by Anna Roberts
“But were they related?”
“Yeah,” said Lehman. “But unless Gloria had been hiding a dick-shaped secret all those years –”
Oh, he had no idea. Wrong shape. And wrong species. “ - but they were related? That hair sample didn’t come from Gloria. It came from her first husband.”
“Your girlfriend’s grandfather,” said Lehman. “Makes sense.”
“It does?”
“Sure. Gloria’s gone, so Blue moves on to the next elderly relative.”
Gabe leaned across the table, trying not to think too much about that suitcase full of money. “You’d better watch your mouth, because you don’t know her. I’ve never known anyone to care less about money; all she ever wanted was...”
He stopped, realizing too late that he didn’t know. She said she’d come to the Keys to scatter her mother’s ashes, but that she’d found a job and stayed. And then what? What did she want beyond that? He was pretty sure it wasn’t cleaning hotels for the rest of her life.
“Wanted what?” said Lehman.
What she wanted then was different from what she wanted now - Gabe knew that much. In just three short months her whole world had changed into something unrecognizable, and now she was a part of it, always and forever. She’d always been a part of it; maybe that was why she’d been adrift in her life before. Not like now, now that she had an adversary to fight.
There was so much he needed to admit to himself about Blue.
In the end it was curiosity that got the better of him. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the charred, crumpled mugshot. “This guy,” he said. Was she looking for him or was he? It didn’t matter any more.
Lehman looked like he’d seen a ghost. “Where the fuck did you get that?” he said, and his voice was shaky. Figured. He’d watched his partner eat himself to death - and according to Grayson’s theory - had probably had Yael under his skin for more than five minutes. According to Blue, five minutes was more than enough for a lifetime.
“Here’s where things get a little weird,” said Gabe. “Or weirder. A little bird told me that it came from you.”
“Me?”
“Yep. Charlie Silver says you handed it over to him.”
“I did not,” said Lehman. “I had an evidence file stolen, yeah –”
“ - you don’t remember handing that over either?”
“Why would I do that?” said Lehman. “That makes no fucking sense.”
“I don’t know. Do you often do things you can’t remember?”
Lehman snorted. “If you’re trying to gaslight me then it’s not fucking working. It’s a condition, okay? A mild form of epilepsy - it’s managed.”
“And do your higher ups know about this?”
“You little asshole,” said Lehman.
Gabe held up his hands; he had to cop to that much right now. “Maybe,” he said. “But you’re not doing this on the taxpayer’s dime, are you? In fact, if you’re not working with the full sanction of your superiors I guess what you’re doing could be construed as stalking. Harassment of a private citizen. I don’t know the exact legal definition, but I’m sure you do. Either way, I can see you’ve been under some stress lately. Maybe that’s why you’re chasing ghosts.”
“Oh, I’m not,” Lehman said. “Whatever Gloria had to do with it is just the tip of the iceberg –”
“ - whatever Gloria had to do with what? She was a sick old lady who didn’t want to get any sicker, so she blew her brains out. End of story.”
Lehman shook his head. “That’s one way of looking at it, I guess.” He tapped a finger on West Lafayette’s forehead. “Or the granddaughter showing up reminded her of a whole bunch of things she’d rather not remember about her son.”
“Like what?”
“Like the fact that she birthed a monster,” said Lehman.
Like Gloria would be shocked that her kid was a werewolf. She’d have been more surprised if he wasn’t. “Monster is as monster does,” said Gabe.
“You’re damn right,” said Lehman, finger tapping away on the photograph. “And this guy? He did three of them, they say. Every full moon. All they ever found of the bodies was the odd bone they found tossed by the side of the road.”
Gabe turned cold. He’d heard it, the same as everybody. The stuff of campfire stories and down home boogeymen. His shock must have shown on his face, because Lehman nodded and almost smiled, like someone delivering the punchline to an urban legend.
“That’s right, Gabe,” he said. “I think Gloria’s baby boy here was the Keys fucking Cannibal.”
6
There’s fresh paint on the porch railings, a new mirror hung alongside the front door. If you weren’t looking the in the right places you might have been fooled that you were looking at a normal house, respectable, even. Until Gloria steps out.
She’s given up. The kid, the house, the husband, the white picket fence – she’s finally admitted those things weren’t for her. Once she thought that they – like Warren Yates or the rank of prom queen – were the greatest things she could ever aspire to, only to realize that for someone like her, someone with sharp enough teeth to take a bigger bite out of life, they were only settling.
It’s the middle of the afternoon and she’s wearing a dark green maxi dress that – judging by the amount of sunburned cleavage – is meant for the evening. She wears a chain of beaten metal butterflies around her neck and her hair falls in fat curls, a Kool smoldering on her glossed lip. She’s almost thirty-three and old enough to know better, but someone indoors isn’t and that’s why there’s a cop car outside her front gate, the exhaust farting foulness into the hot Florida air.
The engine stops, the door opens. Badges wink in the sunlight. “Miz Blanchard?”
Gloria holds up her left hand, palm inwards. There’s a new ring there. “It’s Tessio now. My divorce came through.”
“Huh. Never knew you were Italian.”
“I’m not. My husband is.” Larry’s off selling kitchen fittings and balling secretaries. The rot had set in long before she moved back to Islamorada, but he bought the old house back for her. Maybe she’ll get a new kitchen floor out of him before she cites his wandering eye as grounds for divorce number two.
“Huh,” says the cop. “Italians. Ain’t they into communism?”
“Ism, jism,” says Gloria. “Capitalism, Communism, Catholicism. If there’s an ism on the end of it you can be sure someone somewhere is pulling your prick. And not in the good way. What do you need, officer?”
“Frankie Cobb,” says the cop.
“Uh huh.”
“He here?”
“Nope.”
“Has he been here?”
“Yep.”
“Night of the fourth?”
“He was here,” says Gloria, stubbing out her smoke. “Helping me tear up the old floor. I’m getting a new one in the kitchen. You want to take a look?” She nods to the pile of linoleum at the end of the porch. Same old orangey-brown stuff that Celeste went splat facedown on back in 1962. It was old back then, but fifteen more years of humidity have turned it to curly-edged shit. She told Larry she wanted terrazzo this time, although she doesn’t have a lot of faith in his ability to deliver. Just like his dick never lived up to the promise of his white teeth, dark eyes and hairy chest; he’s the king of half-assing it. That’s why he’s a traveling salesman, so’s he can drive away from his deals - the leaky bidet, the temperamental garbage disposal.
The police officer squints at the old linoleum. Gloria steps aside to let him indoors, pointedly ignoring Yael’s growl. Maybe on some wordless, spine-shivering level the young cop knows that there’s something in the house, because he holds up a hand and shakes his head. “No, ma’am,” he says. “We’re good. Thank you for your time.”
“Okay then,” says Gloria. “Bye bye.”
She closes the door. Yael rakes at the insides of her bones; she trapped him and he’s mad as hell, but what was she supposed to do?
Hand over the kid? Having Yael inside you is like having a great white thrashing around under your skin. Fairy tales are just that; the reality is that there are some things you don’t do to children, least of all your own.
The butterflies are warm against the skin of her neck; something’s set him off, but it’s not poor, dopey tow-haired Frankie Cobb. Yael likes young men, but Frankie is too dumb to tickle his fancy. Frankie’s the kind of person who fucks up on a regular basis and yet thinks that the consequences of his dipshit actions are some kind of karmic kickback that he could never have seen coming. Something missing in there, some fundamental disconnect between cause and effect. If he didn’t have two thumbs and a dick he’d be entirely useless.
Frankie stands on the bald kitchen floor, his head under the faucet and his mouth open. He remembered that much - she told him not to touch the glassware after he’d been shoveling the chicken coop.
“So,” she says, and he straightens, almost braining himself on the kitchen tap. “What did you do this time? Please tell you didn’t try to knock over the liquor store again.”
“It was nothing, I swear,” says Frankie, smoothing the sweaty spikes of his hair. “We were just hanging out back at the restaurant, having a smoke, and then this cop car rolls by and I guess they can’t tell the difference between a joint and a goddamn cigarette –”
“ - yeah, I get the picture,” says Gloria. She knows the police know only too well, and that what Frankie was smoking on a break was definitely not tobacco. Although knowing his luck it was probably oregano. “Jesus, child. Do I have to go through this with you again? Do you know what will happen to you if you go to prison?”
Frankie chews his lip for a moment. “Uh...I’ll get raped?”
“That, too,” says Gloria. “You can’t go to prison. You can’t afford to go to fucking prison. Remember they had that riot up in Okeechobee? Everyone went bugnuts and they blamed the full moon. Only that one prisoner - they never got him back. He escaped and they never found him, although one of the guards said he accidentally shot what he thought was a German Shepherd in all the confusion. Couldn’t figure out how it had gotten in there. Guess what, dumbass? That wasn’t a dog. Now finish up with the chicken shit, and remember - getting shot in a prison riot is going to be the nicest thing that happens to you if you wind up in the goddamn pokey.”
It’s barely a day away. She doesn’t know exactly what would happen if Frankie happened to be locked up in the cooler at the wrong time of the month, but she thinks of little else these days. All these boys keep drifting to her door, runaways and fuck-ups and black sheep, all of them messed up by what the moon keeps doing to them. She used to think Meg McBride was just some story that Celeste told to add color to their white-trash ancestry, but genetics has a way of coming back to bite you in the ass. Gloria has failed at marriage and failed at motherhood, but she’s ended up a wolf witch without even trying.
There’s the sound of an engine idling outside, and she sighs, bracing herself for another brush with the law. Spare me from persistent cops. If they keep this up she’ll have to bust out the big guns, stare into their eyes hard enough to poke her will into their brains and scrape their memory clean as carefully as she can. She doesn’t like to do it if she can help it; it’s more of an art than a science and not as precise as she’d like it to be.
(Or it reminds her of that time she gave grandma a stroke, said Yael. Told you she knew how.)
Only it’s not the cops. It’s worse. It’s fucking Maury, still driving that janky-ass station wagon from seven years ago. There’s new gray in his black hair and those fashionable flat front pants only draw attention to the little gut he’s sprouted since she last saw him.
“What the hell are you doing here?” she says, but she knows anyway. And she knows who’s in the back of the car, because Yael is howling (you promised you promised pay the fucking piper already Gloria) and thrashing hard enough to break her bones from the inside.
“Your kid,” says Maury. “Is sick.”
“He can’t be here.” The butterflies burn hot around her neck again. Oh, he wants out. He wants out of her and into the boy, but that’s not going to happen. It wasn’t a fair bargain. She had no idea what she was signing up for when she made it.
Liar liar, pants on fire...
“He has to be somewhere,” says Maury. “May as well be here. And don’t you look at me like that, Gloria. I did a little digging into your family tree; all your Keane cousins and all those other winners.”
“Like your family were kings of the goddamn swamp,” she says, remembering her ex mother-in-law, a woman who kept yabbering about how the Blanchards were descended from lost kings of France, like she hadn’t come by the name simply by opening her legs. Almost as pitiful an achievement as being born to it in the first place.
“Whatever,” says Maury. “At least we didn’t have that in the family.”
She knows what’s wrong before she even sees him. West steps shivering from the station wagon, her little boy stretched into the shape of a lanky pre-teen. His angel baby blond hair is gone now; it was darkening to brown when she left him, but now it’s as black as his father’s used to be.
“It skips generations,” she says, and the words fall out of her mouth, like a reflex, like a prayer that things are going to be different for him. But they’re not. It skips generations when the father’s a werewolf, but if it’s the mother? Well, that’s asked and answered. The boy looks like he’s shivered so long and hard that it’s left him the freckled little toothpick standing before her. When she meets his blue eyes – her own eyes – she knows it’s under his skin, vibrating in the core of his bones, throbbing in the roots of his teeth and burning in the gaps where the substance of boy blurs with the substance of the man he’s becoming. The wolf’s howling under his skin and there’s not a damn thing she can do about it.
There is, says Yael, and his voice sounds wet, like if he had a mouth it would be watering. She tastes blood and swallows him down, out of sight.
Maury doesn’t know anything of this. He’s just a dad looking to dump a kid that got overgrown, like a puppy that was cute once but turned into an outsize shitting machine that ate the couch and humps on neighbor’s legs. And then he says the thing she knows she’ll never forgive him for. “Is he even mine?”
Once it was a fair, if nasty question. Now it’s just outright assholery; the kid’s clearly got his nose, his chin, the same sullen way of peeking up from under his messy black hair that she used to find sexy when his old man did it. And he just asks her right in front of the boy.
“You son of a half-bright whore,” she says. “Of course he’s yours.”
Maury pushes the kid through the front door. West stumbles, glances at the mirror beside the door that’s meant to keep the devil out. Can’t do a thing about the devil that’s already inside, but that’s superstition for you; it’s just witchcraft that got passed down and garbled in a game of Telephone or Chinese Whispers, diluting its efficacy.
“Go on in, son,” says Maury. “You remember your ma, don’t you?”
Gloria nods him inside the house and the boy vanishes indoors, even though he has no idea where he’s going; the conversation was hurting him and he wants to get away from it. “You shithead,” she says to Maury. “How dare you ask that in front of him? He’s the spit of you.”
He shrugs. “Sure, but he got it from somewhere, and you don’t see me howling at the moon once a month.” He looks at her and then – after all these years, he was never that bright – she swears she could almost hear the thud of the other shoe dropping. “Jesus,” he says, slowly. “You?”
“Yup.”
“I don’t remember you ever...holy Christ, Gloria. How the hell do you keep a thing like that secret?”
It’s a long story, but a short answer. “Practice,” she says, thinking of the old joke. How do you get to Carnegie Hall?
“Well,” he says. “You better start teaching him, then.” He nods to where the
boy is lurking in the hallway, bright blue eyes dark in the indoor gloom. “He’s your problem now, you goddamn wolf bitch.”
And with that he just walks away. Like she was the bad parent all these years. “Better a wolf bitch than a fuckin’ deadbeat,” she yells after him, and then realizes too late that she’s going to have tone down all the fucks and motherfuckers around the kid. It’s bad enough she accidentally promised him to a ghost that she didn’t know wanted to wear him like a pair of socks, and now she can’t even keep from saying dirty words in front of him.
She closes the front door. It’s dark now that she’s used to staring into the glare of the outside, but the butterflies around her neck burn so hot that she’s surprised they don’t light up the room with their glow. She’d have scorch marks, if she ever dared take them off, but she doesn’t. Not in bed or her bath. Like most bogies and bugaboos, Yael is afraid of iron.
The kid looks like he’s growing by the minute. He can look her in the eye for now, but she knows it’ll be a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment before he goes streaking up to the sky like young boys do. Takes after his dad; she’s always been on the short side.
“Well,” she says. “Better go kill a chicken for dinner. Since we’re all out of fatted calves.”
He doesn’t say a word. Can he even talk? Maybe Yael sneaked into his head one night and made him mute, or simple. Like a dog in a manger.
She’s halfway across the kitchen when she hears his voice for the first time.
“Can I watch?”
Gloria turns. “What?”
West shrugs. “I wanna see if they still jump around when their heads are cut off.”
“They flap a bit is all. You don’t wanna see a thing like that; you’ll have nightmares.”
He follows her all the same. Frankie’s nowhere to be found, the shovel leaning against the side of the chicken house. He’s swept the yard with the stiff broom, the wrong broom, taking off the top layer of dirt and baring the points and angles of last moon’s bones. West bends, folding himself almost in half, his long brown fingers shaking part of a lamb’s pelvis loose from the earth.