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The Wolves
Copyright © 2005-2007 by Aster Rose - All rights reserved		 

The Wolves
by Aster Rose
They taught me how to hate.

Placing a gun to a trembling man’s head, letting go, leaving me, alone. Years of scoldings and fairy tales where bad children were devoured by wild animals overwhelmed my brain, screaming in my mother’s soft voice. And I kept hearing Esmarelda Villalobos from the movie Pulp Fiction murmuring over and over, “What ees eet like to keel a man?” I wasn’t a child anymore. I knew that anthropomorphic wolves would not swallow me whole if I released my sweating grip on the trigger. It didn’t matter, really. They would kill the guy whose life I held in my palms, if I did it for them or not. But it did matter. I would be accepted, for once in my miserable life. That pestering question “What ees eet like to keel a man?” would finally be answered. Swarms of curiosity drowned out my ethics set in stone with their incessant buzz. And, before my mind could change, I tightened my finger on the trigger. A deafening crack that pushed me backwards shattered the silence in that bleak alleyway, lit only by the soft glow of a faraway lamp post.
“What ees eet like to keel a man?” And though I had done it, though I had cruelly stolen life, I found that I did not have the answer.
“What ees eet like to keel a man?” not so much the voice of a woman, but that of my father, his face shattered by a psycho’s pistol.
“I don’t know, I don’t know,” I wailed to the sky, but the voices were relentless, forever demanding an answer.

“The first one’s always the hardest,” a face whispered, and strong hands pushed me to my feet from my fetal position on the cement. I stumbled forward, dizzily regaining my balance. Two shadows were carting away the limp body of the man I had murdered, and I fell to my knees again, retching bile tainted with blood onto the asphalt.
“It’s over now, the hard part. It just gets easier,” came the whisper again.
What ees eet like to keel a man?
“Who was he? The man I killed,” I gasped.
“I dunno. A traitor. Deserters are always killed by their replacements.”
“Oh,” I said, and steadied myself to keep from vomiting again.
“Shit, man, you’re screwed up. I know a good bar not too far from here.” I didn’t bother to mention that several suspiciously unclean drinks that had been explored by rats before me weren’t going to settle my tumultuous stomach.

The dim lit bar brought back unpleasant memories.

Christy, raped and half naked in a gutter. A thin, crimson line across her tiny throat, and her baby blue eyes staring into eternity. She was only ten. Only ten.

Mom, her shining bald head the last thing I saw before she was wheeled into a sickeningly antiseptic room filled with bizarre devices all sharper than a razor.

Dad, his skull blown to bits, the sidewalk black with blood stains and strewn with chunks of flesh and brain.

And me, swigging anything alcoholic I could get my hands on, letting a hangover every morning mask my pain. Wandering the streets, no home, no job, no life.

What was it that I wanted when the man had dragged me off the street and taken me into the nearest MacDonalds where he offered me the world? What was it that made me sell my soul to some guy who would barter it off for crack cocaine? Perhaps it was my desperation that drove me to kill, that thirsted for a sense of family, which made me want what I was already beginning to regret.

“Are you okay? Seriously dude, you haven’t even touched that bourbon,” said the shadowed face from the alley, which had now become a tanned, bleached blond human whose nose was ridiculously large. I pushed the glass away.
“I don’t want it.”
“Whadya mean you don’t want it?! That’s good, hard liquor there. Guaranteed, instant happiness.”
“Guaranteed, instant hangover,” I muttered.
“Pessimist. I paid for that bourbon, and I am not gonna let you leave it there to rot.” I reached out for the glass, letting some of the amber liquid burn its way down my throat. “There, that’s better, isn’t it?”
“Not particularly,” I said flatly, but drained the rest of it anyway. “So, now that I’m “in”, where do I live?”
“Where do you live? Where you were living before you got “in”, of course. Where else?”
“Don’t live no where. I haven’t for a real long time.”
“Oh, yeah. They picked you up off the street. Well, I guess you can hang at my apartment for a week or so, but not forever. A guy needs his privacy, you know what I mean?” he said, winking.
“Yeah, I guess,” I said, and slammed my empty glass onto the cheap wooden counter.

“Look,” I said, standing in front of his apartment building, “I’m not sure I should be staying in your house if I don’t even know your goddamn name.”
“I don’t want you to know my name. I don’t want to know yours. Names build friendships. You never know if I might have to leave you to die one day.” I nodded hesitantly, and then followed him through the revolving doors.

Half an hour later, I sat on a musty couch, which looked as if it was about to fall apart. Blondie, as I had decided to call him in my head, was reclining in a much newer looking armchair, channel surfing. He had a rather annoyed expression on his face, which subsided once he found the Playboy channel. I watched him contemplate calling the toll free number to buy “Girls Gone Wild” before deciding it wasn’t worth it, and muttering something about how expensive porn was these days. He then proceeded to goggle at women wearing bikinis so revealing, you wondered why they bothered wear anything at all.
“So, what happens now?” I asked.
“What the hell do you mean what happens now?” Blondie snapped, before returning his gaze to a particularly buxom redhead removing her top.
“Well, I’ve been admitted, so, what do I do?”
He stared at the stripper for a few more moments and said, “That is one sexy bitch. Now, whadya wanna know?” I repeated my question.
“Well, tomorrow you get your tattoo. That makes you officially a member. Then you do whatever we have to do for the gang.” He shrugged. “Now, if you will excuse me, I would like to enjoy my porn in peace.” I left him alone, drowning myself in my forever sea of thoughts.
What ees eet like to keel a man?
“What is it like to kill a man?” I asked Blondie, dropping the Columbian accent and hoping that my question might be answered. Turning around and about to begin screaming at me for interrupting his show, he paused and thought for a while.
“I don’t know,” he said finally, “That’s a damn hard question, you know that?” he eyed me reproachfully, “What do you think?”
“I think you can never know. That no matter how many times you kill that feeling always eludes you. It’s like…the agnosticism of death.”
“Are you on weed, man? When people are high, they tend to spout shit like that. Can I have some? I need a joint pretty bad.”
“I’m not on weed,” I said.
“Yeah right. You’re on something, at the very least. Heroin, meth, crack….oh, I know…acid! That stuff makes you say the weirdest things…anyway, I want some.”
“I’m not on anything!” I said, exasperated.
“Whatever. If you’re not gonna share, you’re not gonna share.” He settled back into the cushions, his face lit by the glow of the television.

It was a wolf, its head raised to snarl at the moon. We all had them, each one slightly different.

The tattoo artist was an old man, his skin sagging about his face, and wrinkles disfiguring the ink which seemed to cover every inch of his body. He specialized in wolves, and had been doing the gang’s tattoos for years. It looked strange, a small, wizened man chatting casually to muscular boys whose clothes were filled with lumps like oatmeal, which to the trained eye indicated where weapons where hidden. A man from another time, another generation, huddled over a piece of modern technology. He told me of the old times when he did jailhouse tattoos with a dull needle and pen ink. I didn’t ask why he had been in jail, and simply tried not wince from the pain.

“So, why are we killing this guy again?” the somewhat rickety convertible bounced along the highway. Blondie shrugged.
“How the hell am I supposed to know? That’s the kind of shit the boss deals with.”
“Oh.”
It was silent for awhile, the only sound a disturbing clang as Blondie came to a stop beside a set of abandoned apartments. He palmed a shiny Smith & Wesson and stepped out onto the asphalt. I carefully imitated him and then trotted behind him as he walked up to the apartments, and surprisingly, knocked on the door. There was no answer. A barely audible click made both of us rush around to the side of the building.
“Damn!” said a man wearing blue and red Spiderman boxers, who was halfway through climbing out the window. He hit the ground running with a thud, bare feet slapping against the concrete.
“What the fuck?! Now I’m gonna have to chase the bastard,” Blondie muttered under his breath. He began to jog behind the man, and I followed. I imagined that this would be the sort of gun chase seen in movies, full of brick walls and ricochets. However, Blondie hardly seemed to care that our victim was getting away.
A dark stain was forming in the center of the man’s shorts, probably caused by copious drinking the night before and fear. As he ran, a puddle began to form on the asphalt behind him. Blondie stopped.
“Hey asshole! What kinda bitch coulda had someone as ugly as you?” The man spun around.
“Don’t you insult my mo-” he slipped in his own urine, collapsing onto the concrete.
“That is called creative problem-solving. Shoot his brains out kid!” I leveled my gun.
“Shit! This is what happens when you have a hangover!” he moaned. I lost myself in my turbulent ocean of feeling.
Bang. Christy.
Bang. Mom.
Bang. Dad.
Bang. My old life.
I felt a hand on my shoulder, causing me to flinch and set another bullet whooshing into the air and thudding into the man’s shoulder.
“God. I told you to kill him, not mutilate the goddamn bastard!”
I stared at the man with Spiderman boxers, viewing what I’d done to someone whose crime I didn’t even know. I buried my face into my hands.
“Oh shit. Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit.”

Back on the ragged couch, Blondie was trying to find something good on, but failing miserably. He had already scolded me like someone’s mother, screaming about my queasiness at the sight of blood. He went over how it was my own fault for shooting the guy so many times, making the corpse almost unrecognizable. He told me that killing was my job so deal with it, and that if I was going to get all woozy over a dead body I should go ahead and quit.

He didn’t understand. He had never seen his own sister with her throat cut in a gutter. He had never seen bits of his father’s skull littering the ground, and watching fascinated little neighborhood boys scooping them up off the ground for mementos, despite your wails. He had never had a doctor with Listerine breath whisper his regrets in the midst of a waiting room filled with smiling children and their plastic toys. I spat the word bastard in Blondie’s face and locked myself in the bathroom.
I sat on the toilet contemplatively, hoping I would die there, like Elvis. I finally came out, settling in front of the TV in moody silence.
“You have to stay with the pack. That’s your problem, you can’t stay with pack,” Blondie broke the tense quiet. I said nothing, remaining resentful.
“What are you deaf, bastard?! Wolves stay in packs and you gotta stay with the pack or you die. You die.”
“There’s such thing as a lone wolf,” I pointed out. Even Blondie, with his seemingly uneducated brain, caught the nuance in my tone, perhaps regretting telling me to quit earlier.
“You know what they do to deserters, don’t you?”
“Yes,” I said stiffly. It didn’t hinder me at all the next morning.

I heard their shouts from outside the tattoo parlor. I had by no means expected it likely for me to get away with my desertion, so it came as no surprise to realize they had caught up with me. They burst inside, a group of thugs, Blondie at their tail. The tattoo artist looked up from where he was turning my wolf into a rose at this disturbance in his shop.
“Hey, what are you-” the artist stopped, recognizing that these burly men belonged to a gang. There was a moment of awkwardness as one of the gang members confirmed my identity with Blondie.
“We need your customer,” said one of the men.
“I-I-I can’t do that! He hasn’t paid me yet. I’m not going to be cheated out of my hard-earned money!”
“It’s money you want, then?” asked the bulky man who seemed to be heading the small group. “Well, here.” He pulled out a leather wallet and began piling stacks of fresh green hundred dollar bills on the tattoo artist’s hands. The artist gazed greedily at the impossible sum, not noticing the handgun the gangster pulled from his pants.
Bang.
“You’re coming with us,” said the man, kicking the artist’s body out of the way and grabbing the hundred dollars from the tiled floor. He then grabbed my arm and yanked me up. I let myself be dragged, knowing the uselessness of fighting.

He looked like I must have. His eyes darted everywhere, his palms sweating massive amounts of liquid. He kept staring at the gun in his hand, wondering. He stood there in the alleyway, watching us come, watching his possible victim, me.

They forced me to stand beside him, carefully positioned the gun against my skull, and left us, left me, for the second time. I watched them go, almost running, and I heard a soft echo in my mind as a head of bleached blond jogged away with them. You never know if I might have to leave you to die one day. And as I was about to give up, Blondie looked back. It was only a glance, one last look at me, alive. And maybe, just maybe, it meant that he cared.

We were alone. Two men, a gun, and a choice. The tables had turned, the gun had changed hands. I could almost hear him turning his two options around and around in his mind, like clothes in a washing machine. And although I had the angry black nozzle of a revolver pointed at my head, I couldn’t help smiling at the irony of it all.

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