by Hal Johnson
Most of this information was in the local news, accompanied by wildly inaccurate speculations about an explosion. Everyone assumed, of course, that Myron and Garrett had just been walking amiably by, innocent bystanders to some kind of occult phenomenon. The mystery was a slim sidebar in a couple of national papers, which was where I read about it. So I packed up an overnight bag, a gun, a thermos, and an extra can of gas, and I called Alice.
At his parents’ request, Myron’s return to school was a quiet affair. “Let’s act as though nothing happened,” they may as well have painted on a bedsheet banner and hung in the front hall. Lunch tables the custodian moved to the gymnasium temporarily. In the lunchroom, workmen got paint on their coveralls.
If I may be permitted a moment of melodrama (which is after all the idiom of my chosen profession), there were two smoke-filled basements in which Myron’s return to school caught a sinister eye. One of them was in Baton Rouge. The other was in Westfield, Pennsylvania. Unlike Myron, Garrett Bercelli was not without friends. Three or four of them had gone to visit ol’ Garrett in his hospital bed; had heard his secret whisper that Horowitz had, somehow (he remembered nothing!), done this to him; had later in a metaphorically smoke-filled basement made a secret pact to find Myron Horowitz after school and 1. steal his backpack; 2. remove, and 2a. steal, his pants; and 3. “teach him a lesson” through violence. Violence was their idiom. Perhaps it was not yet, but it would be before long, and they were testing the waters on a small, ugly boy, who would soon be, they high-fived each other in celebratory anticipation, bloody and half-naked. It would be pretty funny, you must admit, if you are heartless.
Donald Chang, Michael West, and one or two others needed time to make their clever plans. And so it was three days later that they lay in wait for Myron Horowitz, who was, incidentally, no happier, and no handsomer, than he had been before this whole foofarah. It never rains but it pours, they say; they say a lot of things. Myron was walking down the street. Was he whistling to himself? Was he dreaming of a brighter future not to be his?
Westfield is a pleasant, small, suburban community. There are almost no sidewalks. The front lawns are large, trees scant, and there is, consequently, a dearth of places to hide in ambush. But this was why our conspirators (Donald, etc.) had waited for this day. This was Thursday, and Thursday was garbage day; large, green, plastic, identical garbage cans sat at the end of every driveway. They had already been emptied of their garbage. Our conspirators (West, etc.) had, that day, run ahead of Myron as he walked home from school—students were allowed to use the front exit now, until the lunchroom paint dried—run to the end of Myron’s block, and secreted themselves, one each, beneath the hinged lid of a trash can. Three or four garbage cans total. It had rained earlier, and at the bottom of each can sat a quarter inch of stagnant garbage water. The stench was formidable. But it would all be worth it for the money shot, when out of three or four garbage cans leapt three or four bringers of the mayhem.
Please note that I am not being cute here. I have been unable to ascertain the exact number of mayhem bringers.
Myron’s house, or rather his parents’ house, was scarcely visible down the block, a good hundred yards away from the site of ambush. Perhaps he saw a garbage can lid twitch, for young Myron suddenly stopped whistling, then stopped walking altogether. From scant trees’ leaves dripped the remains of the morning rainfall. The road was black and shiny still. Myron was not quite at the spot he was supposed to have reached, but what, thought everyone, the hell. First one, and then another sprang from the garbage cans in a way they had probably discussed. Such springing is, in fact, very difficult to do, and in every case the can tipped over, spilling out a wet and filthy boy who was standing up, dusting himself off, and thirsting for blood.
“Take off your pants,” one said, prematurely. There was supposed to be an order to these things.
Myron tensed. If he had started running when the cans commenced falling over, he probably could have gotten away, but, frankly, he had not expected to be assaulted here, or in this fashion. He may have expected from a garbage can to have emerged a raccoon, and true raccoons can be pleasant company. Now it was too late to run, he was surrounded by people with longer legs; now he was ready to sprint at any opportunity, now that there was no opportunity forthcoming.
From up ahead, near Myron’s house, a station wagon pulled out from the curb. Of course, no one noticed it.
“What did you do to Garrett?” one person was inquiring, while another was suggesting that Myron might want to drop his backpack and make this easier. Perhaps these two speaking were Donald Chan and Michael West. Both were killed, one quickly and one slowly over the course of six futile surgical procedures, after the speeding station wagon struck them. This happened very quickly, and to call it a surprise would probably be understating things, especially for Messrs. Chan and West. But this was also Myron’s opportunity, and he had already begun sprinting, sideways, across the lawn, not toward his house but simply away. God help him, he was glad the car had struck; knowing him, as I do now, he probably did not think his classmates were dead; or perhaps he was too scared to care. Across the generous front lawn and across the generous back lawn he ran, and as he ran, and his mind processed what had happened, he gradually became less scared of the small cadre of bullies and more scared of a station wagon and its homicide of a driver. Soon Myron was on the front lawn of another street, Pennylane Place, if I recall correctly. He saw, to his right, rounding the corner, a station wagon with blood on its hood. A thin woman with short blond hair and sunglasses, he could dimly perceive, was behind the wheel. She could not follow him across the lawns, of course, but her car was much faster than he, and, houses being spaced out as they were, Myron had nowhere to hide. He turned around, ready to run back, and he saw a man there, huge and wild-haired and dressed, unseasonably, in a long leather duster. His nose was as long and square and thin as an ax blade. His back was hunched; patches of long black hairs tufted his chin. The man looked terrifying, for all sorts of objective reasons, but he also made the hairs on Myron’s neck stand up, in a way nothing else ever had. There was a shadow of a memory he could not articulate associated with this sensation. What with all that, it took Myron a moment to realize that the man, whoever he was, had been in the station wagon and had gotten out to chase him.
“What are you?” the man said.
Myron stood paralyzed. He had hardly led a life that had prepared him for acts of violence beyond schoolyard bullying, pummeling and pantslessness, and a little bit of blood. Driving through two people, killing two people—
(One or two people got away. Minors, their names were kept out of the papers if they were ever learned at all.)
—this was another order of cruelty, to which the Garretts of this world, and their friends, could only aspire in time.
The station wagon, behind him, had parked, and Myron could hear the door opening. He risked a quick glance behind and quickly took in a tall, pale woman striding across the lawn toward him. In front of him, “You’re the kid who fought the lion and mane?” the man said, and took a step forward. The afternoon sun was behind the stranger, and he was close enough now that his shadow touched Myron’s shoe.
Just then a pickup truck jumped the curb, skidded across the lawn, and churned to a halt in between Myron and his interlocutor. The passenger side window was down, and from within a smartly dressed young woman, her long black hair in a ponytail, said, “Hop in the back, this is a rescue.”
That was Alice saying that. But I was behind the wheel.
3.
There is a cacophony inside my mouth. I have read a lot of books in my life, and have written more than a few, and, if not all of them, then at least many of them are still there in my mouth in one way or another.
I mean, there are, of course, many ways of telling a story. Horace recommends starting in the middle; the King of Hearts recommends starting at the beginning. Obviously Myron’s story started a while ago, with the acc
ident and all, but I didn’t start back there. Why should you know more than Myron did?
I lived with the Ainu of northern Japan, once, some time ago, and there I encountered an epic poem collected and published under the name “Repunnotunkur” that ran for some five hundred lines of adventures for the narrator, before that narrator was asked to give an account, to a curious man, of everything that had happened thus far—and the poem just repeats it, word for word, five hundred lines, up to the present moment.
Readers would probably not have the patience to let a narrative start over. Imagine if, three chapters from now, Myron Horowitz were asked how he got here, and he replied, “A shameful fact about humanity . . .” I’d certainly close the book.
Oh, we asked him how he got here, and he didn’t answer. He just looked dumbly at us. He was kneeling in the flatbed of the truck as we raced through the sidestreets. It might have been a little scary for a kid.
A small window separated the flatbed from the cab of the truck. Alice slid the window open. “What’s your name?” she asked.
He told us.
“Jeez Louise, you got screwed, kid,” I said. “Look, what’s going on? Why is Benson after you? And where’d you come from, for that matter?”
“What are you talking about? How would I know what’s going on? I don’t know who Benson is. I don’t know how you fight a lion and its mane. I don’t know who you are or where you’re taking me.”
“Hey, don’t cry, Myron,” Alice said. He was crying. “My name is Alice, and this is my friend Arthur.”
“That’s me!” I said.
“Benson was the big guy who was chasing you. His driver was Mignon Emanuel. They work for Mr. Bigshot. Does that help?”
“I have no idea what you’re even talking about. Are you police?”
“Oh, lawsy, no,” Alice said. “We’re, you know, like you.”
“Like me?”
“We’re lycanthropes.”
“We’re what?”
“Technically,” I pointed out helpfully, for I abhor imprecision, “we are therianthropes.”
“You’re werewolves?” Myron asked.
“No, no, I was just saying, and this is why I abhor imprecision,” I said, “lycanthropes are werewolves, and we certainly do not turn into wolves.”
“I was using lycanthrope colloquially,” Alice insisted. “I didn’t mean wolves, I meant were-animals.”
“You’re crazy,” Myron said. He had stopped crying at least, but he looked like he was going to go all hysterical at any moment.
“We saved your life,” Alice said, “crazy or not. And we can turn into animals.”
As we pulled onto the highway our truck hit a bump that threw Myron against the window. I’d been watching him in the rearview mirror, and when his face came up to the window, I gave a start. He was really ugly. The features weren’t even in the right place was the problem. One eye was lower than the other, and the bridge of his nose was shaped like a seven, and it ended in nothing. Myron drew his face away from the window, pulled off his backpack, and sat on it. The flatbed must have been wet, come to think. “What animals?” he asked.
“I’m a red panda, and Arthur’s a binturong.”
“What’s a binturong?” Myron asked.
I was getting annoyed. “It’s a bearcat. What, like you’re something cooler?”
“You turn into a bearcat?”
“No, Myron, he is a bearcat. He’s a bearcat who turns into a human.”
I growled, “Can we just say binturong? I’m a binturong. A binturong is driving your car. You’re going to have to learn the word eventually.”
Alice was still calm, damn her eyes. “What are you, Myron?”
“I’m . . . I’m Jewish?”
“No, I mean, what animal. What do you turn into a human from?”
“I don’t turn from anything into anything. This is crazy, you don’t turn into anything, either.”
“Show him,” Alice said.
“I can’t, I’m driving.”
She grabbed the wheel and swung a foot over onto the gas pedal. “You can, I can’t—I’m wearing the wrong kind of clothes.” And she was right, her clothes were for street wear, it would’ve taken her forever to put them back on. Whereas I was dressed stylishly but sensibly, so I turned into a binturong. Shaggy black fur, tufts on the tops of my ears, and a long, sinuous tail. I popped back into human form right away, and now I was naked, of course, my clothes strewn about the font seat where they had fallen.
“You can change form, too,” Alice said, relinquishing the wheel and dropping a shirt in my lap, for modesty’s sake. “Do you not know what you are?”
“Because we sure don’t know,” I said, “so don’t look to us for the answer. Also, it’s cold in here, close the window.”
Alice did not close the window between us and Myron, of course, which I suppose made sense. The kid took this all pretty well, considering, and said, “Maybe, maybe I just haven’t turned into anything yet. Maybe at puberty I’ll start turning into something, at the full moon.”
“Jeez Louise, kid, not that old full-moon bromide. And I’ve got bad news for you: you’re never going to hit puberty.”
“Are you going to kill me?”
I was so frustrated that I leaned forward and bit the steering wheel. He was so slow to catch on!
“We saved your life,” Alice said, “we’d hardly kill you now. You’re safe, we’re just trying to figure things out.”
“How do you know I can turn into something?”
“We can feel it, when we’re around one of our own kind. Can you get the feeling from us?”
“Yeah, like your neck’s all prickly. I got the same feeling from the big guy.”
“Benson. He’s one of us, too. He’s a bison.”
“That’s how he got his name,” I added helpfully.
“And Mignon Emanuel, the woman driving the car, and Mr. Bigshot—they’re like us, too.”
Myron said, “Benson looked like an Indian, an American Indian.”
“Of course he did, where do you think bison are from?” Alice said. “I’m from Burma, or it’s Myanmar now. Arthur’s from Indochina, probably around Cambodia. It’s hard to tell where you’re from.”
“With a map like that,” I muttered. By map I meant pan—I meant his face.
“Why won’t I hit puberty?” Myron said. You couldn’t distract him from the important stuff.
I said, “You haven’t hit puberty yet, have you? And everyone else you knew did, I bet.”
“The doctor said I was slow to develop.”
Alice said, “I don’t know how you can’t know this stuff. Surely you’ve noticed that you don’t age. You’re stuck at that age, just like I’ll be twenty-three and Arthur will be seventeen forever.”
“I’m more like twenty, twenty-one really,” I said.
“Forever?” Myron said.
“Of course, you fool! Haven’t you noticed?” I was squirming all over my seat, I couldn’t stand it. Also, I was cold. “You’re immortal.”
“I can’t be immortal, I’m only thirteen years old!”
“You can’t be thirteen years old, you’re immortal.” I felt something like an itch inside my nose, but I chalked it up to nerves. “The only thing that can kill you is one of us. In animal form. With the claws and the teeth.”
“You could kill me?”
“Well, probably not, I’m a binturong. We’re pretty harmless. But for all I know, you could be a vole. I could kill a vole.”
“What’s a vole?”
“Like a field mouse, stop asking quest—”
But Alice interrupted me. “Someone’s nearby.”
And they came up the ramp, onto the highway, the station wagon with Mignon Emanuel and Benson. I floored it and they floored it, and I said, “How did they find us?”
“They must’ve known we were going to see Gloria,” Alice said. Her head was turned around, her eyes glued on the station wagon as it slowly ga
ined on us.
“How could they possibly know that?”
“She’s in Shoreditch, that’s pretty close to here.”
“Who’s Gloria?” Myron asked. But just then there was a loud, sharp noise, and he cried, “They’re shooting at me!”
“They’re not shooting at you,” I replied, with calm assurance and nerves of steel. “They’re shooting at the tires.”
“What, so they don’t want to kill me?”
I checked the rearview. Benson had his arm out the window, carelessly blasting away with a pistol. With his other hand he was attempting to manipulate a CB radio. What an idiot. I considered telling Alice to get my own pistol from the glove compartment, but I didn’t want her to end up looking as stupid as Benson did. Instead, I said to Myron, “Anyone wants to kill you, I told you, bullets won’t do the job.”
“So they do want to kill me?”
“How the devil would I know? Jeez Louise, kid, I’m driving here. Now hold on, I’m going to try something tricky.”
I yanked the wheel left, crashed over the median, skidded backwards on the wet road, whipped around, bounced in a shower of sparks off a stone embankment, and drove the wrong way under a bridge and down an on-ramp. We threaded around a descending railroad gate, made a U-turn that involved at least two people’s lawns, and cut through a city park to avoid a red light. Alice screamed and laughed, and, frankly, I was screaming and laughing, too. I was impressed with the kid, that he never made a peep. Fifteen minutes later, after a half-dozen other moving violations, we pulled into a gas station, and noticed that Myron Horowitz was no longer in the flatbed.