This Is Not a Werewolf Story (32 page)

That afternoon is so hot the trailer feels like the inside of a volcano.

“Come on,” my dad says as he opens the back door. “You two will be more comfortable outside in the shade.”

He trusts us. He knows we'll walk from the door of the trailer straight into the cage.

I nip White Wolf as she trots out the door. She
swings her head back at me. I make a low noise in my throat.

Right then we hear a truck coming up the dirt forest road that leads to the trailer. My dad turns at the sound. The blue jay darts up from her branch and flaps her wide indigo wings to the sky.

We bolt.

My dad hollers.

White Wolf is already at the edge of White Deer Woods. I'm close behind her. I slow down and stop, right in the shade of an enormous cedar. I swing my head back toward my dad. I give him one long last look. I make the sound that means
Good-bye.

Then I hear him say it. “Go!” It's a whisper of a shout. “Go!” I can see him take his hat off and wave it at me. “Go!”

We run and run.

The woods are deep and dark and cool. The rabbits haven't missed us.

We return to our ledge deep in White Deer Woods. I know the ranger won't try to track us. We'll keep quiet and he'll keep quiet and soon the others will forget us.

We're free from our cage, but White Wolf and I are trapped. Nobody can help us. We'll be wolves until the day we die.

I'm melancholy. Do you know the word? If you were a melancholy wolf, your tail would droop. If you were
a melancholy boy, you would shut the door to your room and listen to sad songs. If you were a melancholy kite, your streamers would straggle. A melancholy ball would go flat on one side.

At the lake I can smell the fish and frogs. I look to where the Tuffman straw man once hung. Now it's just a pine like any other. I look at the bicycle up in the oak. I look at it for a long time because something is different. I sniff. Fresh sawdust. I trot slowly toward the tree. I see the marks of a saw's teeth in the branches. Someone is trying to cut the bike from the tree. Soon every trace of me in these woods will be gone.

Late that first night, very, very late, I lope out to the lighthouse. By the orange light of an enormous moon I see that the shrubs and brush around it have been cleared. A small garden has been planted. I sniff. Broccoli, carrots, kale, basil. It makes me so mad I could growl. I'll never be able to eat those things again; to crunch and chew and taste something other than meat and bone and fur.

Who has uprooted the bleeding hearts and fern?

I nose the door open carefully. The room has been swept and cleaned.

I sniff. The smell is familiar—like the dining hall after Cook Patsy has sprayed the tables down with her special cleaner.

I look in the oven, even though I know it will be
empty. The ashes and bits of wood and charcoal have been swept out.

It has to be Vincent.

The wolf rage simmers in me. He took my skin and now he wants my lighthouse.

I'm going to play a little prank on him. I'm going to scare his pants off.

I come back often, staying in the shade of the cedars at the edge of the clearing, waiting. My gray fur makes me look more like a shadow than an animal. It's how I feel, too. I'm between skins, between shadows, between shapes.

One day I hear them.

They are coming out of the woods from the path I used to take.

“Are you
sure
Raul wasn't the one?” Vincent asks.

“
He
didn't tell me,” Jack almost shouts, like he's been giving the same answer to the same question for an hour. “Give it up, already. Raul never told nobody nothin'.
Tuffman
told me you freaked when you heard the cougar. Then
I
told everyone else—'cause it was funny, that's why. Nobody ever told me not to tell.”

As he gets closer, I can see Vincent's eyes darting all around. Is he looking for me? Good. 'Cause I'm looking for him.

I push the growl down. I'm not in a hurry. I've got him right where I want him, finally.

“How'd you know this was out here?” Jack asks as Vincent leads him toward the lighthouse.

Vincent stops on the threshold. “I'm fixing it up. In case Raul comes back.”

“Why do you look so scared, Vinnie?” Jack asks. “You do something off the record?”

If he's scared now, just wait until I come charging out of these woods and run him right up to the edge of the cliff.

“You remember that gray wolf at the ranger's place?” Vincent asks.

I hold my breath. Is Vincent actually going to do the right thing?

The two of them step into the lighthouse.

A few minutes later they come out.

“We better get the ranger,” Jack says. He's shaking his head.

“No grown-ups,” says Vincent.

“Face it, it's too big for the two of us,” Jack says.

“He's Raul's dad. He'll hate me,” Vincent says.

“Well, you ain't gonna come out of this smellin' like roses.” Jack shrugs. “But we don't have to tell the whole story, get it? Let Tuffman take the rap.”

They're walking away from me now. My heart is beating so hard the blades of grass on the ground in front of me are trembling.

I can't stop myself.

I run out from under the cedar. I sprint across the meadow. They turn and see me. Vincent screams and falls down. Jack stays on his feet, but he looks scared. I trot the rest of the way to them slowly, tail wagging, tongue out of my mouth, lips drawn back in one wicked smile.

“Get up, Vincent,” Jack says in a tired voice. “It's just Raul.”

I jump and put my front paws on Jack's chest.

Jack scratches my ears. “Don't worry, we're gonna get your dad.”

“Tuffman made me do it,” Vincent says, his face pressed into the grass.

I walk over to him and sniff at his back. He's shaking like a leaf on a tree.

“I'm sorry, Raul,” he says. “I'm really, really sorry.”

What can I say? Nothing. Those are the words I've been howling to hear.

I wait at the edge of the forest. White Wolf waits with me.

The sun is high in the sky. It gets lower. Then lower still. The light of the setting sun streams down through a small opening between leafy branches, making a tunnel of speckled, spackled, dappled light from sky to earth. Through this tunnel of filmy light two boys walk. Behind them are two men. I take a big breath. Thank goodness. They brought Dean Swift.

White Wolf sits up. I nudge her with my nose.
Stay,
I'm saying to her. Because my only fear is that White Wolf will leave.

“I'm still not clear as to how you knew Raul's clothes were on the top rung of the ladder in the Blackout Tunnel?” Dean Swift asks.

“Tuffman told me,” Vincent says. “But I didn't remember until just now.”

Dean Swift makes a face like he can't believe what he's hearing. “You didn't
remember
?” he says.

Then he sees the lighthouse. He whistles softly between his teeth. “So they never destroyed it. Red Bluff has been here all along. I should have guessed.” His face lights up like it does when he learns something new.

I get up and walk across the meadow. We meet in the middle. Tears stream down my dad's face, and he kneels to stroke my fur.

My dad looks up at Vincent. “This better not be some game.”

Then he stands up. “Give him the clothes.” He yanks Vincent by the arm so that he's standing in front of me. Vincent stares at the ground.

“Wait,” says Dean Swift. “Let's put the clothes in the oven. Isn't that where Tuffman found them? And then the rest of us should step back into the forest.”

Vincent doesn't look at my dad, but I hear him whisper, “I'm sorry, Mr. Ranger.”

My dad nods, but there's an unforgiving look around his mouth.

Vincent takes a big breath and walks over the threshold.

Dean Swift tilts his head curiously. “So this is where Vincent has been coming all summer. He told me he had made a memorial garden for Raul.” He scratches his head. “But how did he find the lighthouse?”

Jack pipes up, “Raul told him it was a place you could only find if you knew it was there.”

Dean Swift looks at my dad. I can see them put it all together. My dad cracks his jaw. He looks after Vincent with pure hate on his face.

“Vincent knew about this all along, didn't he?” the dean asks Jack.

Jack lifts his left hand in a lopsided shrug.

Dean Swift's face turns purple. “Here I've spent endless hours reviewing every account of these kinds of occurrences, trying to find some way of bringing a boy back, and that little traitor had the answer the whole time!”

Now Jack and my dad look at the dean with surprise.

“You knew Raul was stuck in the gray wolf?” Jack asks the question before my dad can figure out how to say it.

“Thirty years of research has given me one irrefutable and entirely
natural
fact: These woods are magic.
Native cultures the world over and throughout time believe that there are places scattered over the earth where thresholds, or doorways, exist that allow us to move between the physical world and the world of the spirits. And in these special places, white spirit animals, like the wolf that accompanies Raul, are messengers between those worlds. The local tribes have always considered White Deer Woods to be one such sacred
locus
.”

See how he does it? He only tells as much as he thinks you need to know. He's not going to mention that Fresnel lens. Even he doesn't know how the lens fits into the woods magic, just like he doesn't know that the white wolf is my mother. He knows more than anyone else, but he doesn't know it all, and he'll never tell all that he knows.

“So you're sayin' Raul's a wolf because of these woods?” asks Jack. “Can they turn me into a bear, then?”

“Well, yes, and I don't know. I believe the ability to shift between human and animal states and gain access to these thresholds is passed down genetically from mother to child.” The dean speaks slowly. “The unusual forms of light in these woods are most certainly involved. Either these lights actually give special powers to certain people or they activate those powers in individuals who carry the code.

“I can only make observations,” he says. “The light
phenomena in these woods spoke to me long ago—first as a scientist and then, well, then in the way that only Raul can understand.”

He looks down at me. And I see the shadow of eagle wings on his back. The feathers ruffle in the breeze.

My dad looks skeptical, but he keeps his mouth shut. I mean, here he is in the middle of a clearing at the edge of a cliff on an island in the far west of the country, waiting for a lighthouse to turn a gray timber wolf back into his son.

So what's he really gonna say? That he doesn't believe in magic?

When Vincent returns, they all enter the woods.

I hug my old clothes when I pull them out of the oven. Joy, relief—I can't tell you how happy I am.