by Toby Barlow
she is her own brand of beast.
She could play in your yard, but
you would not want to find her
crossing your trail in the twilight.
And were you cornered by her,
eye to eye,
you would see that
there are still some watchful creatures
whose essence lies unbound by words.
There is still a wilderness.
XIII
Over time, the intensity of the days
plays on Lark’s nerves.
One rival pack is a new thing.
He needs to be careful.
Two rival packs is downright bad news.
And three games to play. Damn.
Napoleon had only Wellington and Blucher.
Roosevelt had Europe and the Pacific.
Augustus had the Gauls and his wife.
But Lark has three games.
Ah, to hell with it.
The cards have been dealt
and no matter what
everyone’s in.
So pay attention.
He sends her down with Bone to get the dogcatcher’s job.
He calls up to Pasedena.
Cutter and Blue sound frustrated and bored.
They keep moving up in the bridge tournament.
They’re naturals, good with numbers and they can smell
their opponents’ moves.
But this isn’t exactly the life these two dreamed of.
They can do a thousand sit-ups and run fifty miles without pausing to rest.
They can make a man disappear without a trace.
They can turn into dogs in a little over twenty seconds.
But now they’re just ticking away time
counting clubs and diamonds
like bored officers in some dusty corner of the empire.
Lark says “Keep your eyes open. Tell me what you see.”
Cutter says, “Shit, it’s a handful of blue hairs, an odd French
Canadian couple, a bald guy who won’t stop talking about Tampa, and a lawyer from Hillside.”
“Keep an eye on the bald guy,” says Lark.
Probably wrong, he knows,
but he has to keep Cutter interested somehow.
All he’s certain of is that these days,
everyone has to be
on their toes.
XIV
She walks into the kennel, everyone looks up,
nothing that lovely is supposed to be in here.
Anthony spots her right away and moves toward her.
She’s with a guy.
The guy with her doesn’t look like any kind of relative
but hey, who knows.
“This is Bone.”
He nods at Bone and sizes him up,
a lean fellow without much warmth,
but fuck it, he seems better than Calley, Mason and the rest.
Anthony hands him the paperwork and
they wait as Bone fills it out.
Her eyes are dancing, nervous.
The dogs are yapping in the cages
wild right now for some reason.
Anthony feels a little anxious, a little awkward,
he just wants to get her out of here.
Finally, they all head out the door,
while the sun on the pavement is as bright as a blinding mirror.
He shakes Bone’s hand, thanks him for coming down.
He shakes her hand too, holding it for a second longer.
Squinting in the light, he tries to catch her eye,
tries to read something in her look.
“Would you guys like to get some lunch before you go?”
“No, no, but…”—she pauses,
watching as Bone goes round to the passenger side—
then, in almost a whisper she says,
“I’ll meet you at the bar, later, okay?”
He nods
hell yes.
XV
Lark’s been exploring the San Pedro pack for a month now.
He has his dog in there now. Baron slowly earned the trust.
Packs are tough to crack, once you share your blood
they think you’re theirs.
Baron’s been playing it straight, in deep.
Baron has been getting phenomenal tattoos.
He’s been tossing in the lots with the other dogs.
He’s been studying their family, their moves, their lines of business.
It’s gray market on a good day, black on the rest.
Lark drives through an In and Out.
He gets eighteen burgers and throws them in the back
Then he drives down to the piers,
pulls into an open lot, and waits for Baron.
Baron says he’s got news.
Lark gets there early.
He likes having the time to think.
Things seem too loose these days
even with Con gone and the pack tightened.
It’s not the girl
that’s hard to control
but that’s not it.
Something is making moves
plates are shifting.
Pay Attention.
Lycanthropes first came out of the native tribes
in the Northwest,
born, legends say, from a native thirst
for a superior warrior.
But when the weather turned,
their packs were wiped out
knifed and skinned in fear
as native American witch hunts
took on their destruction
as a sacred, healing mission.
On a hundred nights, surrounded and fighting mad,
pack after pack were driven into drought-dry woods
where they were all burned
down to smoldering stumps.
The howling shook leaves in distant trees
and rolled through the valleys
like the screams
of lost birds
echoing the thunder.
Small packs survived, waited,
roamed the endless wilderness
met the trappers and shared raccoon fat
and maple sap, sucked the marrow of crow and buffalo bones.
This is when boundless nature
seethed in the untamed wilds,
bushels of game birds, barrels of fur
could be found in any glen.
They taught the lone trappers, guided the coon-skinned scouts,
riding on, through the expansion,
keeping things low
building new codes
to match the manners of the whiter world
which is to say, live on the invisible side
and if you kill
kill the unmournable:
deserters, wanderers, rustlers, rum runners, drug dealers,
men who will never be missed. Life goes on.
The light asks little from those who send the darkness away.
Wolves don’t have to take blood,
but when the change happens, well,
control can be tricky and
there is that
certain hunger.
Now, better technology, wider surveillance, and safer streets
make every change more complicated.
The blood sugar fever still survives
but invisible becomes more difficult.
It’s either retreat
or adapt.
They stepped deeper into the shadows.
Nobody saw them.
Rumors became legends,
ghost stories became TV shows,
while outside, in the dark, the packs wandered on.
They still travel together.
Without a pack, they’re called coyotes
by those who know.
And though it’s true that
real coyotes fill the hills
with the endless barking
of their own restle
ss packs,
it’s also true
that it’s not easy to
survive as a coyote
when you’re all alone.
Lark checks his watch.
Baron’s late, should have been here already.
Each second now undoes itself, unraveling like a fraying thread.
Lark clenches his jaw, reaches in the back, grabs a burger,
the crinkling of the paper wrapper scratches at the silence.
His eyes dart through the night’s shadows as he chews.
Lumber and spooled wire, an old broken boat
up on blocks, and there in the corner
one shadow moves.
The hair on his neck is up now.
He gently puts the burger down.
He fires up the ignition,
hits the gas
hits reverse
the car sweeps back
his headlights arc into the space
catching four big hounds.
Circled and frozen midstalk, a plain attack,
even if he changed, they could take him
easy, there are four of them.
But he’s not changing,
he’s driving.
And cars
tend to win.
Drive now. Fast. Thud. Bump. Reverse.
He swerves in the dirt and catches one on the fender side.
Another jumps on the hood,
but gassing it pushes the car forward and
that one slips off, landing on its side.
Back fast brake forward again now,
catching that one solidly against the bumper,
smashing it against a piling.
With the wet crack and cry
out goes one headlight.
He spins the car back
to see the two other dogs
peeling off into the dust and dark.
They are smart enough to run.
While the engine idles
he eats the rest of his burger
and thinks.
Trapped in the car, he would have been done in seconds.
Strategically perfect.
Where is Baron?
And whose pack was that?
What else do they know?
Probabilities begin to dawn on him.
He hits the gas,
hopes that no cop stops him for his headlight,
and prays for speed.
XVI
This is what Calley sees when he opens his eyes:
a small man, sitting by his bed, skinny, white hair
in a black suit, money tie.
Calley sits up, what’s this guy doing in his room? What—
Another man steps out of the shadows
The guy is big and round as a planet.
An islander? Samoan?
This whale kicks Calley forcefully and then
with pure flashing pain
Calley is left holding his hand, numb and probably broken,
And so, Calley being Calley,
he sits back, swollen with fear and flesh
exposed and waiting for whatever comes next.
“Sir, please, stay seated.” The man has a lisp like a twister and
moves through the room like he has been there a thousand times.
“Sir, do you remember when you took the dogs?” the man says.
Sir?
“What?” Calley’s head throbs and his brain sweats
somehow he felt something odd like this was coming,
a premonition brewing in his rancid gut, stewing for weeks now.
“Sir, you took the dogs, with your friends Turner and Mason,
up to the hills. The fighters.
You sold them, you do remember that, yes?”
“What?”
“How much did you get for them, sir?”
Calley tries to remember. Like six hundred bucks.
But who the fuck is this guy? “Who the fuck
are you anyway?” Calley nurses his dead hand.
The Samoan’s slap stings, blood fills Calley’s mouth.
“The dogs, Calley, I’m asking about the dogs you took.”
He remembers way back. Eight months?
Someone had come round looking for dogs, it happened sometimes.
They didn’t want nice ones.
And Turner and Mason had just the curs,
two nasty coke fever junkyard psycho dogs,
drugged and beaten to be worse than bad
found in a drainage ditch on the south edge of town
where they’d been guarding over a third.
It took six tranqs to shut them down.
The vet had stitched them up and then
seeing a market opportunity,
Turner and Mason had moved them to two cages
they kept in Turner’s dark garage.
The dogs woke up pissed, impossible to contain,
and were about to be shot by an itchy Turner.
But then the opportunity knocked, someone
was looking for something fierce
and fast.
Nobody asked where they were going.
Maybe they were going to be used for fights.
Maybe as guard dogs.
Nobody cared.
Calley was only in because they needed help handling the dogs.
They took a fire road up to the drop-off.
It was hard work, the bitch bit Calley’s hand.
But on the hill they met four dark men built like fire plugs,
pierced and tattooed all to hell,
and one older Mexican, standing at the edges,
who paid them cash.
Said little, worked fast.
Calley waited by the cars,
nursing his bleeding palm.
He tells this to the man in the suit and the Samoan
Calley didn’t know anything about the Mexican or his friends.
All he knew was that he drank that money fast
thinking there would be more
but nobody ever called back.
The little guy in the suit gets up. He picks up an empty bottle.
His voice is syrupy, maybe southern?
“Liquor is a funny thing,” he says.
“It can make a wise man an idiot and then,
almost magically at times, it makes an idiot wise.”
Calley eyes him. How did these guys get in here anyway?
The man goes on,
“Yes, liquor is the thin white coat of paint
you wash over the cracks in your foundation.
Makes any rotten house livable for a few hours.
Sometimes even days.”
Calley rolls his eyes and says, “Okay, asshole, do you want a drink or not?”
The man stops talking, looks at him for a minute, nods and
in less than a second the Samoan’s standing, one foot on the floor
the other squeezing Calley’s throat,
the smell of leather and blood
up in Calley’s nose,
the shoe pressing Calley’s skull against the wall.
The fat dogcatcher is flailing pink, gasping
while the little man speaks.
“One, most of the men you sold the dogs to are dead.
The dogs got them.
Dogs can work fast, and if they’re fast and large and smart,
and if they work together, well…
of the five men you met
four are dead.
Only the old Mexican you mention
remains unaccounted for.
The forensics were fascinating.
These were good dogs. Dogs trained in the south.
They gnawed out the men’s throats
ate their guts.
The men weren’t dead,
they were dying slow
the dogs didn’t want them dead.
Because, of course, the dogs wanted
to eat them alive.”
The
little man turns his head sideways and looks
into Calley’s bloodshot, terrified eyes.
“They chewed off their hands
snapped their Achilles tendons,
these big men, these fire plugs you mention,
they wanted to scream but
like I said
their throats were gone.
The dogs bit their toes down to the nub.
You remember these men, right?
Big strong muscular fellows.
And as these men crawled across the dirt
screaming without voices.
The dogs ate slow.
These were good dogs.
And now Turner is gone,
to the same dogs no doubt,
And Mason, well, you saw that.
Leaving you and the old Mexican.
Now, we don’t know where to find him,
but, thankfully,
you’re listed in the phone book.”
He pauses, walks over to the window,
plays the dust on the pane with his fingers.
“I must say, your foundation looks weak, Calley.
The cracks are showing.”
Calley is silent, his breath shallow.
He doesn’t dare say a word.
“But perhaps it’s too late. Because honestly, Calley,
from the little I’ve seen,
it seems like, in many ways,
you have always been dead.”
The man puts the bottle on the floor by the bed.
“Relax and enjoy this, Calley, we’ll be back.
It’s too bad you couldn’t be more helpful.
But don’t worry. I don’t want you,
I just want those dogs.”
And the man and the Samoan walk out.
Calley rolls his eyes to the ceiling,
he’s feeling like he’s drowning.
He reaches for the drink.
book two
A room is, after all, a place where you hide from the wolves. That’s all any room is.
JEAN RHYS
I have seen where the wolf has slept by the silver stream,
I can tell by the mark he left you were in his dream.
JOHN PERRY BARLOW
I
Lark pulls in to the driveway
headlights play the preview of a bad movie.
He’s jumping out and moving fast.
It’s a little past 2 a.m. and
nothing smells good.
The lights are all on,
the front door is open.
Far off he can hear sirens.
He’s inside
facing too many pieces of news
for him to process in the time he’s got.