Skinwalker of Love

Hank Haberdough kept love in a rusty chocolate tin beneath the air mattress in the back of the ’73 Chevy pickup truck which was bequeathed to him by a girlfriend who died of lupus. The pick up truck was bequeathed to him, not the love.

When Hank’s girlfriend, Polly Anne, died, she was watching Hank cut the corns off his big toes with a serrated kitchen knife. He was placing the corns in a rusty chocolate tin, where for years he had been placing superfluous skin tabs, moles, corns, and the occasional hang nail. As Polly Anne took her last breath, and then exhaled for the last time saying, “I love you Hank,” he was able to catch the love on the tip of her last breath in the open chocolate tin and quickly seal it shut with duct tape.

For a while after Polly Anne’s death Hank tried to live in the couple’s 1951 Landola Trailer Home but the memories of his deceased beloved haunted him continuously. He decided he could not go on living where he’d once found love and now found only emptiness. So one night Hank packed a few necessities in a Nike duffle bag, doused the innards of the Landola with kerosene, struck a match, and watched it burn to the ground. The next day he left Boiling Springs, Pennsylvania traveling west towards Arizona, the chocolate tin duct-taped to his abdomen along with sixteen hundred dollars in cash and a nickel plated Browning 9mm with a custom cherry handle.

He took his time traveling across the United States, really seeing the country, weaving in and out of states, avoiding major highways and skipping any town which housed buildings over four stories tall. He spent the nights in fields or campgrounds, sleeping in the bed of his truck on an air mattress. After a week or so of traveling, with the rusty chocolate tin pressed against his abdomen, he developed sores which grew infected, oozed, and really smelled quite bad. After removing the tin and cleaning the wound with peroxide he’d found in the first aid kit under the seat of the Chevy, Hank decided that he didn’t need to be that close to Polly Anne’s love anymore, so he placed the tin under the air mattress in the back of his Chevy, the cash in his glove compartment and the Browning in his waistband.

The wound the rusty chocolate tin full of love left on his abdomen would leave a scar.

When he reached Windrock, Arizona where his grandmother’s people were from (she was full blooded Navajo) he stopped at a small mom and pop grocery store, bought a six pack of Budweiser, a can of Bush’s Best Barbecue Baked Beans and a thick T-bone steak. That night he set up camp in an abandoned field outside of town and built a roaring fire out of tumble weeds and broken up skids he’d found behind the local Wal-Mart. He planned to cook his T-bone and barbecue beans over the open flame and then when his belly was full drift off to sleep listening to the Diamondback’s game on his Walkman.

The moon loomed large that night, like a mammoth ping-pong ball on the vast ping-pong table of the sky, and it made Hank, for the moment, forget about Polly Anne’s love, which was buried under the air mattress in the bed of his Chevy. Feeling better than he had in months he decided a little music was in order and retrieved his Martin Backpacker guitar from behind the seat of his truck. His guitar playing really wasn’t that good but it made him happy, and for Hank there hadn’t been a whole lot of happiness as of late. So he played “Mother” by Danzig, the only song he knew besides Kenny Roger’s “The Gambler” and sang along in a voice better suited for a slasher movie than a stage. Soon, a pack of wolves came and joined in, howling along with Hank's really rather bad guitar playing. The wolves had just been reintroduced to Arizona thanks to the effort of conservationists, and to the chagrin of farmers and livestock.

The wolves were of a rather clever bunch and although unaccustomed to love in its deepest forms, knew of its supposed mystical powers, for they’d gathered outside the campfires of lonely cowboys and listened to them lament of love lost, and once in the darkness outside a nearby drive in theater they had watched Pretty Woman while gorging themselves on partially eaten hotdogs they’d discovered in a dumpster.

The wolves having senses much more highly developed than mans’ could smell love under Hank's air mattress and a T-bone in his Igloo mini-cooler. Being pack animals they didn’t have any need for love but a juicy T-bone steak was another story. The decision was made through a series of sign language executed with various positioning of ears—an abbreviated form of Morse code—that Hank would have to be taken out in order to secure the T-bone.

So, when Hank hit the first chord of Kenny Roger's “The Gambler” the wolves converged on the paunchy guitar plucker and ripped a hole in his esophagus. While Hank lay on his guitar, gasping for air, his legs flaying, drowning in his own blood, the wolves set about tearing the Igloo cooler open and wrestling the bloody T-bone out. Hank never even had time to reach for his pistol, which was still in the waistband of his Levis.

One wolf, known by the name of Lanie, having already eaten a prairie dog that day, wasn’t interested in the steak, but was curious about the love she smelled, and rooted out the chocolate tin from under the air mattress in the back of the pickup truck. After some more nosing she was able to pop the seal on the chocolate tin and the love, along with moles, calluses, skin tabs and other assorted skin fragments came tumbling out. Lanie gasped, and accidentally inhaled the love and a handful of dead skin. She felt suddenly very strange and looked at Hank lying on the ground. Her heart bucked and shimmied, went pitter patter pit, warmth like hot chocolate flowed through her veins. It’s very likely that Lanie would have finished Hank off for the mere sport of it, if she hadn’t stumbled upon the rusty chocolate tin of love.

“Goddamn, look what you’ve done,” Lanie howled.

Although the other wolves were kind of freaked out that Lanie had spoken like a human they were too busy tearing at the T-bone to acknowledge the aberration. Undaunted, Lanie knelt by Hank’s side. He was gasping for breath from the hole in his neck. She saw the plastic wrap from the T-bone by the fire and an idea formed in her mind. She retrieved the plastic wrap and dropped it over Hank’s wound and held it down with her forepaw, instantly sealing his wound. A few moments later he awoke, very weak. Lanie was licking his cheek. Her heart pounded from the love she’d inhaled, which was really Hank’s dead girlfriend Polly Anne’s love but it was love just the same. This feeling was simultaneously wonderful and dreadful for now Lanie cared more than anything that Hank should live. She knew that he needed help.

Lanie was a hellish big she wolf and was as mighty as any male in her pack and much, much more intelligent. With her powerful jaw she clamped down on the collar of Hank’s Dickies work shirt, dug her paws in the sand and dragged Hank to the pickup truck. Within five minutes she had him in the passenger’s seat and was driving him to Kronkite General Hospital. The drive was difficult for she lacked thumbs—her paws slipped whenever she made a turn—but she managed to get Hank to the hospital with only one minor fender bender, which occurred when she ran over a newspaper machine in the parking lot of a Seven Eleven.

On the sidewalk in front of the entrance of the emergency room Lanie parked the Chevy and then honked the horn three times with her nose, which stirred Hank from his near coma. For a moment the two stared at each other and Hank wondered what the hell a wolf was doing in the driver’s seat of his truck. He thought he must be hallucinating from the loss of blood but then he remembered about the legend of the skinwalkers that his Navajo grandmother had told him as a child. These shape shifters, according to Navajo legend, were evil witches who could wear the skin of any animal they wanted, mimicking the animal but retaining their human intelligence. “Is it possible,” Hank wondered, “that this wolf is a skinwalker? And if so why hasn’t it killed me? I’m sure Grandma Doba told me skinwalkers kill their victims. So why would it drive me to the hospital? This doesn’t make sense.” Of course Hank didn’t know that Lanie had swallowed Polly Anne’s love or it just might have made perfect sense.

Just then the doors to the emergency room burst open and two EMT’s came scurrying out. For reason’s he couldn’t explain Hank suddenly felt like embracing the wolf and dare he think it? Kiss the wolf. These strange emotions left him feeling terribly unsettled but before he had time to fully comprehend the implications of this bizarre occurrence Lanie licked his cheek, bound out the open driver’s side window, and disappeared into the night, and then Hank promptly passed out.

For six days Hank was in and out of consciousness, dipping in and out of dreams in which wolves figure skated on top of giant cans of Bush’s Barbecue baked beans. On the seventh day he suddenly popped back into reality. His eyes fluttered open and for a moment he didn’t know where he was.

“Are you comfortable?” a feminine voice asked.

From his prone position in the hospital bed Hank looked up and his gaze met that of a beautiful nurse. Immediately he was reminded of Polly Anne, although this woman, curvaceous with black hair, was nothing like his fair and petite deceased love.

“Water,” Hank whispered.

The nurse picked up a glass on water on the table beside Hank’s bed and held it to his lips.

“She smells like Polly Anne, like her honey shampoo and the Marlboros she smoked,” Hank thought.

“You’re a lucky man to have survived that wolf attack,” the nurse said.

Hank nodded, although inside he was wondering just how lucky it was to have one’s neck ripped open by a pack of wolves.

In the weeks to come he would find just how lucky he was, and would come to believe that the wolf attack was the luckiest thing that had ever happened to him. “If it weren’t for the terrible wound,” he reasoned, “I might never have found love again.”

That Hank fell in love with the nurse won’t surprise many people, that they were married a year later might be lost in the footnotes of mankind, but what might be of interest to those who don’t believe in skinwalkers or shape shifters of any kind is that when Hank and his new wife would have sex, when the passion would become great, she would scream out and to Hank it sounded just like the howling of a she wolf.