A Few Other Adjectives

Godfrey House was a massive and utilitarian Georgian Colonial that overlooked the river on the summit of the highest hill in town, the province of management, and had the appearance to those below of a squat, blunt, and obscurely disapproving tusk. The property was enclosed on three sides by a forest of red oaks containing a population of occluded and vaguely horned shapes calling a low and sporadic hoo hoo … hoo hoo … In the circular drive was Roman’s Jaguar and a black Ford F-150 pickup truck. A light was on in the attic. Peter rang the doorbell and Roman’s mother answered. She was wearing a white robe and her hair was damp and she moved and also stood still like milk being poured under the full moon, and though she would have had neither time nor purpose to apply cosmetics after bathing, her lips were a shock red that in their present purse of distaste caused within Peter’s privatemost circuitry a sudden and confusing crossfiring at how arousing and simultaneously dick-shriveling this apparition was. He tried to envision Shelley Godfrey emerging from … that. Nicolae had told him the world of the upir was a strange and confusing one to a simple wolf man. Peter could think of a few other adjectives.

“Yes?” said Olivia in a tone suggesting he ought to be grateful she had not perforce closed the door on his nose. But it was not yet outside the realm of possibility.

“Is Roman here?” said Peter. “May I ask who’s calling?”

“Peter. We’re in the same English class.” “May I ask in regard to what?”

“Study group,” he said.

“Mm.” This syllable communicating her internal debate over whether to notify her son or the authorities.

“I’ll inform him,” she said. A moment’s consideration. “You can come in.”

Peter waited in the foyer as she withdrew down the hall. On one wall was an aged and chipping painting of a grotesquely fat cherub, layered rolls of dimpled fat, wings comically small, and smiling mouth smeared with chocolate. Maybe chocolate. On the other was a large framed photograph of an engorged and multi-hued hermaphrodite’s vulva. Peter’s eyebrows knotted. No—it was a flower, a close-up image of the stamen and stigma of a flame tulip. Peter was still entranced by this intricate arboreal obscenity when Roman appeared alone.

“Yeah?” he said, with the cold aloofness of a scorned woman. “Powwow,” said Peter.

Roman led him to his room, which was nearly the footage of Peter’s trailer. On the door was a picture of a crucifix with a serpent wrapped around it. The serpent’s tail was in its mouth. Otherwise there was an almost total lack of decoration, except mounted to the wall a train car coupling link, an old oblong of warped and rusted steel. Which despite its meager appearance Peter immediately knew without being told was the most valuable thing Roman owned.

“Well?” said Roman, with the cold, aloof satisfaction of a scorned woman to whom you’ve come

crawling back.

“Development,” said Peter. He described to Roman the afternoon’s encounter.

Roman evaluated the story with a noncommittal expression. “So? The Wendall girl totally flipped out. They can’t be taking it seriously.”

“It’s not that simple,” said Peter. “This woman is what she says she is like a Mexican hates fireworks.” Roman nodded, what insult he may have felt about their earlier meeting losing traction to this new

intrigue.

“What is she?” he said. “She’s a digger,” said Peter.

Roman shrugged. What of it? “The only people who really know what you are are your mom and me.” He grew defensive. “And I know how to button up.”

“That’s not why I’m here,” said Peter, lying: half his reason in coming was to keep the upir from running off at the mouth.

“So what are you afraid she digs up?” “Nicolae,” said Peter.

“He’s still alive?”

“No. But she goes deep enough, she’s gonna find out.” Roman looked at him.

“That Nicolae was a killer,” said Peter.

The Taste of Fear

By nature Nicolae was a pussycat. In his later years he had individual names for every duck he fed, and musicals made him cry. More than anything he loved his Sundays with Peter. On this day he would allow Peter to help him as he went around with a hammer and a dolly looking for cars that had a dent that needed to be fixed. Peter would help by pretending to be retarded because people were happier to give business to the guy with the retarded kid, and this made him feel clever and useful. Then they would go and spend Peter’s share of the proceeds immediately on ice cream or at the arcade. Nicolae would never let him save; a rich man, he said, was one who spent a million. Later, when it started in Peter, the turn, Nicolae was the one who showed him the right way to be a wolf, not brain surgery but impossible to understate the importance: Don’t hunt when you’re not hungry; when you do hunt, go for the flank, thus avoiding antlers in front and hooves in the rear; and when you are filled with the song of the universe, the breathing spirit that passes through and unites all things, throw your head back and close your eyes and join in.

But though Nicolae may have had a heart of gold, the substance of his brain was perhaps not as valued a commodity, and when he was young he fucked things up very badly for himself. He was part of a kumpania in the old country, and because he was one of seven Rumancek boys, and the Rumancek boys being about as useful at holding in gossip as a woman with a map, the fact that once a month he discarded his man coat and roamed in the purview of arcane and unruly gods was not only fairly widespread knowledge but also made the young man a more celebrated figure than even the most accomplished dancers or dulcimer players. How the old women clucked and the young girls tittered as that Rumancek swaggered past. It was really living high on the hog. So it was to increase his standing that he permitted a tradition to emerge among his brothers and their cronies, a real gentlemen’s club, to get howling drunk before the turn, then steal a pig or a sheep and watch Nicolae have at it. Better than the movies! Of course the older and wiser wagged their fingers over the only possible moral of this story—children playing with fire yields one outcome just as drunks playing with werewolves yields one other—and so it came to pass: the night the comedian of the cronies decided it would be a gas to snatch a bone from the wolf’s mouth.

At first the others tried sticks and rocks and finally guns, but it was already too late. Once the wolf gets the taste of fear all there is to do is back slowly away to avoid further provocation and then run, run and pray someone else in the pack is slower.

So that was that. It was all over before it began. It was all over. To kill another person, this doesn’t exist in Gypsy courts. It’s unthinkable. A person who would do this, unthinkable. So there’s no punishment, no sanction to be made against a thing so irreconcilable with the breathing spirit that passes through and unites all things. It’s just over for the one who did it, he doesn’t exist anymore. And no punishment is greater, it’s having your heart removed. The next morning Nicolae awoke alone on bare earth where the blood of his friend had melted the snow and to the sound of the creaking wheels of the caravan and all his brothers moving on, to the sound of his heart being removed from his body.

“That’s where this comes from,” said Peter.

He patted his rib cage where there was the tattoo of a g.

“It stands for gadjo. Outsider. Nicolae stood outside all worlds and I stand next to Nicolae.” “How did he get here?” said Roman.

“There was only one way. He was invisible to all his people and would have curled up and died with his thumb up his ass except for his two oldest friends in the world: his feet. So he walked. He walked day and night in the rain and the sun and he didn’t stop until he hit America. And he started again.”

“You can’t walk to America, there’s an ocean,” said Roman. “Well, he found a way to lick it,” said Peter.

Roman looked at him.

“It’s in the Bible,” said Peter.

“In the Bible it’s a miracle, you don’t lick it,” said Roman.

“Well, he did,” said Peter. “There it was in writing, and Nicolae didn’t know how to write himself so he figured if you took the trouble it must be true. So he walked up and down the beach until in his mind he licked it, and then he went inland a ways until he found a pond, and he tied lily pads to the bottoms of his shoes. And that was how he walked to America.”

Roman was not satisfied. But perceiving this line of inquiry a blind alley, he changed the subject. He asked what any of this had to with Peter.

“This is my blood,” said Peter. “Blood … stains.”

Roman picked up the coupling link and hefted it thoughtfully. “Shee-it,” said Roman.

“Shee-it,” said Peter.

“Who do you think this Chasseur really is?” said Roman.

“I need to know like an extra ear on my dick to hear myself whack off,” said Peter. “Let’s be clear, only one thing matters here: not putting me in a cage.”

Roman was quiet. “What now.”

“We do what you said,” said Peter. “We find the vargulf. And we stop him.” Roman slapped the link against his palm a couple of times. “How?”

“If there’s time before the next moon, help him,” said Peter. “It’s possible he doesn’t even know what he’s doing.”

“If there’s not?” “I kill him.”

Roman looked at the other boy who was hiding a wolf. “You would do that?”

“I would do what was necessary,” said Peter, who in a past moment of truth failed to wring the neck of a dying fox in an act of merciful necessity and could make no promises to himself what he would or would not do in a replicated scenario with so much more on the line. But he did know he needed to sell it convincingly for the benefit of the upir’s not insignificant resources.

“So if we went through with this,” said Roman, stressing the word if to lend the false impression there was any question in his mind, “where would we start?”

“Lisa Willoughby,” said Peter.

“Seems like a bit of a dead end,” said Roman.

“What’s left of her,” said Peter. “We find out where they’re burying her.” “Why?”

“Because we’re going to dig her up.”

Peter was not sure if the joyful light that suddenly shone in Roman’s green Godfrey eyes was indicative of how auspicious or dumbfuck a partnership this would be.

“We’re not calling ourselves the Order of the Dragon,” said Peter.

“Do you … know what it’s like?” said Roman, haltingly shifting gears. “The taste of fear?”

Peter did not know what he disliked more: the idea of formulating an appropriate response to this question or that it had been asked. So he employed a strategy he had perfected in his dealing with the opposite sex: reply naturally as if to an entirely different conversation.

“That bum who hangs out at Kilderry Park,” said Peter. “We also may as well try and talk to him—who knows, maybe he saw something.”

Roman was quiet. “What bum?” he said.

* * *

From the archives of Norman Godfrey:

NG: You wanted to see me?

FP: …

NG: Mr. Pullman? Francis?

FP: I … seen it.

NG: What?

FP: There was another one. I didn’t know there was another one.

NG: Another what?

FP: …

NG: You didn’t know there was another what?

FP: Another girl.

NG: What did you see, Francis?

* * *

Letha was sleeping when some obscure tension woke her and she saw in her doorway a silhouette palpable with ill ease.

“Dad?” she said.

“I’m sorry,” said Dr. Godfrey. “I didn’t mean to wake you up.” “It’s fine, but … are you all right?”

He considered his response. “No,” he said. “Why don’t you come over here?” she said.

For a moment it seemed as though he hadn’t heard. But then, trancelike, he went to her bed and sat. He tucked his hands into his lap. She smelled the scotch on him and in her condition it was nauseating to her, it was the smell of a man in pain. She touched his arm.

“You don’t have to worry about me,” she said. “I’m going to stay away from the woods. I’m not going to walk by myself. I’m going to be safe, Dad. I know your job is to worry, but my job is to be safe.” Her other hand passed over her stomach.

He looked at the little hand, this little person’s hand resting on his arm. Looking into Pullman’s story earlier in the night entailed confirming a detail about the Bluebell killing with the sheriff’s department that had not made it to the papers: though the body was disemboweled, the animal responsible had left vital organs intact while consuming only body fat. Meaning she was alive; she was alive and watching herself being eaten. When asked for a statement by the paper he had declared, in his view, a state of emergency. But does raising a child have any other name? There is a fly in the ointment peculiar to the study of the mind and it is that the subject of study is also its instrument, like a microscope under a microscope. He looked out at the dendritic network of branches cast by the streetlight in shadow puppet on her blinds.

“Dad?” she said. “Why are you crying?”

* * *

MYSTERY CREATURE: DEMON DOG?

Todd Palermo, Easter Valley Bugle

The currently unidentified predator responsible for the fatal maulings of Brooke Bluebell and Lisa Willoughby in Hemlock Grove has been described by an eyewitness as “a giant black dog, tall as a man, three hundred pounds, at least, with glowing yellow eyes.”

Francis Pullman, 53, an inpatient at the Hemlock Acres Institute for Mental Wellness, came forward last night claiming to have seen the first attack. Pullman is a homeless veteran of the U.S. Army. He said he was sleeping at Kilderry Park the night of September 30 when he awoke to the sounds of screaming. The victim, Brooke Bluebell, came running from the woods, followed closely by the “demon dog.”

“She had a ten-, fifteen-foot lead, but once they reached the open, he pounced right on her. I’ve seen a rabid dog before and this wasn’t anything like that. This was not natural.”

Pullman, who was admitted to Hemlock Acres last week in a highly agitated condition, apologized for saying nothing sooner, but it was a deeply traumatic experience for him.

When reached for comment, Dr. Norman Godfrey, psychiatrist in chief of the institute, refused to speculate on the likelihood of Pullman’s account on the basis of doctor-patient confidentiality.

“All I can recommend is that all parents consider this a state of emergency,” he said. “If at any time you are unsure of the location and welfare of your child, that is unacceptable.”

Sheriff Thomas Sworn, however, has warned not to lend too much credence to Pullman’s account. “We are willing to entertain the possibility that Mr. Pullman was witness to the tragedy, and are grateful to him for any light he might shed,” he said in an official press release. “But we are receiving expert help on this case, and though the wounds are certainly consistent with some sort of large animal, there simply isn’t a species of canine on the planet that fits his description, not to

mention the sort of evidence it would leave.”

Sheriff Sworn noted that it was night, Pullman has a history of narcotics abuse, and additionally “sometimes the mind plays tricks. I just don’t want a panic to start. It’s our job to find this thing, and as the father of twin girls myself, I promise you we will. Soon.”

Until then, he recommends residents continue taking precautions, “but against a typical feral animal, not some ghost dog. Those teeth are real enough.”

In Poor Taste

From the archives of Dr. Norman Godfrey:

From: morningstar314@yahoo.com

To: ngodfrey@hacres.net

Subject: A girl’s best friend

Dearest Uncle,

A dreadful row this morning. I was reading my newspaper (“demon dog”? horrid, horrid…) when Roman came to breakfast, upon which Mother instantly set upon him about the guest he had entertained last night, as he was paid a quite unexpected visit by that rascal Gypsy boy, Peter—who, I’ve decided, is most certainly not our hellish hound … well, almost certainly—and had a rather lengthy conversation behind closed doors. (How I should have liked to eavesdrop!—but alas, your charming niece’s sneakier impulses are in inverse proportion with her sheer volume; I fear I would not have much of a career in cloak and daggery barring some conspiracy of the blind, deaf, and dumb—but even then I suppose I would be bumped into eventually.) Mother inquired into his business. Roman replied they were partners on a school project. Mother was not satisfied by this patent evasion.

“Do you want the truth?” said Roman.

“Yes,” said Mother.

Roman gave a lengthy and graphic account of a homosexual affair. “But don’t worry,” it culminated, “it’s only [EXPLETIVE DELETED].”

Needless to say, it was not long before they were trading the usual poison slings and arrows. And despite my unhappy familiarity with the phenomenon, it still eludes me: how two people whose love for each other is so great can find words of such hate. Maybe I’ll understand one day, but I am not impatient for enlightenment.

I am dismayed to report that this is not the only evidence of a general decline in Mother’s temper lately. I went with Roman to the mall this past weekend (I needed a replacement copy of Beyond Good and Evil; I had ripped mine in two in a rage but on reflection decided there were a few points that warranted—ever so tentatively, Herr Nietzsche—reevaluation), and who should we encounter but Jenny from the club! She had been absent from our most recent supper and was to my surprise ringing up a sale at the earring boutique. I poked Roman, quite accidentally bowling him over, and restrained myself from tucking him under my arm like a suitcase to hasten our salutation (I do get excited sometimes).

But at our approach Jenny looked over with a distinct lack of enthusiasm and gave the barest nod of recognition. Of course I was crushed and racked my brains for any cause I may have given to offend her. My first assumption as always was that it was my own fault.

My brother, however, with his characteristic nonchalance in the face of the vagaries of mood of the fairer sex, asked how she’d been.

“Terrific,” she reported flatly. “Your psycho [EXPLETIVE DELETED] mother got me fired.”

I was simultaneously horrified at Mother and to hear Jenny speak of her like that.

“Yeah, well, she’s a [EXPLETIVE DELETED] on stilts,” said Roman. “Stop the presses.”

This was even more distressing. Of course he’s hurled far worse within our walls, but to talk so in this public setting … I grinned like a nervous dog (the friendly household variety).

But my brother’s waggishness had its reliable effect on the mademoiselle—who took apparent pleasure in the all too easily romanticized cynicism of the throne’s heir presumptive.

“You think you got troubles?” continued Roman, impressed with his own performance. “At least you didn’t end up with your brains gussying up the wainscoting.”

My knees grew weak, and I scarcely think this recounting is any more pleasurable for you, but you are my trusted doctor in addition to dearest uncle, and I depend as much on your professional as familial compassion. I’m sure you have heard the vulgar jokes as well, implicating Mother in this family’s great tragedy, and for the most part I am able to turn a deaf ear to such lurid insinuations, but to hear one cast so thoughtlessly from the lips of my brother … It took all my will to remain stoic—not to mention upright.

Jenny laughed, the way the fairer sex tends to around Roman. “You’re bad,” she diagnosed. But coaxed now from her initial sullenness she turned to me and graced the thoroughfare with one of those smiles that had so many times brightened our supper, and my dejection was an unmourned memory. Truly astonishing just how much of the world’s trouble could be erased by the simplest smile. She tapped her ears and said, “Come to accessorize, honey?”

I returned her smile with my own inferior facsimile and shook my head.

“You know what would look fabulous on you?” she said, and then unlocked a display of the more exclusive stock and removed a pair of teardrop diamond earrings that would nearly rival some of Mother’s.

“This is the fanciest thing we carry,” she said. “Just waiting for the proper lady. Come here.”

I bent in mad glee and glanced in the mirror as she held one to my ear, and even the juxtaposition of her fine hand with that monstrous countenance (which, though it happens to be my appearance, I will not call my reflection) did not darken my spirits once more. Rather, both of us, Jenny so fair and Shelley its antithesis, were equally delighted by the gentle farce that a thing of such delicate beauty could have a home on such a grotesque.

“Jolie fille!” exclaimed Jenny. “What do you think, big brother? It’s not like it’s outside your spending

limit.”

“Brilliant,” said Roman. “Mom would [EXPLETIVE DELETED] a bowling ball.”

“Well, I think your mom just doesn’t want the competition.”

It would hardly have been noticeable under the skylight, but I began lightly to shine.

But the bell will be ringing soon (eighth period, it tolls for thee). Christina is absent again today, the poor girl. One cannot imagine what toll stumbling on the demon dog’s handiwork must have taken on such an innocent. I sent her a card with a humble little poem to perhaps give her courage (no! I will not repeat it here), and also mentioned your name should she desire the audience of a professional. Despite my own impediments on the elocution front, you will never have a more vocal advocate to those in need.

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 Christina 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 did 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.

He shrugged. He was darker and poorer and had conspicuous style. People didn’t need their little girls to be found in pieces to fucking hate that.

“What are you doing with my cousin?” she said. “What needs to be done,” he said.

“You know we’re in the cafeteria and not a Clint Eastwood movie?” she said. “When you go to the bank do you ask for twenties or wheelbarrows?” he said. “Lazy!” she said. “Money doesn’t make you dumb.”

Peter did not disagree—it just made you used to people caring what you think. “Do you want my help or not?” she said.

“If things keep going down this road, someone very important to me is probably going to get hurt,” he said.

“Who?” she said. “Me,” he said.

She was annoyed to find she couldn’t dispute the logic; she had already decided she was in, as if exclusion was even an option, but had been looking forward to making him work harder for it.

“Well, I’m glad you’re friends, anyway,” she said. “Roman doesn’t have enough friends. I mean, there’s those people.” She nodded her head toward Roman’s lunch table. “But all they care about is the name. Nobody really knows him. Least of all, Roman.”

She leaned in with a confidential aspect and looked at him intently, and Peter saw now with clarity. Her soul’s light, the wide-eyed mysticism that set her apart from the rest of these dipshits. Right. The thing Roman didn’t know it but he was really in this for, Order of the Dragon my ass. Good to know, unless it wasn’t.

“Promise me something,” she said. “Promise you won’t let things go too far. Promise you’ll keep him from doing anything stupid.”

Peter made a solemn face and smiled inside: he enjoyed the ceremony and impressiveness of making

promises completely irrespective of his intention of keeping them. “I promise I won’t let that happen,” he said.

They were quiet within the cafeteria babble. She shifted one leg over the other under the table intentionally grazing his shin, for which she falsely apologized but he paid no heed at all, filling her with the surpassing desire to give it a sharp kick. Then she realized it was the table leg she had artlessly footsied and projected on her face the exact opposite of how much dignity she felt.

“Can I ask you something?” said Peter. She consented.

“What can you tell me about Roman’s mom?” “Aunt Olivia? Why?”

“Curious.”

She bet he was. “What do you want to know?” “What do you know about her?”

She thought, and shrugged. The truth was, nothing. No one did. In the ’80s JR had seen there was no way to compete realistically with the Chinese and decided to move from industry into biotech. He went abroad to inspect some facilities and came back engaged to the most beautiful and despised woman in the town’s history.

“Where did they meet?” said Peter. “England, I think.”

“Is that where she’s from?” She was not sure.

“What about her people?” She shrugged.

“Do you think there’s any chance your dad knows more of the story?” “Maybe. He was her shrink.”

Peter’s expression did not change but there was no hiding the crafty crackle this inspired.

“I don’t suppose you might be able to fish around and see if you can fill in some of the holes,” he said. “Mixed metaphor!” she said.

He gave her a look that somehow made her feel dumb even though he was the one who went around mixing metaphors. This boy!

“Well, I don’t suppose life was getting interesting enough already,” she said. “Life is always interesting,” he said.

“Did you steal that from a movie poster?” she said. He opened a box of Cracker Jacks.

“Ooh, let me find the prize,” she said.

He held the box out, widening the opening between his grip, and she rooted with closed eyes, producing a plastic packet.

Peter looked at the prize and was quiet.

She opened her eyes. “Huh, weird,” she said.

She was holding a translucent pink plastic ring, a little nub in the middle like the drawing of a planet in orbit. A snake—a snake eating its own tail.

Peter held out his hand, and she gave him the ring. He opened it. “Wear it. It’s good luck,” he said. Across the room, Roman watched Letha hold out her hand and Peter slip something around her finger.

* * *

That afternoon Dr. Chasseur waited in the atrium of the Godfrey Institute for Biomedical Technologies for an interview with its director. At the reception desk was a small man in a pink country-western-style shirt

with rhinestone pistols at the shoulders skimming through an entertainment gossip magazine. Engraved in the marble flooring of the entrance was a horizontal line followed by an omega followed by another horizontal line:

* * *

She asked if this motif had any meaning. The receptionist shrugged. He licked a finger and turned a page.

Then there came from behind her the sound of footsteps approaching from the bank of elevators and she turned to see a man who appeared no older than forty, though he was over a decade past. His hair was black but tinted gray to suggest his real age and his face was a firm polyethnic blend. An uncommonly dense musculature was visible under his suit. He held out his hand. His hands were small in comparison with his build, and of almost feminine delicacy, curiously smooth even of the calluses along the pad of the palm common to bodybuilders.

“Dr. Johann Pryce,” he said, and there was a certain spurious slickness to his carriage and his smile that brought to mind the rainbow patina of oil on a puddle.

“Dr. Clementine Chasseur,” she said.

The receptionist, sipping a Diet Coke, abruptly coughed it back into the bottle. They looked over. He gesticulated at his tabloid.

“He’s marrying that whore!”

Pryce asked Chasseur if she objected to holding this interview over lunch.

Chasseur said that would be fine and Pryce escorted her outside and around the building. In the front lawn there was a cloistered quadrangle surrounding a carefully tended rock garden in the spiral pattern of a nautilus shell. She followed him to a white van in the parking lot, with the same omega motif repeated on the door.

“A hieroglyph, of a fashion,” Pryce answered, preempting by a fraction of a second her actually asking the question. “Adapted from the code of the samurai: no matter the length of the journey, it must be taken inch by inch, like the measuring worm.”

She looked again and saw it was in fact a literal visualization of that process:

* * *

He took out a set of keys and punched the button to unlock the van. “Truth be told, a lunch break will be the closest thing I get to a vacation this week,” he said.

She looked up at the White Tower. “Doesn’t it make you a little crazy?” “Does the name Noah Dresner mean anything to you?”

It did not.

“He was the architect of the institute, which was to be the summation of his life’s work. Dresner was something of the Ahab of sacred geometry: the Fibonacci sequence, geomagnetic alignments, all that hokum-pokum. His intention was to culminate his legacy with the proverbial axis mundi: the connecting point between earth and sky. Upon the completion of this opus he took the elevator to the summit but collapsed and died of a brain hemorrhage by the fifth floor.”

Chasseur suggested this did not exactly answer her question. Pryce tapped the side of the van with his knuckle. Inch by inch. They relocated to an upscale Asian fusion restaurant near the mall.

“People inform me the sushi chef here is quite good,” said Pryce upon seating. “I wouldn’t know. If you told me tartar sauce on Styrofoam was a delicacy, I’d probably believe you. It’s all glucose to me. I’m not Asian, incidentally.”

“You’re German and Brazilian,” said Chasseur. “You came to term at twenty-six weeks of age but after fairly spectacularly staging something of a prison break from your own incubator were diagnosed with the condition of myotonic hypertrophy. Superstrength, to us mortals. And you’re allergic to peanuts.”

“You read the Sunday Times,” said Pryce, in reference to a New York Times Magazine profile titled “Man and Superman” of which he had been the subject the previous winter, the sort of puff piece focusing on the more sensational aspects of his biography that he submitted to from time to time in order to hide in plain sight, diverting attention from the nascent stages of a project of unusual sensitivity.

“I have a hideously abusive relationship with the crossword,” she said. “But I keep on going back.” His mouth smiled before his eyes did.

“Are you going to be recording this conversation?” he said. “I hadn’t intended to, Dr. Pryce.”

“Johann. But I am, just so you know. Which is to say, I have been this whole time. Just so you know. You understand.”

She did not object. “So what exactly is it you do, Johann?” she said. “Pretending you don’t know.”

“We’re strangers on a train.”

He smiled at the unusual prospect of play in the middle of a working day. “I’m the director of the Godfrey Institute for Biomedical Technologies.” “Whoa, Nellie, that sounds fancy. What do you do there?”

“The gamut. We design diagnostic equipment, prostheses, artificial organs, etc., and stand at the vanguard in pharmaceuticals, genetic manipulation, and nanotechnology today. We’re about to roll out a series of biosynthetic masks for burn victims that will convey human empathy via facial expression mirroring.”

“Does that explain your receptionist?” she said.

He was confused at first, then realized it was another attempt at humor, and again attempted to appear like he went in for that sort of thing. “No, we can’t take credit for Cesar. Actually, if you’d like to know a trade secret, all nonspecialist personnel are hired largely on the basis of an obvious disinclination toward natural curiosity.”

“You don’t want anyone asking questions.” “We certainly don’t.”

“What kind of genetics experiments are you doing?”

“Principally gene therapy,” he said. “JR Godfrey foresaw, correctly, that while the malleability of material properties was what defined the crucial advances of the nineteenth century, it is the malleability of life itself that will define the twenty-first. And so his mandate was that the name come to mean for healing backs what it once did for breaking them, which happily aligned with my own inclinations. I can’t really discuss much of it, but then you would probably only be so interested in the treatment of vein graft stenosis in adult dogs anyway.”

“You do animal testing?”

“I respect you’re asking out of diligence, but do I really need to answer that?” “How exactly did you get this job?”

“Because there is no one in my field working at a remotely comparable level.”

“But your own area of specialization is one of contention,” she said. “Exobiology, a highly speculative field dealing with possible nonterrestrial systems of life. In fact, I had some difficulty following the premise behind your first published and highly controversial paper. I found no shortage of … interpretations, but if you wouldn’t mind walking me through it.”

Pryce nodded. “You mean the one that has become popularly called ‘Better Reincarnation Through Chemistry.’ Certainly. In theory, if one took an existing but inanimate carbon-based structure—”

“A corpse,” she said.

“—that was still in a relatively labile situation—” “A baby’s corpse,” she said.

“—one might weave into the existing structure the element phosphorus, which is capable of forming chain molecules of sufficient length and complexity to support life, new life. But phosphorus alone is dangerously unstable. However—in theory—a stable bond can be achieved in combination with nitrogen. Though we’re not quite out of the woods: molecular nitrogen is practically inert and very difficult to convert into energy—a necessity to an organism constituted of the stuff. But a rather dynamic solution could be found, of all places, in the bean world. Legumes host within their roots bacteria that fix soil nitrogen in exchange for resources from the host. So a subject as described might survive by hosting these bacteria in, say, for the sake of argument, the feet, requiring simply a ready supply of dirt. In theory.”

“A theory that discredited you in the eyes of many of your peers before your career even started. You were, if I might speak candidly, a provocative choice for one of the most competitive posts to open in your field.”

“An infuriating one!” said Pryce. “Oh, the shoes that were eaten that day. But just as Westinghouse patronized the future in alternating current, JR was a man more concerned with what lay past the horizon than with clinging with both hands to the sagging teat of orthodoxy. He was not, to use the vernacular, a complete fuckwit. Which cannot be said of many of my contemporaries.”

She noted he did not echo her use of the word peer.

“Do you mind,” said Chasseur, “if I ask you a personal question?” “Insofar as we’ve been discussing my work, you have been all along.”

She nodded as one who could relate. “What attracted you to such a controversial discipline in the first place?”

His expression drifted and subtly dulled as though animating energies were absorbed for internal distribution, and studying this void it occurred to her she was seeing him for the first time fully inhabit his natural character. And as someone uniquely adept at not showcasing her emotions she realized that this subject accomplished the reverse trick in animating his face at all.

“Shortly into my eighth year I read for the first time the most important book ever written, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection,” said Pryce.

Chasseur nodded that that was indeed a dandy.

“I was enthralled,” said Pryce, “and yet troubled at the same time in a way I couldn’t identify, until I sat down and made a simple calculation.” He gestured at her as a for instance. “There is an exponential increase in system complexity through the upward progress of levels of organization. So I calculated the statistical probability of a system as stupefyingly complex as human consciousness arising from random mutation in the geologic age of the Earth. And I concluded that it is not. Probable. Or, for that matter, possible. By random mutation. Draw your own conclusions.”

By now she had quite an inventory.

“Now do you mind if I ask a question of my own?” said Dr. Pryce. She made a hand gesture: Go ahead.

“You completed a doctorate in predator ethology at the University of Texas in 2004,” he said. She did not reply. This was not a question, and he would not have chosen his words casually. “How is this of any possible interest to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service?” he said.

She looked down. There was a glass top over the table that reflected the skylight above in such a way that it contained her doppelgänger peering back at her from within a lighted shaft. She looked back at Pryce with amiable surrender.

“You got me,” she said. “It’s not, I suppose. They just give me a lot of rope to do my job, and I have my own method. It’s a little elliptical.”

“If I’m not mistaken, to complement your training in sociobiology you have some experience with the Reid technique of interrogation and have been asking tangential questions to establish a rapport with the suspect as well as elicit behavior symptoms of truth and deception preparatory to a more direct confrontation.”

“Johann, is there any chance one of your test animals could have gotten loose?” “No.”

“What about a test subject?” “You mean a person?” “Yes.”

“None whatsoever.”

She regarded him. And if moments before, the vacuum of basic human vitality in his face had been a momentary lapse, it was now strategically deployed: he had become such a blank that he could have been napping right there with his eyes open, or breathing dead. She had never before looked into another living person’s eyes and not found incontrovertible evidence of the human soul. She had never seen anything more terrifying.

She snapped her fingers. “Rats. And here I thought I’d cracked it. You wouldn’t have any of your own ideas on our demon dog, would you?”

His point made—you will get nothing from me that I don’t give you—Pryce suffered imitation of life to reinvest his features.

“I understand the animal has left no tracks,” said Pryce. She nodded.

“I understand canid scat was discovered in the area containing large amounts of human hair, but from an adolescent male, of which none have gone missing. Further, I understand analysis of this scat revealed abnormally low levels of adrenal glucocorticoid, indicating that the animal not only had not recently engaged in an act of aggression, but also is by nature nonaggressive.”

She did not bother to inquire how he came into possession of this information. “Your conclusion, Johann?” she said.

“I conclude I’m glad it’s your job to make sense of it and not mine,” he said. “However, considering the parallels between both killings, I would calculate the probability that these were not premeditated acts of a pathological sexual predator at within an order of magnitude of one in ten million.”

“But a person wouldn’t possibly have the ability to do what was done to those bodies. Not bare-handed.”

Dr. Pryce nodded. He reached into his breast pocket and produced a digital voice recorder. He held it in his soft, feminine hand and, giving her a collegial smile, made a fist that he tightened and tightened until its shell ruptured and its gadget innards spilled onto the table, which he tidily swept into a napkin and set aside.

“If a problem can’t be solved within the frame it was conceived, the solution lies in reframing the problem,” he said.

Hello, Handsome

Immediately after dropping Shelley off, Roman went round to unhitch the cart. Olivia emerged on the porch and watched him. She could see that someone was sitting in the car, but she was not wearing her sunglasses and the sun’s glare reflected from the window hit her eyes and she shielded them with her hand. Roman whistled an old Rodgers and Hart standard.

“Where are you going?” said Olivia, massaging her eyelids and causing a neon flare of blood vessels. “Nowhere,” said Roman.

“Will we be returning again at five a.m.?”

“We’ll see.” He lowered the cart and resumed whistling.

She blinked through a haze of phantom color as her son pulled from the drive but through her own galled determination made out the passenger, slouched and superstitiously averting his face from her direct gaze: Peter Rumancek. Olivia lightly traced her finger along the rail and pressed down on a knot in the wood.

She turned and was startled to find Shelley standing in the foyer studying her. Looming with nervous sensitivity to climatic shifts in her mother’s mood. Olivia made an effort to slough off some of the tension the girl tended to absorb.

“And what,” she said, “have we been told about how bloody disconcerting we are when we sneak up on people?”

She made her hands into pincers and pinchedpinchedpinched at Shelley’s sides and the house shook with thunderous laughter.

* * *

On the parkway, Roman said, “So was that a nice little lunch date?”

“She pities me,” Peter said. He didn’t have to put his finger to the wind to know that extreme caution was required here.

“She’s all heart,” said Roman. They entered a tunnel.

“Can I ask you something?” said Roman. “Go ahead.”

“What do you do when you get horny? While you’re turned?”

Peter looked up at the lines of parallel lights extending into the white vanishing point at the tunnel’s far end. He didn’t answer.

They drove to the Pittsburgh neighborhood of Shadyside, making a detour at a health food store and then arriving at a crumbling yellow brick apartment building. Pet

Date: 2016-01-05; view: 860