Miscreations

by Michael Bailey

  It’s not too late to change, Johnny.

  But I knew it was. I knew there was no way on heaven and earth that I could refuse this moon with a mind to refuse every one to come. I leapt from that train, hitting gravel hard enough to strain a shoulder, an injury that persisted for weeks, but that seemed to clear up just in time for the moon after that one.

  And as goes the man in the car, Angelo Hanks, I never forgot him. Never forgot a word he said. And so he was fresh in my mind when, six years later, I saw his picture on the television set. Saw that he’d been arrested in Tacoma, Washington for having tore a woman’s arms from her abdomen, for having eaten half her legs.

  This from one who’d figured it out.

  The report said the woman survived. Do you believe that? And do you think Angelo Hanks still lives guilt-free?

  It’s amazing how news works, you know, how you might feel strongly one way or another about a tragedy but if the same tragedy happens to you, you suddenly relate to a different song. I suppose you could say I’ve been able to live with myself because this is myself. And isn’t that what any violent man or woman can say? Wolf or not-wolf? Isn’t that the argument being made in a thousand apartments in a thousand cities right now … men and women running for the brandy in the cupboard, crying out,

  This is me, dammit. ME.

  Yep. Feels horrid to admit it now, but that’s been me my whole adult life. For good reason, some might say, as I’ve lived through extenuating circumstances. But again, that decision thing …

  Full moon means it’s up to you.

  I feel compelled to tell you about last night. That’s right, my own story, as recent as it gets. I won’t tell you where I am now. For obvious reasons, I’d like to keep that to myself. But the thing is, I’d been telling myself I’m too old to transform for a long time now. And these days I say no as often as I say yes. These days my head hurts worse.

  So do the thoughts, the memories of what I’ve done.

  I gave it up. Last month. I told myself that was it as, the day after, my body felt as though I’d been in a fight. Even my bones felt sore, bones that have no nerve endings of their own. My chest hurt and my breathing was labored and, if I’m honest, I started thinking about death. I’m an old man, you see? An eighty-year-old werewolf walking the roads of small town X____, muscled, sure, full head of hair, yep, but wrinkled and white as the next one. I know most people think I’m a Navy man, and maybe the tattoo on my chest, visible through the tank top that is my only shirt these days, adds to that. Or maybe it’s the look in my eyes, not of having survived war but violence nonetheless. People can tell, see. You’re all much smarter than you think you are. Here’s a tip: If you see a stranger in town, man or woman, and you find yourself thinking of the wolf, chances are your instincts are right. There’s a wolf in town.

  You can tell by the coupling of the violence and the guilt. Navy man doesn’t have that the same way.

  Did I tell you I killed a schoolteacher in Ohio in 1965? That I tore her face from her head and sent it spinning through the sky until it landed upon a knot in a tree, the bud of the trunk through the eye socket? I left it there. Even the day after, having changed back, I left it there.

  I understand why we kill, but why do we carry out these smaller cruelties, these mean details on the way? I left the schoolteacher’s face on the tree just as I left the father of three’s head on the roof of his car in Indiana. I tore a young woman from a park bench in New Mexico as the man she sat with knew not what to do. I squatted in a field in Vermont, waiting for the same hippies who had invited me to the outdoor party not two days before. I waited in the kitchen of an old woman, older than I am now myself, and when the woman entered the room and saw the beast I am, I showed little mercy, tearing first the photos that hung on the wall above the sink, as if letting her know that her life was over, set to be erased, chronologically from the past up to now.

  Why?

  It’s the demon in us, Angelo Hanks said on that train. The wolf is not only addicted; the wolf is unkind. And the reason we abide, Angelo said, his voice rocky from the speed of that train, is because the wolf has convinced the man there is more depth in the taboo than the accepted. But is this true, Angelo asked? Is the guilt that follows more profound, more telling, more of a teacher, than the joy of turning it away? I asked him if it was a matter of maturity, him being much older than I was at the time. He considered this, for an hour I’d say, silent in the black corner of the car. Then he told me something that’s followed me to this day. Perhaps it’s why I’ve decided to quit.

  The body grows old. Philosophy matures.

  I guess that meant it was up to me. And isn’t that the whole of the werewolf existence? All always … up to me?

  Full moon means you gotta decide. That also means you got the days between the moons to think. Here you weigh what you’ve done, often fooling yourself into believing you may as well continue the carnage, if only to prove to yourself that this is who you are, and there ain’t no stopping it. Because if you did stop … wouldn’t that mean there was something to quit? And wouldn’t that then imply what you were doing before was a terrible thing to do? I don’t need to know other wolves intimately to know that half the reason they sally into the swampy shadows under the bright midnight sky is because not doing it would be admitting wrongdoing. And the wrongdoing of a wolf is a lot worse than yours.

  So we keep going.

  Until, perhaps, a certain maturity does arrive. See, I think Angelo Hanks was wrong when he finally changed his mind and said maturity was in the mind of the beholder. I think it does come. It’s come to me. And if I’m honest with myself, and therefore honest with you, I’ll admit I’d been wanting to quit the life for a long time now. Ten years? Yeah. About that. But quitting takes time, you know. Especially quitting something you’ve long believed to be you.

  Last month, I quit what was me. A particularly messy scene not a hundred miles from where I stand now. And because I quit, that put a spotlight on last night.

  The full moon last night.

  And full moon means you gotta decide. Every time.

  Why was I so confident I’d quit? Was it because I’d said no to full moons before? I suppose it was something like that. Angelo has been on my mind a lot lately, despite his ignoble end. Something like that, too.

  Time was up, far as I could tell, despite the fact that I’d noted the nightly routine of a farmer named Ivan, a young man, the head of a young family, who walked to and from town about an hour after midnight, every night, in order to retrieve fresh water from the town bar as the well out by Ivan’s farm had gone bankrupt.

  Now hear me out. I understand that my watching him was a bad idea. That my knowing his routine by heart was even worse. But haven’t you heard of the man who quit smoking by keeping cigarettes in the breast pocket of his shirt? Way he saw it, that horrid desperation, that feeling of being so far from what he longed for, would never come to pass. Rather, it was right there, at his fingertips if he so desired. And while desire it he did, he could wait, knowing where it was.

  You see? Different ways of doing things is all.

  I knew where Ivan was. Every night. It got to the point where I could play drums on my thighs to the sound of the water rocking in the wood bucket he carried back to his farm, a gift from the town bar. Water to start Ivan and his family’s every day.

  I don’t know the name other wolves have for this process, Angelo and I didn’t speak of it, but “stakeout” certainly works. How many had I spied on? How many lives have I known in this way? Did I tell you that the schoolteacher once sat in a chair in the woods and prayed to God for money? Did I tell you that a woman in Louisiana walked her cat on a leash the same six blocks every night until the night she met me under a moon so gorgeous I think of her still?

  You get to know the routines like most people know the traffic lights, the street names, the signs
. To us, it’s the routines that make up the town. Not the laws.

  So what if I knew the owl would hoot twice before Ivan’s shoes could be heard in the distance? So what if I knew that same owl would hoot a dozen more times before Ivan could be heard returning, the water sloshing in rhythm with those shoes? And so what if I knew the owl would catch, at last, the mouse he’d been waiting for just as Ivan went out of earshot again, as I, eighty years old and sore from crouching in the tall grass beside the road, finally stood up to see the kill?

  I’d already quit as far as I was concerned. I’d already given up the life, my life, the life that, at times, was as profound, inversely, as Angelo’s descriptions of “brief joy.” The first step to quitting is wanting to do so, so they say. And I was well past wanting.

  My body said no. My mind said no more. I was done.

  Then, last night. The test, one might call it, though I don’t like the idea of either passing or failing the moon. It’s a hard thing to explain, that bit there, but I imagine it’d be something like putting a score on your love life. Can you quantify how you’ve fared in love? Can you say whether or not you’ve won or lost, day to day, month to month? If you keep a record, that’s on you. But me? I’m elastic in my feelings for the moon. My nature won’t debase her with a number.

  I’d already told her I was finished. In that same tall grass, as Ivan sloshed home the night before last night, I stood and turned my face to the moon. Face, not snout, a rare sight for her to see.

  Thank you, I said, for all you’ve given me. Thank you for the virility, the action, the blood. Thank you for the feasts that perpetuated my life, that brought me sustenance in a way no restaurant menu and no home cooking could fulfill. Thank you for the chase, the hunt, the run. Thank you for the light to see by, the slants of glorious reflected unseen sun.

  For, in an effort to wean himself off the moon, Angelo proposed that what we really worship is the sun. Why, isn’t it the light of the latter that guided our hunts? I smiled at this attempt, me in shadows, sensing Angelo might not find peace in Seattle, the way he was talking in Illinois. Because I knew (as every werewolf must know) that it wasn’t the light we idolized, but the face suspended in the sky, the eyes and chin, the nose and snout and teeth, there floating in the darkness, so big and profound that it denied the sun, that it refused the sun, using it for us below, taking something so kind and, by way of repurposing it, exploiting the darkness therein.

  Don’t you know, sun worshipers? Haven’t you heard? The wolfman hunts by the same light you dance to.

  I love you, I told her. But the truth of it is, each moon is her own. And while I’ve loved over six hundred, I’d already decided to turn my back on this one. Still, isn’t that some form of love? Perhaps the highest. To resist killing in her name. Bound to her forever, for her being the one you quit by.

  I thought of my parents then, them being the only real coupling I’d ever bore witness to, never having human, daily love of my own. They loved, oh did they love. Uninterrupted, as they never knew the beast they’d birthed.

  I left home three years prior to my first transformation (oh, what a moment, oh, what an era). I could feel the horror on its way. At first it confused me. How could I not wonder at the coming monster that had sprung from them, they being so honest, so mindful, so dear? I was far from them for my first change. Alone in a bathroom, if you must know. And, in the coming months, I snatched more than my share of lovers without once thinking of what the same fate would mean to my mother or father. I can still hear one woman calling,

  Gene? Gene?? GENE?

  But Gene was deep in the dark of night by then.

  I can still see the horror in all of their eyes, scanning the horizon for their other half, so recently by their side. Perhaps the smell of fur kept them searching. Probably they knew something much worse than abandonment had occurred.

  Is what I did to them worse than abandonment? Or am I now doing worse to the moon?

  These thoughts and more, last night, a night of a moon.

  Poor Ivan, the farmer, with three mouths to feed. Yes, I knew his family, by sight, as I followed him the first night I heard him, followed him all the way home. There he had a wife and a daughter, a dog and two cows, a goat. I kept Ivan in my breast pocket, so to speak, within reach.

  Now, as you know, I’ve turned down moons before. So why should this one be any different? Is perspective, point of view, so profound a thing, even to he who is guided by the body, the change, the thirst? I wasn’t worried. I was sad. Yes, me, eighty years old and weeping for the life I’d left behind. For behind it truly was, even as, last night, I crouched under that moon I’d said goodbye to and waited for the sound of Ivan’s shoes, the empty bucket in his hands.

  Do you find me foolish? Do you think me so bad?

  I’ve been foolish before. I snatched a man from a parade. Desperate, I was only twenty-two and he not much more than that. Nobody heard him screaming as I stole him from the very back of the crowd and dragged into an alley. I hardly heard him, what with the music. Last night, Ivan’s shoes made me think of that music, the beat of it, eclipsed, for me, only by the beating of that man’s heart, clenched between my upper and lower jaws.

  Ah, it all sounds so dark, doesn’t it? Hard to explain to someone who hasn’t lived it. Am I an animal who can talk? Who can tell you how guilt-free it is to chase down a deer and burrow my snout in its chest? Or am I a man, here to confess? I’ve tried not to think of these things, through the years, the decades. I’ve tried to ignore my own mind. And that leaves the body, I am living, and therefore reliant on these muscles and bones. At eighty, they’ve begun to betray me. And me, last night, knowing I had no need for Ivan the farmer under that mournful moon, I rose to and entered the deep woods behind me, where the mice tried to avoid the owl.

  In there, I thought of the busted motorcar on the side of an Alaskan highway. This was, what, fifty years ago? Forty? Hard to know, though these incidents do leave an imprint, rings on a tree, wrinkles in skin, a watermark that someone a little more studious than I might pinpoint. In any event, I was much younger, and foolish enough to have found myself possibly hungry for the second time, for a second moon. At the sight of that moon, I’d decided to transform, to take hold of the night. I remember feeling particularly free about it. I remember assuming there would be food to feast.

  But that’s no way to wolf.

  A plan is knowing the routine of the farmer Ivan as he passes, as you yourself are deep in the shadows of the woods, as you hear his steps upon the road and the sound of the bucket clacking against his belt or thigh.

  That Alaskan night, I had no plan. But the moon provides. Mostly, the moon delivers on her promises, though I won’t be the one to say she owes you any. Still, you tell her you love her and she gives you a broken vehicle with a single passenger, a middle-aged woman with a briefcase full of pills and papers. Who am I to guess what the woman was doing out there? Who am I to know? I’m just the one who descended from the incline of evergreens dwarfing her car. I’m the one who, when she looked out the driver’s side window, made her scream.

  Is it too much? Yes, of course it’s too much. But don’t you see? Denying one moon is the equivalent of saying yes to a hundred. Because there’s nobody to tell you not to. No second wolf to direct your decision. You’ve got you and you alone out there, in all the world, all that night. So I felt okay, last night, for having denied the moon. For having said no, at last, to the life.

  I heard Ivan’s footsteps vanish toward town.

  I left the woods then, returning to the grass. I stood there in my jeans and white tank top, the grass to my waist, the letters of my name jutting up over the dip of the shirt’s collar.

  And I looked up at the moon.

  I’m leaving you, I said. But I smiled because I guessed she knew I wasn’t angry, that I couldn’t be, that we shared a bond no two humans could understan
d. And as I gazed upon her, I saw her smile back, something beyond the light, of course, the real her, the rise of half a lip over the side of a her cratered snout.

  You’re awake, I said. But of course she was. What I really meant to say, but was too worried to voice was, You see me.

  I was certain she did. Sure she was looking directly at me, me of all below her, me of all the wolves in the world. I couldn’t look away, as the memories of two dozen kills crossed my mind. Turns in Florida and Wisconsin flooded my mind, as if they were near on the map. And I knew why: It was in both these states that I stole men who reminded me of myself. I was particularly brutal to both.

  I recalled a blonde man in Utah. A runner in Oklahoma. A woman from the patio of a restaurant in Denver, as life went on behind the glass walls of the dining room inside. I recalled them all, every one, as I prided myself for having turned down the life, denied the moon this time, and every time now, retired. I removed my shirt as I walked toward the road, hearing in the distance the shoes of Ivan the farmer, the young man, husband and father, and I told myself,