The Werewolf and His Boy

Chapter 1: September 16 to October 11, 2009Larkin’s at Short Pump, Far West End, Richmond September 16, Wednesday night Henry Allan Thorn Henry really loved the night and his graveyard shifts at Larkin’s. He loved the shadows and the dark corners that even the lights high in the ceiling somehow failed to illuminate. He loved the unexpected caves made by lumber or boxes or concrete that just happened to be stacked in a certain way, even if the next day, like sand castles, the caves were gone. He loved the green shadows of the Garden Center that darkened and grew and turned black and grey as night fell. He loved the Garden Center’s green, earthy smells: the stalks, the fronds, the leaves, the tiny pots, the ferns in hanging baskets. Tonight he had found a shaded corner in the back, where he was deadheading flowers and watering flats of petunias, dahlias, pansies, calendula and sweet alyssum. Snapdragons, chrysanthemums, asters. The autumn roses were next. Henry inhaled, drinking in all the scents, the green, the earth, the shadows. He had never told anyone that shadows had colors and scents and that green shadows had the richest, the deepest, smell. The Garden Center was his favorite place; he wanted to work there full time. Instead he was a floater. Sort of. Henry had never told anyone a good many things. He had learned early on that he was different from everyone around him in some deep basic way. People didn’t like differences. Sometimes they would hurt you if they thought you were different. No one would ever know he had another secret besides smelling shadow-scents: he knew how to disappear. Somehow he knew how to pull the shadows around him like a soft, soft cloak, the colors of his skin, his clothes, his black hair, became ghosts of themselves, faint enough for whatever was around him to show through. Sometimes even the sounds he made in the shadows were muted to barely audible whispers. He had learned long ago how to pretend to be invisible in a crowd. He tried not to use the shadows at work, but a lot of the time Carlene seemed to forget that he was in the Garden Center, and that was fine with him. Even if he didn’t love working with plants so much, Henry knew he had to be in the Garden Center right now. Something was coming. That was another of Henry’s deep and dark and long-kept secrets: he sensed when things were coming, events, weighted moments coming charged with meaning. He rarely knew what the moments would be, and some he might have avoided if he had known, like the time the dog at his last group foster home attacked him. He just knew that they were coming and where. One was coming to the Garden Center. Henry shook his head to clear his thoughts. It did him no good to waste time trying to focus on these impending moments. He went back to deadheading and spraying the plants. Plants, Henry had found, were often a lot nicer than people. Sometimes thorns and leaves might tear or prick his skin, but they never bit him or snapped at him, like cats and dogs did, or even some people. Plants never looked past him or through him or talked around him, the way some of the guys at work did, even at lunch, when they would go over to Jason’s Deli or Chipotle or out front to Dominic’s Garden Grill. He was used to it; it had been happening to him all his life, including in all the foster homes he had been in and out of until he was eighteen. It still hurt. Henry was scanning the next flat of pansies: a little dry, a few deadheads—when he jerked up, the watering can spilling on the concrete floor. He felt the weight of the impending moment pressing on him. He listened hard, his head c****d toward the doorway, some forty or fifty feet away, with only two rows of plants of one kind or another and a flat cart loaded with bags of potting soil and mulch between him and whatever was coming. “Three weeks of training and orientation, I told you that, right—this is the Garden Center, obviously…Back this way is the storage room, where we keep the special order bins, appliances on clearance…” Carlene, the senior day manager, was giving a new guy a tour. Her voice trailed off as she disappeared back into the main store. The new guy, red hair falling over his face, stood in the doorway and stared at Henry. Henry could feel his gaze as if it were directly on his skin. He could feel his body responding and he knew the redhead was feeling the same things he was. “Mr. Currey?” The redhead took a step back, and turned, looked at Henry again and then disappeared into the main store. Henry closed his eyes as he inhaled, exhaled. He smelled the new guy: mint-scented soap, Tea Tree Tingle Shampoo, Old Spice shaving cream and deodorant, desire—the sharp, acrid smell of fear. Smells, scents, odors. Henry had been thirteen when he had first started to smell the emotions of those around him. At first, it had been just the slightest scents, as if carried by a breeze from far away. It had taken him a long while before he could match scent to emotion. At times he had felt almost overwhelmed in a tangle of sensory input; the worst had been when one of his foster parents had taken him to a revival meeting, and it was so bad, he had run screaming from the church. They had called Social Services to come get him that afternoon. The doctor said nothing was wrong with the boy, except maybe stress, and being overly sensitive. Henry’s next foster parents were more understanding and let him wear a bandana over his mouth and nose, until he sorted through the scents, the feelings, and how to tune them out, learned how to not-smell. Thankfully, they didn’t take him to any church revival meetings. Now Henry could smell when he wanted to, or not-smell. Fear was sharp, pungent, layered. Anger, burning and dark, hot, sometimes cold. Cold anger was the worst. Desire, sweet, strong. Only recently had Henry developed the ability to detect the distinctive scents of more subtle emotions—despair, melancholy, and anxiety. * * * * James George Currey For one intense, intense moment, Jamey couldn’t breathe, he couldn’t move. He was consumed with desire. That guy in the Garden Center: dark, dark black hair, thick, streaked with silver. Medium build, medium height. Pointed ears, tufted with black hair. When Jamey closed his eyes and then looked again the ears were completely normal, no points, no extra hair. He heard the manager call his name, her voice sounding distant and far away, and he turned to leave and follow her, but he stopped in the doorway to look back. The desire was still there. The second time it was even harder to turn away and follow after her, but he did; he had to. Jamey needed this job. The money his mother had given him after his father had kicked him out of the house, spewing Bible verses as he threw stuff in his car—what Jamey called his “maternal severance package”—was about to run out, and although neither his friend Charley nor Charley’s roommate had said anything, Jamey was pretty sure the offer to sleep on the couch wasn’t good indefinitely. “That’s—I always forget his name. Harvey. Horace, Harry. Henry. Henry Thorn,” Carlene said. “You’ll meet everybody after training. Anyhow, this way, kitchen cabinets, special orders…” Jamey decided not to mention that he’d seen pointed ears on this Henry Thorn. He had always seen things that no one else did as long as he could remember. His mother had told him stories about baby Jamey telling her he was seeing moving lights in the trees, and how he’d cried because no one would believe him. Everybody had laughed and told him they were fireflies or car lights—no, no, they were as big as my hand—so Jamey decided that some of the things he saw were secrets because nobody else ever saw them. Or would admit it; he wondered now about his grandfather and his mother’s brother—and sometimes his mother. The green man and the green lady in the woods, the silver lady in the lake and the goat-footed horned man: all secrets. Optical illusions and an overactive imagination, his mother said. He had never told anyone about flying. It had been September, he had been six and the teacher had sent him to the lower playground, out of sight of the school, to fetch left-behind equipment. Jamey stood for a moment at the top of the green hill, looking down at the empty playground. He had started running and running and the wind had caught him or he had caught the wind and for one supreme minute, he was airborne. It had happened only twice more that fall, on the lower playground, the last time in a swirl of leaves. Nor had he ever told anyone about the other, older memory of walking through a wall. He had been at the back door and then he found himself outside in the backyard. His mother had spanked him and yelled at him for lying. Jamey wondered if his mother still told baby Jamey stories. He hadn’t seen or heard from anyone in his family since the end of summer school, other than the seemingly endless anti-gay tracts his mother kept mailing him: the weird little cartoons, like Doom Town, Sin City, and The Gay Blade, and endless photocopies of Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13 and 1 Corinthians 6:9-11 and the rest. It had been hard at first to throw them into the recycling bin. He had been too scared to try going home to Fredericksburg. He had called his little sister and brother but his dad had caught them, and blocked the phone number. Charley had then offered to let Jamey use his cell phone but Jamey had been afraid to touch it. Using a pay phone now seemed like a luxury. If he didn’t get this job…Pay attention to what this woman is saying, Jamey. Pay attention, he told himself. “You had a year at VCU, so you might be interested in our tuition reimbursement program. All right, come in the office, let me give you the forms you need to fill out to get on payroll, your fingerprints for the background check, signatures on the privacy waivers, the usual. I think I will start you as a floater at first…” Jamey had looked back one more time in the direction of the Garden Center. Did that guy really have pointed ears? * * * * Ella, Atlanta The kids were in bed. Danny was on the night shift at the hospital and Ella finally had some time to herself. She was reading when the alarm sounded: wind chimes, silvery, sweet, faint. She closed the book and sat very still. She hadn’t heard the alarm in how many years? This persona, Ella Lewis, had never heard those faint wind chimes. Silvery, sweet, far away. A false alarm? She would have to wait; that was protocol. But already she felt the edges of this persona start to unravel. She sniffed. Just the barest of traces but she recognized both scents. It wasn’t a false alarm. * * * * Henry, Friday—early Sunday morning, October 9-11 When Henry moved his marker to In on the staff board, he saw that James Currey was In, too. Just looking at his name, as Henry had for the past week, made him pause and catch his breath. He had dreamed of Jamey more than once. Henry had wanted to speak to him, to say something, anything, but somehow, no opportunity other than glances across the break room, had presented itself in a week. But that, he knew was just an excuse. When he had smelled fear, he had smelled both Jamey’s and his own. Rehearsing while he sorted his clothes at the Laundromat or rode the bus to and from Short Pump, or alone in the Garden Center didn’t seem to help. Some of the dogwood saplings had seemed especially interested, which he actually found annoying. Henry knew he had choked, which was stupid, he was stupid, stupid, stupid. But he was still scared. Henry had figured out being gay had to be one more of his secrets in high school. It wasn’t safe to be out, not at Deep Run High School in Henrico County, nor in the mob of kids in the different foster homes. A girl had been pushed down the stairs, and then the bad thing had happened to a guy at the bus stop.