I got a job as a bookkeeper in a sketchy office building. It was there that I first got the idea for the straw purchase.
Would that I’d never thought of it.
Firearms were highly regulated in the city. Only certain folks could get licensed, and it all rested on an intelligence test. This had the effect of driving the price of the guns up, even those that were available for sale illegally.
A man in my office, Mr. Crenshaw, began talking wistfully about how he’d like to buy a gun. “I’ve been saving every last grunt I’ve made for the past year. A hundred grunts just to take the test, and another hundred for the gun. But I keep failing the damn thing. I’m almost a thousand grunts into buying a gun, and I still don’t have one.”
That gave me an idea.
“Mr. Crenshaw, why don’t you give me three hundred grunts, and I’ll give you a gun.”
Mr. Crenshaw was an elderly sort, and his eyes watered as he peered at me. “Say what?”
“Well, if I take the test and pass, I can buy a gun. I can buy as many as I’d like, right?”
He considered me. “Well, I s’pose.”
“No one knows who the gun belongs to once it’s bought. No one cares. So if I buy the gun and give it to you, you get a gun and I get enough money to take my girl out somewhere nice.” There was no girl, and the money would go to the rent, but the old man was so happy that he forked over the dough lickety-split.
When I got back to the flat I told my brothers my scheme in a low voice, so our roommates wouldn’t hear us. Peter gave me a slow nod; his way of agreeing it was a good idea. But Phillip had bigger ideas.
“Pauly, why stop at one old man? Why not buy a hundred guns?”
I blinked at him. “What?”
Phillip began to pace. “There have to be dozens of suckers like him in the city, just aching for a chance to get their grubby mitts on a gun. A gun means protection; it means power. Every girl wants to be with a fella who can keep her safe, and every man wants a gun. Nothing makes a man more foolish than a loaded gun.” Here Phillip paused and elbowed me to make sure I caught his double meaning. “And a fool and his money are soon parted. So why not make some grunts? I can chat these guys up, and you take the test and get them their merchandise. It’ll be brilliant.”
I looked at Peter, who was now doing his slow nod for Phillip.
“What’s Peter going to do?” I asked.
Phillip grinned, showing his teeth. “Peter is going to keep everyone honest.”
* * *
For the next year we lived a life of leisure. The straw purchase racket was pure genius, and all three of us quit our jobs and moved out on our own. Phillip moved to the north end of town, near the poker clubs and bars he loved. Peter met a nice girl and moved with her into a small house on the outskirts of the city.
I moved into a nice high-rise building with a security guard. Although I’d been in the city for a while, it still made me nervous. Especially with our less-than-legal enterprises.
Phillip had big plans for us, and the straw purchase soon grew into a full-fledged criminal empire. I came up with the ideas, and Phillip and Peter implemented them. Prostitution, racketeering, illegal gambling, moneylending. If it paid well and it was illegal, we dealt in it.
And we were good at it.
Phillip was the mouth of the operation, using his gift of gab to cement alliances with other rackets and to smooth the way with the local cops. Peter was the muscle, and whenever a payee was late or someone didn’t want to play nice, he broke into their house and hurt their feelings.
And I was the background guy, the idea man. Phillip looked like he was in charge of things, but I was the one running the show from the shadows. I kept my ear to the ground and applied the rumors and gossip I heard to our business, moving poker parlors before they were raided, paying off minor nuisances, and ending those who were thinking about talking to the feds. We cut a bloody swath through the city, taking what we wanted, killing anyone who got in our way.
The three of us were unstoppable.
That’s when I started to hear the whispers about the Wolf.
* * *
In the old days the Wolf had owned this city. He was big and he was bad, but no one had seen or heard from him in years. There were rumors that he took a chunk of the pie from every operation, and those that weren’t willing to play nice risked having their houses blown in, so to speak.
Phillip tsk-tsked away my worry when I mentioned the rumors I’d been hearing; stories of a bushy-haired fella kicking in the doors of some of our smaller operations. We were in the back room of the bar my brother owned, the liquor sales and good-time girls up front a cover for the games in the back. Those days, Phillip spent more of his time playing cards than running things, so more and more of the day-to-day operations fell to me.
“There’s no such thing as the Wolf, Pauly,” Phillip said, throwing a card down on the table. “We would’ve met him long before now if he was a real thing. Quit worrying,” he said. “You’re gonna give yourself wrinkles.” Then he did that thing where he grabbed the back of my neck and shook me a bit.
I pulled free and gave him a nod as he went back to his card game, his hat cocked at a jaunty angle and a girl on his knee, that fearless grin I’d come to hate plastered across his face.
The next morning Peter found Phillip dead, his eyes staring wide and surprised. He’d been closing up, restocking, when someone had come in and iced him. No one knows what was said, and the drink straws scattered across the bar floor weren’t talking.
Peter and I gave Phillip the best funeral money could buy, and at the wake afterward, I pulled my brother aside.
“We need to look into this Wolf thing, Pete. You and I both know he offed Phil, and the last thing I want is this guy huffing and puffing all over us.”
My brother shook his big dumb head and drained the beer from the bottle in his giant mitt. “Never you mind, Pauly,” he said, his voice deep and rusty from disuse. “I’ll get him. The boys and I are gonna go out and rattle a few cages, see what shakes loose. You just keep everything running smooth like. Phillip woulda wanted it that way.” Then Peter went off to comfort his girl, who was standing in a corner crying pretty tears for a man she didn’t know.
I shook my head, feeling a dark sense of déjà vu. Phillip hadn’t listened to me either, and look where it had gotten him. But I knew better than to argue with big dumb Peter, and I let him do what he wanted.
Peter took out his grief on the city. Shopkeepers trembled in fear at the sound of his heavy boot steps, and the women in the markets whispered about whose husband had taken a beating recently. Peter worked his knuckles bloody trying to get answers, but he came up with nothing.
“Maybe it was an inside job,” he said one night as he sat on the couch in Phillip’s old office. It had been two months since Phillip’s murder, and I sat behind his big fancy desk, going through the day’s take. With my brother gone I had started meeting with the cops on our payroll and the bosses who ran some of our smaller operations. Although I wasn’t as good at it as Phillip had been, I was holding my own.
“It wasn’t an inside job, it was the Wolf,” I told Peter. “We need to find this guy and offer him a deal; otherwise we’re going to be next.”
My brother just shook his big dumb head and sighed. “I told you, there ain’t no such thing as the Wolf. It’s just an old rumor. Phillip was axed by someone in the organization. We just need to find out who.” My brother stood and put on his flat cap. “I’m goin’ home. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
But I never saw my brother again.
* * *
They said it was a bomb, and that someone had snuck into Peter’s house during the day while his girl was out and planted it in the kitchen. When the thing went off it completely devastated his house and part of the neighbor’s. The cops never really found all of Peter’s body, just bits and pieces of it mixed in with the sticks of his destroyed house. Peter’s girl wasn’t home at the ti
me, and for a little while the cops tried to pin it on her, but she wasn’t a killer. When she came home from her bridge game and saw the condition of the house, she broke down. The only damning bit of information the cops got out of her was that she’d been seeing Phillip on the side before he bit it. The poor girl was destroyed. Here she’d lost the two greatest loves of her life within a span of a couple months.
I paid for her to go upstate for some relaxation in a facility and thanked my lucky stars I was smart enough to leave the skirts alone.
But now I was all by myself, and I knew that the Wolf was real. Any day now he’d be coming for me, and I’d be ready.
I bought the building I lived in and evicted all the other residents. I fired the guard downstairs, giving him a nice bonus so he wouldn’t be too out of sorts, and I put my own boys in the front. I installed bars on all the windows and bricked up all the entrances except for the main lobby. Now there was only one way in and one way out, and you had to get past my boys to see me.
I was ready.
The bosses and dirty cops who reported to me thought I was losing it, that it had been an inside job, both Peter’s and Phillip’s murders. I took out hits on all of them. Then I found new guys, ones I could trust. I let them move up through the organization. I rebuilt my enterprise from the ground up.
And I waited.
Six, seven, eight months passed, and no sign of the Wolf. I relaxed my guard a little, started going out more. Dinner once a week. A show every once in a while. My enterprise flourished, and I was rich. I deserved to enjoy a little bit of that.
The Wolf found me one night while I was out at dinner.
I sat in the center of the restaurant, the only patron. I had taken to buying out the entire establishment when I dined so that I could eat alone, since people made me jumpy. I was less paranoid, but the Wolf could still be out there, waiting for his chance. I was enjoying a bowl of slop, the specialty of the house, when a bushy-haired man walked in. Both of my boys stood up, ready to escort him out, but he mowed them down without a word.
I jumped up from the table and ran, through the kitchen and out the back alley. I could hear the Wolf’s shoes pounding as he chased me down, and I gasped for breath, squealing as I ran. I was soft and large from too much food and too little movement, and there was no way I could outrun the monster I’d glimpsed back in the restaurant.
I skidded down an alley, coming up on a dead end. I searched around for an exit, but the only thing there was a pile of bricks and a few overflowing trash bins. I grabbed a brick and ducked down behind the garbage can, trying to quiet my breathing and hoping the Wolf hadn’t seen me.
Footsteps paused at the end of the alley and then began to approach. “Little pig, little pig,” a gravelly voice called, and chills ran down my spine. “You owe me.”
“I don’t owe you nothing!” I yelled.
The Wolf chuckled, voice low. “Just because you already paid me to do the job don’t mean you ain’t gotta pay me again. What would your associates say if they knew you were the one who had your brothers snuffed out? Your own flesh and blood. That you killed all your old boys just to cover your tracks. Nothing but a parade of death and sorrow all the way home.”
I squeezed my eyes shut, and thought about my brothers. I thought about the way we’d played together in the mud when we were small and how hard our first month here in the city had been. But mostly I thought about how they were always there for me, fighting my battles, talking on my behalf. And how, later, they’d always taken the bigger cut, how I’d done all the hard work, but they’d kept most of the gains.
And now here was the Wolf, trying to do the same thing.
It wasn’t about the money anymore. It was about the principle.
I opened my eyes just as the Wolf walked by. I gripped the brick with my mitts and brought it down on the back of his head. He fell to the ground, but I didn’t stop. I brought the brick down again and again until the Wolf stopped moving, his bushy tail limp.
I’d killed the Wolf, me and my brick. And I felt no better for it.
I stumbled home and washed the blood off me. I felt so old and so drained. I was sick of the city and tired of my life. I’d had my brothers killed and killed the Wolf, but there would always be more of his kind, scavengers looking for a taste of blood. The city had broken me. It had turned me into a murderer, a criminal, a parasite on society. I couldn’t even stand to look at myself in the mirror.
So I fled.
I took all the blood money I’d accumulated and left the city. I bought a small brick house out in the country and found a girl who didn’t mind when I got quiet and stared off into space, thinking about the old times. It was a good life.
But every once in a while, in the dark of night, when the wind would blow through the rafters of the attic, I’d think I heard footsteps and a voice crying, “Little pig, little pig, you owe me.” And now, as an old boar with nothing to occupy his days, I think I hear that voice calling to me more and more.
I know it’s all in my head. The Wolf is dead, and I killed him. It still scares the bejeezus out of me.
So if you’ve got your heart set on going to the city, kid, go. You can find success there, even though hopefully, you travel a more honorable path than I did. Just remember this one thing:
Beware the wolf inside your heart.
Cody giggled at first, and then he started laughing so hard he had to stop because he almost dropped his end of the litter, and Georgia along with it. “Did you really just give us ‘The Three Little Pigs’?”
Jackie shrugged, smiled. “Maybe.”
“Genius,” Sunday said. “But I kind of want to know what happened to the brothers in space.”
“Maybe some other time,” Jackie said.
The rain had slackened off and finally quit altogether as the sun was starting to set. We hadn’t figured out what we were going to do for food, and if the others were as hungry as I was, people were going to start getting cranky before too long.
“How much farther do you think we have to go?” Georgia asked.
“What do you care?” Tino said. “Not like you have to do any of the walking.”
“That’s not her fault,” Cody said.
“Like hell it isn’t.” Tino leaned against a tree. He was trying not to show how exhausted he was, but the strain of hiking on empty stomachs was wearing on us all, and Tino didn’t hide it well.
Lucinda was already up in his face, anger ready to boil over. “All you do is complain. If you don’t like it, find your own damn way back to camp.”
“Maybe I will.”
“No one’s leaving the group,” Jaila said. “I’m not . . . We’re not losing anyone out here.”
“They thought this would bring us together,” Jenna said quietly. “Being alone out here, forced to rely on one another. This was supposed to teach us the value of teamwork or whatever, but we’re all too fucked up to work together, aren’t we?”
“Speak for yourself,” Lucinda said. “I’m just fine working with you.” She motioned at Tino. “It’s him I can do without.”
“Why?” Jenna asked. “What’s he done that’s so bad except say what he was thinking? What gives you or anyone the right to keep him from speaking his mind?”
Lucinda opened her mouth to say something, but closed it wordlessly.
We were never going to sit around a campfire singing songs and roasting marshmallows together. When we left the Bend, we would each scatter back to wherever we’d come from and never speak to one another again. We’d slip into to our old lives and forget the others existed. The courts and our parents or guardians had sent us to the Bend hoping it would change us, but I didn’t think that was possible. The things that made us strong individually were also the qualities that kept us from functioning as a unified whole.
Dipshit Doug had told us on our first day how Zeppelin Bend had been named after a knot used to tie two pieces of rope together. It was considered by some to be the ideal bend
knot because it was secure and easy to tie. He’d said we were each a piece of rope, and his goal was to tie us to one another, teach us how to form a knot with the people in our lives and become stronger as a result.
But I knew a thing or two about knots, and the Zeppelin bend was also known for the ease with which it could be untied. Even if we managed to work together to find our way back to camp, we’d never stay tied to one another. We’d slip the knot as soon as we were able, and fall to loose ends. That was just reality.
And who would care? We were castoffs. We’d been told the Bend was our last chance to turn our lives around, but I doubted anyone expected we’d actually do it. Those who’d sent us here already considered us lost causes, or they wouldn’t have sent us here in the first place. We’d stopped being people to them and were, instead, problems to shove off onto someone else to fix. Nothing we did mattered because, to our families, we were only what we’d done to get sent here. It’s all they would ever see.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” Georgia said.
“I can take you,” David offered.
“Of course the perv volunteers,” Lucinda said. She’d backed off from Tino, but her anger was still floating on the surface, like an oil slick. It only needed a spark to catch fire.
“I’m not—” David started. Stopped. Then said, “Forget it. Fuck all of you.”
“I’ll take her,” Jackie said. “Maybe we’ll find a McDonald’s while we’re out there.”
Jaila looked around where we’d stopped. “This is as good a place as any to make camp. I don’t think we’re going any farther tonight, anyway.”
Cody found Georgia a stick she could use as a makeshift crutch before Jackie led her off a distance to take care of her business, and the rest of us worked on making camp. Jenna collected kindling for a fire, Tino found rocks to circle it with, and Cody went searching for logs he could drag over so we’d have something to sit on. Everyone seemed to know what they were supposed to do, and did it without needing to be told. I went off on my own because I also needed to relieve myself, and I was hoping to find something to eat. But I returned empty-handed.