Running with the Pack

BLAMED FOR TRYING TO LIVE JESSE BULLINGTON

The summer after Charles’s mother died he decided to become a werewolf. Not really, of course, he wasn’t crazy, even after the murder and moving to a city that was as hot and wet as the inside of a mouth, every breeze like warm breath in his face, every afternoon the clouds sneezing warm rain; he wasn’t crazy and he wasn’t a kid who believed everything he read or saw in a movie. He was really, really bored, though, and he didn’t have any friends, and one of his library books on werewolves had a six page chapter on how people turned into them, and with the start of tenth grade still a month away Charles figured in the name of science he should put the book to the test. He knew nothing would come of it, not really, but he’d never drunk water from a wolf’s pawprint or dealt with the Devil, either, so who knew?

If he had hit on the plan back when they were making him see the two psychologists he wouldn’t have mentioned it, obviously, but he knew what the shrinks would probably have said. The older one would think that Charles’s ambition came from an urge to protect himself and his remaining family, and the younger one would have told him that lycanthropy was his way of metaphorically dealing with his post-puberty anxiety. They were both, in Charles’ estimation, dumb as balls.

“Mr. Jenkins said Rickards is an urban high school,” Charles had told Mr. Matherne, his A.P. history teacher and an old friend of his mother’s.

“Jenkins dropped the U on you, huh?” Mr. Matherne shook his head the way he always did when Mr. Jenkins came up, as though the principal’s name was a fly buzzing around his ears. “You know what that means, right?”

“Ghetto,” Charles and Mr. Matherne said in unison.

“It won’t be easy, being the only vegan in the ghetto,” said Mr. Matherne, and that was the double truth, Ruth. Charles’s dad didn’t buy that shit, and his gramma, while she tried, didn’t understand, and so the only people he knew who really understood what the V-word meant were back in Baltimore. Person, Charles would correct himself, person, because even back home he’d never told his friends when he restarted his vegan clock, and while Mr. Matherne was still embedded in 4A waging his one man war against ignorance, Charles’s mom was gone, even if her bones weren’t going anywhere.

Southside was the ghetto, too, Charles soon realized, even worse than the Frenchtown neighborhood that lay bunched up on the far side of the public library. Lie-berry, his gramma pronounced it, and Charles winced every time. For an “urban” area there were a lot of dirt roads linking the narrow paved streets, actual dirt roads shaded by the huge live oaks that peppered Tallahassee, as if the rednecks who had built the place didn’t know the meaning of the word city. The shotgun shack Charles moved into with his dad and gramma was over a mile from the library but three blocks from the nearest liquor store, two if you took the path through the kudzu-smothered vacant lot next door. That’s a ghetto, all right, Mr. Matherne had agreed in his last email to Charles, watch out for drive-bys.

Except Tallahassee wasn’t enough of a city to have drive-bys, at least not real ones. A silver hatchback full of white kids would occasionally prowl down the narrow streets to shout or throw trash at the crack-veterans who patrolled Southside like the world’s shadiest neighborhood watch. They had pegged Charles with a McDonald’s bag when he was returning from a library trip, the car’s bass almost-but-not-quite muffling the sound of laughter. Looking down at the class-trash they had nailed him with Charles felt the old sting in his eyes and the shaking in his legs, then let out a long sigh and kicked the bag away. At least they hadn’t jumped him like the crew of Southside locals that took umbrage to a cheeseduplittlebitchsteppinout, or whatever they had said.

“They just think you’re a faggot cause of your glasses,” Charles’s dad had told him knowingly, his sour breath reeking like whatever was on sale at the ABC. “Next time clock’em in the face.”

“I can’t fight them all,” Charles had said, instantly regretting having told his father. “And don’t say faggot. The community’s ignorance about homosexuality—”

“Are you a faggot?” Charles couldn’t tell if his dad was messing with him or not but the way he recoiled reminded the boy uncomfortably of his own reaction when Mr. Matherne had casually mentioned his orientation during one of their first lunches together.

“No,” said Charles, his heart picking up like it did when other kids focused their attentions on him. “But so what? As black males it’s our responsibility to cut out the bullshit homophobia—”

“Don’t take that high tone with me,” his dad scowled. “This ain’t that dumb comic strip, and this community don’t care about hurting your feelers. Fifteen years old and already talkin like her. Comin down here’ll do a world of good for you.”

Her. Charles went inside and his dad stayed on the porch, reflecting through his buzz that it was maybe still a little soon to discuss the problematic rearing his ex-girlfriend had given their only child. He had reason enough to be bitter with her, and once the kid got himself together he’d set’em straight. She’d cut north after graduation, not even telling him about the boy until Charles was five, for christsake, and then refused to take the boy to visit, making him fly up instead, and by then Charles was ten or eleven, already looking like that Urkel kid with those glasses and pressed clothes, so it’s not like he could be blamed for being a deadbeat dad or whatever—he didn’t even know about the kid for years, so how the hell was that his fault?

“These are good,” Charles said as he chewed the turnip greens and surreptitiously pushed the ham further away from his oasis of watery vegetation.

“Long’s you’re in my house you’ll have vegtables,” his gramma said, patting his knee.

“Next time let me know before you cook,” said Charles. “I’d like to learn to cook southern like you, ma’am.”

“Cookin’s good work,” his gramma said, giving Charles’s snickering father a reproachful glance. Since moving down Charles had found himself cooking far more than he ever had at home. There was a hippy grocery store an hour walk or so down Magnolia so he’d been able to spend what little allowance his dad gave him on actual safe food. That, and plain bean burritos at the Taco Bell. Once he had started public school Charles had covertly revolted against his mother’s diet, but ever since the funeral he couldn’t look at meat or smell eggs without getting queasy. He knew it would make her happy if he—

“Jus put the hamhock in with the greens, so they soak the flavor and—” His gramma went on, making Charles’ dad howl with laughter as the boy put down his fork. She broke off, confused. “What? What’s funny, Douglas?”

“Nuthin,” Charles’s dad said, spearing a piece of the pink meat and waggling it at his crestfallen son. “Nuthin at all. Clean your plate, Charlie, or no allowance this week. Serious, now, you need meat.”

Reset vegan clock to zero, Charles thought glumly as he picked up his fork. The longest he had made it so far was four days. By the time he had worked his way through the greens his dad was back on the couch and his gramma took the ham off his plate, winking at him. “Tonight you don’t gotta, but you’ll get sick if you don’t start eatin right, Charlie.”

Charles went to his room and looked at his twin stacks of books. The pile that was on semi-permanent loan from the Matherne Collection consisted of the poetry of Langston Hughes, the fiction of Ernest Gaines, and the autobiographies of Olaudah Equiano and Malcolm X. The other stack came from his most recent trek to the library—non-fiction on werewolves, bigfoot, and more werewolves. Not even losing the only real parent he had ever known had dampened his interest in horror movies and books, although of late his predilections had shifted to what his gramma dubbed “things comin out the woods people never heard of,” instead of more mundane slashers and thrillers. Charles had already worked his way through vampires, and avoided the subject of ghosts as carefully as he tried to eschew meat and dairy.

After a while he put the Dead Prez CD Mr. Matherne had given him into the dusty jambox his dad had left him upon moving out to the living room. Since the self-proclaimed Holten Street Clique had liberated Charles of his iPod, the Let’s Get Free album was the only music not trapped inside his mom’s laptop that he was now only allowed to use for an hour a day.

“They’re from Tallahassee,” Mr. Matherne had told him. “Rickards alumni, even; knew that name was familiar. Pro-veg, pro-active.”

“Really?” Charles accepted the compact disc with the reverence of a relic.

“For real, like Sarandon in Fright Night,” said Mr. Matherne. “I also tried to find The Beast Must Die but it’s out of print. So keep your eyes peeled for that down in the dirty dirty.”

“Are they also positive?”

“Who? Oh, no, it’s a movie. Great white hunter has a dinner party.”

“Except?” Charles smiled.

Mr. Matherne smiled back. “Except all the guests are suspected werewolves. And the great white hunter’s a black guy.”

“Cool.”

“Very.”

“I’m not a hunter, but I’m told . . . that, uh, in places like the arctic where indigenous people, uh, sometime might, might hunt a wolf.” A man lecturing over the sound of howling wolves opened the album, a chairman of some group or movement. “They’ll, they’ll take a double-edged blade, and they’ll put blood on the blade, and they’ll melt the ice and stick the handle in the ice so that only the, the blade is protruding. And that a wolf will smell the blood and wants to eat, and it’ll come and lick the blade, tryin to eat. And what happens is, when the, when the wolf licks the blade, of course, ah, he cuts his tongue and he bleeds and he thinks he’s really havin a good—and he drinks, and he licks, and he licks and of course he’s drinkin his own blood, and he kills himself. That’s what the imperialists did to us with crack cocaine . . . ”

That was when Charles always pressed the skip button. The first time he had put the CD in and heard that bullshit he had turned it off, and it was several weeks before he gave it another chance. That Mr. Matherne would give him something like that right after what had happened to his mother was crazy and stupid, and he had hated his teacher for a few days afterwards.

“And they actually think that there is somethin that is bringin resources to them but they’re killing themselves just like the wolf was lickin the blade, and they’re slowly dying without knowing it. That’s what’s happening to the community, you with me on that? That’s exactly and precisely what happens to the community. And instead of blaming the hunter who put the damn handle and the blade in the ice for the wolf then what happens is the wolf gets blame, the wolf gets blamed for trying to live. That’s what happens in our community. You don’t blame the person, the victim, you blame the oppressor. Imperialism, white power is the enemy, was the enemy when they first came to Africa—”

“Bullshit,” Charles whispered, the word a mantra he recited whenever he heard those lies. Maybe some of it was sort of true on some other, higher level, but the crackhead who had knifed his mom wasn’t a victim, he was a wolf, a hunter, and he didn’t deserve any sympathy or justification. He was a beast, and he should die. She had fed him, fed all of them in that slouching brick building the color of old blood that she had single-handedly turned from a crackhouse into a shelter, she was there six days a week and even brought her son along, made him come along if he wanted the allowance he spent on pizza and beef jerky and chocolate milk and everything else he guiltily wolfed down in the cafeteria after throwing away the tempeh sandwiches she made him, the salads and fruit. The junkie wasn’t the victim of white oppression and imperialism, he was a drug addict and he tried to jack her car right there in the fucking parking lot, and Charles knew she couldn’t have, wouldn’t have fought him over it, probably tried to talk him down like she talked everyone down, but instead of getting talked down he stabbed her twenty-eight times and then crashed her car into a parked police cruiser two blocks away.

Charles had to think about something else, so he turned the music off and picked up the second werewolf book. He opened it and saw the chapter was simply titled “Becoming a Werewolf.” Twenty minutes later he knew how he would be spending the rest of his summer.

The simplest method for a young man trapped in a sweltering southern city distinctly lacking in werewolves to coerce into biting one’s arm seemed to be the herbal recipes the book listed, complex combinations of various dried plants brewed in this tea or bound in that poultice, whatever a poultice was. The bulk bins of New Leaf Market were, to Charles’s disappointment, void of wolfsbane, hemlock, and just about everything else but a few of the more common dried flowers. Day One was a bust but Charles was not in a hurry to return home, so after eating a rare, hot vegan lunch he walked in the grass bordering the big road down to the tower of the capital and the two smaller, domed buildings abutting it, the architecture resembling a dude’s junk even to non-teenaged viewers.

The downtown was nothing but offices, banks, and government buildings, and finally Charles marched south. He had no way of knowing he passed within a block of a local vegan soulfood cart, or four blocks of a twenty-four hour veg-friendly coffee shop, just as he had no way of knowing that there were dozens of non-asshole kids in his neighborhood, kids who preferred reading and riding bikes and playing video games to terrorizing their peers and getting fucked up. The sun was setting as Charles reached Holten Street but he walked around the block a few times before going inside the dilapidated house where his gramma was already cooking something he didn’t want to eat.

There was a bike in his room. It didn’t have gears and was a little small but it was, undeniably, a bicycle. Charles felt a lump in his throat, and then felt stupid for feeling it.

“Gotcha bike,” his father said over the hoppin john that Charles could barely taste the fatback in.

“I really appreciate it,” Charles said. “Thanks.”

“Can’t be walkin everywhere lookin like such a target,” his dad went on, a strange expression on his ashy cheeks. “Gotta be able to dip out quick next time them toughs come atcha. Fight’s out, so that leaves you with flight. What?”

Charles realized he must be looking pretty confused himself, his gramma looking back and forth between her son and grandson with a beatific smile on her pinched face.

“I went to school, boy,” his dad shook his head and set back to his meal. “Maybe not as much’s some but I went, and that’s how I got the state job. Rickards is hard but it’ll be good, toughen you up, and then you can head over to Fam like your mom and me. That’s the last thing the government wants, us simple coloreds getting degrees.”

Florida Agricultural and Mechanical College wasn’t exactly Ivy League, and Charles knew his father had only received an AA, but it was the closest thing to a good night he had enjoyed since arriving. It only got better—after dinner his dad took him out to the video store and let him pick out a movie. When his gramma went to sleep they settled in on the couch his dad slept on with a battered VHS tape called Black Werewolf. About halfway through the film Charles realized it had to be the same movie Mr. Matherne had recommended, The Beast Must Die, just with a different title for some reason. Not even his dad offering him a hit on the acrid joint he puffed and cutting up with “Werewolf my ass, that’s a damn dog leapin all over the place. More like leap-wolf, you ask me” could diminish Charles’s pleasure. That night he dreamed of being a real werewolf, and not like the obvious German shepherd in the movie but the real deal, a beast both ferocious and fair, a cross between a superhero and a monster. Then he dreamed about his mom and woke up feeling sick and scared.

The next morning Charles pored over his book and realized he was rapidly running out of means of becoming a werewolf, given the short supply of rare herbs and the continued absence of the Devil offering up magic ointments. One method the book listed was to sleep outside under a full moon on a Friday, but who knew when the next one of those would be, and if that actually worked, the world would have been long overrun in lycanthrope winos and boy scouts. Just about everything else involved werewolves or, failing that, normal wolves, and so Charles had almost given up hope when he re-read the paragraph about being cursed.

There weren’t a lot of Gypsies in the ghetto, but if Hollywood had taught Charles one thing it was that the South was brimming over with magical black people. Of course, they always appeared whenever white people needed them so Charles was at a marked disadvantage there, but he did know an old black lady, and if she didn’t know voodoo or whatever she could at least point him in the right direction. His gramma spent most of any given day in the community center a few blocks away, and Charles was halfway there before he remembered his bike and trotted back home to get it.

It lacked a kickstand and he had to peddle backwards to brake but the feel of the wind on his face was a welcome one. Leaning the bike against a handicapped parking sign, Charles walked up the cracked concrete walkway and pushed open the tinted glass doors. He felt like he had jumped into the neighborhood pool back home, the AC burning his sweaty skin. Taking off his glasses and wiping them on his shirt, Charles realized at once why his gramma spent so much time there.

“Charlie!” she cried, and putting his glasses back on he saw he had walked in on an impressively stereotypical game of bingo. His gramma waved him over and he moved between the tables crowded with old men and women, most of whom seemed put out by the distraction. The tables were obviously from a school cafeteria, and his gramma scooted down the bench to make room for him, the older gentleman beside her smiling at Charles as he squeezed between them.

“This is Charlie,” she said proudly.

“E-nine,” announced the portly man at the front of the room, causing a flurry of groans, mutterings, and laughter. “E-nine.”

“Charlie, that’s Mr. Johnson next to you, and this is Ms. Hattie, and she’s Mrs. Leacraft, and—” a half-dozen more introductions were made, to the consternation of those who actually treated the game with the severity it deserved. Finally Charles’s gramma finished up and seemed ready to turn her attention back to the game but Charles realized he had hit the jackpot and acted quickly before the attentions of the seniors could return to their bingo cards.

“Ma’am, I came here to ask you something,” said Charles, pleased to see Mr. Johnson and a few of the others were watching him curiously.

“Well go on then,” she said, her eyes flitting back to the front of the room where the announcer sifted out the next ball.

“Is there anyone around here who knows about voodoo and cursing people and all that?” Charles asked.

“What?” His gramma frowned at him, her voice nearly drowned out by the laughter of some of her neighbors and the disapproving voices of others.

“We’re Christians, boy.”

“Don’t go messin with rootwork.”

“You think you’re funny?”

“Charlie’s dad’s been showin him movies bout, whatsit, werewolfs,” his gramma said defensively, though she had every intention of bawling him out once they were alone. “He’s just got himself curious.”

“Ware woofs?” Ms. Hattie said, peering at Charles. “Takem on ta the juneya moosam, they got ware woofs there.”

“They do?” Charles couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

“Red’uns,” Ms. Hattie nodded, the thick patch of hair on her neck making Charles wonder if a bite from her would be sufficient. “Ma Davie liked’um.”

“Don’t you get her started on her boy,” Charles’s gramma hissed. “Go on home and don’t come back in here less you behave, Charlie. I swear—”

Charles didn’t wait to see what she swore, instead thanking Ms. Hattie and booking it. Back at the house he dug through the phonebook, and in five minutes he had directions to the Tallahassee “Junior” Museum. He considered asking them about werewolves but it wasn’t like he had a lot else to do if Ms. Hattie was as crazy as she sounded, and so he set off down Orange Avenue.

The neighborhoods thinned out as he peddled and it took him over an hour before he even reached the turn-off. Regular as locker searches at Rickards High School the afternoon rain came down and soaked him as he rode, but finally he hit the hilly stretch of gravelly road. He was out in the woods now, poison ivy and brambles filling in the gaps between the scrub pines, the sounds of the highway he had foolishly ridden on fading as he rolled into the parking lot. The wooden building looked awfully small and wanting in spooky architecture for a place purported to hold some variety of werewolf but in he went, drenched from sneaker to snout.

The Junior Museum was more or less a zoo for local animals. Beyond the building lay a re-creation of an old farm, and trails wound through the woods and over long boardwalks near a lake. There were supposedly alligators and a panther but they must have been hiding in their large enclosures, everything green palmettos and brown leaves and reddish cypress and gray oak. There were hardly any other people on the grounds as he wound through the maze of paths and walkways, and then he arrived. Charles grinned, the plaque on the raised boardwalk overlooking the pen clarifying Ms. Hattie’s rambling.

Red Wolf. Endangered. Rare wolves, indeed.

They looked like dogs, lanky and brown and lolling in the shade of the underbrush at the mouth of their den—two wolves. Charles wondered just what in hell was wrong with him, coming to a zoo. He supposed the patch of woodland was their natural habitat but still, locking up intelligent animals was unfair. That was why he didn’t eat them, after all, because they were smart and felt pain and rejection and the sting of confinement, because they were just as real as he was and deserved to live for themselves instead of being locked up.

Looking down at the bored wolves Charles couldn’t believe what a kid he had been. Even if werewolves were real, which they weren’t, why would he want to be one? He didn’t even eat cheese anymore so why would he want to gnaw bones and rend flesh? Would he scare the Holten Street Clique straight, or fix the crackhead who had killed his mom? What he was doing was daydreaming about violence, no different than some fool thinking a heater or a knife would even the score or keep him safe. What did violence beget? Again, what in hell, Charles? The Vegan Werewolf sounded like a pretty dumb premise for a children’s book, not a mature plan for fixing himself and helping his community, like his mom had—

They came up behind him, braying in their exaggerated dialect, and somehow he knew, as if even then his nose were keener, his ears sharper.

“—bwah, that shit is r-tarded,” one of them hooted.

“See one fight a red-nose pit, that’d be tight,” said another, and Charles turned around and looked at the three white kids from the silver hatchback that had pelted him with garbage his first week on the Southside. There was a fat one with a kango hat, a bulky but strong looking dude, and a wiry little one in a wife beater. None of them looked older than Charles but clearly one of them had a license.

“Hey,” the smallest nodded at Charles and they moved a little way down the boardwalk.

“Nuthin here, either.” The ripped guy said. “Bunk as fuck.”

“My moms’ll go to work in another hour,” the skinny one said. “Try out that gravity B I built?”

“Go ghetto-callin later,” the fat one said in a low voice, glancing over his shoulder at Charles as they turned and went back down the walkway, away from the pen. “My cousin showed me how to get piss into a water balloon.”

Then they were gone around the bend of the wooden boardwalk, and Charles exhaled, light headed and nauseated. Looking down into the enclosure his eyes focused immediately on a small puddle, probably rainwater, and the footprints around it. What else was he going to do that summer? The chain-link fence went right up to the railing of the boardwalk and Charles went over before he chickened out.

Halfway down he realized what he was doing and froze. It took more strength than he knew he had to turn his head, knowing they must be about to pounce and drag him down to a bloody, painful death. Instead he saw the two wolves watching him lazily from their shady lookout. He scrambled the rest of the way down, painfully aware of the noise the metal fence made as he descended into the pen.

Fingers still biting into the fence, he glanced away from the wolves to the muddy earth at his feet. Dry pawprints speckled the ground but a few feet away one was filled with blackish water. Squatting down, he moved like a nervous crab over to the print, the wolves still motionless but watching. Then Charles giggled at how stupid he was being and, dropping onto all fours, stuck his mouth in the pawprint and slurped up a mouthful of muck-water. He coughed on it but stood triumphantly, which was when he saw that only one of the wolves was still lying in the shade watching him.

Charles turned back to the fence, knowing what he would see. The boy had suffered nightmares before, had seen a horror flick or two, and knew what came next. Sure enough, the red wolf stood between him and the fence, its teeth bared, its hackles raised, a low growl bubbling out of its throat. Bullshit, thought Charles, and then it lunged forward.

Charles kept his bloody hand in his pocket as he passed through the museum building and out into the parking lot, dusk creeping down from the dirty clouds. The white kids must still be on the grounds somewhere, the silver hatchback one of the only cars in the lot, and after looking around Charles took his damp shirt off and wrapped his hand in it before getting on his bike. He had only peddled halfway to the main road before he had to ditch his bike and throw up, still terrified and confused.

It knew what he wanted and was helping him, a part of Charles told himself, but the rest of him was certain the wolf had been just as scared as he was, territorial but scared, and that’s why it had fled back to its mate after nipping his hand instead of dragging him down and ripping out his throat. Charles didn’t know how he had made it up the fence afterwards, his bound hand already dying the shirt an impossibly bright red. The silver hatchback passed him as he got back on his bike but none of the kids seemed to notice him, and Charles rode as fast as he could, his stomach twisting, his head pounding, his hand itching.

The setting sun at his back, Charles peddled harder and harder, his bike whining, traffic content to cruise behind him instead of passing the crazy-looking kid flying down the road on a tiny bike. Then the bike was too slow, and in the deepening twilight he left Orange Ave and skidded his bike to a stop on a side road by one of the FAMU gardens. When the last car passed him he hurled the bike down into the gully that ran parallel to Orange and scrambled down the steep bank after it, foam flecking his lips, a fever working its heat from his spinning head down his parched throat and into a ball of fire in his belly. He fell the last few feet down the overgrown slope, kudzu tangling his legs, and lay beside his bike in the shallow, mucky stream at the mouth of the culvert that dipped under the side road. Charles guzzled the water until he vomited, and then he drank more.

The creek had to be toxic, what in hell, Charles, his skin burning and his limbs aching and his bowels pinching, and he scrambled into the wide culvert, away from the headlights shining at the top of the deep ditch. Then all of his bones broke, every single one, and Charles couldn’t even scream from the agony of it, just the sound of the splintering bones making him throw up, except instead of ditchwater a long, dripping tongue spilled out of his mouth, dangling by his chin. Charles tried to stop himself from shitting his pants, as if that were somehow the worst part about dying, as if embarrassment hurt worse than real pain, but he couldn’t even scream so holding it in was futile. Then it was real pain, it was the worst part, and he managed to make his twisting, warping arms get his pants down to relieve the pressure.

The length of spine that had split out of the skin beneath his tailbone extended further without the jeans to constrain it, and that freedom was when the pain turned to pleasure, when Charles finally let himself acknowledge and believe what was happening to him. Not bad water, not exhaustion, not craziness—he was a werewolf, a real werewolf, and he could no longer control himself. He was going to forget himself, he was going to be a deadly beast hunting the crackheads and wannabe gangbangers and ghetto-callers, he would rip them apart and he would lick and he would drink and he would drink and he would lick and when he came back to himself the next morning he would be covered in scratches and bruises and no memory of what had happened, but when he saw a human finger or some bling in the toilet bowl he would realize that it was time to reset the old vegan clock, yes indeed, and every full moon it would happen and—

Charles realized it had finished, his body trembling but again complete and static, yet he was still himself. Mentally, at least—his eyes were sharper, as were his nose and ears and, flexing his paws in the drainage pipe, his claws. Trying to get up, Charles felt the faintest tinge of disappointment that children do when things do not go exactly as they expect—he was not some hulking, half-human lupine monster who could walk on his hind-legs, he was a wolf, and not even a very large one. Nevertheless, moving on all fours felt so natural and cool that Charles laughed, a raspy, alien growl. Standing at the mouth of the pipe, he licked his chops and looked up at the full moon, wondering if it had been the water in the footprint or the bite or simply his desire. Then he tried howling, and it came as naturally as walking had, and dogs took up the cry all over Tallahassee.

Staying to the channel, Charles marveled at how stunning the night was, the smells and sounds so rich he felt like he was gobbling them up, and he only left the wild of the filthy brook when streetlights began spilling down into the dark ravine. He waited until the sounds of cars were a safe distance off and scrambled up the side, the trickiest maneuver thus far. Then he crossed Orange and headed home by way of the FAMU campus, smelling and hearing any would-be witnesses long before they caught a glimpse of him, and if anyone working late at the university saw a large dog loping across the parking lots it did not make the paper the next day.

Southside was beautiful under the full moon, Charles realized, beautiful but sad. The scarcity of streetlights in this particular urban area allowed him to walk right up the middle of the street, his nails clicking on the rough pavement, and whenever headlights rounded a corner he cut into a backyard or under a house, most of them raised shotgun houses like his with plenty of room for a beast to hide until the car passed.

A silver hatchback was parked in front of one of the houses Charles ducked under, and he waited there until the trio of white kids came down the stairs, their fear stinking more than the dried-up pot in their pockets or the cigarettes in their hands. Charles kind of wanted the beast to take over then, at least to scare them, but one of the Holten Street Clique who had jacked Charles was with them, and even bristling with teeth and claws Charles was scared of the big thug—he had a funky, metallic smell about him that might well have been a gun. Otherwise the kids smelled the same, more or less, which meant something, Charles supposed.

Charles moved on as they jawed in front of the hatchback, and in a vacant lot he rested by a worn fence and watched three men pass around a glass pipe, their fingers the only parts of their bodies not shaking as they smoked the stinking, sour lumps. Charles realized with a single sniff that one of them was the father of the Holten Street bully who was with the white kids two blocks over, and he wondered if the boy knew his dad was a junkie. The kid certainly had nicer clothes than his father, but that wasn’t saying much.

Deeper in the night and the Southside he found a group of men and women enjoying a midnight grillout in a backyard, and further on a fenced-off yard where several pitbulls woke up growling at his approach, the dogs ripe with anger, their throats scarred from fighting, the stink of their dead fellows rising out of shallow graves beside the fence. Charles checked the address of the house to report them to the police in the morning. By then he was starting to fade, his tongue panting, his limbs sore, and he followed his own scent back to Holten Street, toward his bed.

His father was asleep on the front porch, an ashtray and the cordless phone on a stool beside him. Charles nosed the screen door open and padded inside the dark house. Hopping onto his bed, he curled up and fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.

“Boy, don’t you sleep naked in your gramma’s house!” Charles sat up in bed at his father’s voice, his head pounding, his whole body sore and scratched and bruised and his eyes watering from the ruthless sunlight. “Charlie, I don’t wanna call the police on you but you cannot be stayin out all night, not callin or nuthin. You don’t wanna go where I’ve been, Charlie, trust me. What’s wrong with you?”

“Sorry,” Charles blinked away the tears and saw his father had turned away from him in the doorway. “I was—”

“I don’t wanna hear it,” his father shook his head. “But this is it, understand? No more. One free get-out-of-shit card and you just used it, son—no more. I lied to my mom for you, Charlie, I told her you got in right after she went to sleep. How do you think that made me feel? I rented us another wolfman movie and you make me stay up all night thinkin you run off or got yourself killed with that smart mouth of yours. Where you get off . . . ”

Charles wondered if he would transform the next time the moon swelled. His father droned on, clearly taking satisfaction in the lecture, and Charles realized that he had been wrong about a whole hell of a lot of things. He was actually relieved that he had woken up human, and more than even knowing how the night-air of Tallahassee tasted or what the full moon smelled like, that was the most surprising thing about the summer that Charles became a werewolf.