Wolf Gang Read online

  Jerome fitted his whole fist into his mouth to cork himself.

  “The kids are around back,” she said. “Through the alley entrance, the aquamarine door.”

  We backed away as a group. When we were a safe distance from Yvette, we turned and ran around the corner.

  Standing in front of the entrance to Wolf’s clubhouse, in all her brutal glory, was Ling’s big (big, big) sister, Rock. She had one great paw resting on one meaty hip, and the other curled around her javelin. She held the spear at her side, like a centurion guard standing in front of the palace in an old gladiator movie.

  “So, we meet again,” I said. You can’t let them get in the first shot.

  “Wanna be impaled?” she asked good-naturedly.

  “Don’t, Steven,” Ling said. “It hurts. It hurts a lot.”

  It made sense that she should stand there looking like a palace guard. Because that’s what Wolf’s club was, a palace. A puff palace.

  There were two rooms, not counting the front where Yvette did her evil business. The first room, coming from the back through the aquamarine door, was for storage and … I don’t know, the reception area, I guess.

  “Would you like a cup of tea?”

  “What?” I jumped back toward the door. She’d come out of nowhere. I knew her from somewhere but couldn’t figure it out. She looked normal enough, for a girl—long brown hair, jeans, white sweatshirt—but something wasn’t right about her. Like she was in disguise.

  “No,” I snapped. “I don’t want any tea, and neither do they.” I pointed at my men not with a finger, but with my whole fist. “We don’t do tea.”

  She shook her head at me. “You need a lot of help, kid.”

  “Oh ya,” Cecil jumped in. “Well, maybe he does …”

  We all waited for him to finish.

  No, that was it. He was finished.

  “Thanks, Cecil,” I said. He nodded.

  So there were at least two women in Wolf’s new club. He was sinister, boy.

  “Have a seat,” Rock said, pointing at a contraption that was either a retired piece of hairdressing equipment or a boy-killing death device. It was like a sofa, covered in peach vinyl, but with four gigantic helmetlike hoods hovering above each of the seating positions.

  “Right,” Ling said, challenging his big sister. “We sit down there, those things come down over our heads, and then what? Is it an electrical charge that gets us, or a poison gas, or are spikes going to come down and shoot through our heads?”

  “They’re hair dryers, stupid.”

  “Heh-heh-heh,” Ling said. “Better men than me have fallen for the old ‘just a hair dryer’ line.”

  “Better men than you have fallen for ‘Hey, your shoe’s untied,’” Rock said as she shoved him down into the seat. It didn’t actually kill him, so Cecil sat too. Then Jerome.

  “Actually, I’d love a cup of tea,” Jerome said.

  “Coming right up,” the other girl said. “You sure you won’t have a seat and a cup of tea?” she asked me again as she headed for the office door.

  “I don’t drink,” I said. “And I don’t sit. Ever.”

  She nodded. “That explains a lot.”

  The four of us remained silent under the watchful eye of Rock as we waited for his majesty to see us. Another girl came out and served Jerome. Another one, not the one who had taken his order. Jerome was shaken, looking up at her.

  “I know that one,” he said as she walked away. “I remember her from the snowballing incident. She is one of the—”

  “Girl Scouts,” I growled.

  “This is starting to smell like another setup,” Ling said. “Steven, I think we better run!”

  He jumped up out of his seat and bumped into a stack of metal shelves holding cans of hair spray, jelly jars of green goop, mousse and cream and nail polish … hundreds and hundreds of bottles of nail polish in hundreds and hundreds of shades. Enough polish to lacquer the claws of an army of girl soldiers. Or one gigantic killer fingernail that could skewer us all at once.

  Jerome and Cecil jumped up too. Jerome spilled his tea. Rock laughed. The boys broke for the aquamarine door, threw it open … and jumped back from it when a column of several more out-of-uniform Girl Scouts marched in.

  “So you want to play rough,” I said, rolling up my sleeves. “This is it, guys … it’s our Little Big Horn!”

  At that point the office door flew open, and everyone turned.

  “General Custer,” Wolf said in that old smooth tone of his. “I am so happy you could come.”

  He rolled into the room, being pushed along by his right-hand man.

  Mmmmmonic-c-c-c-ca.

  It had reached the point where I couldn’t even think her name without stuttering.

  “Hey, Wolfgang,” Cecil said with a big wave, as if Wolf was not the enemy.

  “Huckleberry, how are ya?” Wolf said, waving him on for a big hug.

  Jerome watched the embrace from a distance. Wolf, catching his eye from over Cecil’s shoulder, laughed.

  “Jerome, my old and dear friend. How good to see you again after all this time.”

  “I just saw you like a week ago at the Store 24.”

  “Jeez, it seems like so much longer. And Ling, you old rascal. All my friends, all my comrades, together again. This just makes me so … happy … I think I’m gonna cry.”

  All right, crying now, for crying out loud. He is a genius, in his demented way. Here he was inviting us into his new club, which was the photographic negative of his old club, and taking all the things we stood for—no girls, no tea, no crying—and making a mockery of them.

  “Have the girls been taking care of you all right there, Steve-o?” he asked. “You comfortable? Anything you need?”

  “No, I’m all—”

  “Here,” Wolf said. “Have a cookie.”

  The monster.

  “I don’t want a cookie,” I growled.

  “Sure you do. We’ve got them all. We’ve got your Tagalongs, your Samoas, your Thin Mints….”

  Every Girl Scout cookie there was. He gestured to a separate unit of shelves that held nothing but the cookies, every variety at least five or six boxes deep.

  “You keep your rotten cookies away from me,” I said.

  They all hissed, and went oooohhh in mock fear of me.

  “See?” Monica said to her new boss. “I told you he’d just be weird.”

  “Now, now,” Wolf said to her. “Steven’s not weird. He just doesn’t act like any other person any of us have ever met before. Steve-o and I go way, way back. We had some rootin’-tootin’ times together, and I don’t want to spoil all that now.”

  Cecil raised his hand.

  “But, ah, we did try and court-martial you and stuff last time we was all together.”

  Wolf waved him off. “All in good fun, though.”

  I couldn’t take any more of this. “All right, what’s your game?”

  “What?” he said innocently. “Game? What game?”

  “Your game. What’s your angle? You always have one.”

  “All right,” he said. “You got me. I have a motive. I want us all to be one big happy family again. I want my club and your club to join in a partnership, to forge a truce and bridge our gap and—”

  “You don’t even have one single guy in your club,” I said, sounding as if there was a dead cow decaying in the middle of their clubhouse and nobody would clean it up.

  “I know, I know. And to tell you the truth, I thought I would like it, but I feel an emptiness. I miss the camaraderie we used to have over at the Women Haters.”

  The Girl Scout gallery booed.

  “So what I propose is that we get together, all of us, to make us all stronger.”

  I laughed in his face.

  “I see you want some time to think about it,” he said. “Why don’t I take you on a tour of our facility while we talk about it?”

  “Hah,” I scoffed. “This ought to be good for a lau
gh.”

  Wolf nodded at Monica, who then went to the door that led into the front of the shop. She opened the door and stuck her head in. “Mom, is it okay if we come through now?”

  I knew there was something not right about that Yvette.

  Monica waved us on in, and we followed.

  As we took the tour, following behind Monica’s mom as she showed us the shampooing station, the cutting station, the drying station, etc., Wolfgang drifted farther and farther toward the back of the group, pulling me along with him. Finally we left the group altogether, winding up in his office. It was a very bare, cold, and colorless room compared to the other two. I liked it right off.

  He whispered as we faced each other across his desk—which had a nameplate on it that read YVETTE. “See, what I figure is, you guys can just join up, no questions asked. Kind of like an introductory offer, limited time, no fees, that kind of thing. Because I know you guys. Of course, you’ll have to dump the old name, since it really is kind of out-of-date anyhow and it offends some of my membership, as you can imagine, and—tell the truth—you all never really hated women anyway. So we’ll all just be in the Wolf Gang from this point on.”

  That was it, that was Wolfgang all the way. He was absolute wickedness like straight out of the Bible or Star Wars—the soldier from the side of goodness who fell, then turned right around to come and take the rest of the good guys down with him.

  He smiled for me his rottenest smile ever, and stuck out his hand like we’d just finalized some dirty deal.

  “You’re crazy, Wolfgang, you know that?” I stood up, looking down over his desk. “Nuts. Why don’t you just give it up and stay here playing dolls with your new little friends? We kicked you out of the club because you were no good, and you’re not getting back in no matter how sneaky you are about it.”

  “Steven, Steven, Steven,” he said. I hate it when he calls me that. “All I want is to help you.”

  He sounded so calm and sure of himself that I knew I had to get out of there right that minute. I burst out through the door and heard the rubber of his wheels as he took off after me.

  I ran out into the front of the shop to collect my men.

  Horrors! How could I have fallen for it? I never should have left them out there unprotected.

  Cecil was sitting in the shampooing chair, reclined to full horizontal position, as Yvette massaged his scalp. Ling was sitting in a chair completely dazed, as if he’d been hypnotized or drugged, as Monica opened up one little vial after another and waved each one under his nose.

  “Now smell this one,” she said seductively. “Doesn’t it make you think of the beach and wild-flowers? Don’t the muscles in your neck just start to …”

  Jerome.

  Jerome!

  My god, no.

  Jerome was sitting right up there in the front window, across a small table from a small woman in a white lab coat. The woman spoke softly to him, held his hand, and buffed his nails with a white Popsicle stick.

  “You see,” she said, “real men get this all the time. There is nothing in the world wrong with wanting the small details of your personal appearance to be in order. It is actually a sign of strength … and you have such fine, big strong hands.”

  Jerome’s hands are roughly the size and strength of butterfly wings.

  “What is going on here?” I yelled. It looked like the Wizard of Oz scene when the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Lion were getting all primped up to meet the Wizard. “On your feet, men. We’re getting out of here right now. And we’re going out the front door.”

  I marched. Cecil and Ling snapped out of their trances and fell in line behind me.

  “God, you are so uptight, Johnny Fishlips,” Monica said. She pointed one of her potions at me. “You could use aromatherapy more than anyone else I know. Here, come over here and smell this.”

  “No, you smell this,” I said.

  She waited. “Good one, Johnny,” she said.

  It wasn’t until we were outside and half a block down the street that we realized Jerome was not with us.

  “My god,” Ling gasped. “We left a man behind enemy lines!”

  We bolted back to the shop, then were stopped short to find him still sitting there in the front window. The woman was now working on his other hand as he admired the high polish of the first.

  “He-Man Jerome,” I barked as I stuck my head in the door under the tinging bell. “Come on, we’re outta here.”

  He looked up at me, then back at his manly manicure.

  “She said she did General Colin Powell’s nails once.”

  “I’ll slap your face,” Ling ranted. “General Powell is one of the greatest—”

  “Jerome!” I yelled again, hoping the recognition of his own name might bring him back. “Let’s go, man.”

  His words came slowly, thickly. He stared at his nails. She was massaging the spaces between his knuckles now, and you could almost hear him purr.

  “I will, Steven,” Jerome said. “I’ll be right there. She’s just going to finish doing this hand, and then I’ll be right along. You go on ahead.”

  I never would have believed it. Not He-Man Jerome. No, no, not Jerome.

  As we retreated again, I caught a glimpse of Wolf, the four-wheeled devil himself, watching and smiling from the darkness of his back-room empire.

  5

  Guerrilla Girlfriend

  BROKE MY HE-MAN HEART.

  It was the saddest sight of my life, watching Jerome’s very essence being bled out of him by that cult of females Wolf calls a club. Maybe that’s how they do it, through the fingernails, sucking the strength and manliness right out of a guy and leaving him a wreck, a shell, a broken wasted joke. Poor He-Man Jerome.

  Jerome, ya broken, wasted joke.

  “Really?” Cecil asked when I gave the boys that good-bye Jerome memorial speech back at the garage. “If you ask me, he looked happier than I ever seen him. Shows y’all what I know, huh?”

  “Yes, it does,” I said.

  “You are so right, Steven,” Lars said. “That’s just exactly the way they work it. They lull you into a state of reduced awareness by hypnotizing you or feeding you real good food or singing, right, then they take all your power away. Like when Samson got all his hair cut off. So ya should just stay away from ’em altogether, or next thing ya know they’ll be taking every hair off your chest with Nair while you’re asleep in front of the TV, or they’ll trick ya into talking baby talk to ’em while they’re secretly recording it to play for their friends, or …”

  The problem with Lars was, there seemed to be so much history back there between him and some woman or women that he always wound up giving us more information than we would ever want to know.

  “But we can’t just quit on Jerome, can we?” Ling asked. “I mean, don’t we owe it to him to try and save him? Come on, Steven, he was your first recruit, your comrade, and you’re going to leave him there behind enemy lines?”

  Sometimes if you listen to Ling, he can really get you thinking straight. Not often, but sometimes.

  “We can’t let it happen,” I said. “Our boy is in trouble, and Wolf is getting more dangerous every day. Power. Authority. Some people are built to handle it—like myself. Others just shouldn’t be allowed.”

  Ling nodded. “War. There is no other solution. It can’t be avoided.”

  I agreed. “Wolf has just gotten too mighty over there. And we, as everyone knows, are men of action.”

  So we were sitting around after making the declaration of war, trying to figure out exactly what that meant. Our first move was to take the meeting into the War Room.

  Ling spoke in hushed tones, looking over his shoulder even though we were in the safety of our own Lincoln in the middle of our own locked garage. “I have a magazine that has an ad, in the back … where we can get actual nuclear weapons. If we can scare up $49.95 plus shipping and handling.”

  Lars had been eavesdropping outside the car. He threw open th
e door, pushed his way in next to Cecil on the backseat. I was driving—naturally—and Ling was riding shotgun—also naturally.

  “Well, that’s just stupid,” Lars said about the warhead proposition. I was very surprised by my uncle’s unusual attack of common sense. I shouldn’t have been. “Because,” he went on, “if you nuke their clubhouse, it’s so close, you’ll get all that nuke-u-lar dust floating back here to your own place. And that’s no good. Everybody knows you need to be far away from a nuke-u-lar event, like when Three Mile Island melted, but I was livin’ practically a half a mile away so I comed out all good.”

  Lars scratched his forehead with his elbow and looked around at us. “Was I finished?”

  “Ya,” I said. “Thanks.” When he’d left us, I got back to the point. “I was thinking more like we’d toilet-paper the beauty shop, fill their aromatherapy bottles with ammonia, something like that.”

  “I know,” Cecil contributed. “Let’s make haircut appointments … and not show up!”

  He was giggling, rubbing his hands together, proud and silly at the same time.

  “And that, Ladies and Gentlemen, is why they call him The Killer,” I said. He blushed.

  “We can’t do any of that,” Ling said. “Our fight’s with the Wolf Gang. If we bother Yvette, we’ll get in trouble.”

  “Trouble?” I asked. “Not like if we nuked ’em, huh? That wouldn’t bother anybody, you don’t suppose?”

  So we were pretty much back where we started, which was no place. We were kidding ourselves. War? What did we possibly know about launching a—

  “Lemme in!” came the screechy voice from the street.

  We didn’t answer, just turned to stare in the direction of the voice.

  “Lemme in! Lemme in! Lemme in right now!” the screech went on, accompanied by a wild rattling and pounding of the door.

  “Gee,” Cecil remarked, “ever since we locked the door, everybody wants to get in all of a sudden.”

  “Go away,” I hollered.

  “I won’t!” it hollered back.

  “Don’t make me come out there,” I called.

  “Don’t make me come in there,” it called back.

  I turned to Ling and shrugged. Ling got out of the car and walked to the door. Putting on a voice almost as large as his body, he bellowed, “Apparently you don’t know who you’re fooling with in here, kid, but if you go quietly, we won’t come after you until you’ve had a sporting head start. We are the He-Man—”