The Pet

ONE

A cool night in late September, a Wednesday, and clear— the moon pocked with grey shadows, and a scattering of stars too bright to be masked by the lights scattered below; the chilled breath of a faint wind that gusted now and then, carrying echoes of nightsounds born in the trees, pushing dead leaves in the gutters, rolling acorns in the eaves, snapping hands and faces with a grim promise of winter.

A cool night in late September, a Wednesday, and dark.

… and so the boy, who really wasn’t a bad kid but nobody really knew that because of all the things he had done, he looked up in the tree …

And from the Hudson River to a point midway across New Jersey, the land climbed in easy steps toward the Appalachian chain. The forests were gone and so were most of the pastures, replaced by communities that grew in quick time into small towns and small cities, pieces of a jigsaw fit too close together.

One piece was Ashford, a piece not the largest, settled on the first of those low curving plateaus, its drop facing south, low hills at its back. From the air it was indistinguishable from any of its neighbors — just a concentration of lights, glints on the edge of a long ebony razor.

… and he saw the crow sitting on the highest branch in the biggest tree in the world. A big crow. The biggest crow he had ever seen in his life. And the boy knew, he really and truly knew, that the crow was going to be the only friend he had left in the world. So he talked to the crow and he said …

The park was in the exact center of town, five blocks deep and three long blocks wide, surrounded by a four-foot stone wall with a concrete cap worn down in places by the people who sat there to watch the traffic go by. At the north end was a small playing field with a portable bandstand erected now behind home plate, illuminated by a half-dozen spotlights aimed at it from the sides; and the folding chairs, the lawn chairs, the tartan blankets and light autumn jackets covered the infield, protecting the large audience from the dust of the basepaths and the spiked dying grass slowly fading to brown.

A student-painted banner fluttered and billowed over the handstand’s domed peak, unreadable now that twilight had gone, but everyone knew it proclaimed with some flair the approach of Ashford Day in just over a month. The concert was a free preview of the events scheduled for the week-long celebration — a century-and-a-half and still going strong.

The high school band members sat on their chairs, wore their red uniforms with the black and gold piping, and played as if they were auditioning to lead the Rose Bowl parade. They slipped through “Bolero” as if they knew what it meant, marched through Sousa as if they’d met him in person, and they put fireworks and rockets, Catherine wheels and Roman candles exploding and spinning into the audience’s imagination, into the dark autumn sky, when they bellowed and strutted through the “1812 Overture.”

At the rim of the field, back in the bushes where the lights didn’t reach, there were a few giggles, a few slaps, more than a few cans of beer popping open.

… do you think it’ll be all right?

The parents, all the relatives, the school board, and the mayor applauded as if they’d never heard anything quite so grand in their lives.

The bandmaster beamed, and the band took a bow. There were no encores planned, but the applause continued just the same.

… and the crow said, it’ll be just fine as long as you know who your friends really are.

In the middle of the park was an oval pond twenty feet wide, with a concrete apron that slanted down toward the water. It wasn’t very deep; a two-year-old child could wade safely across it, but it reflected enough of the sun, enough of the sky, more than enough of the surrounding foliage to make it seem as if the depths of an ocean were captured below the surface. Around it were redwood benches bolted to the apron’s outer rim. Above them were globes of pale white atop six bronze pillars gone green with age and weather. Their light was soft, falling in soft cowls over the quiet cold water, over the benches, over the eleven silent children who were sitting on them now. They didn’t listen to the music, though it was audible through the trees; they ignored applause that sounded like gunshots in the distance; instead, they listened to the young man in pressed black denim who crouched at the apron’s lip, back to the pond, hands clasped between his knees.

His voice was low, rasping, his eyes narrowed as he sought to draw the children deeper into the story.

“And so the boy said, how do I know who my real friends are? Everyone hates me, they think I’m some kind of terrible monster. And the crow, he laughed like a crazy man and said, you’ll know them when you see them. The boy was a little afraid. Am I a monster, he asked after a while, and the crow didn’t answer. Are you one of my friends, the little boy asked. Of course I am, said the crow. In fact, I’m your best friend in the whole wide world.”

The children stirred as the applause faded, and they could hear the first of the grown-ups drifting down the central path. The young man frowned briefly. He thought he had planned the story better, to end just as the band did, but he had gotten too carried away, elaborating and posturing to get the kids laughing so they wouldn’t be bored. Now he had lost them. He could see it in their eyes, in the shifting on the benches, in the way their heads turned slightly, too polite to ignore him outright though their gazes were drawn to the blacktopped walk that came out of the dark on its way to the south exit.

“Crows don’t talk,” one ski-capped boy suddenly declared with a know-it-all smile as he slipped off his seat.

“Sure they do,” a girl in a puffy jacket argued.

“Oh, yeah? You ever hear one, smarty?”

“Bet you never even saw one, Cheryl,” another boy said. “I’ll bet you don’t even know what they look like.”

The girl turned, hands outstretched. “Donald, I do so know what one looks like.”

The others were lost now, noisily lining up as if choosing sides for a game. The crow’s supporters were outnumbered, but they made up for it with indignant gestures and shrill protests, while the mocking opposition — mostly boys, mostly the older ones — sneered knowingly and laughed and punched each other’s arms.

“Everyone knows what a crow looks like,” Don said, in such a harshly quiet way that they all turned to look. “And everyone knows what the biggest crow in the world looks like, right?”

A few heads instantly nodded. The rest were unconvinced.

Don smiled as evilly as he could, and stood, and pointed to the nearest tree, directly behind them. Most of them looked with him; the others, sensing a trick and not wanting to give him the satisfaction, resisted.

Until the little girl put a hand to her mouth, and gasped.

“That’s right.” He kept pointing. “See? Right there, just out of the light? Look real hard now. Real hard and you won’t miss it. You can see his feathers kind of all black and shiny. And his beak, right there by that leaf, it’s sort of gold and pointed like a dagger, right?”

The little girl nodded slowly. No one else moved.

“And his eyes! Look at them, they’re red. If you look real hard — but don’t say anything or you’ll scare him away — you can see one just over there. See it? That little bit of red up in the air? It looks like blood, doesn’t it. Like a raindrop of blood hanging up there in the air.”

They stared.

They backed away.

It was quiet in the park now, except for the leaves.

“Aw, you’re fulla crap,” the ski-capped boy said, and walked off in a hurry, just in time to greet his parents strolling down from the concert. He laughed and hugged them tightly, and Don without moving seemed to stand to one side while the children broke apart and the oval filled with voices, with feet, with faces he knew that thanked him for watching the little ones who would have been bored stiff listening to the music, and it was certainly cheaper than hiring a sitter.

He slipped his hands into his jeans pockets and rolled his shoulder under the black denim jacket and grey sweatshirt.

His light brown hair fell in strands over his forehead, curled back of his ears, curled up at the nape. He was slender, not tall, his face almost but not quite touched by a line here and there that made him appear somewhat older than he was.

Within moments the parents and their children were gone.

“Hey, Boyd, playing Story Hour again?”

He looked across the pond and grinned self-consciously. Three boys walked around the pond toward him, grinned back, and roughed him a bit when they joined him, then pushed him in their midst and herded him laughing toward the bike stand just inside the south gate.

“You should’ve been there, Donny,” Fleet Robinson told him, leaning close with a freckled hand on Don’s arm. “Chris Snowden was there.” He rolled his eyes heavenward as the other boys whistled. “God, how she can see that keyboard with those gazongas is a miracle.”

“Hey, you’d better not say stuff like that in front of Donny the Duck,” said Brian Pratt solemnly. Then he winked broadly, and not kindly. “You know he doesn’t believe in that kind of talk. It’s sexist, don’t you guys know that? It’s demeaning to the broads who jerk him off on the porch.”

“Drop dead, Brian,” Don said quietly.

Pratt ignored him. With a sharp slap to Robinson’s side he jumped ahead of the others and walked arrogantly backward, his cut-off T-shirt and soccer shorts both an electric red and defiant of the night’s early autumn chill. “But if you want to talk about gazongas, you crude bastards, if you’re really gonna get down in the gutter, then let me tell you about Trace tonight. Christ! I mean, you want to talk excellent development? Jesus, I could smother, you know what I mean? And she was waiting for it, just waiting for it, y’know? I mean, you could see it in her eyes! Christ, she was fucking asking for it right there on the stage! Oh, my god, I wish to hell her old man wasn’t there, he should’ve been on duty or something. Soon as she put down that stupid flute I’d’ve planked her so damned fast … oh god, I think I’m dying!”

Robinson’s hand tightened when he felt the muscle beneath it tense. “Don’t listen to him, Don. In the first place, Tracey hasn’t talked to him since the first day of kindergarten except to tell him to get the hell out of her way, and in the second place, he don’t know nothing he don’t see in a magazine.”

“Magazine, shit,” scoffed Jeff Lichter. “The man can’t even read, for god’s sake.”

“Read?” Pratt said, wide-eyed. “What the hell’s that?”

“Reading,” explained Tar Boston, “is what you do when you open a book.” He paused and put his hands on his hips. “You remember books, Brian. They’re those things you got growing mold on in your locker.”

Pratt sneered and lifted his middle finger. Robinson and Boston, both heavy set and both wearing football jackets over light sweaters, took off after him, hollering, windmilling their arms as though they were plummeting down a hill.

Ahead was the south gate, and beyond it the lights of Parkside Boulevard.

Jeff stayed behind. He was the shortest of the group, and the only one wearing glasses, his brown hair reaching almost to his shoulders. “Nice guys.”

Don shrugged. “Okay, I guess.”

They walked from dark to light to dark again as the lampposts marked the edge of the pathway. Jeffs tapped heels smacked on the pavement; Don’s sneakers sounded solid, as if they were made of hard rubber.

“How’d you get stuck with that?” Lichter asked with a jerk of his thumb over his shoulder.

“What, the story stuff?”

“Yeah.”

“I didn’t get stuck with it. Mrs. Klass asked me if I’d watch Cheryl for a while. Said she’d give me a couple of bucks to keep her out of her hair. Next thing I knew I had a gang.”

“Yeah, story of your life, I think.”

Don looked but saw nothing on his friend’s face to indicate sarcasm, or pity.

“She pay you?”

“I’ll get it tomorrow, at school.”

“Like I said — story of your life.”

At the bike stand they paused, staring through the high stone pillars to the empty street beyond. Pratt and the others were gone, and there was little traffic left to break the park’s silence.

“That creep got away with another one, you know,” Jeff said then, looking nervously back over his shoulder at the trees. “The Howler, I mean.”

“I heard.” He didn’t want to talk about it. He didn’t want to talk about some nut over in New York who went around tearing up kids with his bare hands and howling like a wolf when he was done. Five or six by now, he thought; once a month since last spring, and now it was five or six dead. And the worst part was, nobody even knew what he looked like. He could be an old man, or a woman who hates kids, or … or even a kid.

“Well, if he comes here,” Lichter said, glaring menacingly at the shadows, his hair wind-fanned over his eyes, “I’ll kick his balls right up to his teeth. Or get Tracey’s old man to arrest him for unlawful mutilation.”

Don laughed. “What? You mean there’s such a thing as lawful mutilation?”

“Sure. Ain’t you never seen the dumb clothes Chris wears? Like she was a nun sometimes? That’s mutilation, brother, and she ought to be arrested for it.”

They laughed quietly, shaking their heads, sharing the common belief that Chris Snowden’s figure was more explosive than dynamite, more powerful than a speeding bullet, more likely to cause heart attacks in every senior class male than failing to make graduation.

Lichter took off his glasses and polished them on his jacket. “I’ll tell you, she’s enough to make me wish I was a virgin again.”

This time Don’s laugh was strained, but he nodded just the same. He wasn’t a prude; he didn’t mind talk about sex and women, but he wished the other guys would quit their damned bragging, or their lying. If they kept it up, one of these days he was going to slip and get found out.

“So, you start studying for the bio test next week?” Lichter asked, his sly tone indicating he already knew the answer.

“Yeah, a little,” he admitted with an embarrassed grin. “Should be a snap.”

“Right. A snap. And if it isn’t, you and I will be standing outside when graduation comes around,” He sighed loudly and looked up at the stars. “Oh, god, only eight more months and the torture is over.”

The wind kicked up dust and made them turn their heads away.

“School,” Jeff said then, with a slap to his arm.

“Yeah. School.”

Lichter nodded, left waving at a slow trot, veering sharply right and vanishing. Don knelt to work the combination of the lock he had placed on the tire chain, then straddled the seat and gripped the arched handlebars. They were upright, cranked out of their racing position less than ten minutes after he had brought it home from the store. He didn’t like hunching over, feeling somehow out of control and forever toppling unless he could straighten his back. He pushed off, then stopped as soon as he was on the sidewalk. To the right, far down the street, were the hazed neon lights of Ashford’s long shopping district; directly opposite was the narrow island of trees and grass that separated the wide boulevard into its east and west lanes; to the left the street poked into a large residential area whose houses began as clean brick and tidy clapboard and eventually deteriorated into rundown brownstone and aluminum siding that had long since faded past its guarantee.

He glanced behind him and smiled suddenly.

On the path, just this side of the last lamppost, was a feather. A crow’s feather twice as long as a grown man’s hand. It shimmered almost blue, was caught by the wind, and tumbled toward him.

He waited until it fluttered to a stop against the bike’s rear tire, then shook his head slowly. Boy, he thought, where were you when that kid opened his big mouth?

But as Jeff would say — the story of his life. Honest to god giant crows were not in his stars.

Tanker Falwick swore impotently under his breath. Thorns in the red-leafed bush had snagged his coat sleeve and held it fast, and he couldn’t move quickly without making a hell of a racket. He slapped at them angrily while he rose and peered over the wall. And groaned with a punch to his leg when he saw his last chance for decent prey getting away. The boy was turning, bumping his ten-speed down off the curb and across the street. Away from the park, in spite of the moon.

It was too late. Goddamn, it was too late.

“Shit!” he said aloud, and yanked his arm until the thorns came loose. “Fucking shit!”

A glance up at the moon riding over the trees, and he swore again, silently, hoping that the squirrel he’d killed earlier wouldn’t be the only meal he’d have tonight. There hadn’t been much meat and its heart had been too small, and twisting off its head didn’t give him near the same satisfaction as tearing out a kid’s throat.

Several automobiles sped past, a half-empty bus, a pickup with three punks huddled and singing in the bed, a dozen more cars. None of them stopped, and when he headed back into the trees, he couldn’t hear a thing, except his paperstuffed shoes scuffling wearily through the leaves. He hushed himself a couple of times before finally giving up. He wasn’t listening, and there was, most likely, no one else around to hear.

The whole place had just been filled with damned kids, just filled to the rafters with them, and every opportunity he’d had to introduce himself to one had been thwarted in one way or another.

A large dirt-smeared hand wiped harshly over his mouth, not feeling the stiff greying bristles on his chin, on his sallow cheeks, on the slope of his wattled neck. He sniffed, and coughed, and spat into the dark. Then he drew his worn tweed jacket over his broad chest, hunched powerful shoulders against the wind, and moved toward the center path. He waited in the shadows for a full five minutes, then stepped out and took a deep breath.

He didn’t like it back in there. He didn’t like it at all despite his affinity with the best parts of the dark. There were too many noises he didn’t understand, and too many shadows that trailed after him as he trailed the children who were scurrying after their parents.

A lousy night, all in all — except for the music.

He stopped at the oval pond, checked the path, and knelt on the apron, then leaned over and scooped some of the cold water into his mouth.

The music was nice. Not bad for a bunch of fucking dumbass high school kids, and he had even recognized some of the tunes. He had been hiding behind a patch of dense laurel just to the left of the bandstand, nodding, humming silently, and applauding without sound at the end of each number. He had also been hoping that one of the punks would have to take a leak during the program and wouldn’t be prissy about heading into the bushes. Tonight he wasn’t fussy about the sex; one of the boys would have done just as nicely as one of them young whores.

When that didn’t work and he couldn’t move anyone over to him through the sheer force of his will, he had moved down toward the south entrance since that’s where the fewest of the audience had headed when it was over. He was hoping for a stray, but the little ones were too good, too well-behaved, like those who were at the pond while that other kid, the older one, the punk bastard in black denim, told them a preposterous story about a stupid giant crow.

And the big ones, the punks, the snot-nosed creeps who made up most of his fun, they stuck together like glue right to the street. Especially the whores.

He rocked back on his heels and dried his face with a sleeve.

That had been a close one, that one had, the moment with the black denims. Suddenly the punk had pointed right to the tree where he had been concealed, and he thought for sure he’d been caught, the cops would be on his ass, and he’d be fried without a trial. Then the kid had jabbered on about this dumb creature of his, and there was an argument, and Tanker was able to slip away without detection.

That, he thought smugly, was the easy part — because he was a werewolf.

The realization of his condition had been a long time coming, starting shortly after he had been handed his separation pay and papers. They said he had lost his touch with the new recruits; they said he wasn’t living up to the image of the “new army”; they said he drank too much; they said it was against the new rules to hit the little snots when they didn’t obey his commands. They said. They, who weren’t hardly born when he had first signed his name in that pissant office in Hartford. And they said he ought to be able to find a pretty good job somewhere, that his pension and the job would take care of him for the rest of his life. After thirty years, though, the rest of his life wasn’t all that far away.

He left Fort Gordon, Georgia, as he had arrived — on foot, his belongings slung over his shoulder. Refusing several offers of a ride, he walked into Augusta, put his things into a locker at the bus station, then went out and beat the shit out of the first kid under twenty he could find.

There had been a full moon that night, and though a number of people saw and chased him, he had escaped. He noticed the connection right away because he had been running ahead and behind his shadows the whole time, and he decided then and there that the moon would be his charm. It would help him in civilian life make a fortune and spit on those young bastards who thought they knew what the military was all about.

It didn’t, though. It had plans for him he hadn’t known at the time.

As winter passed, and the jobs passed, and he was constantly in trouble for mouthing off to spineless, candyass bosses usually two decades his junior, he realized that.

As the money ran low, and his friends stopped their loans, and the police looked at him more closely the more his clothes began to fade, he realized that.

The moon had other plans.

Another winter, and a third luckily mild. But the fourth was spent freezing to death in an overcrowded shelter for homeless men in New York City. Humiliation compounded when he was interviewed by a bleeding-heart liberal television reporter and he had tried to explain about his service to the country, and all the reporter wanted to know was if he could get a decent night’s sleep in the same room with fifty other old men.

Old men.

Old man.

Christ, he had turned into an old man and he hadn’t even known it.

That’s when the moon came to him again. Last winter. To save him and show him what werewolves could do.

He had been stumbling along Eighth Avenue, popping into one porn place after another in hopes of getting a free peek at some tits since he hadn’t the stuff to find some piece of his own, when a guy in tight jeans and leather jacket did something to his ass as he passed by. Tanker had frozen, turned slowly, and saw the look in the kid’s eyes. Blank, like they were dead.

He had almost thrown up, but looked up and saw the moon, looked back to the young hustler and let himself smile. He still had good teeth, still tried to exercise when he had the food in him, and it wasn’t hard, in that two-by-four hotel room that smelled like piss and pot, to tear the sonofabitch apart.

The moon winked.

And Tanker howled before he rolled the punk and left.

It wasn’t the sex, it was the age.

“Babyfucks,” he muttered. That’s what they all were— babyfucks taking on the world like they knew what they were doing, leaving good men like him behind to fill up the gutters and the bars and the steps of churches that locked their doors at night.

Babyfucks who didn’t know the power of Tanker Falwick, the power of the man who had personally seen the rise and the fall of the armored First Cav, who had crushed Nazis and Fascists and gooks beneath his treads, and who couldn’t understand why a tank had to have all them damned computer things inside when all a man had to do was aim the fucking thing and run the enemy down. It was as simple as that, and he didn’t need a babyfuck TV screen in his lap to tell him how to do it.

They said he was untrainable in the ways of the new army; they said he was unstable because he fought them every step and trench of the way; they said he had to keep going to the babyfuck shrink or they’d muster him out and leave him on his own.

They said.

But they didn’t say anything about the moon, and how it felt on his face, and how the blood felt when he found the kids and tore out their throats and tore out their guts and sipped a little red and gnawed a little meat and howled his signature before moving on.

They didn’t say anything about that.

He rose, skirted the pond, and headed for the ball field and the large thicket where he had watched the concert. He would sleep there tonight and hope for a bit of luck tomorrow, for something more than a squirrel to keep the moon his friend. He needed some badly. He needed something to fill his stomach and something to leave behind and something to remind all those babyfucks that Tanker Falwick was still around. He couldn’t do it anymore in New York, in the state or the city, because they had found the alley lean-to where he lived when the black hooker with the blonde hair saw him one morning dressed in fresh dripping red. But he didn’t mind because there was a whole country out here just waiting to learn.

First stop, then, this burg, whatever name it had.

He didn’t care. All he knew was that it had a lot of kids who thought they were going to live forever.

Despite the fact that it was a school night and his parents didn’t like him staying out so late when he had to get up so early, Don decided not to go home right away. Instead, he pedaled across the boulevard, over the center island, and headed east until he reached his street. He turned into it and kept going, not looking left except to note that the station wagon wasn’t in the driveway, so his folks still weren’t home. And that was all right with him because it was getting harder to stand their sneaking around him as if he didn’t know what was going on.

He had no idea where he was headed, only that he didn’t want to get warm just yet. He liked the autumn nights, the way the air felt like thin ice on a pond, crisp and clean and ready to shatter as soon as you touched it; he liked the trees so black they were almost invisible, and the way the leaves were raked into huge gold and red piles in the gutters, and the way they made the air smell tart and smoky; he liked the sounds of things on an autumn night, sharp and ringing and carrying a hundred miles. It was somehow comforting, this stretch of weeks before November, and he wanted to enjoy it as long as he could. Before he had to go back; before he had to go home.

He scowled at himself then and slapped the handlebar, slamming his hair away from his high forehead with a punishing hand. That wasn’t really fair. He really didn’t have such a bad life, not really, not when you thought about it. The house was large enough so that everyone had his privacy, and old enough so that it didn’t look like all the others on the block; his room was pretty big, and he never wanted for” a decent meal or decent clothes, and he was fairly confident he would be going to college next fall if he kept his grades where they were, nothing spectacular but not shameful either.

But he didn’t want to go home.

Not just yet.

There were two high schools in town — Ashford North and Ashford South. He attended South, where his father was the principal, and he had to work like a dog to get his competent grades because he was the honcho’s kid and favoritism was forbidden. Norman Boyd had been in charge there for five years before his son became a freshman, and Don was as positive as he could be without proof that his father had met with all his prospective teachers privately before school began, perhaps one at a time in his office, and told them that while he didn’t expect them to curry favor by giving the boy good grades just because he was who he was, neither did he expect them to punish Don if decisions were made that they didn’t agree with.

Don was to be treated just like any other student, no better and no worse.

He was sure that’s what had happened. And sure now they were ignoring their boss since it looked more and more as if the faculty was going to walk out at the end of next month over a salary and hours dispute that had erupted last May.

His father didn’t believe him.

And neither did his mother, who taught art in Ashford North.

Besides, she was too busy anyway. She had all her lessons and projects to prepare for and grade, she had her private painting to do whenever she could take the time and get back into Sam’s old bedroom, and she had the Ashford Day Committee that was beginning to keep her out of the house and his life most nights of the week.

And somewhere in between, when she thought about it at all, there was little Donny to look after.

Damn, he thought as he turned the corner sharply, nearly scraping the tires against the curb; little Donny. It wasn’t his fault that Sam had died, was it? Sam, whose real name was Lawrence but called Sam because his mother said he looked like a Sam; Sam, who had been five years younger than Don, and had died screaming of a ruptured appendix while the family was on vacation, camping out in Yellowstone. Four years ago. In the middle of nowhere.

Sam, who was a shrimp and liked listening to his stories.

It wasn’t his fault, and nobody really blamed him for not telling them about Sam’s pains because he wanted to go so badly, but he was the only child left and godalmighty they were making absolutely sure he wouldn’t leave them before they were good and ready to let him go.

He swung around another corner, slowed, and looked down the street as if he’d never seen it before. It was an odd sensation, one that made him close his eyes, and open them again slowly to bring it back into proper focus.

Slower then, the bike on the verge of wobbling.

It was much like his own street — homes dating back to the Depression and beyond to the turn of the century, all wood and brick and weather-smooth stone, with small front yards and old oaks at the curbside, the sidewalks uneven and the street itself in deep shadow, where the leaves still on their branches muffled the streetlights’ glare.

And several cars parked at the curbs.

Nothing at all out of the ordinary, and ordinarily he would have ridden right on. But tonight there was something different, something he couldn’t see, something he thought he could feel. It seemed familiar enough — Tar Boston lived halfway down, in a green Cape Cod with white shutters and no porch — and yet it wasn’t the same.

Slower still, as if someone were behind him, pulling a cord and drawing it beneath the tires.

He closed one eye, opened it, and gripped the handlebars a bit tighter.

The cars.

It was the cars.

No matter what color they were, they were dark — gleaming dark, waiting dark. The facets of their headlamps glowing faintly like spidereyes caught by the moon, and the windshields pocked with the onset of frost. Their sides reflected black; their tops reflected the shadows of dying trees. They were giant cats from the jungle somehow transformed, and all the more menacing for it.

Finally he stopped in the middle of the street and watched them, licked quickly at his lips and imagined them waiting here just for him, waiting for him to tell them what to do. A stable of cars. No. An army of cars. Patiently waiting for the order to kill.

His mouth worked at the start of a smile while he nodded to them all and told them his name.

From somewhere down the block, just past the middle, an engine rumbled softly.

Metal creaked.

A chassis rocked slowly back and forth in place.

He bit at his lower lip; he was scaring himself.

A headlamp winked.

Tires crackled as if they were frozen to the blacktop.

Jesus, he thought, and wiped a palm over his mouth.

The engine died.

Metal stopped shifting.

There was only the faint hiss of late downtown traffic.

He pushed off again and barely made the far corner without swerving off the road, then headed rapidly back up the boulevard toward home. A bus grumbled past him, exhaust clouding his face. He coughed and slowed again, watched as the amber lights strung along its roofline vanished when the street shrank into the dark that hung below the lighted sky above the next town.

Jesus, he thought again, and made himself shudder. He knew it was only heat escaping from the engines, released from the metal frames, that someone had only been warming up a motor in a garage. That’s all it was. Yet he made himself think of something else, like what it was like to live in a place where the cities and towns weren’t slambang against each other, like they were here, all the way to New York.

Spooky, he decided.

All that open space, or all those trees — spooky as hell, and anyway, Ashford wasn’t all that bad of a place.

He turned into his block again, saw the station wagon in the driveway, and pulled up behind it. After wiping his hands on his jeans, he walked the bike through the open garage door. There was no room inside for the car — too many garden tools and cartons and a thousand odds and ends that somehow always managed to be carted out here when there was no place immediate anyone could think of to put them. Like an attic with its house buried a mile below the ground.

He hesitated, and wiped his hands again as a sliver of tension worked its way across his back. Then he opened the door and stepped into the kitchen.

“I thought,” his mother said, “you’d been kidnapped, for heaven’s sake.”

The light was bright; he squinted to adjust.

She was standing at the sink with one hip cocked, rinsing out a cup while the percolator bubbled noisily on the counter beside her. Her hair was dark and long, reaching almost to the middle of her back, and when she pulled it together with a vivid satin ribbon the way it was now, she looked almost young enough to be one of her own students. Especially when she smiled and her large eyes grew wide. Which she did when he walked up and kissed her cheek, shucked his jacket, and draped it over the back of a chair.

He was going to tell her about the cars, changed his mind when she looked away, back to her cleaning.

“I was riding.”

“Good for you,” she declared, glowering at a stain that would not leave the cup. “Fresh air is very good for you. It flushes out the dead cells in the blood, but I guess you already know that from biology or something.”

“Right.”

A glance into the half-filled refrigerator and he pulled out a can of soda.

“But that gassy junk, dear, is bad for you,” she said, setting the cup down and rinsing out another. There was a stack of dirty dishes in the sink, soaking in hot soapy water. Maybe tomorrow she would get around to washing them all. “It’s not good to drink that stuff before you go to bed. It lies there in your stomach not doing anything but making you burp and giving you nightmares.”

“Am I going to bed?”

She tsked at him and pursed her lips. “Donald, it is now”—she checked the sunflower-shaped clock over the stove—”forty-seven minutes past ten o’clock. Exactly. You have school tomorrow. I have school tomorrow. And I’m tired.”

The percolator buzzed at her and she pulled out the plug.

“You didn’t have to wait up for me if you’re that tired, you know, Mom.”

She dried the cups and poured the coffee, everything perfectly timed. “I didn’t. Your father’s been on the phone since we walked in the door. By the way,” she added as he headed for the living room, “I saw that Chris playing the piano tonight. She’s really quite pretty, you know it? Are you going to take her to the do?”

“I don’t know,” he said, still walking away. “Maybe.”

“What?”

“Maybe!” he called back, and under his breath: “On a cold day in hell, lady.”

Chris Snowden was the new girl on the block, and in this case it was literal. She and her family had moved in three doors down in the middle of last August. Her hair was such a pale blonde it was nearly white, her skin looked so soft you could lose your fingers in it if you tried to touch it, and, Brian Pratt’s crudeness aside, she had a figure he had seen only in the movies. She was, at first glance, a laughable stereotype — cheerleader, brainless, and the football team captain’s personal choice for a consort. Which she had been for a while, while everyone nodded, then — professed shock and puzzlement when she started dating the president of the student council. She didn’t need the grades, so he wasn’t doing her homework, and she didn’t need the ride to school, because it was only five blocks away and she walked every morning — except when it rained and she drove her own car, a dark red convertible whose top was always up. Then just last week it was known she was on her own again, and those who decided such things decided she was only sleeping around.

Don puffed his cheeks, blew out, and sighed.

Chris’s father was a doctor in some prestigious hospital in New York, and if Don’s mother had her way, he would be taking her to every event of the town’s century-plus birthday— the Ashford Day picnic, party, dance, concert, football game, whatever. A full week of celebration. But even if he wanted to, he knew he didn’t have a chance.

Just as he reached the front hall and was about to turn right into the living room, he heard his father’s voice and changed his mind.

“I don’t give a sweet Jesus what you think, Harry. I am not going to take a position one way or another.”

Great, Don thought gloomily; just great.

The position was which side of the dispute to be on; Harry was Mr. Harold Falcone, his biology instructor and president of the teachers’ union.

“Look,” his father said as Don poked his head around the doorway, “I’ve pushed damned hard for you and your people since the day I walked into that place, and you know it. I got money for the labs, the teams, for the goddamned maintenance, for god’s sake, so don’t you dare tell me I don’t sympathize.”

Norman Boyd was sitting in his favorite chair, a monstrous green thing with scarred wood trim and a sagging cushion. His back was to Don, and it was rigid.

“What? What? Harry, goddamnit to hell, if my mother hadn’t taught me better, I’d hang up on you right now for that kind of nonsense. What do you mean, I don’t give a shit? I do give a shit! But can’t you see past your wallet just this once and understand that I’m caught between a rock and a hard place here? My god, man, you’re screaming crap in one ear and the board is screaming crap in the other, and I’m damned for doing this and damned for doing that, and double damned if I don’t do a thing — which is exactly what I feel like doing sometimes, believe me.”

He tapped a long finger on the handset, looked up at the high plaster ceiling, and used his free hand to rake through his greying brown hair. A deep breath swelled his chest beneath a white crewneck sweater; the tapping moved to the top of his thigh.

“I will be at the negotiations, yes. I’ve already told you that.” He shifted. “I will not—” He glanced over his shoulder. “Yes, of course my contract is up for renewal at the end of this year. I know that, you know that, the board knows it — for Jesus’s sake, the whole damned world knows about it by now!” He saw his son and grimaced a smile. “What? Yes! Yes, damnit, I admit it, are you happy? I do not want to jeopardize my job and my future just because you assholes couldn’t come to terms over the summer. No,” he said with acid sweetness, “I do not expect your support either if I decide to run for office.”

He grinned then and returned the handset to its cradle on the floor beside him. “The creep hung up on me. He ain’t got no manners, and that’s shocking in a teacher. Hi, Don, saw you talking to the kids tonight. You change your mind about joining us and being a teacher, carrying on the new family tradition?”

“Dad,” he said, suddenly cold. “Dad, there’s a big test next week. Mr. Falcone is my teacher.”

“I know that.”

“But you were yelling at him!”

“Hey, he won’t do anything, don’t worry about it.”

Don squeezed the soda can. “You always say that.”

“And it always turns out, right?”

“No,” he said softly. “No, not always.” And before his father could respond, he said, “See you tomorrow. It’s late. Mom wants me in bed.”

He took the stairs slowly in case his father wanted to join him, but there was nothing but the sound of his mother bringing in the coffee, and the start of low voices. He heard his name once before he reached the top landing, but there was no temptation to eavesdrop. He knew what they were probably saying.

Dad was wondering if there was anything wrong, and Mom would tell him it was all part of growing up and Donny was really in a difficult position and perhaps Norm shouldn’t lose his temper like that at the boy’s teachers. Dad would bluster a bit, deny any problems, finally see the point, and reassure his wife that none of the faculty would dare do anything out of line, not if they wanted his support in the strike.

It was getting to be an old story.

Great, he thought as he pushed into his room. I’m not a son anymore, I’m a weapon. An ace up the old sleeve. If I fail, it isn’t me, it’s the teachers getting even; if I get an A, it isn’t me, it’s the teacher kissing ass. Great. Just … great.

He slammed the door, turned on the light, and greeted his pets by kicking the bed.

“I don’t understand it,” said Joyce Boyd from her place on the sofa when she heard the door slam. “He’s a perfectly normal boy, we know that, but he hardly ever goes anywhere anymore. If we hadn’t insisted tonight, he would have stayed home, playing with those damned things he has upstairs.”

“Sure he goes out,” Norm said, lighting a cigarette, crossing his legs. “But with all your zillion civic projects and that Art League thing — not to mention the Ashford Day business— you’re just not home long enough to see it.”

Her eyes narrowed. “That’s a crack.”

“Yeah, so?”

“I thought we agreed not to do that anymore.”

He studied the cigarette’s tip, the round of his knees, and brushed at an ash that settled on his chest. The coffee was on the table beside him, growing cold. “I guess we did at that.”

“I guess we did at that,” she mimicked sourly, and pulled her legs under her. A hand passed wearily over her eyes. “Damn you, Norman,” she said wearily, “I do the best I can.”

“Sure you do,” he answered without conviction. “Whenever you’re around.”

“Well, look at him, will you?” Her lips, thin at best, vanished when her mouth tightened. “When was the last time you spent an evening with him, huh? I don’t think that poor boy has seen you for more than a couple of hours in the last two weeks.”

“I have a school year to run,” he reminded her tonelessly, “and a possible strike on my hands. Besides, he sees me at the school every day.”

“Not hardly the same thing, Norm, and you know it. You’re not his father there, not the way it should be.”

He pushed himself deeper into the chair and stretched out his legs. “Knock it off, Joyce, okay? I’m tired, and the boy can take care of himself.”

“Well, so am I tired,” she snapped, “but I have to defend myself and you don’t, is that it?”

“What’s to defend?”

Her eyes closed briefly. “Nothing,” she said in mild disgust, and reached over a pile of manila folders for a magazine, flipped the pages without looking, and tossed it aside. She picked up a folder — schedules for Ashford Day. She was one of the women in charge of coordinating the entertainment from the two high schools. She dropped that as well and plucked at her blouse. “I worry about all that running he does too.”

He was surprised, and he showed it.

“What I mean is,” she said hastily, “it’s not really like jogging, is it? He’s not interested in keeping fit or joining the track team or cross-country. He just … runs.”

“Well, what’s wrong with that? It’s good for him.”

“But he’s always alone,” she said, looking at him as if he ought to understand. “And he doesn’t have a regular schedule either, nothing like that at all. He just runs when he gets in one of his moods. And he doesn’t even do it here, around the block or something — he does it at the school track.”

“Joyce, you’re not making sense. Why run on cracked pavement and take a chance on a broken leg or twisted ankle when you can run on a real track?”

“It just … I don’t know. It just doesn’t feel right.”

“Maybe it helps him think. Some guys lift weights, some guys use a punching bag, and Donald runs. So what?”

“If he has problems,” she said primly, “he shouldn’t … he shouldn’t try to run away from them. He should come to us.”

“Why?” he said coldly. “The way you’ve been lately, why should he bother?”

“Me?”

Her stare was uncomfortable.

“All right. We.” And he let his eyes close.

A few moments later: “Norman, do you think he’s forgotten that animal hospital stuff?”

“I guess. He hasn’t said anything since last month. At least not to me.”

“Me either.”

He opened his eyes again and looked at the empty fireplace, ran a finger absently down the crooked length of his nose. “I guess, when you think about it, we didn’t handle it very well. We could have shown a little more enthusiasm.”

“Agreed.” She rubbed at her knees.

Norm allowed himself a sly look. “Maybe,” he said with a glance to his wife, “we ought to do like that couple we read about in the Times, the one that claimed they solved their kid’s mind-shit by taking him to a massage parlor.” He chuckled quietly. “That’s it. Maybe we ought to get him laid.” He laughed aloud, shaking his head and trying to imagine his son — not a movie star, but not an ogre either— humping a woman. He couldn’t do it. Donald, as far as he was concerned, was almost totally sexless.

“Jesus,” she muttered.

“Christ, I was only kidding.”

“Jesus.” She reached again for the magazine, gave it up halfway through the motion, and stood. “I’m going to bed. I have to teach tomorrow.”

He waited until she was in the foyer before he rose and followed.

“You don’t have to come.”

“I know,” he said, “but I have to be principal tomorrow.”

At the landing she turned and looked down at him. “We’re going to get a divorce, aren’t we?”

He gripped the banister hard and shook his head. “God, Joyce, do you have to end every disagreement with talk of divorce? Other people argue like cats and dogs and they don’t go running for a lawyer.”

He followed her down the hall, past Don’s room, and into their own. She switched on the dresser lamp and opened their bathroom door. Her blouse was already unbuttoned by the time he had sagged onto the bed and had his shoes off. Standing in the doorway, the pale light pink behind her from the tile on the walls and floor, she dropped the blouse and kicked it away. She wasn’t wearing a bra, and though he could not see her face, he knew it wasn’t an invitation.

“I know why,” she said, working at the snap on her slacks.

“Why what?”

“Why you don’t love me anymore.”

“Oh, for god’s sake.” His shirt was off, and he dug for his pajamas folded under the pillow.

“No, really, I know. You think Harry and I are having an affair. That’s why you’re so hard on him. That’s why you make an ass of yourself when you talk to him like you did tonight.”

“You’re full of it,” he said unconvincingly. He put on his top, stood, and unfastened his belt, zipper, and let his trousers fall. “I figure you have better taste than that.”

She turned away to the basin, running hot water and steaming the light-ringed mirror. “You don’t have to pretend, Norman. I know. I know.”

Except for her panties she was naked. Her breasts were still small and firm, her stomach reasonably flat for a woman who’d had two children and didn’t exercise, and her legs were so long they seemed to go on forever. He watched as she leaned forward to squeeze toothpaste onto her toothbrush; he watched while she examined herself in the mirror, turning slightly left and right. He watched, and he was saddened, because she didn’t do a thing for him.

It’s a bitch, he thought; god, life is a bitch.

He wriggled under the covers, rubbed his eyes to relieve them of an abrupt burning itch, and looked at her again. “Are you?” he asked at last. “With Harry, I mean.”

“You bastard,” she said, and slammed the door.

The overcoat wasn’t going to be enough, but Tanker had nothing else to use as a blanket. The leaves covered most of him, and the brush kept away most of the wind, but it still wasn’t enough.

What he needed to relax was one of them whores. Like the one up in Yonkers. Tits breaking out of her sweater, teenage ass as tight as her jeans. When he yanked her into the alley and clubbed her with a fist so she wouldn’t scream, he had known once again he wouldn’t be dying without getting a piece. Her eyes had crossed when he dropped her on the ground, and she’d spat blood at him when he slapped her again; but she was warm, no doubt about it. She was warm right up until the moment he had opened her throat with his knife, and had finished the job with his nails grown especially long.

She had been warm, and now he was cold, and he decided that the next one would have to be one of them whores.

He shivered, huddled deeper under the coat and the leaves, and closed his eyes, sighed, and waited for sleep.

Waiting an hour later, eyes wide and watching.

It was the park.

The moon was up there, still guarding him, still whispering him his orders, but there was something else, something in the park that was waiting just for him. He tried scoffing at it, but the feeling wouldn’t go away; he tried banishing it with a determined shake of his head, but it wouldn’t go away.

It was out there, somewhere, and if it hadn’t been for the moon, he knew he’d be dead.

Tomorrow, he promised himself, crossing his heart and pointing at his eye; tomorrow he would have a whore, and then get the hell out.

And if the moon didn’t show, he’d kill somewhere else.

The door was open just enough to let a bar of light from the hallway drop across the brown shag rug, climb the side of the bed, and pin him to the mattress. Don lay on top of the covers, head on the pillow, hands clasped on his stomach, and checked to be sure his friends were still with him.

Above the headboard was a poster of a panther lying in a jungle clearing and licking its paw while it stared at the camera; on the wall opposite, flanking the door, were posters of elephants charging with trunks up through the brush, their ears fanned wide and their tusks sharply pointed and an unnatural white. Elsewhere around the large room were pictures and prints of leopards and cheetahs running, eagles stooping, pumas stalking, a cobra from the back to show the eyes on its hood. On the chest of drawers was a fake stuffed bobcat with fangs bared; on the low dresser was a miniature stuffed lion; in the blank spaces on the three unfinished bookcases were plaster and plastic figurines he had made and painted himself, claws and teeth and talons and eyes. And above the desk set perpendicular to the room’s only window was a tall poster framed behind reflectionless glass — a dirt road bordered by a dark screen of immense poplars that lay shadows on the ground, shadows in the air, deepened the twilight sky, and made the stars seem brighter; and down the road, just coming over the horizon, was a galloping black horse, its hooves striking sparks from hidden stones, breath steaming from its nostrils, eyes narrowed, and ears laid back. It had neither rider nor reins, and it was evident that should it ever reach the foreground, it would be the largest horse the viewer had ever seen.

His friends.

His pets.

After examining them a second time, he rolled over and buried his face in the crook of his arm.

His parents refused to allow real animals in the house, at least since Sam had died and they had given the kid’s parakeet to an aunt in Pennsylvania. Because of the memories; and it didn’t seem to make a difference that Don had loved the dumb bird too.

When he pressed for a replacement — any kind, he wasn’t fussy — his mother claimed a severe allergy to cats, and his father told him reasonably there wasn’t anyone around the place long enough anymore to take adequate care of a dog. Fish were boring, birds and turtles carried all manner of exotic and incurable diseases, and hamsters and gerbils were too dumb to do anything but sleep and eat.

He had long ago decided he didn’t mind; if his parents weren’t exactly thrilled about what he wanted to do with his life, why should he fuss over the absence of some pets?

Because, he told himself; just because.

And suddenly it was summer again, the sun was up, and he was down in the living room, bursting with excitement. Both his folks were there, summoned from their chores in the yard and waiting anxiously. He could tell by the look on his mother’s face that she expected him to say he was quitting school to get married, by the look on his father’s that he’d gotten some girl pregnant.

“I know what I’m going to study at college,” he had said in a voice that squeaked with apprehension, and he bolstered his nerves by taking his father’s chair without thinking.

“Good,” Norman had said with a smile. “I hope you’ll get so rich I can quit and you can support me in a manner to which I would love to become accustomed.”

He had laughed because he couldn’t think of anything else to do, and his mother had hit Norm’s arm lightly.

“What is it, dear,” she’d asked.

“I’m going to be a doctor.”

“Well, son of a bitch,” his father had said, his smile stretching to a proud grin.

“Oh, my god, Donald,” Joyce had whispered, her eyes suddenly glistening.

“Sure,” he said, relieved the worst part was over and there was no scene to endure. “I like animals, they like me, and I like learning about them and taking care of them. So I might as well get paid for doing what I like, right? So I’m gonna be a veterinarian.”

The silence had almost bludgeoned him to the carpet, and it wasn’t until several seconds had passed that he realized they had misunderstood him, that they had thought at that moment he had meant he was going to be an M.D.

Joyce’s smile had gone strained, but she still professed joy that he was finally decided; his father had taken him outside after a while and told him, for at least the hundred-millionth time, that he was the first member of the Boyd family to get a college education, and Donald would be the second. He said he hoped with all his heart the boy knew what he was doing.

“Being a teacher, and now a principal,” Norman had said, “is something I’m not ashamed to be proud of, son. Being a vet, though, that’s not … well, it’s not really anything at all, when you think about it. I mean, helping cats instead of babies isn’t exactly my idea of medicine.”

“But I like animals,” he had argued stubbornly. “And I don’t like the way people treat them.”

“Oh. Dr. Dolittle, I presume?” his father had said lightly.

“Yeah. Maybe.”

“Don.” And a hand rested on his shoulder. “Look, I just want to be sure you’re positive. It’s a hell of a step, making up your mind about something like this.”

“I wouldn’t have said it if I wasn’t.”

“Well, at least think about it, all right? As a favor to me and your mother. It’s only August. You have a full year to graduation, and even then you really don’t have to make up your mind. Some kids take a lot of time. You just take all the time you need.”

He had wanted to shout that he had done all the thinking he had to on the subject; instead, he had only nodded and walked away, and had walked and run for the rest of the day. When he finally returned home, nothing was said about the announcement, and nothing had been said since.

He grinned now in his bed; he wasn’t quite as thick as his father thought him — he knew they were hoping he would come to his senses and decide to treat rich old ladies instead of little old poodles.

What they didn’t know was that he didn’t want to work with poodles or Persians or dachshunds or Siamese; what he wanted was to work with the live equivalents of the pets in his room.

They’d scream bloody murder if they knew about that.

But he didn’t mind, because nothing they could do would make him change his decision; now if he could only stop minding the sound of them arguing.

The voices in their room, as if at his command, stopped, and he undressed quickly and got into bed. Stared at the ceiling. Wondered if he was soon going to become part of a statistic. Jeff Lichter’s folks had divorced when he was ten, and he lived with his father two blocks over. He was an all-right guy, nothing wrong there, but Brian Pratt lived with his mother, and whether it was because of the divorce or not, Brian was practically living on his own.

Nuts, he thought, and rolled onto his stomach, held up his head, and looked with a vague smile at the panther, then over to the horse, then the otters on the nearest bookcase. There were no names for any of them, but he shuddered to think of what Brian or Tar would say if they ever found out he sometimes talked to them all. Just a few words, not whole conversations. A touch on one for luck before a test, a wish on another that he would meet The Girl and wouldn’t have to suffer the guys’ teasing anymore, a wish on still another that he would wake up in the morning and discover that he had turned into a superman.

He grinned.

Don the Superman! Leaping tall buildings at a single bound! Carrying Tar Boston over the park and dropping him headfirst right into the pond. Saving Chris Snowden from a rampaging Brian and letting her be as grateful as she wanted.

Using his X-ray vision to see through Tracey Quintero’s baggy sweaters just to check if anything was really there.

Don the Superman.

“Don the jerk,” he said.

It was funny, when he thought about it, how the little kids were the only ones he could really talk to. For some reason most of them thought his stories were pretty okay, except for that one little monster tonight. A laugh was muffled by the pillow. A good thing the brat’s parents had come along just then, or he would have had them all really seeing that giant crow in the tree.

And damn, wouldn’t that be something!

Don the Superman, and his giant pal, Crow!

Just before he fell asleep, he wished he could wake up and discover that he was the handsomest kid in the entire city, maybe the whole state, maybe even the whole world.

Just about anything except waking up. to see plain old Don Boyd still there in the bathroom mirror.