Beasts of Extraordinary Circumstance

by Ruth Emmie Lang

  I choked back tears. “Don’t act like you care about Weylyn! You only care about yourselves!”

  I turned to Mama, who at least had the decency to look contrite. She’d finally gotten what she wanted. It must have taken a lot of self-control not to break into gleeful laughter.

  “I hope you’re happy,” I said pointedly and ran out of the room before she could see me cry.

  * * *

  In the days leading up to Weylyn’s departure, I avoided my parents by spending evenings in the carriage house. It was too cold and wet outside to do anything other than watch TV, so I brought over my entire library of VHS tapes and asked Weylyn to pick ten movies he couldn’t leave without seeing. After blackballing The Brady Bunch Variety Hour, I stacked the tapes he’d selected on the TV stand. One by one, we fed them into the black maw of the VCR and watched in silence until there was only one tape left in the stack, The Wizard of Oz. I had saved it until the end because it seemed fitting for Weylyn’s last night in town. The tornado was a little on the nose, maybe, but I thought he’d enjoy a story about adventure given that he was about to start a new one of his own.

  When Dorothy clicked her ruby slippers together and wished she were home in Kansas, I looked over at Weylyn and saw that he was tearing up. “Sorry…” I paused the tape. “Do you want to watch something else?”

  “No, it’s okay,” Weylyn said, blinking away tears. “I like it. It’s just … it was nice to have somewhere I could call home. Now I have to start all over again.”

  “I know. It’s bullshit,” I said, fighting back tears of my own.

  “I’m not stupid. I know my being here has caused some problems, but I thought Mr. Kramer liked me.”

  “He does. They’re just taking their problems out on you. It’s not fair.”

  Weylyn cast his eyes down. “Do you think they’re scared of me?”

  “I don’t think so. I don’t even think they believe you had anything to do with what happened.”

  “What about you? Are you scared of me?”

  “Ha. No way,” I said, squeezing out a smile. “I’m more scared of Merlin than I am of you.”

  Weylyn laughed and looked down at the little pig napping in his lap. “He is pretty scary, isn’t he?”

  “Terrifying. Is he coming with you to Alabama?”

  He nodded. “I couldn’t leave him behind.”

  We sat in silence for a few minutes, listening to Merlin’s gentle snoring and the muted percussion of sleet on the windows. “You can always call me, you know,” I said. “Or visit. I mean, even if you live someplace else, you’re still my brother.”

  Weylyn brightened. “Really?”

  “Of course.”

  He smiled and turned to look out the window. A small break in the clouds revealed a perfectly full moon. “Look! The moon! Will you come outside with me?”

  I nodded and joined him on the front porch without my coat. I should have been cold, but strangely, I wasn’t. The moonlight was slightly warm like sunshine tempered by clouds, and the precipitation that bounced off my skin felt more like a summer shower than sleet. It was as if the moon had been waiting for us.

  “Ready?” Weylyn said, his eyes catching the moonlight and shining like newly polished silver.

  “Ready.”

  Our howls reached the moon just in time. A few moments later, the clouds returned, and our wolf song slipped behind them with the moon, the stars, and the rest of the night sky.

  20

  MS. MEG LOWRY

  You don’t really know whether you’ll make a good parent until you are one. I wasn’t perfect. I let Weylyn stay up late on school nights and track mud into the house. He repeatedly forgot to brush his teeth because I forgot to remind him, and I let him eat cake for breakfast multiple times the week following his birthday. To be fair, I was thirteen years behind where most parents are by that point. I was just grateful I never had to change any diapers.

  Weylyn and I moved back to my hometown in Alabama and into our own little apartment. It wasn’t much, but it had a patio out back where Weylyn would plant tomatoes in the summer. Every day, he’d bring in bowls of ripe, juicy tomatoes even though I never saw him water them once.

  Lydia would visit during breaks from school, and we’d watch movies or make hot chocolate or both. It wasn’t long before she left for college and not so long after that before Weylyn left, too. I guess I only really had five years as a mother, but it was five more than I ever thought I’d get.

  And I spent them with Weylyn Grey.

  second interlude

  WILDWOOD FOREST, OREGON

  2017

  ROARKE

  “Pssht! I could take down a tornado,” I said dismissively as I swung from a ropy tendril of cobweb like it was a jungle vine and I was Tarzan. “I’d just throw rocks at it. Or kick it like this. Hiiiiya!” I pumped my legs, forcing my body into a swing and kicking the air.

  “I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Weylyn said as the rotten joists overhead creaked ominously.

  “I’m flyyyying!” I squealed. “I bet you can’t do that, can you?”

  “No, I can’t fly,” he said, irritated. “Now, stop before you take the rest of the roof down with you.”

  “You’re no fun.” I relaxed my legs and let my body slow to a stop. “If my dad heard your stories, he’d say you’re full of—” I stopped short when I felt hot, wet breath on the back of my neck. I spun around and came face-to-face with a huge, white wolf. Screaming, I hid behind Weylyn.

  He laughed. “Boo won’t hurt you. He’s as soft as a peach. Aren’t you, boy?” Weylyn scratched him behind the ears. The wolf leaned into his fingers, jaw slackening into a dopey pant.

  “He was trying to eat me!”

  “Nonsense. He could eat you. Unfortunately, I’ve spoiled him so much that he barely remembers how to hunt. His favorite is grilled cheese.”

  Boo ambled a few steps, then collapsed lazily onto the dirt. “I never had any kids, but I suspect that if I had, they’d be as doughy as this one.”

  I inched out from behind Weylyn and patted the wolf’s huge head. Boo’s tongue lolled happily out the side of his mouth. “I can’t wait to tell Mike I saw a full-grown wolf!” Or won a fight against one, whatever sounded good at the time. “The only time I’ve seen a wolf is when the lady from the zoo brought a wolf puppy to class.”

  “Really? What kinds of things did you learn?”

  “The wolf peed on Mike’s backpack!” I snorted.

  Weylyn didn’t seem to find it as hilarious as I did. “Well,” he said as he put down his knife, “looks like you’re free to go.”

  The sun had set, leaving behind a forest of dark-blue, deep-ocean shapes. My mother probably already had the FBI on the phone, so I’d have to hurry if I didn’t want my face on the back of a milk carton.

  I felt a drop of rain land on the back of my head. Weylyn must have felt one, too, because he looked up at the hole in his ceiling and frowned. “I have an umbrella around here somewhere. Ah! Here it is!” He reached for a black umbrella that was tangled in a nest of cobwebs over the fireplace. After several hard tugs, Weylyn yanked it free, and it popped open, sending dust motes flying like dirty confetti.

  “Here,” he said, coughing, and handed the umbrella to me. A spider dangled from its lip by a thread of silk. The tiny creature seemed to return my gaze for a moment before rappelling down to the floor below.

  Weylyn looked up at my knife that was still suspended from the web. “Sorry about your knife. Once it falls, I can mail it to you.”

  “Nah. It’s okay. You keep it.” My mom told me if she saw me with it again, she’d introduce me to her friend who accidentally cut his own thumb into a pot of potato soup. I opened the front door.

  “Oh, Roarke…”

  “Yeah?” I said, turning back.

  “I could use some help patching the roof if you’re free tomorrow. I’ve already used up all my favors with the spiders.”

  The hole wa
s kind of my fault. Plus, it could earn me a few more brownie points with Ruby if I told her I had not only escaped Old Man Spider’s lair but I had also returned for a second round. Maybe if I was super helpful, I could even convince Weylyn to stage a fight with me and let me win. “Sure,” I said. “It’s Sunday, so I don’t have school.”

  “That would be great. Thank you.”

  “Sorry again.”

  “It’s okay. I’ve done crazier things to impress a girl,” he said, knowingly.

  I blushed despite myself. “What girl?”

  “When I heard you clomping around up there, I looked out the window and saw her watching. Can I give you a piece of advice?”

  I shrugged, unsure of whether or not to trust the romantic wisdom of a hermit.

  “Don’t try so hard,” he said; then he set out a bucket to catch the rain that had started puddling on his kitchen table.

  * * *

  When I arrived at Weylyn’s the next day, he was already on the roof, but I couldn’t see a ladder. “Use the tree!” he shouted down to me, then darted out of sight. I gave him credit. Most old people I know are terrible at climbing things, my dad especially. I once had to run and get help when he “got stuck” in my tree house.

  I dropped my backpack, shimmied up the branches like I had the day before, and joined Weylyn, who was sitting on a rickety wooden beam, his legs dangling over the edge of the hole. I peered into the kitchen below, expecting to see puddles and soggy furniture, but the room was surprisingly dry.

  “Ready to get started?” Weylyn hopped to his feet, the board beneath him groaning under his weight.

  “Sure.”

  “Mud or straw?”

  I must have looked confused because he pointed to a bucket of mud sitting next to a pile of straw. “Mud, I guess,” I said, unsure of what he wanted me to do with it. Usually, when one of my friends pointed to mud, it was because he was daring me to eat it.

  “Good choice!” Weylyn dropped the bucket at my feet. Mud sloshed over the edge and onto my sneakers. I groaned as the wet muck soaked through to my socks.

  “I’ll place the straw, and you pack it with mud,” Weylyn instructed and began laying straw bundles across the opening in the roof. I sank my hand in the bucket, pulled out a goopy wad of mud, and slathered it across the layer of straw. “Like this?”

  Weylyn nodded. “Excellent. The messier, the better.”

  I smiled. I was good at messy.

  After we had finished the first layer, Weylyn said we needed to let it dry before adding a second. I glanced up at a wall of dark clouds that were rolling in. “But what if it rains?”

  “Don’t worry. It won’t,” Weylyn said as he lowered himself off the edge of the roof and onto a tree branch.

  “But what if it does?”

  “It won’t,” he insisted. “Do you want a grilled cheese while we wait?”

  “Yes!” I was starving. My mom had made meatloaf the night before, and all I had eaten was my side of green beans and a chocolate milk.

  We climbed off the roof, and Boo greeted us at the front door. “Hey, Boo!” I crouched down next to the wolf and tousled the scruff of his neck.

  Weylyn went to the fridge and pulled out a stack of cheese slices and a loaf of bread. “How many pieces of cheese do you want? One or two?”

  Boo’s ears perked up at the word cheese. “Three,” I said.

  Weylyn dropped a pat of butter onto the cast-iron pan sitting on the stovetop. “Three slices, comin’ up!” Boo licked his jowls and whined. “Don’t worry, Boo. I haven’t forgotten about you,” he said and tossed a slice of cheese to the wolf, who caught it in midair with an audible chomp.

  When the butter began to sizzle, Weylyn placed two sandwiches on the skillet. I sat down at the kitchen table and accidentally kicked over a bucket, the one Weylyn had pulled out the night before to catch the rain falling through the roof. It was empty. “Why is the room so dry?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “It was raining last night. Why isn’t everything wet?”

  Weylyn gave a perfunctory glance around the room. “It stopped just after you left.”

  “No, it didn’t,” I protested. “It rained all night.” Or that’s what Mrs. Kutschbach said when she told me I couldn’t play basketball at recess because the blacktop was flooded.

  Weylyn dished the grilled cheeses and sat down across from me at the table. “Yes, but it didn’t rain here.”

  “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “Remember that tornado I told you about?”

  I nodded.

  “Well,” he said, taking a bite of his sandwich, “I can say from personal experience that the weather doesn’t always do what’s expected of it.”

  book 3

  STORM SEEKER

  LITTLE TURTLE, MISSISSIPPI

  1997

  21

  BOBBY QUINN JR.

  I was the first student council president of Little Turtle High to ever be impeached. My fellow officers held a secret meeting in the cafeteria after school and unanimously voted me out. I heard my treasurer pretended her jelly doughnut was me and stabbed it with her pencil, and everyone laughed as I bled sugary red goo. I’m not saying I didn’t deserve it. I did hire a magician instead of a DJ for the winter formal. But for them to go behind my back like that, and for my treasurer to stab a perfectly good doughnut, well, that was just plain rude.

  I didn’t even want the job. My dad, Robert Quinn Sr., made me run for student council in an attempt to get me to follow in his footsteps. He was mayor at the time, and the only reason I won was because he promised the student body he’d waive their speeding tickets if they voted for me. Traffic violations went up 20 percent the week of elections. I got rear-ended by a fourteen-year-old kid with a VOTE FOR BOBBY bumper sticker. Most of the kids who voted for me didn’t even know my name. They just wrote “mayor’s son.”

  My dad was mayor of Little Turtle for forty years. His dad was mayor for fifty, and his dad, well, let’s just say he dropped dead cutting a ribbon with a comically large pair of scissors. A dynasty, that’s what we were. It was easier that way. We were a small beach town whose citizens were mostly students from the local college who would rather be surfing than voting, anyway, so there was usually only ever one name on the ballot and only a few dozen people who bothered to fill it out. I usually forgot, which drove my dad crazy. “Why does it matter? You’re gonna win whether I vote for you or not,” I’d gripe every four years.

  “Because someday you’ll be the one who no one votes for, and I want you to understand what that means,” he’d growl as he knocked the sand out of his loafers. If there was one thing my dad couldn’t stand, it was the beach. He built our house as far inland as he could within city limits. We couldn’t see the beach, but we could still smell the salt water. Mom called Little Turtle well seasoned. I don’t think I ever saw my dad use a saltshaker.

  I’m sure my dad would’ve liked to win an election the old-fashioned way. He once tried to goad his friend Howie into running against him. Howie worked in the governor’s office for thirty years, then one day up and left to open a taco stand on the boardwalk. Howie refused, but my dad was mayor, so he put him on the ballot, anyway. It was a tight race, sixty-six to sixty-eight. My dad won.

  That night, he took the family to Crableg Joe’s for a bucket of lobster tails. Howie was there with some boardwalk buddies and a pitcher of margaritas. Mom told Dad to be a good sport and go over there. I saw him shake Howie’s hand, but I couldn’t hear what they were saying. I’m pretty sure Howie never realized he was on that ballot.

  Twelve years later, my dad had his first stroke, and without warning, it was my turn to run. The first person I ran to was Howie. I begged him to take my place, but all he said was “Sorry, kid,” and handed me a taco with extra sour cream as if I wasn’t sour enough already. I was thirty-seven, and the only real job I’d held was renting surfboards to tourists who should have been renting canoes—all
they did was float and paddle around on them, anyway. I knew nothing about being a mayor—or an adult, for that matter. I had promised my dad a long time ago that I’d take his seat someday, and after trying everything I could think of to get out of it, I entered the special election for mayor. Even though I was the only candidate on the ballot, I still only got twenty-nine votes, and I didn’t deserve any of them. My dad wasn’t shy about reminding me of that fact.

  “Would it have killed you to wear a goddamn tie?” he said when I arrived at city hall for my swearing-in ceremony. His near-death experience hadn’t softened him one bit. In fact, it had only made him surlier—due in part to the wheelchair he was now confined to. The only arguably positive thing that had come out of the whole experience was that he now had a legitimate excuse for not going to the beach.

  “I couldn’t find mine,” I lied. I had one tie, and it was currently the only thing stopping my trunk from flying open when I drove.

  “You should have called me. I would have let you borrow one of mine.” Now he was lying. If I had called him asking to borrow a tie, he would have said, You’re an adult, Bobby. Adults buy their own ties.

  “Can I borrow one now?” I asked, nodding at the navy striped tie around my father’s neck.

  “You want me to take off my tie and give it to you?” he asked, incredulous.

  I shrugged. “You kind of offered.”

  He smoothed out his tie, making a show of not removing it. “There are photographers here, Bobby. I’m not showing up in tomorrow’s paper looking like a waiter on his cigarette break.”

  I looked down at my rumpled white dress shirt and black slacks. It was the same outfit I’d worn as a busboy nearly twenty years earlier. “I’ll see if they have any ties in the lost-and-found,” I muttered, reluctantly taking the back of my dad’s wheelchair and pushing him up the disability ramp.

  My dad hadn’t wanted to resign. My mom and the doctors had made that decision for him. If it had been up to him, he would have kept chugging along until the day he died like his grandfather had. He had always talked about me carrying on his legacy. I just think he hoped he wouldn’t be alive to see it happen.