I know it all weighs on you, Uncle. The burden of it is there between your words. Forgive my presumption, but when I am making my own reconciliations—at least, attempting to!—I derive heart sometimes from standing apart from my fear and remembering these words:
“I cannot tell how it mounts on the winds through the clouds and flies through heaven. Today I have seen the Dragon.”
Irrepressibly yours,
S.G.
* * *
Letha was walking to her bus after school when Roman tugged the strap of her book bag and told her he was driving her home. At his car Peter waited with Shelley; he was wearing an inherited plaid driver’s cap and juggling three small rocks, she in breathless captivation. Thus far Letha’s general impression of Peter was one of distaste. Not that they had had any real interaction, but he struck her as one of those boys with overly supportive mothers and proportionate grossly inflated sense of their own hotness. Which isn’t to say she was not dismayed by his social ostracism in a generic state-of-the-world sort of way, but this did not detract from the pervert stare he gave any passing skirt with the apparent conviction when caught at it that his gross gawking was a kind of flattery. And this showboating performance right now, something inherently sad and stupid about exhibiting a pointless skill that required an investment of hours totally out of balance with its value, like the skater boys she always mentally crossed a finger would crash. The fact is, other people being jerks to you doesn’t make you not inherently kind of a jerk. Then, the climax: Peter bending to one knee and catching two of the rocks in his hat and impeccably timing an am-I-forgetting-something face a split second before the third landed on his skull. Shelley applauded vigorously. And with that it is not so much that Letha revised her opinion as that the bottom of her heart fell open and swung slowly back and forth on its hinge. If you have never been a young girl you may not know exactly what this feels like.
“Got any other ones?” said Roman.
“Not with ladies present,” said Peter, arching an eyebrow at Shelley. She hid her face behind her hands with glee.
They loaded up and hit the road. Roman asked if Peter and Letha had been introduced.
Letha turned to the backseat. She was puzzled. Somehow, in her appraisal of his round brown face and feral stubble and deep almond eyes as being vain and vulgar, it had eluded her that it was quite possibly the most interesting face she had seen in her life, a riddle yearning to be solved—the vanity and vulgarity twin guardians of some unknowable mystery it goes without saying she would have to possess. She left her hand on the headrest fearing that if she lifted it to shake his she would reach and touch his face, the precise reason she couldn’t stand museums. Who wants to sit around looking at things?
Peter wondered why Roman’s cousin was looking at him like that, and why she wasn’t shaking his hand. This family.
“How would you like to do us a favor?” said Roman.
“Roman Godfrey, don’t tell me you had an ulterior motive,” said Letha.
“You know that guy we almost creamed? The one who saw Brooke Bluebell?”
She was suspicious. “Yeah?” she said.
“Talk to your pops. See if you can find out more about him. Stuff that might not have made it to the papers.”
There, the wrinkle. Her immediate assumption at the presence of the other boy was that Roman was hanging out with him to piss off his mother, but there being some other moronic and potentially calamitous object was no surprise.
“What are you two up to?” she said.
“That’s on a need-to-know basis,” said Roman.
“We’re hunting the demon dog,” said Peter.
Roman gave him a look in the mirror. Peter shrugged. The open statement of their retarded mission surely less incendiary than an apparent conspiracy.
“No you’re not,” said Letha, less of a contradiction than wishful thinking.
“We think there are mitigating circumstances,” said Roman.
She gave him a Do we? look.
“The demon dog is really a person,” said Roman.
“Have you been drinking?” said Letha.
“Letha, this guy is hurting people,” said Roman.
Letha tallied on her fingers: “(A) it’s not a ‘guy,’ it’s an ‘it’; (B) saying you had a single good reason to think it was a person, you cannot seriously believe you’re better off than trained professionals to go running after him; and (C) A and B aside, what do you think a mental patient is going to be able to tell you?”
Roman was quiet.
“Is that a yes?” he said.
“(D),” she said, “saying it is a person, and saying you find him: What are you going to do?”
“What do you think, sweetheart?” said Roman. “Put him in the pound.”
Letha turned back to the obvious brains (if that was the word for it) of this operation with the look of chastising mother all women are born with. “Can I ask you what possible good you think is going to come from this?”
He met her look with a face evincing that great rarity: not even the hint of need for self-justification.
“No,” he said.
They stopped at a red light abreast a garbage truck and she studied him and wrestled with the conflicting impulses of the ever Herculean endeavor of saving Roman from himself, and in her new faith-filled condition saying yes to whatever this mysterious moron asked of her as her ears were filled with the implacable grind of the neighboring trash compactor.
* * *
Roman dropped off Peter after Letha and told him he’d be back to pick him up at midnight. He added that it would be for the best if Peter didn’t drop by his place anymore—getting himself mixed up in a series of grisly killings was exactly the kind of thing his mother would view like showing up to a dinner party without a bottle of wine: in poor taste. Peter was not heartbroken. He was not convinced as had been the majority of his ancestors that the Evil Eye could kill but neither would he bet the family farm.
Inside the kitchen, Lynda looked out to see an ill-made giant in a mule cart bouncing and creaking up the hill. She squinted, her cigarette precarious over an unbaked casserole.
“Well I’ll be goddamned,” she said.
* * *
The twins came to stay over with Christina. They brought her homework and a box of cookies they could vomit later and a get-well mixer album. Alyssa told her she had a killer reputation and Christina said that was nice. Alexa asked her if she was on awesome tranquilizers and Christina said she was. Alyssa asked if she was okay to talk about it.
“There’s not much to talk about,” said Christina. “I found half a person.”
The twins were quiet.
“Also, I made out with her,” said Christina.
The twins were quiet.
“I thought it was fake, you know?” said Christina. “Like someone’s idea of a joke. So I kissed her. I thought it would be really funny.”
The twins looked at each other. And then at the same moment they burst into a fit of hysterical giggles.
“Lez!” shrieked Alyssa.
Christina expressed no shared amusement. It was not that she was upset but that the sound of their laughter was the first time she felt like a living person since discovering the werewolf’s discarded one, and she was too occupied trying to get purchase on that, to be here with that just a little while longer.
Alexa’s tone grew cautious once more and she asked Christina if she had seen the papers.
Christina toyed with the drawstring of her pajama pants. “Yeah. Mom tried to hide it from me, but I heard something on the radio and looked it up online.”
“Do you … still think it’s that guy?” said Alyssa.
“It is,” said Christina.
Alexa worried the CD open shut open shut. She abruptly stood and said, “I’m going to play this. Oh, my God, it’s so awesome. All necrophiliacs should be so lucky.”
She put the CD in. Alyssa sat on the bed a couple of feet from Christ
ina and said to come here and Christina laid her head in the other girl’s lap and closed her eyes as the first track played and Alyssa stroked her hair. The first track was what had been the defining song of two summers ago that over the course of those months the three of them had sung along together so many times at sleepovers and the pool and the mall and the backseat of the poor sheriff’s car that when fall came they ceremoniously melted the album in the microwave with the shared revulsion of a thing once so consumingly loved. Christina lay there with those fingers running through her hair and mouthed along with the words. A response more involuntary than breathing because you can choose not to breathe when you are awake.
Then Alyssa’s hand stopped without warning and Christina opened her eyes to see the girl peering down at her with a screwed-up face.
“What’s that?” said Alyssa.
Christina was at a loss.
“What’s what?” said Alexa. She crouched down and brought her face in near Christina’s.
Alyssa sifted through Christina’s bangs and pinched an isolated strand, pulling it out for examination, and Christina’s eyes flitted from one girl to the other hovering over her in close scrutiny. The twins looked at each other frowning and Christina’s face was hot and her breathing shallow and she wondered what could be so troubling about the object of study when with an efficient flick of the wrist Alyssa plucked the strand and held it dangling for its former owner to see: this single hair had gone white, as white as the moon.
* * *
At 12:40 a.m. Peter and Roman passed a pair of shovels and a canvas bag through the wrought-iron bars of the fence around Sacred Heart Cemetery and scaled it. They made their way through the rows to a fresh grave itself buried under the histrionics of grief that they brushed aside. The night was clear and cold and they began to dig. Metal carving earth, grunts and steaming breath. The damp smell of carrion earth, death and the weft of life.
“Did you know that people used to think the dead came back as bloodthirsty revenants because the bloating of internal organs made them belch up fluid from inside the lungs?” said Roman.
“Terrific,” said Peter.
“The only reason we started burying the dead in the first place was to keep predators from getting a taste for human flesh,” said Roman.
“Is there like a summer camp for serial killers?” said Peter.
Roman shut up. They dug.
“How many funerals have you been to?” said Roman after he had been shut up for as long as he could.
Peter grunted, hard to count. “Rumanceks are reliably kicking it as a result of positive lifestyle choices,” he said.
“What are funerals like for you people?” said Roman.
Peter was thoughtful. “Committed,” he said. “You’re not allowed to wash or eat. Mirrors are covered and all the dead guy’s stuff is burned.”
“Why?”
“Because a Rumancek should not be remembered in this world for his things.”
“Shee-it,” said Roman.
“Shee-it,” said Peter.
They dug.
“How did Nicolae die?” said Roman.
“Colon cancer,” said Peter. He was reflective. “I was thirteen and had only just started to turn that year.” He shook his head affectionately. “Man, was Nic something. Watching him, you couldn’t swear on the Bible his feet were touching the ground.”
Peter leaned his shovel against the headstone, took out his wallet, and produced from it a wrinkled photograph that he showed Roman. It was a picture of a slim white wolf racing through pine trees and you could not have sworn on the Bible its legs were touching the ground. Lynda had taken it when they knew he didn’t have much time left. In Peter’s own maturation he never failed to marvel in retrospect at the white wolf’s patience. How little he minded the hindrance of a dumb pup. The fastest thing on four legs and he was simply in no hurry. It was still well outside Peter’s grasp: the ageless wisdom that permits you to wait for others to catch up. What a drag.
Roman handed him back the photo and they dug.
But it had been different the last time, Nicolae’s last turn. That night the white wolf had vanished, leaving Peter with no chance of catching up or scent to follow. Peter hunted for him all night but with no hope of success: Nicolae had affairs to settle on which Peter had no business intruding. Peter howled his loneliness to the night’s listening ear and wound up just going home and scratching at the back door and curling at the foot of his mother’s bed. After the sunrise Peter went to Nicolae’s room to find the old man snoring like nothing was different. They didn’t discuss it; in this matter Peter would have to catch up in his own time. The old man died before the new moon.
“They let me do it,” said Peter. “At Nic’s funeral.”
“Do what?” said Roman.
“Cut off his head. Things happen to our kind after we die if you don’t cut off the head.”
They dug.
“So … what kind of things?” said Roman.
“Bad things,” said Peter.
There was the dull voiceless drone of a helicopter behind the hills. They dug.
In time, despite the coolness of the air, their faces began to shine with the sweat of their labor, and Roman wiped his brow and looked into the night where a ring of cloud was passing in the breeze. He put his foot on the pile of dirt and crossed his arms on the shovel, resting.
“I’ve been to two funerals,” said Roman. “One was my dad, in ’99. It’s all pieces. I remember hearing the shot and going downstairs. The way Mom was sitting on the couch, the look on her face like she forgot why she’d walked into the room, you know. He was on the floor. It smelled like her favorite perfume, he’d soaked himself in it. I remember thinking how much trouble he’d be in for wasting it.”
He drifted off, other fragments coming to him. His uncle coming by later that night. He was the one she called, and that was when Roman knew about them. He was too young to know what he knew, but nevertheless. His mother sitting with him every morning and reading out loud what the newspapers were saying. If he was going to hear it he was going to hear it from her mouth. Dr. Pryce dandling Shelley at the service—looking at her like their father never had. Like something of his.
“People like to say it was Mom, but no way,” said Roman. “She would never have done it on that rug.”
“Who was the other funeral?” said Peter.
“Shelley’s,” he said.
* * *
It was near dawn with threads of mist playing cat’s cradle between the graves when they hit it. Roman climbed up to the ground and pulled on his palms to stretch his cramping forearms and the night air felt good on the callused pads of his hands. Peter braced his legs against the side of the hole, wedged his shovel under the lid, and pried. Lisa Willoughby was in a satin blouse safety-pinned at the bottom and completely surrounded with stuffed toys; each had the painstaking imperfection of having been made by hand. The bottom half of the casket was weighed down by sandbags where it was not weighed down by Lisa Willoughby. Peter lowered into a hunker unfastening the safety pin at the hem of the blouse and asked Roman to hand down the bag but got no response.
Roman was fixated on something staring up from near the head: a plush cardinal, the bead of the moon on the curve of its black eye. Roman stared into its black eye lost suddenly to another childhood memory, one of his earliest. A third funeral that had previously escaped him. He had been in bed and jarred awake one morning after a late winter’s snow by a sharp bang against the window. He got up and opened it and poked his head outside. There was a cardinal down on the ground. It was late February and it lay there in the snow, wings spread. He went downstairs and hunched over it, mesmerized by the brazen redness but unspeakable delicacy of the thing. Its black eye quivered and he expected it to roll down like a teardrop. He watched, not noticing the cold, for he didn’t know how long. Until the quiver stopped. He felt a hand at the back of his neck and looked up at his mother.
“Where di
d it go?” he said.
She pointed into the sky, and he tried to follow her finger but had to look away in the bright.
“Earth to fucknuts,” said Peter.
“Sorry,” said Roman and handed him the bag.
* * *
When the sheriff picked up Alexa and Alyssa three hours later, both said “Shotgun,” but as their father called it Alyssa had been a hair quicker and he cocked a finger at her. Alexa climbed grudgingly into the back and their father said to just hold on now while we get ourselves combobulated and handed Alyssa a brimming cup of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee. He backed out of the driveway and asked how Chrissy was holding up.
“We told you not to call her Chrissy anymore, it’s infantilizing,” said Alexa.
“She still says the demon dog is Peter Rumancek,” said Alyssa. They went over a pothole and a spurt of coffee came through the slit of the lid and onto the webbing of her hand. “Ugh, coffee burp,” she said.
“She says it’s going to happen again the next full moon,” said Alexa.
He reached for the cup and gingerly took a sip. His saliva spanned a membrane over the slit and then popped.
“Does she,” he said.
Inch by Inch
That afternoon Peter had company for lunch. This was unusual. For a while he’d sat at the table with the kids who wore dog collars and misquoted the Existentialists, but then they started sitting somewhere else, even the girl called Scabies Peter was pretty sure had left him anonymous voice messages of just moaning a couple of times. He didn’t follow; more to say for eating alone than running around after a girl called Scabies. But today a brown bag was set down across from him and he looked up from his motorcycles and tits magazine to find Letha Godfrey joining him. She opened a container of fruit salad with exaggerated casualness and said, “There’s a rumor going around you’re a werewolf?”
Peter sipped his orange soda. He’d caught that one.
“Well, are you?” she said.
He looked at her. What do you think?
“You know, you really scare people,” she said.
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