—Where the fuck are they?

—They’re out there watching us. Listening.

—Some of them’ll like this.

—It’s not what they signed up for.

—What did you think you were doing? Norman Rockwell? You don’t want to live like normal people. You want to transform. Violently. This is what that looks like.

—We beat someone up at the other house. All together. It didn’t feel right. It didn’t bring us together. Or it did, some of us. I don’t know how many people are out there, but it scattered us. It split us all up.

—The ones who stuck with you are the good ones.

—I don’t know about that.

—You hear what he’s saying about you? Can you hear him?

—We lost the dog. That doesn’t seem like a good omen. Everything’s fucked now.

—You hear what he’s saying?

—I’m not saying anyone’s bad. I’m just saying we can do better.

—I’m not talking to them. I’m saying, listen to the Peugeot guy.

—He’s dead, Angel. You can smell it.

—He’s trying to say something. Open his mouth.

—No.

—That’s our ticket out of here. Open his mouth.

—No.

—I put the keys to his Peugeot in his mouth. I told him if he could swallow them I would let him go. They were on a great big key ring with a metal disc that said “Peugeot.”

—We’re going to turn you in to the cops.

—Fucking shut up. And listen to what he’s saying to you … Can you hear it?

—No one is gonna go along with this.

—He’s saying we can take his car. He’s saying we can take it and drive out to the country. There are homes in the country where there are no neighbors.

—We found guns at the other house.

—You’re threatening me with a fucking gun?

—Angel. Stop.

—A gun is just a tool. I know how to kill somebody.

—I can kill, too.

—Then do it.

—No. I’m gonna take everybody away from here and call this cop I know.

—Listen to him.

—He’s dead.

—He says you are, too. If you try to leave this house without fighting me.

—Run. Everybody, run.

—They’re not going anywhere. They want to see what we’re about to do.

Fight. Fight. Fight. Fight. Fight.

—Robert.

—

—Robert.

—

—Robert!

—What?

—Are you asleep?

—No.

—What’re you doing?

—I’m getting ready to crawl out the window and leave this house for good.

—I thought we were going tomorrow night.

—I’m getting ready in my mind. I’m trying to go over everything that’s gonna go wrong so when those scenarios come up, we can sidestep ’em. Chess players do it. The night before a big match. Chess players lie in bed like this and they play the game over and over, looking for the quickest way to lose. As soon as a chess player figures out a way to lose, he starts over and avoids that move and looks for the next quickest way and so on and so on, until it’s just not possible for him to mess things up.

—I could go tell Mom right now.

—Tell her what?

—Tell her we’re leaving tomorrow at midnight.

—Why would you fuckin’ do that? You’re such a cowardly shit of a little brother.

—Fuck you! I’m just trying to do what you’re saying. Telling Mom is the quickest way I can think of to mess this up.

—But you wouldn’t go tell Mom unless we were fighting. So calling you a cowardly shit is the quickest way
I
can think of to mess this up.

—You’re a jerk.

—Shh. Listen. I love it when the house is quiet like this.

—Do you have the postcard with the address we’re going to on it?

—Yeah. It’s in the pocket of my jeans.

—Where’s your jeans?

—On the floor somewhere.

—That’s another way we could fuck up; we could leave the postcard lying around where Mom could find it.

—She wouldn’t know what it was. It doesn’t have anything but a return address on it.

—It’s got blood smeared on it. It looks like they were trying to draw something in blood.

—It’s a picture of a wolf. It’s code. You have to be one of us to know. And if
you
couldn’t figure it out, there’s no way Mom’s gonna figure it out.

—Mom wouldn’t care what your “code” meant. She would see there was blood on the postcard and figure something was up and she’d give it to the cops—

—What if I destroy the postcard so Mom doesn’t find it—but then I forget the address, or I remember it wrong, and we end up running away but we never get where we’re going.

—Robert.

—What?

—Whose blood do you think it is?

—I don’t know.

—Why do you think they were bleeding?

—They might have had a fight.

—Do they fight a lot?

—Not as much as Mom and Donald.

—Mom and Donald don’t end up bleeding.

—It’s different. It’s more honest. They just hit each other. It’s like with us. If you hurt my feelings. Or if you cuss too much. Or when you won’t stop calling me Bobert ’cause you’re trying to hurt my feelings. Then I hit you.

—But I’m not as big as you.

—Everybody is more or less the same size.

—But it’s not fair.

—How is it fair the other way? When people yell at each other, or call each other names—not everybody is the same size emotionally. You know what I mean? You might think calling me Bobert is no big deal. You’re just teasing your big brother. But you don’t know what it does to me.

—I’m scared.

—I’ll protect you. If somebody hits you, I’ll hit them. It doesn’t happen that often. Besides, it’s just like a warning. It’s how animals talk. We don’t hit each other to hurt each other.

—But someone’s bleeding.

—They’re not bleeding anymore, probably. Besides—besides—besides—it might have just been somebody trying to be cool, like when you become blood brothers with somebody.

—Is that the kind of stuff they think is cool? I don’t like blood.

—You sure like talking about it.

—I just can’t imagine cutting myself is all.

—I don’t wanna talk about it anymore. You weren’t alive yet, Tim, but when I was a baby they had just invented those baby monitors and Mom got one ’cause she was nervous about how to be a mom. She was probably feeling the same as we do now—lying awake in bed, trying to figure out all the ways she could mess up. It’s hard to sleep when you’re a mom, ’cause if the baby stops breathing, the mom won’t know it if she’s already asleep. So our mom went out and got a baby monitor. She didn’t use it on you because by then she was three years into it and she was more relaxed. Who knew she would just keep relaxing to the point that she would let somebody like Donald into the house so he could creep around at night and catch one of us getting up to go to the bathroom and then use that time to make us play with him? But my point is about that baby monitor. She keeps it in the hall closet. And when I came back to get you and
the cops started coming around and no one believed my stories—what if Mom got that baby monitor out of the hallway closet and it’s under the bed? That would be one way to fuck this up. Sitting up talking about blood and postcards. And Mom could be listening to us right now.

—Then I would say—“I love you, Mom.”

—“I love you, Mom, too.”

—You want me to check under the bed, Bobert? I mean, Robert.

—No. I know the baby monitor’s not under there.

—How?

—Two reasons. First, I saw it in the hall closet today when I was packing us some supplies. The sleeping bags are in the hall closet. And second, we’ve been sitting in this room talking about what a dick Donald is and how bad he’s been to us and what he’s done to us and Mom hasn’t killed him. I think if she knew, if she heard us talkin’ about it in private, she would finally start to believe me, and then she would kill him.

—You think so?

—Donald’s the one who started calling me Bobert. That’s why I don’t like it.

—Let’s leave tonight.

—No.

—Why not?

—’Cause that’s one of the worst mistakes we could make.

—But we’re already packed.

—When I was with the werewolves, we kept our bags packed all the time. And we were always packing ’em and repacking ’em. Each house, if it was a better house, we would unpack what we had and pack better stuff. But we never packed our stupid brains with what was gonna happen next. We never thought about who was gonna be in charge. Or how were we gonna make rules. You know, for a while we let a baseball cap be in charge of us. Everyone wrote stuff down and then just picked ideas out of a hat. How’s that for a plan? You wanna do that? Do ya?

—Shhh. You’re gonna wake up Mom.

—The plan is we leave tomorrow. Between now and then I’m not gonna sleep. I’m gonna lie here and think up all the ways that this can go wrong. And then, when we’re out on the road, I’m gonna only do the things that get us to
happily ever after
.

—You could be such a dick to me that I fuckin’ turn you over to the cops and I just go out on my own.

—Well, if you’re gonna do it, I would rather know about it now than after two weeks out on the road. So stop cussing at me. You think the cops could hold on to me? No way. If you ever see ’em putting cuffs on me, you better stand back, ’cause that means I’m about to go wild. I’ll go so wild they’ll be talking about it on the ten o’clock news for weeks. And they’re not gonna get you, either. Not while I’m with you.

—You think it’s gonna take two weeks to get to the address on that postcard?

—Maybe longer. I think we should walk the whole way. No hitchhiking and no buses. And no stealing cars.

—We should steal Donald’s car and roll it off the edge of Glendora Canyon.

—That’s not a bad idea.

—You sure? I just said it. I didn’t think about it. I just pulled it out of my hat.

—Haha. But I think it
is
a good idea. Especially going down to Glendora.

—I thought you said the address on the postcard was up north? Glendora’s the other direction. Down by Fuller.

—That’s why it’s a good idea. That’s what we should spend our time doing tomorrow. All day long we talk to Mom about Glendora and anything we can think of that’s down south. Then we steal the car and drive down that way. Then we can trash the car. Or we can give it away to a homeless person. And then we can turn around and head back north and they’ll be followin’ the wrong trail. Plus it’ll be a final goodbye present to Donald.

—I wish we could just leave now.

—I know.

—I have a bad feeling.

—You’re nervous.

—I know. I want everything to be over.

—And then what?

—What?

—What does “everything being over” look like to you?

—I don’t know.

—Just say it. Like a bedtime story. While I lie here and think. Say it.

—I want you and I to have a place of our own. A house. I want it to be in the woods. And I want all your friends to live nearby. Like in walking distance. You know the way a cul-de-sac is? With all the fronts of the houses facing one another really close, in a circle? But out the back doors we all have big farms, fanning out like a pie chart. And you and I are the hunters for the group. Everyone else, all your friends, farm corn and beets and lettuce. And you and I go out for a couple of weeks at a time and set up a little camp and live off venison jerky and water from some nearby creek. And we sleep on blankets on the ground. Nothing else. We don’t need anything but a blanket and a rifle apiece. We probably have a tarp in case it rains, but most nights we lie on a blanket by the fire and we stare up at the stars. And we fall asleep talking. And in the morning when we wake up, we don’t say a word. We’re as silent as ghosts. It’ll be so early, it’ll still be dark out. And silently we’ll roll up our blankets and go out into the fields and point to where each one of us is gonna sit and wait for the deer. We always know where the other one is, so we don’t accidentally shoot each other. We just point at things and we understand each other without talking. And when we hear the gun go off we can tell just by the sound it makes whether it was a hit or not, the way Donald can. If the gunshot sort of goes flat at the end, that’s a hit. And then one of us goes to the other one and helps him dress the deer and quarter it and we carry it back to the cul-de-sac we have in the middle of the forest. And when we get back there’s a big barbecue and we eat some of the deer right away, roasted over an open fire as we butcher the rest of it to be smoked. And then everybody tells us everything that happened while we were gone. We drink beer by the fire and eat barbecued venison until our faces are just greasy with it. And we have wives. And they tell us what happened with our kids while we were gone. And Mom is there. And she tells us what happened with our wives while we were gone. And we’re not gone
that
much. But it’s our job to go sometimes. And when we do go, it’s just like tomorrow, we wake up in the middle of the night and we leave as quietly as ghosts, so we have a good distance covered by the time the sun comes up.

—Can I have a hundred dollars? I want to go to that concert down in Fuller. It’s a three-day thing. Come on. You get to see every band in the world. They all come to Fuller, just a few miles south of here. It’s the closest I’ll ever get to most of the great art in the universe. Please? Please? God! You suck!