Rules for Werewolves (3 page)

The best way to get into a house is to ring the doorbell. Ninety percent of the time they open the door. If it’s a for-sale house there’s a little blue box on the doorknob with a key in it you’re supposed to only be able to get into if you know the combination. You can break that box pretty easily with a sharp hammer. Or a lot of times we just look under the obvious rocks in the garden where the old owner has left his or her extra key. But even if you get a for-sale house, you still need supplies, and the best place to get those is at a regular house. The way I think about it is: we’d hafta rob a bunch of different stores to get what we need to live, and why should we have to go to a bunch of different places and risk getting caught over and over again? So instead we just go to a regular person’s house, a person with a regular family, because that family has already been to all those stores for us. The more regular the better. Loners and gay houses, widowers, for-sale
houses and just-builts—that’s where we wanna live. But average America is where the plenty is hidden. We pick someone from the neighborhood who can afford to water the lawn. We pick someone who has a minivan or a station wagon, who can carry a lot of stuff back from the stores in a single trip. We pick someone with a nice dog that hasn’t been trained to bark at strangers.

We’re misfits, a group of all ages, mostly younger than thirty, most of us able to pass like we’re selling magazine subscriptions to earn points toward paying for a vacation to help us just say no to drugs. Sometimes we pretend we’re Jehovah’s Witnesses. We pick up a stack of
Watchtowers
at the Laundromat. Then we ring the doorbell. We divide up the rooms and someone does the garage for gas and tools, and two or three people do the kitchen for food and beer, and one person does the bedrooms for clothes and money, and one person is on “fun duty,” just running through the house looking for movies and comics and music. And just recently we started to put one person on the bathroom for pills and first aid. We learned that one the hard way. Sorry, Doug. Sorry, Val. Y’all needed a lot more first aid than we thought. I need some, too, now that I got hit by that Peugeot.

—Ouch.

—Hold still, baby. Your face is full of street. Or do you not want me to clean it good?

—My blood tastes like metal.

—Open this bottle for me.

—You wanna taste my blood?

—No way.

—Shit. What’s in this bottle? It smells weird. Is that hydrogen peroxide or alcohol?

—I wanna surprise you.

—Give me something to bite.

—Like what?

—Like Vicodin.

—Sorry, baby. Somebody snuck in the kit and ate those a while ago. I think you’re gonna have to settle for a washcloth.

—No thanks.

—You afraid one of us already used it?

—I’m afraid about six of us already used it.

—But it mighta been the ones who ate the Vicodin. They coulda used
this washcloth to wipe off that Vicodin sweat. You could get a secondary buzz.

—Give me your shirt.

—Then what’ll I wear?

—Come on. I’ll be able to taste you. And smell you. That’ll take my mind off all the pain you’re about to inflict on me.

—All right. Fine. Here.

—You look good without your shirt. You should go around like this all the time.

—Do I look good enough to distract you from this?

—Jesus. Fuck. That stings.

—It’s supposed to. That’s how you know it’s cleaning.

—Still …

—Bite the shirt and shut up.

—Owwwww.

—Don’t bite a hole in it.

—Whoa.

—Just let the air hit it and dry it out.

—I’m gonna have a nice scar.

—You got blood all over their pretty yellow tile work.

—Don’t clean it up. We’re moving out soon enough.

—Give me back my shirt.

—I will. Hang on.

—Do you think they’ll all come with you tonight to look for that car?

—You mean come with
us. ’
Cause I think
you’ll
come with me. And yes. I think most of ’em will.

—I think Bobert will come with us. And Anquille.

—Angel’s the one I’m worried about.

—You should tell whoever won’t come with us to find a new house.

—We’ll just leave ’em behind. We’re gonna take over Monsieur Peugeot’s house and anybody who isn’t with us isn’t gonna get the forwarding address.

—I hope this guy who hit you really is French and totally into French stuff.

—Like wine?

—Sure. But also like movies, and magazines, and music.

—You don’t speak French.

—And I never will if I don’t get exposed to it.

—You look funny saying that with your shirt off.

—Give it back.

—I will. Hang on.

—I never got to go anywhere before all this, and we’re never gonna get to go overseas. If we really do get a French guy’s house it would be like a weird vacation. To get to listen to his CDs and watch his movies. Maybe he’ll have a couple of French kids and we can lock ’em in the basement and spend weekends with ’em, asking ’em questions and bringing ’em things we find and asking them the word for it.

—French-kiss me.

—You’re a dork, Malcolm.

—So?

—All right, baby. Come ’ere.

Kiss. Kiss. Kiss. Kiss. Kiss.

—Ow. Even kissing hurts.

—You’re right.

—What?

—Your blood does taste like metal.

—See? You can believe what I say.

—You goin’ back to your tribe already?

—I don’t want ’em getting any ideas while we’re in here.

—They know we’re an
us
.

—I don’t want them getting the idea that I need a lot of doctoring.

—Give me my shirt.

—Here, take mine.

—It’s all tore up.

—It’ll look good on you.

—It’s sweaty.

—You can get a secondary buzz … I’m the one that took the Vicodin. I took it with Bobert and Anquille.

—Where was I?

—You were watching
Snow Dogs
with Susan and Angel in the basement.

—Why didn’t you come get me?

—I needed to bond with ’em. To keep ’em close to me.

—That’s bullshit. You need to tell me straight.

—Maybe it’s bullshit, maybe it isn’t. You said they’ll come with us tonight. Maybe it was ’cause I included them in the Vicodin?

—Next time include me, too.

—I will. If I can.

—What the fuck do you think they’re doing in there?

—He’s turning into a werewolf and she’s trying to stop him from doing it.

—The moon’s not full.

—It doesn’t have to be if you get hurt bad or if your life’s in danger or if your soul mate’s dying.

—You think the two of them are soul mates?!

—It’d be cool if they were.

—The only way to find out is to try and kill him and see if she changes.

—I’ll volunteer to keep my eyes on Tanya if someone else will volunteer to try and kill Malcolm.

—I’d fucking love to.

—Why do you hate him, Angel?

—I don’t hate Malcolm. I just wanna see how strong I am.

—If he’s a werewolf, why didn’t he change when the car ran over him?

—Who says he didn’t?

—He survived being run over by a car, didn’t he?

—He got hit. He didn’t get run over.

—What’s the worst thing you think you could survive?

—Out of what? Like the worst thing out of all possible things that could ever happen?

—That’s a lot of things.

—I sometimes go without food for two or three days.

—I don’t see what the big deal is about that.

—Then
you
do it.

—I could, but why would I?

—I go without food for two or three days because it gives me a special kind of strength. If I know there’s food inside a house, I can punch my hand through a window and just not care that I’m gonna get cut. Or if I don’t eat for a while, my fear of stealing goes away. I’ll steal any kind of food, no matter what kind of assistant manager is watching me at the Safeway.

—If you have food why would you need to stop eating it to steal more of it?

—Because we have shitty food. We eat shit. We sometimes try to eat dog food. I have. That’s shit. So sometimes I stop eating. You should have noticed that by now. Then, when I’m hungry enough I sneak off to a good food store and I steal whatever I want. And I’ve never been caught at it. When you get a real serious look in your eyes, which is what happens after two or three days, assistant managers won’t say shit to you. They get scared.

—That’s werewolf.

—What is?

—Oh, hey. Your face looks good.

—So does your shirt.

—Oh. I guess we got confused.

—I guess.

—What’s “werewolf”? I heard you saying something was “werewolf.”

—Yeah.

—Well, what? I want to know what’s “werewolf.”

—She is.

—You think?

—I do.

—How is Angel a werewolf?

—She says she doesn’t eat sometimes for a long time to make herself hungry enough to steal. She doesn’t eat the shitty food we have so she can steal real expensive food.

—You never brought any expensive food back to the house.

—I fucking eat it all right there.

—In the store you’re stealing from?

—Sometimes. Or in the alley. Or in the bushes.

—You should bring it back to share. That’s what I would do.

—Well, let’s do it.

—What?

—Let’s both not eat a few days and see who brings back the better food.

—All right. But not tonight. We both need our strength tonight. Tonight we’re gonna go looking for that car.

—When was this decided?

—It was decided in the house meeting I’m calling right now. Wake everybody up and let’s meet in the living room in five minutes.

—All right. But starting tomorrow neither one of us eats.

—Fine.

I started to not eat because I like to drink. The less you eat, the more bang for your buck you get per bottle. I started hanging out with these guys, these squatters who I’m living with now, at a party. I was shit-faced. I was walking home from a bar, and I was alone, I think because I pissed off the rest of my girlfriends. To be honest, I don’t remember. All of a sudden in the middle of a pitch-black night, there was a door lit up full blast and all these guys were in it. It was open, so I went in.

I like drinking. I would pay to drink—even now. Even after I’ve sworn off money forever. If I ever get any money I’m gonna take one or two of these guys, the ones I think I can trust, and I’m gonna take ’em to a bar and buy ’em the time of their lives.

I think that’s the only thing money’s good for: determining what you really love. Because money’s like a gem you have to mine for in the pits of hate. No one would go to work at a Walmart if there wasn’t something else out in the world that she loved. Most people love security more than anything, so they spend most of their money on a house or an apartment. A lot of people love other people, so they spend their money on them. Everybody says they love nature but it’s very rare to find somebody who actually loves horses or birds or something like that, at least loves them in any real way.

Take for instance what we find when we break into a house. We find
house stuff. We find clothes and DVDs and shit like that. What I would love would be to break into a house and find it lined, wall to wall, with little statues of all the breeds of horses. Every little statue on its own little shelf with a label on the wall explaining the Latin name and the things this horse was bred to achieve for mankind. Every room just filled with kinds of horses. A connoisseur’s house. I don’t know if there are that many kinds of horses. But they could be grouped thematically. Plow horses and agricultural horses in the kitchen. Dray horses and cart horses in the garage. Quarter horses and Thoroughbreds and entertainment horses grouped around the walls of the living room, facing a TV they keep on 24/7 that’d play the greatest horse movies of all time. Maybe we’re not squatting in the right neighborhoods for that sort of thing. But I want to find some house where someone has just given her life over to something. Any one thing. Something one degree from ordinary—only one. It could be first editions of mystery novels with all the clues underlined in red. I don’t care. But we need to find a new, awesome house, because all the ones we’ve been finding have way too much in common.

I don’t know how long I’ll be here. We find beer every once in a while. Or we break into some stupid family’s house and clean ’em out while they’re down mining in the pits of hate. There’s a lot of talk about what to do when we take over a family. What to do with the dad and mom. How to take the kids into another room. How to use the mom against the dad and vice versa. But it’s all bullshit. We never break into a house when the family is home. I think we
should
take a house with a family—then we’d have cable. Malcolm says they do sometimes take a house with a family. When I say, “When?” he says, “Before your time.” But when I ask around it must have been before everybody’s time ’cause nobody remembers it, ever. Malcolm’s been around the longest. That’s why he’s the leader. But when I’m the leader we’re gonna use some of my ideas.

Sometimes I go out on the weekends and wander around looking for a party. If I find a party I just go in and say, “I’m a friend of John’s.” Everybody knows a John. My name is Angel but if somebody at the party asks my name, I tell them,
Tanya
. That’s Malcolm’s girlfriend’s name. I don’t tell ’em that because I want to be her, but because if word gets out that some crusty-punk girl is crashing parties in the neighborhood and it gets back to us, I don’t want it to be me that gets in trouble.

I used to make whole sets of rules before I walked into a party.
I’m just gonna drink beer. I’m not gonna stay for more than twenty minutes. I’m gonna let my body be my clock and make myself leave as soon as I have to pee
. But it didn’t matter how many fucking rules I made. If I step foot into a party I’m gonna go all the way through it. I’d rather be a woman who’s true to her word than one that lives by wishing.