“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.