Furr

by Axel Howerton

  “The Kootenay Indians lived in the low areas of the Rocky Mountains, right? Just over the border in British Columbia, when there weren’t any borders, and it wasn’t British anything.”

  He’s tapping his fingers into the plastic menu to make sure I’m paying attention.

  “The Ktunaxa have tales about wandering white men. White men with what the Ktunaxa called ‘the power of the wolf’. They came and traded with the Ktunaxa, and built themselves a secret town up in the mountain, called Binn Connall.”

  Blank slate.

  “Jesus, Jimmy. Binn Connall . . . Bensonhall . . . It’s classic misappropriation.”

  I’m trying to keep up. Slowly connecting threads. Bensonhall is in the mountains. Larry is a doctor. Some white men built a wolf town on Indian land.

  “Binn Connall is Gaelic . . . Irish . . . means ‘Mountain of the Strong Wolf’. Over a hundred-and-some years, to non-Gaelic ears, it becomes Bin-kon-all, Bin-son-all, Bensonhall. Get it? It’s not on any maps that I could find, but Professor Livingston says he knows exactly where it is.”

  I’m still lost, but my ears perk up at the last bit. I’m waiting. He’s dragging it out. It’s a game to him. A puzzle to challenge himself with. Now he’s pausing for dramatic effect. Or maybe it’s on account of the waitress coming with our food. I smell her as she breaks through the swinging doors, an ocean of strange and powerful scents pouring past her like the tide coming in. But there’s something else. A so-subtle trace of lilacs and lemon.

  The hairs on my neck prick up as the girl sweeps around beside us with an armful and clatters them all to the table, dropping one on the floor as she stumbles back, a horrified mask of recognition frozen to her face. She lands on her ass on the floor and crawls away, muttering in Chinese as I jump to help her.

  The manager, or host, or owner—whatever he is—old man scoops her up, firing off an explosion of Chinese words in a rising tone of displeasure, and carts her off to the back again. A magical ninja busboy appears from the shadows and gathers up the remnants of the chow mein from the floor. The room is silent and still mere seconds later.

  I’m at a loss. Lost. I sit down and turn to find Devil staring a hole through me. Again.

  “You know that girl?” he asks, coldly.

  “I have no idea what the fuck that was about. Maybe they’ve shown my picture on TV or something. It wouldn’t be in the paper yet, would it?”

  Devil leaned forward. “She called you láng rén.”

  “I don’t know her.” She smells like lilacs and lemons.

  “Láng rén means werewolf, Jimmy. They wouldn’t have said that on the TV. We need to go. Now.”

  Devil pulls a wad of bills from his pocket and drops a few on the table, shoving me in front of him toward the door. The old man jumps in front of us, bowing and muttering.

  The old man is holding something out to me. He’s unleashing another volley of strange words at us. Devil nods his head like he understands, but he doesn’t say anything, just shoves me toward the door again. The old man thrusts this rock into my hands. It’s some kind of tiny statue. It looks like a hippo strangling a bird.

  “Thanks, I don’t . . .”

  “Just take it and go.” Devil says, “Take it, bow, say thank you.”

  I follow the instructions to the letter.

  “M goi! M goi!” the old man is repeating.

  He follows us into the parking lot, still bowing, still shouting, “M goi! M goi!”

  DEVIL THROWS IT into drive and peels out from Centre Street onto Sixteenth Avenue. We’re two blocks away before either of us says a word. The little statue is still wrapped up in my fist.

  “What the fuck was that? And how do you speak Chinese?”

  “There are five times more people in China than on this whole side of the planet. How do you not speak Chinese?”

  We drive in silence for what seems like an hour, even though it’s only ten blocks that pass outside the window.

  All of the confusion. All of the guilt. Now it comes flooding back as I see the girl’s face, screaming in wild terror. The dishes smashing to the floor.

  I am that monster. I did attack those people. I tried to kill three people. Maybe more. Maybe her.

  There’s a moan caught in the top of my chest. I’m gulping for air. I hit the button for the window and swallow cool air, just trying to breathe in anything new at all.

  Devil’s hands are tight on the wheel. He’s thinking through it, working the angles, making the calculations. Being Devil.

  “We need to get you to Pitamont.”

  I’m lost again. “What the fuck is Pitamont?”

  “I thought you were just going crazy, Jim.”

  “I AM CRAZY!” I scream, frustration and fury exploding up out of my throat like jagged little slivers of glass from the churning misery in my stomach. “I AM CRAZY!”

  Devil puts a hand on my leg. A simple gesture to hold me in check. The fury turns to a weakness in my bones. The glass turns to sand. I slump. Defeated. Broken, again.

  “Livingston said to go to Pitamont. It’s a town in the mountains, south of Invermere. He said to go to Pitamont and find his uncle Bob. Works at some garage there. Bob knows the way to Bensonhall.”

  My eyes are full of water. I’m looking at the road through hot tears. I feel myself trembling, but I don’t move. I can’t move. Devil sees it. Starts to say something. Clears his throat, and then he falls silent, trying to find his words.

  “He was thanking you,” he finally offers. “The old man. He was thanking you for his granddaughter’s life.”

  I get a flash of lemon and lilac and the taste of hot blood in my mouth. All I see is the fear in her eyes. I’m the Big Bad Wolf. I’m the monster in the night, so terrible that the villagers thank me for sparing their lives. They leave me offerings and beg me not to pluck the children from their beds. I feel it there, solid and warm inside my fist.

  “I swear, I don’t know that girl, I never touched . . .”

  “You said there was a report about two guys in the park?”

  I hear the darkness in my voice. “Attacked without provocation.” Facial disfigurement . . . mauled by an animal.

  I hold the bauble out in my open hand. I watch the hunk of white jade, reflecting pink in the rising sun. I want to hurl it out the window. I want to jam it into my heart. All I can smell is lilac and lemons, and blood.

  “I’m the goddamn monster that people pray to save their children from. Now they leave me offerings, like I’m a fucking demon. Like I’m goddamn King Kong!”

  Devil laughs.

  “It’s a bear, holding an eagle,” he explains. “It’s a good luck statue. The words for bear and eagle make up the word for hero.”

  Once again, I’m staring with blind eyes at the smartest guy in the room.

  Devil’s voice is calm and gentle. “The two guys in the park. They were going to rape that girl. You saved her.”

  Lemons and lilac, fading in the distance, then the blood came.

  “You’re not the monster, Jim. You’re the hero.”

  Devil opens it up as we pass the city limits, heading west. The engine roars, and the road rumbles beneath us.

  “Whatever is happening to you, the answers are out there in the mountains.”

  Almost on cue, we top the hill and sail out onto the highway, and the Rocky Mountains rise up in the distance ahead of us, a watercolour dream, peeking out above the smoke like castles floating on clouds. Hope sailing on the horizon.

  The last of the fury, the frustration, the madness. They fall away in the glow of dawn. Safely away from the city, headed toward my past, and my future. My destiny—whatever the hell that might be.

  My only friend is behind the wheel. I feel so very tired and, for the first time in a long time, I feel safe.

  “Thank you, Adam.”

  Devil raises those eyebrows in the rear-view mirror. I half-expect to get my ass handed to me for the slip-of-the-tongue. He smiles.

 
; “Happy to help. Once you figure it out, control it, you let me know. Maybe you give me a little nip on the heel.” He grins that old Devil grin. “Maybe I can be a werewolf hero too, eh Jim?”

  “Finn,” I decide, and it feels right. It feels good. I feel good. “Just Finn.”

  Sunrise breaks behind us, a muted red glow in the rear-view mirror, pushing us onward.

  Finn. The hero.

  14

  I SLEEP. A beautiful dreamless sleep, all the way to the edge of the mountains, where Devil makes his goodbyes.

  “Let’s just say I wouldn’t want to get pulled over anywhere west of here,” he tells me.

  He gives me a fresh boxed cellular phone out of his trunk, a brotherly slap on the back, and a scrap of paper with Bowmont Livingston’s instructions on it.

  I’M ALONE AGAIN, but I feel more confident than I have in my whole life. I feel in my pockets as I board the bus, making sure I have the paper, the phone, my wallet . . . the jade figurine.

  I take a seat in the back, against the window, gazing out at the mountains as they pass. The smoke is still thick from the forest fires here, but it hovers around the lakes, deflected somehow to wrap around the mountains like sepia-tone skirts that flow and dance in the sun, swallowing up the light and glowing from within.

  I’ve never seen the mountains like this before. Well, I guess I must have, but I don’t remember it. All I can remember is the city. The noise, the smells, the lights. A constant barrage of sensory overload. A constant misery of strange places and strange people and, in all that time, the only thing that was ever silent was the judgement on their faces. The mountains were always just a mirage in the distance, a pretty background painting behind glass.

  Here, in the back of a Greyhound bus, cutting tiny tracks across these colossal mountains, there was nothing but silence. Calm and natural beauty rising up from the earth. Green and blue and gold. No flashing neon. No screaming tires and no wailing horns. No roaring airplanes overhead. No screaming radios and crying babies in the street. No concrete gods, and no glass temples.

  From the south, three sisters fair.

  From the East, Finn the hero.

  MORE THAN A few times, as we weave our way up and around the mountains, the smoke swallows us whole, sucking us through the haze, lost and unaware, creeping along until we’re popped out the other side, fog lifting into daylight again, soft and quiet, as if nothing had happened.

  The last of these patches carries us into Pitamont, where heavy rain is pouring down in a torrent, turning everything around us two shades darker. I am deposited, unceremoniously, next to an abandoned Dairy Queen in that strip of highway that I imagine every town must have, the one that runs just parallel to the places where people actually live. It’s a ghost town out here on the fringe, in the thru-lane full of gas stations and doughnut shops.

  Devil has briefed me extensively on the nature of the town. The population statistics. The ethnic make-up. The various industries that feed the town’s coffers. Unlike most of these mountain towns, there isn’t much of a tourist trade, there’s the odd hiker and cabin vacationer, but the lakes are too hard to get to for the motorboat crowd, and the beaches too rocky for lounging. Likewise, the winter sports are hampered because the trees are too thick and the mountains too rocky for skiing. There’s some kind of forestry company that makes up most of the industry. I don’t see any bare strips of trees or rough logging roads, but I imagine they’d be further away from the town proper. Now, heading into the fall, it would be quiet. Nowhere more so than here beside the highway, apparently.

  The rain has erased the smoke and the fog, but the dark sky and the reflecting sheets of rain make the handful of flickering signs glow with preternatural light. I turn and look through the dark windows of the restaurant behind me—vacant and locked down, the empty tables standing like ghosts behind the tinted glass.

  There’s a McDonald’s across the way, with a blazing red and white sign offering cheap coffee and half-price egg sandwiches. I pass it and wander down the only road that leads inward, presumably into town. No one passes me. Eventually the woods give way to scattered houses and side roads, before I reach what must be Main Street. Every town has one, right? I don’t tangibly recall ever being in a place so quiet, so small, and so quaint—but there’s something about this place, this street.

  There’s a block-long Army & Navy store, with the same backlit plastic sign that they must have opened the place with sometime in the seventies. It seems oddly familiar, as does the storefront of the restaurant next door. I don’t recognize the name, or even the sign, but I get a flash of memory, a medium-rare burger, thick and smothered in ketchup, on a huge Kaiser bun. A chocolate milkshake in an amber plastic tumbler, the kind of milkshake made with chocolate ice cream out of a bucket, mixed with milk and ice cubes, where the foam at the end has little granules, tiny sandy bits of ice. I can taste it, spooning out foam and chocolate grit with the straw, licking it clean. I know that if I go inside, there will be a black chalkboard on one wall, and a long bar, with wooden stools, like in an old western movie.

  It looks like a Swiss ski chalet, a log cabin with a wide, heavy roof, sloping down to overhang the sides of the building almost to the ground. I step through the thick oak door as a little bell tinkles overhead.

  The place is dead quiet, outside of the sound of tinny pop-country coming softly from speakers echoing somewhere inside of the ceiling.

  I sit in a corner, give the place the once-over. Everything is decorated in gingham check and rustic farmhouse kitsch. Paintings of pies and twee messages of faith dot the walls. Not exactly as I was picturing. If I had been here, it was much changed from my memory.

  Pleases and Thank Yous Keep the Lord Alive

  Love is a Fresh Baked Pie

  Happy is as Happy Does

  Jesus Loves Us All Equal

  I’m pretty sure if there is a Jesus, were he to arrive here on the edge of Pitamont-by-the-lake, this is the kind of place he’d set one foot in, and then head back to the McDonald’s. Which is what I’m contemplating when the waitress waddles out of the back, through a swinging double-cowboy door. She’s like a troll doll version of Loretta Lynn playing Barbie dress-up at the ’50s Dream Diner. Short, fat, and stuffed like a sausage into a frilly, pink, poly-acrylic uniform straight out of a bad TV sitcom. Her hair is teased high and thick, bangs curled down onto her forehead. She stops for a breath, waves to let me know she’ll be a minute. She reaches under the counter and comes up with a plate of fries and the world’s biggest presumably-cherry Coke. I can smell the sweetness of it, the syrup is in the back of my throat. She leans in, obviously spent, and munches a dozen or more fries, then takes a long sip through the bendy straw before she draws another ragged breath and finally makes her way over to my table.

  “I’m sorry, sweetie. Blood sugar. You know how that can be!” she laughs, as if I have any idea what she’s talking about. “But the good Lord has spared me from the dia-beet-us. Yes, he has. Every year they check, and every year I am just fine.”

  She waves her arms in the air, praising this Lord Doctor of Diabetes, then plants her pudgy hands down on the table.

  “Now. You’re not from around here, are you? Never seen you before. You just come in on the bus? It’s not tourist season, you know. No skiing around here anyways. And nobody’s coming out for the nature this year, on account of the forest fires and all this yucky smoke, hmmm? Maybe you’re new in town. No. I would have heard about that. Maybe your car broke down, is that it? Maybe you’re visiting someone. No, would have heard that.” She’s breathing hard and sweating. There’s a scent to her that I don’t like. Cigarettes and tuna fish, but something else.

  “Blood sugar,” I explain with as polite a smile as I can muster. “Just need a sandwich. Maybe some coffee?”

  It’s obviously the wrong answer. I must not be worthy of praying at the altar of the dia-beet-us saviour.

  She sits down in front of me and continues her guessing game, a
s if I was some strange thing she found on the sidewalk, and not a hungry customer in her greasy spoon.

  “Well, that won’t do, will it, mister smarty-pants? Come in here and tease a lady about her blood sugar, now will you?”

  She glares at me, looking more and more like a troll, and less like Loretta Lynn.

  “We don’t care for smarty-pants answers here. The good Lord tells us to suffer the fools, and the Jews, and the little children . . . Doesn’t say nothin’ about smarty-pants answers.”

  The scent gets stronger. Something sour and sickly-sweet. It’s on her breath like a curdled milkshake.

  “You can go and get on out of here, if you’re not going to be nice.”

  I just want her to stop breathing at me.

  I lean back in my seat and put my hands up in resignation.

  “I’m very sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you. I was feeling faint is all. I honestly haven’t eaten in a long time. Like, since yesterday.”

  She looks me up and down. I guess she’s trying to discern if I’m a Jew or a fool, or something even more offensive to her sensibilities. She heaves herself up out of the seat and waddles back to the counter for another sip of her drink. She finishes it, keeping her eyes on me the whole time. I want to leave, but I’m afraid she’ll throw a knife at me, or damn my mortal soul if I try to make a break for the door.

  She doesn’t bring me a menu. She doesn’t take my order. She goes into the kitchen and comes back out almost instantaneously with a cup and a plate.

  She drops them unceremoniously on the table in front of me, with a wheeze.

  The pie is brown and syrupy. It smells like flies and sugar water. The coffee seems about the same. I’m afraid to touch either one.

  “Raisin. All we got left.”

  She’s staring at me, scrutinizing my face. I imagine she’s looking for a reason to throw me out into the rain.

  “I think I’ll just be going.” I smile again, as polite as I can muster, and try to slide out of the booth.