Rules for Werewolves (27 page)

—I’m all right … I’m just standing here … waiting for you to stop bleeding …

—All right, Timothy, I’m just behind this door, getting doctored. Oww.

—Hold still.

—It stings.

—I’m just standing here … waiting for you to stop being such a big baby … waiting to get on with our lives … waiting to get out of this place …

—I got all the Lunchables and all the sandwiches I could.

—The ones with mayo aren’t gonna keep. We should eat those first.

—Like pimento cheese?

—Yeah.

—What’s the deal with pimento cheese?

—It’s a Southern thing.

—Like poor people food?

—No. They also serve pimento cheese at, like, the Masters Tournament. It’s a big deal.

—Is that a golf thing?

—Yeah.

—What’s the deal with golf?

—You got me.

—I got Gatorades. Just two. I figured we could use the bottles over and over again.

—Cool.

—I got all the granola-type bars.

—Cool.

—I grabbed what I could off the medicine shelf.

—Let me see.

—What do you think?

—I think it looks like you’re expecting a hemorrhoid.

—I just grabbed whatever.

—Well, who knows? With all the pimento cheese. It’s not impossible.

—What is a hemorrhoid?

—It’s when part of the inside of your intestine, like, gets squeezed out and it fills with blood and hangs outside your asshole. You get ’em from trying to force yourself to shit.

—Why would you do that?

—Look at all this shit that passes for food. All the chemicals and shit. Pimento cheese. That’s what I’m talking about. This stuff’ll give you hemorrhoids the size of golf balls.

—Haha.

—What else did you get?

—I was scared, Robert.

—Yeah, I bet.

—I thought he was gonna come out any second.

—You did a good job.

—I thought he was going to peek his head out around the corner and catch me.

—And then what?

—I don’t know. Call the cops.

—What are the cops gonna do? It takes ’em ten minutes to get anywhere. If that convenience store clerk caught you, I would have just punched him in the face and we would have run.

—Did it hurt?

—What?

—Cutting your hand?

—No. I just thought about how much I fucked up leaving those bags in the car—

—You didn’t fuck up.

—Insisting that we put them in the trunk in the first place—

—It was as much my fault as it was yours.

—Overplanning. That’s what’s gonna get us caught. We have to be wild animals. So it’s a good thing that happened. As a reminder: We have to be wild animals.

—So far it hasn’t been too bad.

—That’s a real vote of confidence, Tim.

—Look there’s Wicklow. Take a left.

—Just before I cut my hand, I thought about how mad I was at myself, for letting you down—

—You didn’t let me down.

—And then it was no big deal. It didn’t even hurt, really. It was like my emotions were a gun. And I just picked up my anger and I pointed it at myself, and then … I let me have it.

—I also got us a couple of newspapers. I figure tonight we can spread the papers out and sleep on ’em. Then tomorrow, while we’re waiting for the sun to go down, we can read ’em. And I got us a new map. And I got us a few scratch-off tickets.

—I don’t think those work if they’re not sold to you.

—What do you mean? The tickets don’t know if they were bought or stolen.

—The code on the back. When you buy it, they scan it in at the cash register. That puts it in the computer system. Then when you win and you go to cash it in, they scan it again. That way they know where it was bought. But if you didn’t do the first scan, the one that puts it in the system that you bought it, then the second scan won’t work. They’ll know it was stolen.

—Are you sure?

—No. But that’s the way I think it works. I’m pretty sure they must do something to keep you from stealing lottery tickets. Otherwise people would steal lottery tickets all the time.

—That sucks.

—We can still scratch ’em. We’ll divide the cards in half and whoever has the most winnings, they get something.

—Whoever has the least winning cards has to do the shoplifting next time.

—You really didn’t like it, Tim, did you?

—No.

—All right. I have a fifty-dollar bill in my pocket—

—Are you fucking kidding me?!

—It’s special. I was saving it for emergencies.

—This is an emergency.

—It’s not like it’s gonna last us more than two or three days—then what are we gonna do?

—I don’t care if we have to steal. If it’s the only way, then it’s the only way.

—All right. We’ll use up the money first. Then we’ll try to find another way when we can. But you aren’t the only one who took shit. I took what I could squeeze into my pockets. I got a bunch of trash bags.

—What for?

—To sleep on. To wear when it rains. To hold a bunch of potatoes and shit when we get out of the city and can start living off people’s farms so we don’t have to shoplift.

—Cool.

—And I got little soaps and some toilet paper.

—It looks like we’re here. Does this look like a construction site to you?

—I guess. I thought there’d be a structure or something, though.

—I guess you have to start somewhere.

—There’s nothing but a port-a-let surrounded by a barbed wire fence.

—What do you wanna do?

—Let’s figure out a way in. ’Cause I really do have to go to the bathroom.

—What do you think, Tim? You think this’ll do for our little daytime hide out?

—We got sunlight coming in through the trees. And I think we’ll be safe here. I don’t think anybody’ll bother us.

—Still. Sitting in a dried-up drainage pipe for twelve hours sure is gonna be interesting.

—I just hope it doesn’t rain. Then where would we go?

—I guess we’d put the garbage bags over our heads and head for higher ground.

—Odds are it’s gonna rain
sometime
in the next two weeks. Right?

—Take out the paper. Let’s see what the forecast is.

—How’d you sleep last night?

—Not good. How about you?

—It’s gonna take some getting used to.

—We can take turns napping today, while the other one keeps watch. I’ll go first. I’m older.

—Go first what—nap or watch?

—Whatever I want. I’m older.

—Yeah, I guess. Hey, are these your friends on the front page?

—What’s it say?

—That housekeeper who got assaulted came out of her coma. She said some friends of the daughter of the people she worked for attacked her. She was cleaning the house and they busted in and beat her up and stole a bunch of shit.

—That doesn’t sound like my friends.

—Police think there might be a connection between this attack and the two dead bodies they found in that burned-down house near Colston.

—I guess they found the Peugeot house.

—What’s that mean?

—Malcolm was looking for somebody in that neighborhood who owned a Peugeot.

—That’s a car?

—Yeah. And I just happened to see that car at a house over by Colston. So maybe that
is
some of the people I was staying with.

—So some of your friends killed the people who owned the car?

—Whoever owned that car tried to run Malcolm over. They tried to kill him first.

—So he killed them?

—I don’t think so.

—And then he burned the house down?

—I don’t think so.

—That’s what the newspaper says.

—Maybe.

—Still.

—I don’t think the others would let Malcolm kill anybody.

—Really?

—Yeah. Sure. I don’t know. What do you want me to say?

—Whose bodies do you think they found in this house?

—I don’t know, Tim. Leave me alone. Who cares? For all I know it’s complete strangers. The police can’t solve a murder so they try to pin it on a bunch of homeless people. Hell, it could be Malcolm and Angel.

—Who’s Angel?

—She’s someone who was sort of challenging Malcolm to be the leader just before I left.

—But she didn’t win?

—It was a tie. You know, they always said, “When two werewolves fight each other, they both die because every werewolf is the exact same strength as every other and werewolves can only fight to the death.”

—I thought you said you didn’t have a leader. You said we would all decide
together
what to do next or we would pull our ideas out of a hat.

—Sometimes. But Malcolm was trying to organize things more. Like train us and give us more discipline.

—They killed somebody.

—You don’t know that. And it was probably each other if they did.

—And they beat up some poor maid.

—Just because the police say it’s all connected doesn’t mean it is.

—And they burned somebody’s house down.

—That’s something Malcolm’s into. I don’t think it’ll happen anymore now that he’s dead.

—You don’t know that he’s dead.

—It was his idea of the best way to get rid of evidence.

—There was blood on the postcard they sent us.

—So?

—I didn’t know we were hitchhiking our way into all this fucked-up trouble.

—We’re not hitchhiking.

—Why? Because it’s not safe?

—Yeah.

—That’s the dumbest fucking thing I ever heard. You know what’s not safe?

Newspaper. Newspaper. Newspaper. Newspaper. Newspaper.

—Why would they send us a postcard and tell us where they were if they wanted to hurt us?

—Because you’re evidence. And apparently your leader is
into
getting rid of it.

—He’s not my leader. And he’s probably not even around anymore.

—You don’t know.

—You don’t know, either. You don’t know anything.

—Why are we going to be with these people?

—Because we can’t go home. We stole Donald’s car. We stole money from Mom.

—I didn’t steal any money.

—I did.

—Then why did you make me shoplift?

—It was in my backpack.

—So now some homeless guy has a bunch of Mom’s money.

—I was trying to take care of you.

—Donald never touched me.

—What do you mean?

—

—

—

—What do you mean, Tim?

—I mean—what you say Donald did to you—he never did that shit to me.

—What do you mean, “what I
say
Donald did to me”?

—I believe you about you. But you have to believe me about me, too.

—Why would he only fuck with me?

—Maybe he was in love with you.

—That’s fucking sick, Tim. That’s fucking sick.

—He was a dick and he had a shitty temper, and he was definitely a pervert in the way he talked, but he never actually did anything perverted to me or around me.

—He would have eventually.

—Listen, Robert—he didn’t. I’m telling you the truth. I’m sorry he didn’t touch me. But he didn’t.

—Don’t say that. I didn’t want it to be true for you. I just don’t know why he would get me and leave you alone.

—Now you tell me.

—What?

—Robert, tell me the truth.

—I did. I swear. Everything I told you about Donald was true.

—I know. I know. I mean, tell me the truth about your friends.

—I did.

—Some of it. But you didn’t tell me about burning down houses. Or killing each other.

—Maybe that’s not them in the paper, Tim.

—You don’t think so?

—Maybe the police are just trying to scare people.

—Tell me the truth, Robert.

—Let me see the paper.

—There. Take a good fucking look at it. And then tell me. Tell me everything.

—Thank you for agreeing to talk to me.

—I already told those other police everything I know.

—I know. They told me what you told them. They let me read their notes.

—So then what am I supposed to fill you in on?

—What I do is: I let a few days pass after I read a file, and I do other work. It’s a demanding job. The average detective around here is working maybe fifteen or twenty cases at a time. And each case has a certain amount of paperwork. And we have to go to court every once in a while—and parole hearings. So what I do is, after a couple of days of that sort of thing, I sit down and I type up everything I remember from the file in question. I do it all from memory. I try to be as specific as I can be. Ideally what I type up would be the same length as the original file and contain all the same facts. It never does. As soon as I finish typing up what I remember, I compare it to the original file. You’d be surprised at the sort of important details that slip your mind. And you’d be equally surprised at the sort of assumptions you make about a situation that are in no way based on fact. It’s these lapses and assumptions that I want to talk to you about.

—I didn’t do anything wrong.

—You’re not under investigation. You’re in a hospital. The people under investigation are the ones who put you here.

—They’re animals.

—I don’t understand it myself. When I see what people do to one another. How do they continue to call themselves people? And why do we want to hang on to the title ourselves, when it’s used by so many monsters?

—They attacked me for no reason.

—I remember you saying you just opened the closet in the master bedroom and someone jumped out and started attacking you.

—And then they rushed in from everywhere. From the bathroom. From out in the hall. While the first few were attacking me I could hear more of them coming up the stairs. While the first few were holding me down I watched one crawl out from under the bed.

—They were waiting for you.