The Werewolf and His Boy

Chapter 2: October 2009-1

Chapter 2: October 2009Larkin’s Home Improvement, Short Pump, west of Richmond

October 12, Monday morning

“Hey, Henry! You skipping lunch?”

Henry looked up from the cans of exterior paint he was transferring from the flat truck to the shelves to see Jamey standing there holding a cup of coffee in each hand.

“Did you see anything Sunday? You were on the graveyard shift, yeah? They say the body—some poor guy who worked for one of the trucking companies that delivers here—the body was chewed on, and his neck was broken.” Jamey said waved both cups of coffee in the air. “Oh, I got this coffee for you. Three creams and a brown sugar, right? C’mon, let’s go outside and get something from Dominic’s trailer out front, yeah?”

“Thanks. No, I didn’t see anything; I fell asleep in the bathroom.” Henry was still amazed and pleased that Jamey had remembered how he liked his coffee and even better, had come looking for him. He put the last paint can on the shelf, took the coffee and followed Jamey out of the store. He’d put up the flat truck later.

* * * *

Earlier that morning Henry had clocked in, looked around for Carlene and her ever-present clipboard, and then wandered into the Garden Center where he found flats of pansies needing deadheading. Not long after he had started a rumpled, tired-looking police detective came looking for him. He told the detective what he would tell Jamey four hours later: that he had been really tired and had fallen asleep in the bathroom. The detective had looked at him over thin wire-rim glasses for a long moment and then said he might have more questions later. Henry nodded and tried not to look like his heart was about to beat out of his chest.

Henry had gone back to the Garden Center then, forcing himself not look over his shoulder; he was sure the detective was watching him. The man’s words haunted him for the rest of the morning.

More questions? Why? To see if he had really been asleep? To see if Henry was hiding something? Did the detective think he might be connected to the dead guy? Was that even possible? No, that was crazy—he had fallen asleep, end of story.

Henry kept telling himself that all morning while he worked in the Garden Center, trying to stay tucked away and shadowed in a corner so he wouldn’t have to listen to the non-stop conversations about the chewed-on broken-neck body.

Henry was inside a green dimness when he heard the rumpled detective and Carlene talking at the Garden Center entrance.

“So, not murder?” Carlene said, her voice light with relief. Henry figured that murdered people in the Larkin’s dumpsters weren’t good for public relations.

“Yeah, just got a report from the coroner. The man fell into the dumpster, probably while he was running from whatever was chasing him, a big canine according to the teeth marks. Not chewed—more like bitten. His arms mostly, as if he had been trying to push the animal away. Broke his neck when he fell inside and took a long time to die in there, too, poor guy, sometime Sunday morning. Looks like we have a dog problem of some kind…”

Henry had dropped his shadows but stayed in the corner, focusing intently on sorting and stacking mulch bags. He wasn’t sure why he was afraid or why he had been hiding. Okay, he had fallen asleep, and taken his clothes off in his sleep—ripped them off, apparently. People did do things like that, right?

By the time Jamey found him at lunch time, Henry was fairly far along on the job Carlene had given him of restocking exterior paint and the day was beginning to feel normal again.

* * * *

After deciding to split Combo 1 (two hot dogs, chips, a twenty-ounce drink) Henry and Jamey scrunched up against a side wall out of sight of the front of the store. The wall faced a parking lot where contractors parked for pick-ups, alongside some huge machinery. Jamey’s leg was right up against Henry’s. Henry could feel it pressing against his scars, warm and close, and he knew his face was red, red, red. Jamey had to be touching him on purpose.

“You slept through it. Geez, Henry, you slept through the biggest thing that has happened around here. Cops everywhere, asking all kinds of questions, reporters, and you, Henry Thorn, slept through it,” Jamey said, shaking his head and laughing. “Geez, man.”

Henry shrugged, mostly because he didn’t know what to say. Jamey leaned back against the bricks for a long moment, closed his eyes, looked at Henry, and then away, as if he had been suddenly struck by shyness. “Hey, uh, if you’re not doing anything after work, you want to catch some dinner?” Jamey asked, staring down at the sidewalk. “I mean, if you’re not too busy—I know, I should have asked you sooner, but I kept missing you at break and we were on different shifts this past weekend and you’re not in the phone book. And today was just crazy, man.”

“No, I mean, yes, I mean—yeah, sure. I can’t afford a phone just yet, maybe soon. I’ve used my landlady’s when I needed to, sure, dinner would be great.” Henry inwardly sighed. He’s going to think I am a complete and total i***t.

“Yeah, I use my roommate’s phone, too—well, Charley is sort of my roommate. I’ve been crashing there since the summer when my dad threw me out. Out front at five, then? Yeah?”

“Yeah, okay.” Henry decided the safest thing to do at this point was to just nod his head. And not move his leg. He would have asked why Jamey’s dad threw him out but maybe Jamey didn’t want to talk about it.

Henry sat there against the side wall by himself after Jamey had gone inside. He had started off this morning being questioned by the police. Then, he had hidden inside his shadows. Thanks to Carlene, the police thought he might not be bright enough to do bad things. Then, Jamey, lunch, and now unbelievably, dinner.

They day had definitely improved.

He got up and brushed off his pants. He had fallen asleep. That was all that had happened. No murder. And he had survived lunch.

* * * *

Atlanta, same day.

The chimes, silvery and sweet, rang for the third time. Ella closed her eyes and hung up the phone, cutting off the voice on the other end mid-word. The woman would call back. Ella shrugged. It wouldn’t matter.

She called Danny’s office and left a hurried message: I’ll be home late, something came up unexpectedly, I’ll explain later, pick up the kids.

Then she unplugged her desk phone, turned off her computer, and arranged her desk: pens, pencils here, papers stacked here, reports to be read over there. She stood and glanced around; just about everyone else was at lunch, and the few left were so intent on whatever was on their screens they didn’t notice her. She picked up her name plate, and traced the letters with her fingers, then she set the plate down very carefully beside the framed photographs of her husband and the boys. She caressed the glass on the photographs and left.

An hour later she was outside the city heading north on I-85.

* * * *

5 P.M., same day

Henry was sure Jamey would come find him at some point during the day and say something had come up. No, Jamey would just send him a note—no, just not be out front at five and when Henry went looking for him, Jamey would be long gone. Dinner with Henry? What had Jamey been thinking?

At five, Henry, certain that Jamey would change his mind, stayed in the Garden Center, pinching dead leaves off a shipment of chrysanthemums. He was safe with the plants, safe in the green shadows. He could smell the last of the afternoon rain sprinkling the parking lot outside the Garden Center, turning the grey asphalt black below a sky scattered with clouds.

“Hey, Henry. Did you forget about dinner?”

“Huh? What? Uh, no—I—I just wanted to finish this.”

“That can wait, c’mon. Let’s get outta here, yeah? It’s after five. We don’t get paid overtime.”

A few minutes later, somewhat to Henry’s surprise, he was sitting in the passenger seat of Jamey’s dented little metallic blue Saturn SL2. Thinking he had to, Henry started talking: about the detective, the dead body that hadn’t been murdered after all but had been bitten, not chewed on, and how people all over Richmond and the surrounding counties seemed to be seeing big dogs everywhere, running in and out of the dark. To Henry’s greater surprise, Jamey, who seemed almost as nervous as Henry, chattered, too—jumping into the first opening Henry gave him.

Who knew how that guy had gotten bitten? Fell in the dumpster and broke his neck, could you believe it? Oh, yeah, sorry for the mess in the car, he really needed to clean it out; his uncle had given him the car in high school; he hadn’t taken it to VCU—couldn’t freshman year—but when his parents threw him out, he just loaded it up and left—

“What a day, huh? Hey, Mexican, okay, yeah? I got a coupon, two for one. And it’s only a few blocks from Larkin’s.”

“Yeah, sure, that’s fine,” Henry said quickly, nodding his head as if he were some back car window bobble-head dog. Please, please, please don’t ask me what my favorite Mexican food is.

The truth was that Henry had never had Mexican food before. And he had no idea if he had enough money to pay for dinner, coupon or no coupon. Why in the world had he not thought about how much his share would be before getting into the car? Please don’t let me screw this up. Not that he was sure to whom he was praying or if anybody was listening. Please make the coupon be enough; please let me have enough money.

Jamey settled the money question as Henry agonized over the menu, wondering what refried beans tasted like and what a fajita was and whether could he make a meal off chips and salsa (a little hot, but okay), and what could he order that would have meat? He really wanted some meat.

“Hey, pick whatever you want. Dinner was my idea, remember? So I’m paying. I’m gonna get two chicken enchiladas, refried beans, yellow rice. What about you?”

“Yeah, sounds good; I’ll get that, too. Good idea,” Henry hastily agreed. Maybe God was listening. He leaned back then, ready to listen to Jamey chatter, but was amazed to find himself talking with Jamey and telling him about being a foster child and his many sets of foster parents and the mysteries of his own parents, his leg scars (he even pulled up his pants to show Jamey) and the dog that bit him and what the guidance counselor had told him about his bad grades and no college…

As for Mexican food, not bad. The spiciness was surprising but okay.

Jamey listened intently. Henry felt his gaze on his skin—it felt golden and warm—and Jamey’s words like a sweet river—a year at VCU, but he couldn’t go back after his father threw him out, no money—that kept flowing on the way out of the restaurant, in the car, only interrupted by Henry’s directions to his little apartment hidden behind and below his landlady’s house on Three Chopt Road, down in the basement.

Professor Melloy was changing a light bulb on her back porch when they arrived so Henry mumbled hurried and awkward introductions and an apology for not changing the bulb. Only when she was out of town, she reminded him. When she went inside, Henry led Jamey down the porch steps, then side steps down one more level, to his front door.

“So, yeah, I am at Larkin’s, instead of being in college,” Jamey said, starting the conversation again. “My dad hasn’t talked to me since he found out I was gay. Caught me kissing a guy in my dorm room this summer when he came by to visit. My mom wasn’t too thrilled either, although she did give me some money when I left. I called it my ‘severance package,’ but not much of that left.”

Jamey stopped for a moment. “I’ve never told the whole story like that before, not even to Charlie.” He looked around before he started talking again. He leaned in towards Henry and said, in a low voice, “You have some amazingly funky ears, and your eyebrows—they meet right here.” He lightly touched a spot right between Henry’s eyes.