When I had imagined this fight between Ralph and me, and I had imagined it a number of times before, though I had never tried to imagine the circumstances that led to it, it was me, always me, who got the upper hand of it, quickly straddling a prone and defeated Ralph. I was the more athletic, the more cunning, I had always assumed, and maybe that’s true, but at the moment, it didn’t matter, and soon enough I found myself flat on my back, Ralph pressing down on me, his red, swollen, sweaty face hanging heavily over my own. Then he spit on me, and then he said, “What the hell, Mano?” Then he spit again, but this time into the dirt. Then he said, “Jesus Christ, what the hell?” And then for a moment I felt like a fool and an idiot and an asshole. Then I heard a hoof paw in the dirt, and I tilted my head back so that I could see the unicorn, upside down and behind us, and then I tilted my head forward again and saw Ralph, his lip bleeding still, his mouth moving, though I didn’t hear or understand what he was saying, and then I tilted my head farther forward and saw that his bathrobe had twisted open so that, except for the corduroy belt still tied around his belly, he was bare and vulnerable from his chest on down, and seizing my opportunity, I jerked my knee up into that softest part of him with as much force as I could muster, which made him pitch forward and land heavily on my face before I could roll him off of me. Then I stood and kicked him once more for good measure, hard enough to stop him swearing and hollering for a moment at least.
I took a moment to catch my breath and then saw that a light had come on in one of the upstairs windows, and then I thought I saw the silhouette of Melissa move away from the lit window, and then other lights started to come on in the house, and so as quickly as I could, I grabbed at the harness Ralph had tucked over the unicorn’s head and I pulled, firm but gentle, not sure what I would do if the unicorn decided not to go with me. It didn’t take any coaxing at all, though, and I had her out of the shed, and then I kicked open the gate, and then pulled her into the alley, which dead-ended, and then led her around the side of Ralph’s house and into the front yard. Then as soon as we’d cleared Ralph’s property and were moving into the street, that unicorn stopped and abruptly and smoothly tossed her head, and with a subtle flick put a gash in my chest the length of my arm and then swept my legs out from under me, and the last I saw of her she was trotting down the street, spearing that horn through every mailbox she saw; I watched that unicorn lower her head and spear through first one mailbox and then another and then another, and before long I lost sight of her, but I could hear her still, her hooves against the pavement, her horn tearing through the aluminum boxes, the crash of them hitting the street. Then I laid my head back against the street and I closed my eyes and I listened for as long as I could, and I waited. I waited for something else, anything else, to happen.
“Wolf!”
My father didn’t become violent until, one night while camping outside of Nacogdoches in the East Texas Pineywoods, he was bitten by a stray and sickly wolf.
Perhaps it was a dog.
Before I continue I would like to put to rest some of the myths concerning werewolves, reveal truths that, had I known them before, might have saved more of us:
The Full Moon
Father’s changes were not restricted by the light of the full moon. The changes, in fact, began even before he returned from his trip, rushed home by his fellow bird-watchers.
His beard had filled out, climbing up his face, covering his cheekbones, and reaching up to the lower lids of his eyes.
His nails had grown longer, sharper, and seemed, at the end, to be made of something harder than metal.
His snout had grown, too, allowing for an enhanced sense of smell.
In fact, all of him, by the end, had grown large, and at times I wondered at the deep reach of his long arms, at his hands and how vast they had become.
Silver Bullets
No matter how many I fired—
into his chest (near his heart),
into his side (piercing, so I discovered after the autopsy, his kidney),
through the thickest part of his neck,
into his soft underbelly,
and into his skull—
no matter how many silver bullets, he refused to quietly lie down, fall into a peaceful, interminable sleep, refused to keel over dead, refused, even, to turn from my youngest sister, whom he slaughtered before I could fire even my last shot.
Sunlight
When we captured him, my mother and I, finally, after two weeks of hiding and foraging and planning, after having buried the rest of his “brood” as Father liked to call us, or, rather, after we buried what was left of them, most of them being — well, let’s not go into that just yet — but finally capturing him with a net knotted together by my mother’s thick, supple fingers, Father was sleeping on his back in a wide strip of sunlight that poured into the living room and spilled across the rug and across his favorite chair.
Father had gone to the Pineywoods (more specifically, into the Angelina National Forest) — that year as he had every year since my birth and most likely before — in search of Henslow’s sparrow.
Not that the sparrow in question is particularly difficult to spot, though it is listed as an uncommon and inconspicuous bird. Not that he hadn’t observed and recorded his observations of Henslow’s sparrow numerous times in the past.
More that this particular sparrow was an obsession of his, one none of us outside of Noah quite understood, and we had our doubts about Noah, too.
Still, despite the yearly trips and frequent sightings, I could only find this blurred photograph of the bird in his office, in a box that contained other ornithological trappings (some ten notebooks describing sightings, habitats, movements, dates, times, etc.; some twenty ornithological texts, including The Audubon Guide to the Birds and Waterfowl of East Texas; two pairs of binoculars; and a small box of photographs [all of them as unfocused as this one, for though he was a fine observer and though he could sight birds quicker than his bird-watching fellows, he never had the steady hand necessary for photography]).
What I am trying to say is: My father was a patient man, an observant man.
The point I’m trying to make perfectly clear is: My father was a man who liked birds, and that men who like birds are, on average, men of a peaceful nature.
My youngest brother, Noah, who had, more than any of us, inherited Father’s ability to sit and wait and record, sat at our father’s bedside for two days after he was returned to us from his camping expedition. The doctor had been summoned, had arrived, had administered medicines, and had proclaimed him (our father) in no real danger.
“But what about the hair on his face?” Noah asked. “What about his fingernails?” he said.
The doctor laughed and said, more to Mother than to any of us children, “Your father merely needs a good shave and some super-sturdy nail clippers. Certainly nothing to worry about.”
“And his nose?” Noah asked. “What do you make of his nose?” he said.
But the doctor had a ready answer for that as welclass="underline" “It’s only made to look bigger by the hair on his face. See if he doesn’t look as normal as Sunday once you’ve given him a good shave.”