Chapter Five
It was about mid-morning when we got to the bus station, and that suited me just fine. It was a bright, coolish kind of day, with showers of yellow leaves coming down off the sweet gum trees whenever the wind blew. A good day for walking, and that was a fine thing. I found out you had to do a lot of walking in Sulphur Springs if you wanted to get anywhere. Everything is so sprawled out and far-flung it takes forever to get around if you don’t have a car.
They had some of those free city maps that the Chamber of Commerce puts out, so I took one before I left the bus station.
I made my way to the public library, intending to follow my plan of getting on the Internet and seeing what I could find out. I’d come as far as I could with what I already knew, and now I needed some more information. I was in Daddy’s home town, and I was hoping and praying Justin wasn’t too far away. If he was, I didn’t know what I might do.
But you know what? When I got there the dadgummed place was closed. I should have remembered it was Sunday. So many things had been going on the past couple of days that I just didn’t think about it, I guess.
That left me out of luck as far as using the Internet. I wouldn’t be able to do that until the library opened back up tomorrow morning, and in the meantime I had a whole day with nothing to do.
I don’t know why I did it, but for some reason I walked over to Stonewall Street and looked at the houses. Curiosity, I guess. I didn’t actually know which one Daddy and Nana Maralyn used to live in. They never mentioned any address that I could remember, and I’m sure I must have walked right past their old house that afternoon without knowing it. It gave me a weird feeling, to think about my dad growing up on that street and maybe playing in one of those very yards I was looking at when he was a kid.
It had always been a sort of unwritten rule in our family that nobody talked about the time before they became monsters or discussed any family members who weren’t one. It was almost like it was taboo or something. I’d never paid attention or cared much before, but now, standing on that street, I decided I did care.
There were so many things nobody ever told me. I didn’t know my grandparents (well, except for Nana Maralyn), or whether I had any aunts and uncles or cousins, or anything at all like that. Justin was the only family member I’d ever even heard of, and pretty much all I knew about him was a name and a face. Everybody else in the world knew all that stuff about where they came from, and I wanted to know too.
Maybe it seems like it was a strange time for me to want to get all balled up in family history when I was in such a tight spot in so many other ways. You’d think I’d have more practical things on my mind right then, like what to eat and where I could sleep that night. I don’t know why it came over me all of a sudden like that, all this wondering about things I never thought about before.
A little kid was playing t-ball in one of the yards, and I watched him for a little while. Daddy used to be a fast pitch all-star in high school, and he could still throw pretty good when he wanted to.
When I was little, he used to play ball with me in the back yard sometimes, and I remember I always used to wish I could pitch as well as he could. So I practiced and I practiced till I learned how, and I’m not half bad these days if I do say so myself. Baseball used to be one of those things he and I could always talk about, till he decided it wasn’t something he cared about anymore. I’m not sure exactly when that was, but for the past several years we hadn’t done much together at all. He wanted to talk about money and monster stuff and I wanted to talk about baseball and books, and so we ended up barely talking at all.
When I thought about it, Mama was the same way, though. She just had different reasons. Lola was her whole world, and even though she did make an effort to hide it and be fair, everybody always knew who her favorite was. After my sister was born, she wasn’t much interested in me anymore.
Neither of them were. Not really. They looked forward to me joining them in all their monster stuff, but that was only because that was what they cared about. I got the feeling they didn’t really value anything I thought was important and didn’t much care how I felt about things. It was almost like any other boy in the world would have done just as well to fill my place. That bites, you know.
I stood there feeling sorry for myself and wallowing in my unlovability for a while until I decided I was being stupid about the whole thing. I’d known all this stuff for years, so why was it all of a sudden upsetting me now? It wasn’t like me to get all bummed out like that, and I don’t know what put me in such a bad mood that day. Maybe it was just the place I was in, and all that broody thinking I was doing.
I decided to put it out of my mind.
I didn’t stay on Stonewall Street much longer. It was too depressing and made me think too much. If I’d known it would do all that to me I never would have gone there in the first place. It was a headache I didn’t need right then.
I eased my way back downtown, walking slowly with my thumbs hooked in the corners of my pockets. I went to a Taco Bell not far from the interstate and had a bean burrito for a dollar. It was nasty, but at least it was cheap.
I wandered around aimlessly the rest of that day. I looked in store windows, and fed the pigeons with some popcorn I bought. Yeah, I know it was probably a waste of money, but I did eat some of it myself. I was still in that funky mood from earlier, and sharing with the birds cheered me up a little.
Lots of places had their Christmas decorations up already, and when it started to get dark I enjoyed looking at lights and things for a while. But in a way that was depressing too, because it only reminded me I wasn’t home.
It was the full moon that night, too. I could tell before it even got quite over the treetops. Mama and Daddy and Nana would all be out hunting tonight, cause you could bet your beefcakes they wouldn’t miss that for all the cows in Texas. And if I’d been home, then I would have been right out there with them, and that would have been my last night not a monster. I shivered.
I was careful not even to step on a bug or swat a fly that whole night. I wasn’t sure what was big enough to count as making a kill, and I wasn’t taking any chances. I had no intention of getting turned into a monster now, just because I was careless.
Later on I had to think of a place to spend the night again. You know, one of the most annoying things about running away is that you can never find a good place to sleep. I went back to the bus station and slept on a bench that particular night. At least it stays open twenty-four hours and nobody thinks it’s very strange if you’re sleeping there. It’s also noisy, bright, and full of people all the time, and I swear the bus company must have tried every kind of bench in America before they found the very hardest and most uncomfortable kind possible. It was worse than gym bleachers.
When I woke up Monday morning the first thing I did was look at my fingernails. Mama and Daddy and Nana all have really hard, sharp nails even on ordinary days, almost like claws, and Nana had told me once that that was a good way to recognize a loup-garou when you saw one. You can bet I looked real close that morning, and except for a little dirt my fingernails looked just the same as they always had. That was a huge relief. Now at least I knew I’d be safe till next fall, even if I did get caught. For a little while, I was sky-high with excitement.
I jumped up and went back to the library not long after it opened, eager to get started. I guess I was still pumped up over dodging the bullet on getting turned into a loup-garou, but it didn’t take long to bring me back down to reality.
All the public computers were busy when I got there (of course!), so I had to cool my heels in the lobby and wait for one. I finished reading Robinson Crusoe while I waited. I was almost done anyway, and when I finished I put it back in my pack. I really didn’t like the ending much.
I still had to wait a while even after that, so I read the newspaper. Finally there was a vacant computer, and I sat down and got to work.
Like I said before, I h
ad no idea where to find Justin except somewhere in Texas, and hopefully somewhere near Sulphur Springs. I knew it was probably too much to hope for that he was still there, but you never can tell about things like that. I was fairly close to Dallas, and there are lots of people there.
To tell the truth, I kind of hoped he didn’t live in a big city. I like the wild places too much for that. But at the time I cared more about finding him at all than I did about what kind of place he lived in. I wouldn’t have cared if he lived in a pup tent on a vacant lot. Well, maybe I would have cared about that, but you know what I mean.
I went to a website that had all the phone book listings in the country on it and tried to see what I could find. Even limiting the search to Texas, there were twenty-two Justin Wilders or JJ Wilders and so forth. I didn’t know Justin’s middle initial, so I couldn’t cross out all the JR’s and JB’s and JT’s and all that crud.
For a while I got discouraged, but then I took a piece of scratch paper and a pencil and started writing them all down. It would have cost me ten cents a page to print that stuff, and I couldn’t afford it.
I had a horrible thought while I was writing down those names and phone numbers. What if Justin was married and the phone was listed under his wife’s name? What if he only had a cell phone, or no phone at all? Worst of all, what if he moved away ten years ago and was living nine hundred gazillion miles from here?
I finally decided there was nothing I could do about any of that, so I’d better work on what I had before I started worrying about what to do if none of those people turned out to be the right one. You can’t always be worrying about what might happen. The stuff you already have to deal with is hard enough.
It would have been easiest if I could have just called all those guys and asked them a few questions. But I didn’t have a phone, and it would have cost way too much to try to do all that on a payphone. So I had to tackle that cat a little bit different kind of way if I wanted to get anything done.
I used Google and came up with some personal websites for several Justin Wilders. I was able to cross out three of the people on my phone number list that way because I found out things about them that meant they couldn’t be the one I was looking for. Two of them were too old, and one of them had posted a picture of himself that looked nothing like Justin at all.
It might sound like I was making progress in whittling down the number of people I had to check out, but even though I was able to cross out a few, I also had to add five more people I found on Google that I hadn’t seen on the phone book site. It was enough to drive me crazy. It also made me wonder how many others I might be missing because I didn’t know where to look for them.
It would be dull to tell you about everything I looked at that afternoon, cause I was there till they closed that night at ten. In the end I wound up with a list of people that had twelve names on it of people that might possibly be Justin. One in Amarillo, two in Dallas, one in Tyler, three in Houston, one in Lufkin, one in Daingerfield, one in Mineral Wells, one in New Boston, and the last one in Wolfe City.
I didn’t know where any of those places were except Dallas and Houston, so I had to haul out a Texas road map and fiddle around until I found them all.
I sort of wondered about the Wolfe City one, and if maybe Justin had a sense of humor. It sounded like the kind of place a werewolf might want to live.
Except Justin wasn’t one, of course. I guess for a minute I sorta forgot that was the whole reason for finding him in the first place.
I noticed that most of those towns were in the eastern or northeastern part of the state, and that was a good thing. None of them were what you might call close. But it was a heck of a lot better than having them scattered everywhere. Wolfe City was the closest, and it was about thirty-five miles away. None of the others were closer than sixty miles.
After the library closed, I spent one more night at the bus station. I knew if I spent too many nights in there somebody would start to notice after awhile, so I tried to make myself as inconspicuous as possible. I slept in a corner away from the ticket counter where it was hard to see me and not too many people had any reason to come.
I used up the last of my food that night. I ate my last piece of beef jerky and the last can of Beanie Weenies. I still had a little money, but precious little, and I knew it wouldn’t last long at all if I started buying food with it.
Tuesday morning I went back to the library and tried to see if I could find out any more about the people I was looking at, any little clues that might help me. No such luck, though, and I didn’t know any other websites to check.
I finally decided I’d just have to bite the bullet and use a payphone to check out the rest of them, in spite of the cost. It was a dollar apiece for every call, and that would eat up the rest of my money real fast.
I decided it was probably wise to check out the closest ones first, but what could I ask these people when I called? I was afraid if I just came right out and told them who I was and what I was looking for, they wouldn’t believe me. The only proof I had was that picture I got from Mama’s album, and I couldn’t show them that over the phone. Mama hated talking about Justin so much, what if he was the same way? He might not admit he even had a sister, even if I asked about her by name.
Maybe it sounds like I was being a worry-wart, but things start not being very funny when you’re completely alone and almost a thousand miles from home, in a place where you don’t know anybody. I never realized how scary and lonely it could be.
I started feeling sorry for myself again, and I almost decided to give up and go home, tell everybody I was sorry and start eating bloody rabbits once in a while.
It’s bad when you get so sick at heart that you start thinking about stuff like that. I’m not sure what kept me from doing it. All I know is, I felt like somewhere deep down, somebody was reminding me to have courage.
So after a while I did, and I decided not to give up at least until I didn’t have any choice. One of my teachers used to talk about guardian angels sometimes. Maybe it was something like that.
Anyway, I went outside to a payphone and started calling those numbers. I’d decided there was really nothing else I could say except the honest truth, and hope things worked out.
Wolfe City was first on the list, but as it turned out, when I called that number all I got was message telling me it was disconnected. That was good in a way since I didn’t get charged for the call, but it didn’t give me much information either. So I moved on to the next one.
Neither of the Dallas guys was the right person. One of them was nice enough; he just told me he wasn’t who I was looking for and wished me good luck. The other one was ruder about it but he said basically the same thing.
Out of the other nine, I got five answering machines, two more disconnected numbers, and two more people who turned out not to be the right one. Those two were the ones in Tyler and Mineral Wells.
It’s awfully hard to tell much about a person just from hearing his voice on an answering machine. Some people don’t even bother to say anything themselves, and others seem to want to talk your ear off before they’ll even let you leave your message. But sometimes you can tell a little bit. I figured out that two of the people in Houston were black, the one in Lufkin was older than dirt, and the one in Amarillo was a foreigner, so that eliminated four more possibilities.
One of the disconnected numbers was in Houston, and the other was in Daingerfield. The number in New Boston just rang and rang, so I bet he probably didn’t have an answering machine at all. Most everybody does nowadays, so it made me think maybe that one was a really old guy too.
I drummed my fingers on the phone and thought some more. The one number that I knew was working was in New Boston, which was maybe eighty miles away. Two of the disconnected ones were pretty close too, even though they were in opposite directions.
I knew I couldn’t automatically cross out a number just because it was disconnected. Not un
less I knew what the reason was. They might just have forgot to pay their bill last month or something. I didn’t dare eliminate the numbers unless I knew for sure. So that left me with four numbers to check on: Wolfe City, Daingerfield, New Boston, and Houston.
When all the water was boiled out of the pot, the real question at that point was how to get to any of these places. I’d found out everything I could without actually going to the address itself to see it with my own eyes.
The hardest would be that one in Houston because it was so far away, so I decided to put that one off till last. The other three were not too awful far.
The problem was, I’d spent almost all the rest of my money making those phone calls. I had not quite three dollars left, and that won’t get you too far.