Running With the Pack (27 page)

The downtown was nothing but offices, banks, and government buildings, and finally Charles marched south. He had no way of knowing he passed within a block of a local vegan soulfood cart, or four blocks of a twenty-four hour veg-friendly coffee shop, just as he had no way of knowing that there were dozens of non-asshole kids in his neighborhood, kids who preferred reading and riding bikes and playing video games to terrorizing their peers and getting fucked up. The sun was setting as Charles reached Holten Street but he walked around the block a few times before going inside the dilapidated house where his gramma was already cooking something he didn’t want to eat.

There was a bike in his room. It didn’t have gears and was a little small but it was, undeniably, a bicycle. Charles felt a lump in his throat, and then felt stupid for feeling it.

“Gotcha bike,” his father said over the hoppin john that Charles could barely taste the fatback in.

“I really appreciate it,” Charles said. “Thanks.”

“Can’t be walkin everywhere lookin like such a target,” his dad went on, a strange expression on his ashy cheeks. “Gotta be able to dip out quick next time them toughs come atcha. Fight’s out, so that leaves you with flight. What?”

Charles realized he must be looking pretty confused himself, his gramma looking back and forth between her son and grandson with a beatific smile on her pinched face.

“I went to school, boy,” his dad shook his head and set back to his meal. “Maybe not as much’s
some
but I went, and that’s how I got the state job. Rickards is hard but it’ll be good, toughen you up, and then you can head over to Fam like your mom and me. That’s the last thing the government wants, us simple coloreds getting degrees.”

Florida Agricultural and Mechanical College wasn’t exactly Ivy League, and Charles knew his father had only received an AA, but it was the closest thing to a good night he had enjoyed since arriving. It only got better—after dinner his dad took him out to the video store and let him pick out a movie. When his gramma went to sleep they settled in on the couch his dad slept on with a battered VHS tape called
Black Werewolf
. About halfway through the film Charles realized it had to be the same movie Mr. Matherne had recommended,
The Beast Must Die
, just with a different title for some reason. Not even his dad offering him a hit on the acrid joint he puffed and cutting up with “Werewolf my ass, that’s a damn dog leapin all over the place. More like leap-wolf, you ask me” could diminish Charles’s pleasure. That night he dreamed of being a real werewolf, and not like the obvious German shepherd in the movie but the real deal, a beast both ferocious and fair, a cross between a superhero and a monster. Then he dreamed about his mom and woke up feeling sick and scared.

The next morning Charles pored over his book and realized he was rapidly running out of means of becoming a werewolf, given the short supply of rare herbs and the continued absence of the Devil offering up magic ointments. One method the book listed was to sleep outside under a full moon on a Friday, but who knew when the next one of those would be, and if that actually worked, the world would have been long overrun in lycanthrope winos and boy scouts. Just about everything else involved werewolves or, failing that, normal wolves, and so Charles had almost given up hope when he re-read the paragraph about being cursed.

There weren’t a lot of Gypsies in the ghetto, but if Hollywood had taught Charles one thing it was that the South was brimming over with magical black people. Of course, they always appeared whenever white people needed them so Charles was at a marked disadvantage there, but he
did
know an old black lady, and if she didn’t know voodoo or whatever she could at least point him in the right direction. His gramma spent most of any given day in the community center a few blocks away, and Charles was halfway there before he remembered his bike and trotted back home to get it.

It lacked a kickstand and he had to peddle backwards to brake but the feel of the wind on his face was a welcome one. Leaning the bike against a handicapped parking sign, Charles walked up the cracked concrete walkway and pushed open the tinted glass doors. He felt like he had jumped into the neighborhood pool back home, the AC burning his sweaty skin. Taking off his glasses and wiping them on his shirt, Charles realized at once why his gramma spent so much time there.

“Charlie!” she cried, and putting his glasses back on he saw he had walked in on an impressively stereotypical game of bingo. His gramma waved him over and he moved between the tables crowded with old men and women, most of whom seemed put out by the distraction. The tables were obviously from a school cafeteria, and his gramma scooted down the bench to make room for him, the older gentleman beside her smiling at Charles as he squeezed between them.

“This is Charlie,” she said proudly.

“E-nine,” announced the portly man at the front of the room, causing a flurry of groans, mutterings, and laughter. “E-nine.”

“Charlie, that’s Mr. Johnson next to you, and this is Ms. Hattie, and she’s Mrs. Leacraft, and—” a half-dozen more introductions were made, to the consternation of those who actually treated the game with the severity it deserved. Finally Charles’s gramma finished up and seemed ready to turn her attention back to the game but Charles realized he had hit the jackpot and acted quickly before the attentions of the seniors could return to their bingo cards.

“Ma’am, I came here to ask you something,” said Charles, pleased to see Mr. Johnson and a few of the others were watching him curiously.

“Well go on then,” she said, her eyes flitting back to the front of the room where the announcer sifted out the next ball.

“Is there anyone around here who knows about voodoo and cursing people and all that?” Charles asked.

“What?” His gramma frowned at him, her voice nearly drowned out by the laughter of some of her neighbors and the disapproving voices of others.

“We’re Christians, boy.”

“Don’t go messin with rootwork.”

“You think you’re funny?”

“Charlie’s dad’s been showin him movies bout, whatsit, werewolfs,” his gramma said defensively, though she had every intention of bawling him out once they were alone. “He’s just got himself curious.”

“Ware woofs?” Ms. Hattie said, peering at Charles. “Takem on ta the juneya moosam, they got ware woofs there.”

“They do?” Charles couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

“Red’uns,” Ms. Hattie nodded, the thick patch of hair on her neck making Charles wonder if a bite from her would be sufficient. “Ma Davie liked’um.”

“Don’t you get her started on her boy,” Charles’s gramma hissed. “Go on home and don’t come back in here less you behave, Charlie. I swear—”

Charles didn’t wait to see what she swore, instead thanking Ms. Hattie and booking it. Back at the house he dug through the phonebook, and in five minutes he had directions to the Tallahassee “Junior” Museum. He considered asking them about werewolves but it wasn’t like he had a lot else to do if Ms. Hattie was as crazy as she sounded, and so he set off down Orange Avenue.

The neighborhoods thinned out as he peddled and it took him over an hour before he even reached the turn-off. Regular as locker searches at Rickards High School the afternoon rain came down and soaked him as he rode, but finally he hit the hilly stretch of gravelly road. He was out in the woods now, poison ivy and brambles filling in the gaps between the scrub pines, the sounds of the highway he had foolishly ridden on fading as he rolled into the parking lot. The wooden building looked awfully small and wanting in spooky architecture for a place purported to hold some variety of werewolf but in he went, drenched from sneaker to snout.

The Junior Museum was more or less a zoo for local animals. Beyond the building lay a re-creation of an old farm, and trails wound through the woods and over long boardwalks near a lake. There were supposedly alligators and a panther but they must have been hiding in their large enclosures, everything green palmettos and brown leaves and reddish cypress and gray oak. There were hardly any other people on the grounds as he wound through the maze of paths and walkways, and then he arrived. Charles grinned, the plaque on the raised boardwalk overlooking the pen clarifying Ms. Hattie’s rambling.

Red Wolf. Endangered
. Rare wolves, indeed.

They looked like dogs, lanky and brown and lolling in the shade of the underbrush at the mouth of their den—two wolves. Charles wondered just what in hell was wrong with him, coming to a zoo. He supposed the patch of woodland was their natural habitat but still, locking up intelligent animals was unfair. That was why he didn’t eat them, after all, because they were smart and felt pain and rejection and the sting of confinement, because they were just as real as he was and deserved to live for themselves instead of being locked up.

Looking down at the bored wolves Charles couldn’t believe what a kid he had been. Even if werewolves were real, which they weren’t, why would he want to be one? He didn’t even eat cheese anymore so why would he want to gnaw bones and rend flesh? Would he scare the Holten Street Clique straight, or fix the crackhead who had killed his mom? What he was doing was daydreaming about violence, no different than some fool thinking a heater or a knife would even the score or keep him safe. What did violence beget? Again, what in hell, Charles? The Vegan Werewolf sounded like a pretty dumb premise for a children’s book, not a mature plan for fixing himself and helping his community, like his mom had—

They came up behind him, braying in their exaggerated dialect, and somehow he knew, as if even then his nose were keener, his ears sharper.

“—bwah, that shit is r-tarded,” one of them hooted.

“See one fight a red-nose pit, that’d be tight,” said another, and Charles turned around and looked at the three white kids from the silver hatchback that had pelted him with garbage his first week on the Southside. There was a fat one with a kango hat, a bulky but strong looking dude, and a wiry little one in a wife beater. None of them looked older than Charles but clearly one of them had a license.

“Hey,” the smallest nodded at Charles and they moved a little way down the boardwalk.

“Nuthin here, either.” The ripped guy said. “Bunk as fuck.”

“My moms’ll go to work in another hour,” the skinny one said. “Try out that gravity B I built?”

“Go ghetto-callin later,” the fat one said in a low voice, glancing over his shoulder at Charles as they turned and went back down the walkway, away from the pen. “My cousin showed me how to get piss into a water balloon.”

Then they were gone around the bend of the wooden boardwalk, and Charles exhaled, light headed and nauseated. Looking down into the enclosure his eyes focused immediately on a small puddle, probably rainwater, and the footprints around it. What else was he going to do that summer? The chain-link fence went right up to the railing of the boardwalk and Charles went over before he chickened out.

Halfway down he realized what he was doing and froze. It took more strength than he knew he had to turn his head, knowing they must be about to pounce and drag him down to a bloody, painful death. Instead he saw the two wolves watching him lazily from their shady lookout. He scrambled the rest of the way down, painfully aware of the noise the metal fence made as he descended into the pen.

Fingers still biting into the fence, he glanced away from the wolves to the muddy earth at his feet. Dry pawprints speckled the ground but a few feet away one was filled with blackish water. Squatting down, he moved like a nervous crab over to the print, the wolves still motionless but watching. Then Charles giggled at how stupid he was being and, dropping onto all fours, stuck his mouth in the pawprint and slurped up a mouthful of muck-water. He coughed on it but stood triumphantly, which was when he saw that only one of the wolves was still lying in the shade watching him.

Charles turned back to the fence, knowing what he would see. The boy had suffered nightmares before, had seen a horror flick or two, and knew what came next. Sure enough, the red wolf stood between him and the fence, its teeth bared, its hackles raised, a low growl bubbling out of its throat. Bullshit, thought Charles, and then it lunged forward.

Charles kept his bloody hand in his pocket as he passed through the museum building and out into the parking lot, dusk creeping down from the dirty clouds. The white kids must still be on the grounds somewhere, the silver hatchback one of the only cars in the lot, and after looking around Charles took his damp shirt off and wrapped his hand in it before getting on his bike. He had only peddled halfway to the main road before he had to ditch his bike and throw up, still terrified and confused.

It knew what he wanted and was helping him, a part of Charles told himself, but the rest of him was certain the wolf had been just as scared as he was, territorial but scared, and that’s why it had fled back to its mate after nipping his hand instead of dragging him down and ripping out his throat. Charles didn’t know how he had made it up the fence afterwards, his bound hand already dying the shirt an impossibly bright red. The silver hatchback passed him as he got back on his bike but none of the kids seemed to notice him, and Charles rode as fast as he could, his stomach twisting, his head pounding, his hand itching.

The setting sun at his back, Charles peddled harder and harder, his bike whining, traffic content to cruise behind him instead of passing the crazy-looking kid flying down the road on a tiny bike. Then the bike was too slow, and in the deepening twilight he left Orange Ave and skidded his bike to a stop on a side road by one of the FAMU gardens. When the last car passed him he hurled the bike down into the gully that ran parallel to Orange and scrambled down the steep bank after it, foam flecking his lips, a fever working its heat from his spinning head down his parched throat and into a ball of fire in his belly. He fell the last few feet down the overgrown slope, kudzu tangling his legs, and lay beside his bike in the shallow, mucky stream at the mouth of the culvert that dipped under the side road. Charles guzzled the water until he vomited, and then he drank more.