Wolf Gang

by Chris Lynch

  Even with a sporting head start, we probably wouldn’t go after the kid. But we did get out of the car to stand behind our leader.

  “Ah, it’s the fat one? You got your cape on in there? That what you boys do all day, fly around inside a locked garage? Open this door or I’ll chew my way in and kick you so hard you will land on the planet Krypton.”

  Ling started running backward away from the door. “Oh god, Steven, it’s Vanessa.” He barreled—much faster than he could run in forward gear—all the way back to the Lincoln and dove inside. All the while he kept staring at the door as if Vanessa was going to bore her way through like the thing in Aliens.

  Not that He-Man Ling’s afraid of her, now. He just doesn’t like her much, that’s all.

  “Nessy?” Cecil called, hopping back into the car beside Ling. “That’s the little mean one, ain’t it?”

  I stood there in the middle of the garage, my hands on my hips. “I just want to tell you guys what an honor it is to be associated with you. No, really.”

  Alone, I walked across the garage to face the fierce Nessy—through a bolted door.

  “What do you want here, Ness?” I growled.

  “Yo, Johnny Chestcold,” she said. “How ya doin’?”

  “State your business.”

  “I wanna come in.”

  “Course you do,” I said. “Who doesn’t? Beat it, beastly.”

  “I got a proposition,” she said.

  “We already heard from your boss. We’re not interested in being Wolf Gangers.”

  “Neither am I,” she answered. “It turned out to be the wimpiest club since the Camp Fire Girls.”

  Now she had my attention. And Ling’s, and Cecil’s, as the two of them slithered their way out of the car and toward the door, where I was.

  “No kidding?” I said, but then I didn’t want to sound too excited. “Well, right, naturally. I could have told you that a long time ago. So, tell me, what is it you do want here, Nessy?”

  “I wanna be a He-Man,” she said.

  Now, most times, a guy can keep his cool no matter what a person says to him. Then, there are other times …

  “You wanna be a what? A what? A what?” I babbled. I turned to Ling. “Ling, what did she say? She wants to be a what? Did she say what I thought she—”

  “A what?” Ling babbled right back. “I think she said … no, I have to be wrong. I know she didn’t say …”

  Nessy, from out on the sidewalk, was laughing raucously.

  “Cecil?” I said, obviously desperate. “Cecil, buddy, did she say that she wants … in my precious He-Man…?”

  Cecil cupped his hands over his ears, in case she said it again.

  She said it again.

  “I mean it. I want to be in your club. Don’t be afraid. Think about it for a minute. I will be the best new member you ever had. One, I could whip all you guys and all the Wolf Gangers, at the same time, blindfolded, with a dress on. Two, you’re down to practically no members left as it is, and you’ll have to take my word for it—there ain’t no line gathering behind me out here to sign up. And three, I guarantee you I hate those other guys even more than you do, and we all know the kind of stuff I’m capable of once I get heated up about something.”

  Ling quietly groaned his agreement and rubbed his big round belly. She once gave him such a vicious finger-poking in the stomach that his mom took him to the hospital to see if his appendix had burst.

  “So,” she said, “what do ya say?”

  What do I say? This was the He-Man Women Haters Club, for crying out loud. Sure, we didn’t have the sign hanging outside yet, but still, everybody knew ….

  “Ah, Vanessa,” I said carefully. “You know, there’s this problem. After all, you are a girl … I mean … right?”

  She paused, then answered with an offended tone.

  “Not hardly, I ain’t,” she said.

  There was—for the first time in a long time—agreement among the He-Man ranks. She wasn’t hardly a Women as far as we three were concerned.

  “I don’t know, Nessy. We have to huddle on this one.”

  She was growing impatient with us. “Oh jeez, ya big buncha babies. So go on and huddle already, but be quick about it.”

  We huddled. She interrupted. “But don’t forget. If I ain’t a member of the club, then I’m a dismember.”

  I do believe she could hear the triple gulp all the way out there on the sidewalk. That would explain her laughter, anyway.

  I surveyed my men.

  “What do I think?” Cecil repeated. “I think I ain’t never met such a skeery little bit of a thing in my life. I think if we let her in, I won’t never have a minute’s peace inside this garage again.”

  “And if we don’t,” Ling added, “you won’t have a minute’s peace outside it.”

  “Good point,” Cecil said.

  “Oh, this is pretty,” I said. “The two of you sure are a recruiting poster for the club. Why don’t we just sign up every kid who makes you nervous, huh? We’d have to find a bigger garage to hold them all, but at least we’d never be lonely.”

  “Hey, good one, Johnny,” Ness called from way yonder.

  “All right,” I said. “She even has ears like a golden retriever.”

  “More like a bat,” she said.

  The sad part was, it was so plain to see that Vanessa was—after myself, of course—the He-Manliest recruit we’d ever had. But that wasn’t the issue here, was it?

  “We have discussed it,” I announced, even though it wasn’t much of a discussion and Vanessa heard every word. “And we’re not interested. We’re not afraid of you, ya gargoyle, and we can’t see what good you could do us anyway.”

  She was totally cool and unflustered, just like I like to be. “What good I could do you?” she responded as the three of us headed back to the safety of the Lincoln, where we would probably spend the rest of our days now. “Well, I figure, since I am still officially a Wolf Ganger, and since nobody knows I’m here … I might make one mighty mighty double agent …”

  I stopped in my tracks. The other boys kept walking, because they don’t have my vision.

  “… and I might very well be the exact thing someone might need, if they were interested in bringing the Wolf Gang and its leader …”

  “To his kneeeeeees …” I hooted as I spun and raced to unbolt the door.

  “Welcome aboard, He-Man Vanessa,” I said, shaking her scaly little hand. But before I let her in, I stopped her. “One question first: Why?”

  She shook her head, tightened her lips so hard her mouth looked like a white Life Saver.

  “If you could see what those … girls … have done to my little Jerome …”

  There was blood in Vanessa’s eyes. Now, more than ever, I was glad I was not one of those … girls.

  6

  Bring ’em Back Alive … or Not

  WHO’D HAVE BELIEVED IT?

  We went from being a nearly dead-in-the-water, over-the-hill, lifeless has-been outfit to being a mean and motivated crack operation overnight.

  And it was all because of a girl.

  Well, not a girl, exactly, but Vanessa, which was close enough.

  “You, chubby,” she barked at Ling. “You’re gonna have to stay on the outside watching from the street because there ain’t no crevices with the capacity to hide you.”

  He saluted her. No lie, Ling saluted her, and accepted his assignment as if it came straight down from his hero, General Patton himself.

  She was very hard to not listen to.

  “You, beanpole.” That would be Cecil. “Lemme see you imitate a coatrack.”

  We waited and watched.

  “Excellent,” Nessy said. “That’ll work fine.”

  Cecil raised his hand. “But I ain’t done nothin’ yet. I was just thinkin’ ’bout it….”

  “Great,” she said. “When the time comes, you just think, and you’ll look like a coatrack.

  “You.” Me.
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  “Wait right there,” I said. “Don’t think you’re going to start bossing me. Here in my club—”

  “Course not,” she replied. “Wouldn’t think of it.”

  She stopped, and waited.

  “All right then,” I said after a respectful waiting period. “So what do I do, Ness?”

  When we got to the shop, the first order of business was to survey the situation from the outside. The four of us crouched down behind a line of parked cars. It was a little difficult to see and not be seen. But even through the windows of the car that hid us, and the plate glass of Yvette’s big showy storefront, what we saw was sickening.

  There he was, our Jerome, back in the same spot where we had left him that fateful day. He was getting his nails done again, right up there in the front window for the whole world to see.

  “How often does he get his nails done?” I asked.

  “Every day that he’s here,” she said. “Can you believe this? Look at him, Johnny. Will ya look what they’ve done to our boy?”

  He was “our boy.” Mine, because he was an original He-Man. Nessy’s, because she had long held a dream of carrying Jerome off on her back to live in her cave.

  “He was such a … man before they got ahold of him.”

  Even I wouldn’t go that far. But I got the point.

  “He certainly is a mess,” I agreed. Even through all the glass and across that distance, you could see the sheen coming off the hand that had already been polished. It was like he was wearing a set of tiny white Christmas lights on his fingertips.

  “That looks a little different to me,” I said. “It doesn’t look like before, when he was just getting his nails buffed up like a shoeshine. There’s … something in there.”

  “It’s called a French manicure,” she said with so much disgust and anger, I thought she’d tear the side panel right off the car. “They give him the high shine, then paint just the very tips with little half-moons of white polish.”

  “Oh my god,” Ling said. I was thinking it too, but could not form words at that point.

  Nessy was staring flames in the direction of the manicurist. “She holds his hand way longer than she needs to. If she don’t let go of him in the next two minutes, I’m gonna be her next customer. I’ll let her buff my knuckles with her forehead.”

  My, the new recruit was fitting in nicely.

  “All right, let’s move in,” Vanessa said. “This is our moment. The only ones in the shop this early are Jerome and his personal stylist there, so we need to set up now.”

  We left Ling there skulking around out front, while Cecil, Vanessa, and I went around to the infamous aquamarine door. Once inside, Vanessa manhandled Cecil up against the wall, stripped the real coatrack of all its sweaters, pink rubber raincoats, and umbrellas, and piled them high on Cecil. She then shoved him behind the vinyl sofa/hair dryer station. He looked no different from the real rack, which she laid on the floor.

  “Cecil, you’re a natural, man. You ever done any acting before?” I asked.

  “You can tell, huh? Truth is, I played Winnie-the-Pooh in the local theater one time. Remember the time ol’ Pooh got hisself stucked in rabbit’s hole ’cause he was eatin’ way too much honey? …” Cecil laughed at the memory. “Course, I only played the back-end part of Pooh, for the scenes when Tigger an’ them guys were tryin’ to get his little bear butt out of—”

  “Act like a coatrack!” Nessy snapped. It would take her longer than most to get used to He-Man Cecil.

  Myself, I got the prime spot. It was a small, secret passageway that ran the length of the building, behind the salon’s wall. When I slipped myself into the space, I practically got pinned between the cinder-block exterior wall behind me and the two-by-four studs that framed the interior one. I felt like a rat, squiggling around inside the hidden dark places where nobody else would go.

  “So what am I supposed to do from in here?” I asked as Nessy pointed me into position.

  “Keep going, keep going,” she said.

  After I’d slid about ten feet in, I reached the spot. Right there in front of my face, the whole front room of Yvette’s Hair-Nails-Aromatherapy salon opened up, like a wide-screen TV program. I was behind the big mirror where the person getting clipped stares at herself. It wasn’t exactly a two-way mirror, but at that range it was awfully close.

  “Isn’t it illegal or something,” I asked, “to have spying equipment in a place of business?”

  She shrugged. “It might be illegal, but it sure is a lot of fun. You ever watch someone closely when they’re watching themselves closely?”

  I don’t even like to watch myself closely.

  “No,” I said.

  “Have fun,” Ness said, and disappeared.

  The first subject I got to test it out on was, of course, Jerome. Fresh from his French fry finger festival, he walked directly to the hair chair right in front of me. There was nobody there to wait on him, so he killed time.

  I barely recognized the creature before me. He wore these baggy wool pants that came to a tight tapered peg at the ankle. He wore a crisply pressed sky-blue shirt with a foolish little polo player whacking its way across the pocket. His shirt was neatly and permanently tucked in at the waist (which is significant because the waist of Jerome’s pants used to be yanked up so high you wouldn’t have been able to see the little polo man). Suspenders kept the pants in place.

  Suspenders, for crying out loud.

  “Dink,” I muttered before I could clap a hand over my mouth.

  Jerome looked up at the sound of my voice. He stared straight at me, as if looking for me. I stopped breathing. He stared closer. He got up out of the chair and took the three steps to where he was nose up with the mirror. And with me.

  A look of recognition came over his face, and a knowing smile. I knew I was cooked.

  Then he smiled broadly, licked his teeth. Took a step back. Fingered an early-stage pimple on his chin, pointed at his reflection, and winked.

  At himself.

  The risk of giving away my position was the only thing that kept me from retching right there.

  As Jerome remounted his throne, Yvette and her rotten little daughter Monica strolled in.

  “Ah, all ready for another hard day in the salt mines, eh, Jerome?” Yvette joked.

  “Oh, no salt,” he answered. “You know it dries my skin out something awful.”

  I began a silent dialogue with Jerome.

  “I’m gonna do something awful to your skin, boy …”

  Jerome patted the very top of his new mountain of sprayed, bent, folded, and pompadoured country-singer hair. “Do you have time to just clip the sideburns, Yvette?”

  “Sideburns?” I croaked. “You pimple-faced, white-washed, snotty-nosed … you couldn’t grow even one decent sideburn if we fertilized your face and left you out in the sun all summer.”

  “Sure,” Yvette said. “We’ve got time.”

  As the trimming began, Monica approached. “Ma, not again. Tell me you’re not going to waste another day working on Conway Twit over here.”

  “Never mind about him, Mon, just go over there and make sure the aromas are all filled.”

  “I always wanted a little sister anyway,” Monica groused as she left.

  Good one, Monica. You’re still a beast, though.

  Vanessa, cool as could be, came marching in from the back room. She walked right up and stood next to the “client,” the two of them now staring straight ahead to where I was. Vanessa looked so unnatural and guilty, I wouldn’t have been surprised if her first words were, “Morning, everybody, I’m a dirty rotten double agent, did I tell you that?”

  “Can I do something for you, Ness?” Yvette asked her.

  “Oh, um, no. My hair’s perfect, thanks.”

  Sure, if you think steel wool is perfect.

  “Vanessa, you’re blocking my light,” Jerome said in a shockingly bold and un-Jerome-y move.

  “There are fifty million l
ights in this place, Jerome,” she answered.

  “Yes, but that one back there makes me look more like I have lips.”

  Vanessa stared triple-depth into me. “See,” she said, pointing at Jerome.

  “See what?” Jerome asked.

  Nessy was already heading back to the storeroom. “See what a simp a boy turns into if he doesn’t have four other boys around him at all times.”

  Everyone in the place said, “Huh?” but she just slammed the door behind her.

  “Come on, Yvette,” Jerome said as his clipping was ending. “When do I get to work on somebody?”

  Excuse me?

  “We’ll see.”

  “Oh, please? You keep saying I’ll get to cut some hair, but then you don’t let me.”

  Come again? This couldn’t be. This could not be. No, not even a former He-Man can work in a beauty parlor. This was just getting to be more than I could bear.

  I slithered my way along the wall, back toward the storeroom. I peeked in to find the coast still clear. Cecil was doing an amazing coatrack, superhuman. Vanessa was working away like a squirrel (or an employee on the last day of a job) yanking Girl Scout cookies out of their boxes and stashing the inner packages into her pockets.

  “Hey, Cecil,” I said. “This has reached crisis stage. We have to do something, and we have to do it now. There is absolutely nothing left of the Jerome we knew, and if we don’t help him immediately, I don’t know if we’ll be able to bring him all the way back.”

  “Told ya,” Vanessa said, hiding an extra few cookies in her mouth.

  Cecil, rigid as an oak, had not responded. He was still in character.

  “Cecil,” I said, “you can stop being a coatrack for a minute. I have to talk to you.”

  Nothing.

  “Cecil,” I said, nudging the great stack of jackets in roughly the spot where Cecil’s ribs would be.

  “Wha—?” he responded, making the unmistakable snort noise of a person being startled awake.