Pack

by Mike Bockoven

  “Save it. If it happens, it happens.”

  “Even if …” Stu said, asking a leading question.

  “Kenny Kirk once drove six miles in a blizzard to come save my ass when I got stuck. Ron, he set up the wifi in the house. Didn’t charge me. That smaller fella, he mows the lawn at the church. Nobody asked him to. He just does it plus he gives me a big bag of cucumbers every August. He heard somewhere I like cucumbers and I do. Love em. Put them in a bowl with vinegar, water and a pinch of sugar and it’s the one snack by doctor says I can still eat.”

  A chilly wind blew across the porch. October had given way to November and November in Nebraska means the slight nip in the air turns serious. Sidney rubbed his arms.

  “Truth is when you’re in the middle of nowhere you don’t get to pick your neighbors. But that doesn’t make them any less your neighbors.”

  With that, Sidney stood up and walked back in to the house without saying another word. Stu still had a couple dozen houses left to visit at that point, but he had a feeling Sidney had summed it up. Something also felt a little dirty about hearing it said out loud. Of course no one was going to run to the press or the government or the United Nations or whoever because sometime, someday soon, they would need their neighbor’s help.

  Stu saved the hardest conversation for last, which was why he was in “Bar” eating a so so hamburger. Dave walked in around five minutes late with a backpack slung over his shoulder and sat next to Stu at the bar.

  “Sheriff,” he said.

  “You want another pitcher of beer?” Stu asked.

  “No, not today. But we can definitely head to that booth in the back.”

  Chuck made a slight guttural sound to express his disapproval as Stu grabbed his plate and headed to the other end of the building. Dave plopped down and ran his fingers through his facial hair, which he had started growing out since Willie’s death.

  “We probably need to get some things straight.”

  “OK. Shoot.”

  “Well, if I were a pessimist, here’s how I would sum up last week. I would think that local law enforcement knew a secret about me and my family and that I had no assurances that he would be keeping that secret. I’d also think that he saw, first hand, a lot of death and violence that we might have been responsible for. And, if I were a real pessimist, I would worry that he would blame me, personally, for the takeover of his town and all the pain and suffering that it brought.”

  Stu finished up his fries and Dave laid it out.

  “Good thing I’m not a pessimist.”

  The heavy glass plate made a loud noise as Stu shoved it aside and put his elbows on the table, meeting Dave’s gaze. Eye contact had never been his strong suit but Stu held this time. He felt it was important.

  “I’ve spent the last couple weeks talking to people about what happened. A lot of people have vouched for you.”

  “That’s good.”

  “I don’t know if you know how I ended up here, but something very bad happened to me where I used to work.”

  “I heard about that.”

  “I had a real rough go of things and got a lot of advice but there was only one thing that anybody said that helped me out. A therapist told me that being in pain and constantly feeling like shit was a good thing. He said it was proof that I cared about the people I had hurt and if I cared about the people I had hurt, I couldn’t be a bad person. Bad people hurt others and don’t care or don’t even remember it. Good people care.”

  “I think that’s right,” Dave said.

  “I don’t know you or your folks very well, but I’ve heard from a lot of people that you care.”

  “Again, that’s good.”

  “I also heard why folks think this happened and it goes back to those first two murders. Those assholes coming to town, shutting everything down, kidnapping and beating people, all of that, nobody blames you for that and I guess I don’t either. But one of your own killing some local girl and then you guys taking the law into your own hands? You can see where that might be a problem moving forward.”

  “Sure.”

  “Plus those two killings put you on Stander’s radar, didn’t it? Even if people don’t blame you, it’s not a huge leap.”

  “Not a huge leap at all.”

  “So you can see my problem.”

  “Yes, I can.”

  Stu kept unbroken eye contact while Dave got a stupid grin on his face.

  “Something funny?” Stu asked.

  “I’m just sitting here thinking,” Dave said. “I’m thinking of all the guys like me who have sat across the table from guys like you. How this is such a complicated thing but it’s been done, dozens of times for hundreds of years. I’ve never had to have this conversation and you’ve never had to have this conversation but what we’re doing, it ain’t new. Not even a little.”

  Dave reached into his backpack and pulled out a worn, leather bound book, the pages dry and flaky. It hit the table with a light thud and Dave started opening pages.

  “I found this when we were going through Willie’s things. It’s a history of sorts. I never knew it existed until a few days ago and I’ve been reading over it.”

  As he watched the pages flip, Stu could see a variety of different handwritings on the yellow pages, all of which were incomprehensible upside down.

  “Sometimes there were bribes involved. Sometimes, and it says this here, the police were ‘bound by the constraints of polite society.’ That’s an A+ phrase, right there. Sometimes the local law enforcement were relatives, sometimes there were some other type of quid pro quo …”

  “What are you getting at?” Stu said.

  “Nobody ever threatened anyone,” Dave said. “I’ve looked and looked and at no point has anyone like me said ‘keep this secret or we’ll hurt you.’ Never. And this book goes back a ways.”

  “Were you thinking of threatening me?”

  “No, I wasn’t, but I think there’s a bigger point here. I think what this means is our thing and …your thing, it can coexist in this place. I don’t think that’s true everywhere but in Cherry, I don’t know. It works.”

  “It just works?”

  “I think so.”

  Stu let his brain wander for a second to what would have happened in Detroit or Minneapolis or Sterling or Tallahassee or Burbank if one of their law enforcement had set upon a seven-foot-tall wolf creature. Someone would have been there with a camera phone or a dash cam. Someone would have uploaded a video and it would have broken the Internet. Someone would have made a meme about werewolves and it would have turned into a joke before the actual event could be processed.

  Here, it just worked.

  “Of course,” Dave continued, “you came to us at a rough time. This book shows that there have been other times when we had to police ourselves, so to speak. What we’re dealing with is not uncommon, but we have to worry about things my ancestors never had to. I would love to give you my word that our town is safe and you won’t have to worry about us anymore, but it’s looking less and less likely that I can do that.”

  “Then let me police things for you,” Stu said, moderately shocked that the words had come out of his mouth. “If I’m your neighbor than that’s not a half way thing. If you need help, even with your werewolf whatever-the-hell-you-call-yourselves problems, come to me. Or at least keep me in the loop.”

  The stupid grin returned to Dave’s face.

  “I can give you my word on that, Sheriff.”

  Stu smiled too.

  “Thank you, citizen.”

  They left with a handshake and a promise to have Robin cook for the lot of them sometime in the spring. Dave said he had somewhere to be and beat it after a few more minutes of bullshitting and Stu was on the way out before Chuck gave him a quick whistle.

  “Sheriff,” Chuck said. “You didn’t pay for your burger.”

  “Sorry, sorry,” Stu said, fishing out his wallet.

  “I’m not running a charity, he
re,”

  “Of course not,” Stu said, smiling before adding one more word.

  “Neighbor.”

  •••

  Dilly had taken his grandfather’s death hard. Josie could tell because it lit a fire under his ass.

  He had never been a lazy kid but after “the incident” (a term that the group had once used to describe what happened to Byron and now used for the occupation of the town), he started working around the clock as if he were going to war. They were homeless, of course, and had no worldly possessions to their name, so the first 48 hours were spent gathering up donations from neighbors and getting the basics in place. Willie’s place was now vacant and even though it was the last place they wanted to stay, given the circumstances, it was by far the most convenient.

  After a day or two’s worth of grieving and depression that came with having committed several murders and losing your grandfather, Josie found her son up early one morning doing reps on a set of dumbbells that had either been donated or abandoned by Willie.

  “Hitting the weights a little early?” she had asked.

  “It’s the only time I have,” he said. “I’ve got school, practice and then the other practice with dad later.”

  “You guys are going out?”

  “I told him we need to. All of us. We need to get back to doing it for ourselves, you know?”

  Josie did know. Since “the incident” things had changed significantly for her, as well. Her transformations had once been excruciating and traumatizing; now she was mildly looking forward to the next one. There was also a sense, growing every day in her mind, that Dilly was something special in the wolf world and she wanted to explore that and work with him but had decided at this point not to press the issue too hard.

  “If you want, we can go out together without dragging everyone else in to it.”

  “I’ll talk to dad and let you know,” he said between grunts as he started a set of arm curls. “But that sounds good.”

  “I’m stronger than them, you know,” he said just as Josie was leaving the room.

  “I know. They know it too. But it doesn’t mean you get to stop listening to them,” she replied, dead serious, and was met with grunts and the clanking of metal.

  Willie’s death had the same impact on Dave, but in a different way. He was motivated but it was out of anger, not preparation, youthful drive, hormones or whatever else Dilly was on. Dave had lost the chance to reconcile with his father and that meant short fuses and cold shoulders. It also meant they had yet to really discuss what came next. They had never needed to have a discussion more but they kept putting it off.

  Dave was spending a lot of time over at Willie’s house going through his mountains of stuff and when he found the unmarked diary detailing the history of wolves in Cherry, he immersed himself in it. He would spend long nights at the kitchen table making notes, trying to figure out who had made particular entries, what codes meant and going over every line like it was some sort of code. They hadn’t gone to sleep at the same time since the night Willie died, where they had held each other tightly in the guest bedroom, both wracked with equal parts gratitude and depression. Since that night it had spent most of his time at the table and on phone calls he didn’t want Josie to know he was having.

  It was Dave who eventually came to her, two weeks or so into their stay at casa de Willie, as Josie was getting ready for bed.

  “I’ve been going over this book.”

  “Yes you have.”

  “Know what I haven’t found?”

  She put down her book and rolled on her side to face him.

  “What?”

  “Anything like you.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Dave stepped inside the door frame and sat on the bed.

  “It’s stupid, but I always figured Kenny’s mom and Ron’s mom and all these families who do what we do, I always figured they were male wolves and female wolves, right? I mean, my mom, I knew she could change but Willie never let her run with us and she died so suddenly I never got to talk to her about it.”

  “Right.”

  “And when you started to change after Dilly was born, I figured that’s how it worked. I remember asking Willie once and he told me that’s how it worked and I took it for granted. But I’ve been over this book twice and I think I understand what I’m reading and there’s no mention of female wolves in there. None at all.”

  “That kind of makes sense,” Josie said. “Women weren’t always equal, right? Maybe they were just omitted.”

  “I thought that too, but look …”

  He crossed over and carefully opened the book. Even with ginger handling, a few pieces of the old pages broke off the edges as he sat.

  “There’s a census in here, a list of all our people starting all the way back in pioneer days, like the 1860s or so. Apparently when a man took a wife and started a family, sometimes the male heirs would be able to make the transformation and others wouldn’t. They would mark it, here …”

  He leaned forward and pointed at the one piece of scribbled writing.

  “ …that symbol, see it? That means they could make the transformation. Even if they didn’t do it very often, they got the mark. There’s one section …”

  Dave flipped through the pages, concentrating hard.

  “ …here. Some of us who could make the transformation moved away and they had to make a promise they’d never transform again. There’s a whole section on it, the oath they had to take and everything. But they still got the mark next to their name.”

  “And no women ever had that mark?”

  “None.”

  Josie was suddenly very aware of her heartbeat. Willie was the only one who had access to this information and hadn’t shared it with his pack. It’s anyone’s guess if he wanted the information out at all. The fact that he had been trying to keep this from her for unclear purposes sent waves of anxiety crashing in her mind.

  “So I did something,” Dave said.

  “What did you do?”

  “I called Connall.”

  Conall had not contacted anyone in the group since driving away with a busted leg, but his presence had been felt. There had been strange text messages that had come to all their phones from unknown numbers offering vague words of encouragement. One read “Thanks for handling things on your end” and another “Way to kick ass, green horns”. Two days before, a cryptic message reading “whenever you’re ready, there’s a whole world out here” was delivered, and everyone was waiting for Dave to call a meeting and discuss how to respond.

  “Is he still pissed about the leg?”

  “He’s still pissed about a lot of things,” Dave said.

  “Don’t attack my kid.”

  “No argument here, but I went ahead and asked him about female wolves. Turns out, you’re special.”

  “Really?”

  “Really special,” Dave said. “So special Conall said he needs to see us, in Ireland as soon as we can get there. He doesn’t want to put pressure on us, which is why he’s kept his distance, but he wants you, me and Dilly on a plane.”

  “We don’t have a house. How are we going to afford plane tickets to Ireland?”

  “He and his group are paying.”

  “OK.”

  “He’s willing to pay for more than just a plane trip. He said he’ll ‘set us up’ somewhere. If we want, we can pick somewhere else to live and Conall and his group will set us up with housing, cars, jobs. Whatever we want.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Does that offer stand for everyone?”

  “I didn’t ask.”

  “Why can’t he ‘set us up’ here?”

  “Because he said this place is compromised. The company that sent Stander and all of them, they know we’re here and so do other groups.”

  “What other groups?”

  “He didn’t specify, but he said there are other groups that would want to track
us down and he didn’t know how well he’d be able to protect us if we stay.”

  For the first half of her life, Josie couldn’t wait to get out of Cherry, out of the State, maybe further. Her parents had once told her they didn’t care where she lived as long as it was close to an airport and she had big dreams of living abroad, getting to know exotic locales intimately and finding a man from outside her culture. These were dreams she’d often revisited, particularly in her youth. Then Dave and Dilly kept her in Cherry and while her fantasies never left, she accepted that they were fantasies and would never be reality.

  But around the time she hit her early 30s, her mood started to shift. She loved her job. She loved her family. Her situation was unique and while she hated driving 30 miles for basics like food, her roots were deep and set. Every time she visited a city, the crowds and traffic drove her nuts and slowly but surely, the worldly woman she had envisioned had turned into the comfortable Nebraskan she had become.

  Byron had been her last shot at the fantasy, the attractive, charismatic man who could whisk her away to different places and different experiences, at least, that’s what he had promised. Part of her had wanted that so intensely she considered leaving her child and abandoning her husband to torture and death to attain it. But in the end she hadn’t. She had said “yes” to running away with Byron and changed her mind almost immediately. He didn’t take the rejection well, as most charismatic people don’t. Later she learned he was already in over his head and if she had gone with him, it would have come with a cost that would have consumed her.

  She took a second to look at Dave. He was a little fat, a little homely and while he was often in a good mood, the heat he gave off would never be enough for her. She would never want him. She loved who he was but would never love him. But Dave had come up with the plan to stop Stander, Dave had pulled it off, Dave had stepped up and while he was never going to be a good leader, he might be the guy who could lead everyone well enough to get the job done.

  Maybe that was close enough to love for the time being.

  “Let’s go to Ireland,” she said. “But tell him we’re all coming. We’ll hear what he has to say and then come back to Cherry.”