Rules for Werewolves (14 page)

—You’re right. I should be getting myself ready for Angel, so I can protect you from her.

—How?

—I need to make us safe. And then I need to get into that gun safe and get those guns.

—Good. But eat something first, baby. Tomorrow we’ll figure out the combination.

—I’m not hungry.

—I don’t care.

—Once you get past a certain point it feels like you could just not eat forever.

—Well, I’m gonna bring you back to your appetite.

—How are you gonna do that?

—Chicken and dumplings. Rolls. Iced tea.

—That sorta sounds good.

—Wait ’til you see me eating it all right in front of you. You’ll get your hunger back.

—All right. You start cooking. I have to go out and take care of something.

—What are you gonna do, Malcolm?

—I gotta make us safe. I have to run back by the last house and make sure we didn’t leave any evidence we didn’t mean to.

—You better hurry. I’ll start eating without you.

—Get up. Wake the fuck up. Wake up.

—Whoa.

—Yeah, “whoa” is right. You need to shake the cobwebs out, sleepyhead.

—Who are you?

—I’m your new girlfriend.

—Did we meet last night?

—What do you
fucking think
?! Am I in your bed?! Am I wearing anything?! Are these bruises on my wrists and my ribs—are they real?

—Ow. Don’t hit me.

—Are you
serious
?

—Yeah, I’m fucking serious. Don’t hit me.

—Don’t you remember anything about last night, cowboy?

—No. You were fucking force-feeding me drinks.

—Look at my arms and my ribs. You see these bruises?

—I didn’t do that.

—You did. This is what you’re into.

—No way.

—You got drunk enough to forget your manners—then you started to wanna mess me around.

—I don’t wanna mess you around.

—You did. You got drunk and then you wanted to play “don’t hit me.”

—I have to go to work.

—Wait.

—Ow. Don’t hit me!

—Yeah. That’s how the game’s played. Only last night the roles were reversed. You were pitching and I was catching.

—Look, I’m sorry—

—So you
are
starting to remember?

—No. I don’t know what you’re talking about.

—Then I’ll show you.

—Show me what?

—Find your fucking handcuffs and I’ll jog your memory.

—I have to go to work.

—Fine. We can talk about it when you get home.

—You’re not gonna be here when I get home.

—I am.

—Fuck you.

—I’m your new girlfriend. I’m gonna stick with you until you remember me.

—Why do you wanna be my girlfriend if I was so mean to you?

—’Cause I’d never let a total stranger treat me the way you did.

I got back, ate the best meal of my life, and then collapsed in the bed. I was planning on the best sleep of my life, too. But the dog woke me up. It wanted to go outside. It kept standing up on its back legs so it could get its front paws on the edge of the bed and lean forward until it could lick my face. At first I thought it was in love. I thought the dog wanted to get in bed with Tanya and me. But when I tried to lift the dog up into the bed it growled at me and backed away. Tanya told me to take it outside.

As soon as I got up and opened the bedroom door, the dog bolted out of the room. Maybe it should have been obvious to me that this was why the dog was licking me. It’s funny, animals and humans can do the exact same action and mean the opposite thing by it. If Susan had been lying on our bedroom floor, reaching up onto the bed, licking my face, etc.—that wouldn’t mean Susan wanted to go outside; that definitely would have meant Susan wanted to get under the covers with us.

The dog ran away when I opened the bedroom door because it wanted me to follow. I know the dog wanted me to follow it because the dog came back and barked at me when I paused in the doorway to get my head on straight. The dog knows it’s going to need me to open more doors to get outside. This is how a dog says “follow me,” by running. But I didn’t run away from home so I could be followed. I ran away to be gone.

The less said about my family the better. I try to do push-ups and
sit-ups every day because that’s one of the simple things I can do to change the way I look, to make me look less like the rest of my family. I keep my hair cut in a mohawk. I try to smile a lot. And I never look directly into a TV screen. If it ever happens that I’m unlucky enough to be standing next to my family ever again, you’re not gonna see any resemblance. They’re clean, clean-shaven, no tattoos, clean clothes and trimmed nails. I’m wild.

The dog’s funny. It runs over people in the living room. When they yell and swing their arms to get the dog to leave them alone, the dog wags its tail and jumps back over ’em. The dog is playing and the people aren’t. But they’re both engaged in the same activity at the same moment in time.

My thoughts are getting shorter and shorter as I get farther and farther from the bed. I’m tired. Not eating for three days will really wear you out. I’m impressed if this is something Angel actually did with any regularity. She’s out there feeling the same way I am, more or less, if she kept her word. Starving makes you wild and then that first meal tames you into a seriously sluggish bad mood.

The back door on this house has at least four locks. A lock in the doorknob, a couple of deadbolts, and a chain latch. All this on a door with a big glass pane in the middle of it so you can see who’s there. Whoever installed these locks ought to be sued for malpractice.

The dog bolted into the bushes after a cat or something. Animals know what they want when they want it. Wish I did. Always.

I want Tanya to get up and come to the window. I want her to stand there, naked, and look down on me in the backyard. I want us to take a little time to look each other over at a distance. I want her to fall in love with what she sees. Then I want Angel to come flying out of the bushes, attacking me with a hammer. But I want to catch Angel’s wrist with my left hand and punch her with a right cross and send her into the pool. We’re all naked in this fantasy. Angel drowns. The dog comes out of the bushes and howls at the moon. All the rest of the gang is in the kitchen, watching me through the windows at the kitchen sink. Everybody is applauding me. And Tanya is up above, looking down on me from the bedroom window, smiling.

None of that’s gonna happen. Tanya’s asleep. The rest of the gang is asleep. The dog isn’t going to come out of the bushes unless I go back into
the kitchen and find a piece of meat or something to lure it back. The dog would come to Bobert. The dog liked Bobert. But the dog only
needs
me.

I don’t know if Tanya’s right about all our troubles being between her and Angel. I don’t know if she’s right in her description of what
Othello
is really about. But I do know Angel’s as smart as Iago. At least in the sense that Angel’s not going to jump out of the bushes and swing a hammer at me. Angel’s gonna lay a trap for me and I’m going to be the one that jumps into it.

I want to kill somebody. I want to see what it’s like. I assume it’s no big deal. At least I tell myself it’s no big deal. But I get really excited when I think about it. Here’s how I imagine it now: A man is washing his dishes at the kitchen sink, and all of a sudden he gets a sensation that he’s being watched. He gets a chill down the back of his neck. He looks behind him. There’s no one. He looks out into his backyard, and there’s me, completely naked. No weapons. But I have a smile on my face. Most people smile because they’re happy. I smile because I’m an animal that’s getting what it wants. The man can’t do anything but watch as I walk to the back door. I don’t even try the handle. I punch my left hand through the glass and unlock all four locks without taking my eyes off the man. I use my left hand because I don’t care about it. I’m keeping my right hand useful for the task and that’s all that matters. The man I’m fantasizing about killing is terrified. He probably yells at me. He probably runs to get the phone. He runs to another room with a better door and locks it between us. But his actions are in conflict. If he wants to calm me down, he shouldn’t yell at me. If he wants to hide, he shouldn’t call the cops and tell them where he is. If he wants to get away from me, he shouldn’t back himself into a corner.

I walk through the house slowly. I open the door to the bedroom. I lift up the covers and Tanya is there, naked, asleep, but growling at me to get in next to her, to pull the covers over both of us and get warm. The dog followed me back in and now it lays on the floor at the side of the bed, perfectly content. The dog knows I can be trusted now to give it what it wants. This is my house now. No matter what Tanya says. I’m not gonna give it up for Angel, or the man who owns it, or his family, or the cops. This is my house. I put my right hand on Tanya’s breast and pull her to me and swear myself to sleep on it.

—Leave me alone.

—Come ’ere.

—You don’t want me to.

—I do.

—You don’t.

—Why don’t I?

—I changed, motherfucker.

—Come back here. Come back here right this instant. Don’t talk to me like that. Don’t walk away from me while I’m talking to you. Bobert. Bobert!

—Morning.

—Morning, sugar. You look great. Who got you smiling like that?

—I love this house.

—Me, too.

—I feel like we can be totally different people here.

—Me, too.

—It’s been three nights and nobody’s trashed the place. Last night nobody got drunk. Nobody broke anything.

—I broke the Jacuzzi tub in the back bedroom, but it was an accident that could have happened to the normal family.

—If we were a normal family, we’d call a plumber.

—But we’re not, baby.

—We just keep using what works. Keep eating yogurt ’til the fridge breaks down, keep watching TV ’til it stops working. Then we’ll get a tape all knotted up in the reel to reel player … until eventually almost everything is broken and we’ll all be jammed up in the bathroom, waiting for the last lightbulb in the house to burn out so we can say we got every last drop out of this place before we move on.

—How’d you break the Jacuzzi? Were you taking a bath?

—I thought I’d clean up. I didn’t wanna get the sheets dirty in the little girl’s bed.

—It’s not just me. This house is changing all of us.

—How do you feel, Susan?

—I could use a cup of coffee. But otherwise, I’m cool.

—I’m glad you told us to go to bed last night, Tanya.

—Did you do it?

—No, but now the coffee tastes
so
good.

—I haven’t had coffee in months.

—Why didn’t we make any yesterday morning?

—We were all sleeping.

—I can’t believe I ever lived without coffee.

—The smell is what woke me up.

—It woke everybody up and lured them into the kitchen.

—So what’s on the agenda today, Malcolm?

—Well, why don’t we get a couple of people on breakfast duty, cooking up a big meal—

—We’re all gonna eat together?

—Like a family?

—What’s got into you, Malcolm?

—I can eat again. I took care of some business last night. I had a big meal. Then I got a good night’s sleep. I got my head on straight. Now I know what I want. And it starts with eating a big meal with everybody.

—I can cook, baby.

—I’ll help.

—While you two do that, the rest of us are going to turn the house over.

—What do you mean?

—We’re done just eating and sleeping and drinking and fucking. We’re gonna make a plan and live by it.

—What’s the plan?

—First thing we need to do is to go through the house.

—You already did that.

—We all have.

—We need to do it again, methodically, and make a mental inventory of everything we’ve got here. Here’s how we’re going to do it—

—Pull out a drawer. Turn the drawer over. Kick through the shit with your foot.

—No. The point is
not
to make a mess.

—We can be neat. We have been, pretty much.

—First thing is: Everybody think through what you personally would need if we all took off to live in the woods.

—Why do we have to go live in the woods?

—We don’t.

—But the point I keep trying to make is not to let this house go to waste when we
do
have to leave. Which we will. Eventually.

—So like: food, water, clothes.

—Right. And I want you all to be especially on the lookout for any money, or medicine, or pills.

—Some of us already found some.

—Well, then tonight, after everybody’s had a chance to go through the house
methodically
, we’re all going to share what we’ve found and divvy it up.

—I don’t wanna share.

—What if somebody finds something better than what you found, honey? You’ll want them to share with you, won’t you?

—I guess.

—Also, collect any clues you find about who might come visit us here. What kind of people might be stopping by? Maids, relatives, house sitters, whatever.

—And anything that gives us a basic family bio—news clippings about little junior’s last track meet or whatever.

—Why do we care about that?

—We need to be able to have a basic conversation about family business with whoever they have checking up on the house.

—What makes you think someone’s gonna stop by?

—Tanya pointed it out to me—we’ve been eating fresh fruit. So I think someone’s coming by to check up on things.

—We should get our story straight in case someone stops by.

—That’s what I’m saying, you fucking moron.