I'm back for a brief visit. (Fall break.)

Last week my wife and I were going through the contents of a trunk we've kept in a cubbyhole under the eaves. Among the dusty old tax documents and such I found this short story. I don't remember writing it. The title scrawled on the first of the typed pages is in my hand, though; considering our history of moves between households, I could have written the story as early as 1987 or as late as 1997.  My wife laughed a bit as she read it, perhaps from surprise, and she agreed with me that it might make a good blog entry for the month of October. I've scanned it and posted it below. It reads as if it's part of a longer work--I wonder if I've written an entire novel that I've forgotten?

(Note 1: This sort of description of the mysterious provenance of a manuscript is a staple in old-fashioned supernatural fiction, but in this case it's actually true.)

(Note 2: Protestations of truthfulness as in Note 1 are also common in the genre.)

 Uncle Jeremy and the Wolf

Mom and Dad used to argue about Uncle Jeremy, in hard whispers that we could barely hear even with one ear pressed to the door. Jeremy came over for dinner two or three times a week. Mom didn't like him, we could tell, and you wouldn't think even Dad liked him, from the way he was always lecturing him. Dad would set his knife and fork down in an X on his plate and pull the conversation toward matters of responsibility, the future, and so forth. As soon as my father started, Jeremy would begin to chew more slowly, perhaps consider a carrot on the end of his fork, but still listening carefully. "Um hm," he would say. "Okay." After a while Dad would stop, shake his head, and change the subject. Then the coolness would turn to warmth, and their conversation would range from recounting of cross-country trips they had taken together to reflections on the character of pets they had known as children.

I wanted to be like Uncle Jeremy. When I asked Jeremy what he did, though, he would say something like "Cosmonaut," or "Formula I racer," or "Pirate." Eventually I figured out that he couldn't be all those things at once. And then I overheard my father talking to a friend about Jeremy; he was "scratching out a living as a writer," Dad said, with a twitch of his eyebrows on the word "living." For a long time afterward I had a picture in my head of Uncle Jeremy sitting in his room scraping across the pages of a notebook with a pen that was out of ink.

Jeremy talked to us, and when he talked, he wasn't watching the clock with one eye, or looking off out the window figuring his rent payments. He had round, black-rimmed glasses, and he always wore a jacket of some kind. On the coldest days in winter he'd come in and pull off his parka and underneath he'd have on an old green army surplus jacket. Even in summer he'd wear a jeans jacket, as if he was cold all the time. My brother Bill and I used to talk aboul it, wondering if he had horrible scars covering his arms or maybe secret blue tattoos that he could nevcr let anyone see. But once, when Jeremy slid out of his jacket to pull on a sweater underneath, we saw that he was just skinny, toothpick, drinking-straw skinny. He probably was cold all the time.

At night, when Mom went to work at the hospital and Dad shut himself in his office, hunched over his tax returns and balance sheets, Jeremy told us stories. Jeremy's voice was like a wave, one that picks you up and carries you like a paper cup on the water. Bill and I sat on the couch, and Jeremy sat across the coffee table from us, sometimes in a chair, but more often crosslegged on the floor, leaning back against the television.

There wasn't a breath of truth to any of the stories he told us. There was a story I remember in particular, one Jeremy told us only once, perhaps because my father overheard and broke in before it was finished. Dad told Jeremy that if he kept on with this short-sighted nonsense Dad would make sure he ended up like one of his story characters. One of the bad ones. Jeremy stopped, so we don't know exactly what happened in the end. But here's how it began:

"Broken Tooth (his name would be nothing more than growls and whines to our ears) was a wolf, a mottled-gray, pointy-eared, yellow-fanged wolf. One of his teeth on the left. side, an incisor, here--" Jeremy hooked his mouth open with a finger to show us--" was chipped off. He'd gotten that chipped tooth when he was just a cub, by trying to climb a tree before knowing that wolves just don't climb trees. Wolf cubs aren't too much different from human cubs in that way.

"When he was older he lived and hunted with his pack in forests near a medium-sized logging town in Oregon. He spent his days sleeping or exploring (wolves have an enormous curiosity). He could track an unfamiliar scent for miles through the woods, or sit for hours in the brush watching humans stack lumber. So far it sounds like the life of an ordinary wolf. But Broken Tooth's life wasn't completely ordinary. There was one night in the year, in the early fall, when all the wolves would stay inside their dens, curled up with each other for warmth but keeping their eyes on the night outside. Every wolf except Broken Tooth. He would be walking through the trees, looking up at the sky, taking slower and slower steps, until he stopped. He wouldn't make a sound. In a particular clearing he would start to feel an emptiness in his chest, and a straining in his arms and legs, and in the space of a couple of hours Broken Tooth would transform into the shape of a man. A were-man."

"No way," said my brother. "No way."

I pushed him. "Shut up," I said.

"Now just think for a minute," said Uncle Jeremy. "You believe in werewolves, don't you?" I looked at Bill. We both looked out the window, into the night, where a curved blade of moon hung in the sky. I nodded, and then, slowly, Bill nodded.

"It stands to reason then," said Uncle Jeremy. "Now by the time this would happen to Broken Tooth, it would be just before dawn, when the sun is still hiding behind the curve of the earth and everything you see is gray and fuzzy around the edges. And just as the sun starts to rise, just when it reaches the trunks of the farthest trees in the forest, up stands Broken Tooth the man, as tall and straight as any athlete.

"He's been through this many times before. In a little cave near the clearing he has some clothes hidden, some human clothes. So of course he trots over to his cave and starts to get dressed. In a few minutes you couldn't tell him from anyone else: dark blue pants, white shirt, black shoes, red tie. And when he smiles (it's a pale and pointy smile) you can see in the corner of his mouth a small, dark gap where there should be tooth."

"How'd he know how to get dressed? Can he talk and everything?" asked Bill.

Jeremy looked exasperated. "Of course he can talk. How does a man know how to be a man? Or a cat how to be a cat, or a fish how to be a fish, or you how to be a Little League pitcher? You just are what you are... Now it's an interesting story all by itself where he's found the clothes. One fall about when this happened, there was a man whose car had gotten a flat tire on the side of the highway not far from the edge of the woods. Broken Tooth was running through the trees with wolfish speed but just on his legs, human-style, though he'd sometimes forget just how tall he was now and get a little poke in the eye from low-hanging branches. When he reached the edge of the trees he kept on running out into the sunlight, kind of enjoying the stretch of his new long limbs, and he came upon this broken down car.

"The man who owned the car was tall, very serious, with glasses like these." Jeremy took off his own round-rimmed glasses, turned them upside down and put them up to his eyes. He goggled at us. "Serious. He's pulling the spare tire out from the trunk when he hears a rushing in the grass by the woods. He looks up and suddenly sees this big, hairy, wolfish-looking man, wearing not even a pair of jockey shorts, coming at him, running faster than he ever thought a human being could run. He straightens up, bangs his head clunk on the trunk lid, and takes off like a rabbit in the opposite direction down the highway. Broken Tooth, who of course is mainly curious, pokes around the car a bit, and finds a suitcase full of clothes in the trunk. They fit him perfectly.

"So on one particular day in the fall, the one I'm going to tell you about, Broken Tooth is walking down the side of the highway. He's decided to go into town, because he has a plan. In the middle of town, next to the bank and across from the post office, there's this enormous steel and concrete building. Long gray windows everywhere, so dark that if someone were looking out at you, you'd never know it. These were the local branch offices of the Portland lumber company, which is in the business of clearing wood from forests all across the state of Oregon, processing it, turning it into lumber, and paper, and even matchsticks and toothpicks. The problem is that the more forest they take, the less room there is for deer and owls and especially (in our case) wolves."

Jeremy stopped to take a sip of water. He shook his head. "For the sake of Harlequin romances and telephone poles. Anyway, when Broken Tooth reaches the building he goes straight up through the front entrance as if he owns the company. He looks up at the directory on the wall and finds the name of the vice president, the head of the branch offices, a man named--" Jeremy looked at the ceiling for a moment, remembering, "--Oliver Cromwell. That's the man, Broken Tooth's target. So he brushes by the first receptionist, glares at the second receptionist as he goes by, says just a couple of words to the third receptionist, and goes on into the heart of the building.

"Of course, this isn't something you or I could do. They'd stop us in our tracks. But Broken Tooth? He's a wolf underneath, and you can sense it, even if you don't realize it. There are some people you automatically have respect for, because they always know what they're doing, and you don't dare say even a word--your grandfather, my father, was like that. Broken Tooth was ten times like that. He'd run at the head of a pack of wolves as they hunted. A few piddling humans would be nothing to him. And you can see it as he strides down the corridors.

"'He's from Corporate,' people whisper behind him as he passes. And in front of him, too, so that he walks with a magic wind ahead of him that opens doors and put studious looks and polite smiles on peoples' faces, wherever he goes. Corporations are like that. You see, no one knows who he is, and no one can even find out, at least not right away. Corporations are big, ungainly dinosaurs. They move slowly and think slowly. It takes forever for that walnut-sized brain in its head to send a message to that peanut-sized brain in its rear end." I snorted a laugh, until Bill pushed me against the arm of the sofa.

"They just can't figure Broken Tooth out. They'll do anything for him, but they don't know what he wants. Pretty soon, though, he's in the office of the vice president, in Oliver's office. Oliver was a hot shot. Young, confident, successful. Double-breasted gray suit, suspenders, white shirt, paisley tie. He ran that branch office like clockwork. But he wasn't a wolf.

"They start to talk. After an hour they've moved to the conference room, the two of them, and Broken Tooth is talking about changes they might make together in the company. After two hours Oliver is nodding his head twice for every word that comes out of Broken Tooth's mouth.

"And Broken Tooth has great plans, you see. Half the fun of of this was maneuvering his way to the top of the pack, the human pack here. But that was only half of it. He wasn't interested in money, of course. Who in his right mind is?" Jeremy stopped to take another drink, then leaned over to us and said softly, "Money is bullshit. Broken Tooth has the soul of a wolf, remember--"

And then from above us my father's voice boomed, "Jeremy!" We all looked up and saw him standing in the doorway to his study. I was closest to him. His mouth was set in a straight line, and I could see the pencil in his hand bending and almost cracking between his fingers. He threw the pencil behind him and shut the door.

"Jeremy, we need to talk." He strode to the kitchen and held open the door. "In here." Jeremy slid past him, the top of his head almost brushing my father's nose. The door swung shut. After a moment Bill and I crawled to the other side of the sofa, close enough to the kitchen to hear almost everything, but far enough not to look as if we were listening on purpose.

"God damn it, Jeremy, I'm not going to have you proselytizing to the kids. And 'Money is--' What is that supposed to mean? We're trying to teach them some proper values, and--"

"Okay," said Jeremy.

We listened restlessly. We had heard this conversation before, often enough that it stayed with me when I was older. I sometimes ran through it in my mind, put myself in Jeremy's position, and changed the ending. I said the things I imagined he thought at the time: that values might not be hard little gems you hand your kids in a nutshell, that the real world might not be big enough and open enough for kids sometimes, that... There were a dozen things I wanted to remember Jeremy saying, because I knew he thought them.

But Jeremy just said "Um hm" and "I guess" and "Okay" while my father went on. After a couple of minutes Bill and I moved back to the couchh and turned on the TV. They came out a little bit later.

"Gotta go, guys," Uncle Jeremy said. "See you next time."

"Uncle Jeremy?" said Bill and stopped. I knew he wanted to ask about Broken Tooth. Jeremy messed up Bill's hair, but not mine, because I hated that.

"He shut it all down," he said. "Stopped production, down to the last matchstick. Of course, after a few days, they started it all back up again ... " He started to grin, but then caught my father's eye and became almost grave. "But he came back."

We watched from the front door as Jeremy got into his car and started it. I waved. He turned on his headlights and flashed them once, twice, then three times. We stood in the doorway until we couldn't hear the sound of his car any more. Then we went inside.