First Chapter: Werewolf, Texas
by D.J. Palladino
There are no werewolves in Texas... Right?
Research wizard John Shaney launches his career as a grad student at University of Texas, Austin planning to investigate how chemistry can transform human lives for the better. One moonlit night downtown, however, Shaney discovers unexpected and more pleasurable mysteries surrounding one Lila May Wulfhardt and her well-heeled, eccentric family while crossing paths with something more ancient than love and money, something that also wants to change the lives of hapless locals. John Shaney’s world is about to become seriously weird and deadly dangerous, yet ultimately transformative.
Werewolf, Texas is a gripping and vividly dark story of a blood-thirsty dynasty set on preserving their power. With Palladino’s unique voice, this grim love tale explores the not-so-secret dark world of the Wulfhardt family.
Young John Shaney scored big in the Lone Star State, though a more vivid evaluation from a more specific mind might argue that falling for Lila May Wulfhardt brought him to his unexpected joy. Indirectly, that is, in the way of the world, but not without dragging him first though a dense moraine of other people’s troubles. By joy I mean fruitful endings, and by troubles I mean the law, slaughters, maimings, plagues, and that general climate trauma everyone shared; the one we dithered about, forgot, feared, and then got.
Lila meanwhile never seemed to fear anything. And if you know her, and who didn’t in those days, this maybe won’t surprise you. One cool customer she was, though also hot like an Austin Friday night behind the club stoned in front of the food truck. And therein lies the rub and the reason Shaney stayed in Texas too long and then just long enough to get saved.
He came to UT Austin (hook em horns) on a chemistry fellowship. You know, as in, better living through… But the proudest achievement of his science life came earlier during his undergrad career in Santa Barbara, California on the day he learned how to synthesize a stronger version of psilocybin to give it wings of pictorial flight. It was to regular mushrooms what 3D IMAX was to watching movies on your telephone. John Shaney’s roommates thanked him, blessed him for his scientific tremendousness. “Awesome” was the word most heard around those sparkling Friday night soirees. Awesomer, awesomest.
He matriculated Texas, Austin because the school thought he had potential in the biochemical arena, helping the body itself manufacture changes. Things like tumors transmogrified into pussycat boils, which could be removed by first year veterinarians if necessary. He enjoyed playing with reversible transformations, too, erasing cellular constructs—he would have morphed shit back to food if he could; just for fun of it, you see, if it was possible, just to watch it happen. But the real reason he came was that he was lost, needed time to develop his own chemical makeup. Where better than school in a hipster town known for vivid youth culture? And they’ll pay me for it, he thought, learning of grad school’s myriad stipends, fee waivers, and fellowships. Aimless research might come later, he figured after hard work and hard partying. O Brethren and Cistern, Amen, I say unto you. Praise the lord and pass the tuition.
Enter Louis Lamel into the tale, later Shaney’s frenemy. Lamel was then between adjunct jobs after grad school accepted his dissertation on Ovid and the Transgender, the topic made him hot but his unwillingness to leave the vicinity and his bad teacher evaluations made him hard to employ. Besides he was cursed.
Lamel sought a room to let from some grad students near Sixth Street downtown, the white hot heart of the city, arriving for a roommate interview the same time Shaney did. Lamel was well-heeled that year, having wrestled the parents’ bequeathal into an early settlement of massive funds. But Shaney was a grad student like the rest of them. At first, they couldn’t choose between them, made them wait. They would think about it, get back to you both they said.
Meanwhile, the full moon.
It was the night before Shaney and Lamel were due to hear from the residents who called themselves the Trinitarians, after the streetname and meant to ironically underscore that they did not believe in any Three-Personed God. That night Louisa Priddy, the prettiest roommate, was heard screaming outside the door at 3 a.m. Everybody in the house woke. When they got down there in a big cowardly group, there was nothing. Oh, what’s this? A little sprinkling of blood on the Welcome Pardner doormat. They called the cops, who were more bemused than sleuth, but managed to establish nonetheless the blood likely belonged to her. Her presence absence question is still on the books.
Turned out Louis got first pick for the vacant room, by Parliamentary vote. A few days later they hesitantly brought in Mr. John Shaney, who somehow wangled temporary college housing, to see how he felt about moving into Louisa’s room. He was weirded out, of course, but was living alone in abandoned dorm named Santa Ana with skittering night sounds surrounding. What if the dead woman came back? He wondered aloud. They understood his hesitancy. First of the month, on the new moon, he changed his mind and came. Thus Shaney and Lamel found a new home in that big craftsman on Trinity Street, and three persons in one place became five.
While Louis was gone a lot, Shaney was always home. Too studious and confused by the sudden reorientation to go out at night, he told himself he was testing his new time zone and feeling out the new city gradually, acclimatizing his soul to the subtle forces of the notorious town. Tasting the terroir. Too bad, he missed a lot of fun. Austin is supposed to be an alternative space in the straightbacked American south, but it’s actually a much more pure form of Texas, which is a well-tended and rigorously defended culture made up of equal parts fierce pride of place while insisting on outsider status. Austin looks equally towards the cosmic and simple pleasures simultaneously, a lone star says it all. The silence of the dry or grassy plains, great clanking music, laconic expostulation, whisky, beer, and easy access to dope. Yet Shaney remained cocooned as his roommates partied on all the above substances and arrived home late speaking loud and incoherent. Even after classes, they tumbled through the door arguing, excited, flush with ideas; the most trifling occasion, like grocery store odysseys, induced high spirits come home giggling all the way to bed into hopscotch rooms. Commodification and transgression were buzzwords back then. And those kids did both. He, monastic, didn’t fit in at all with all the buying and yelling, the loose reducing and gross enlarging.
The others were just about to regret his inclusion when one night the whiff of BBQ drew Shaney away from home, three weeks to the day of his first settling. Maybe it was unfair to smirk about his homebody ways, since he did go to campus nearly every day and was fully engaged there. Though fresh-minted as a grad student, he was expected to teach undergrads, a responsibility presented in the offhand way academia has of granting expertise automatically with diplomas. He never got any training and really he was a coupla years and three weeks older than the kids he was guiding. Yet he was surprisingly apt and committed to the job. First years would approach him with doleful eyes and piteous tales expecting him to agree that the professor was insane to heap them with all this. Who could remember elements with names like Ununnillium or Bismuth? He, always fascinated by the table, its compounds and catalysts, felt and showed little sympathy. He helped nonetheless.
Especially her. She was suddenly in his hands, delivered by a blustery day when he was just about to abandon his shared office for the trip home alone. She walked in, a mess. Her hair tangled by whipping winds and dirty from studied neglect. It was that era when really pretty girls dressed themselves dorky on purpose: fat barrettes pinning back greasy hair and bra and slip straps displayed as if they accidentally crept out over the shoulder gap in thrift store blousenecks. On her it looked good, though. Lila.
At first, Shaney thought she was awkward and maybe even grade grubbing. She needed clarification about some obvious chemical reaction. Seriously? he thought. This chick either craves attention or is stupid. Also, her breath was sour milk like a child’s.
As the class cycle progressed, the contacts between him and the varyingly-talented undergrads grew into unexpected bonds. Some he came to enjoy, others he almost dreaded for their stuck record, none-so-blind-as-he-or-she-who-will-not-see minds. He came to respect Lila, though, and once when he told a joke, a bad pun about a micellar membrane as the place where he would stand if a tornado came, she winked at him and that act seemed both anachronistic and racy. Not giddy, merely winked. She was capable of fun. After a while, he got to like her breath and the smell of her tied-back greasy hair. It was her he liked. He thought, uh-oh.
And then, speaking of aromatics, came the BBQ smell day wafting in one Friday night as he stood dumb contemplating yet another bowl of pale ramen illuminated with pork and shrimp bits. He was indoors and he caught the odor near a window, like some animal smelling parts per million, he wondered at the actual chemical content of the breeze: char, vinegar sauce, and flesh. Shaney followed his nose to Sixth Street past the disconsolate old hippies smoking in front of blues clubs, past the Ripley’s Believe It or Not emporium, and past the bars that seemed designed to recede into vanishing points, the void beyond dead drunk, past all life in lively motion to the end of all the nightclubs where the homeless congregated in hungry packs. He passed unnoticed amongst them, perhaps they sensed his famished tongue, his breathing out off a deprived stomach longing for salty flesh. Up a few blocks and he found it at Stubbs.
Inside the long dark room, the dank room, sooted over and glued down with grease, smoke, and sweat, he ordered the brisket sandwich from the man behind the bar even though he preferred the sound of the pulled pork. When in Rome, he reasoned. Brisket was what Texas preferred, this land of giant cattle ranches, so brisket it would be. First he ordered a sandwich and to chase it a blond beer. The meat had a satisfying bark of crunchy blackened fat, flesh, salt, and herbs surrounding a tender, thick core of the beefiest beef. He was soon back ordering more of the same, wiping his fingers at the high dark wooden bar where the slightly imperious waiter stood jotting down, taking money, and issuing numbers to be displayed at the table for the waitress’s benefit. It tasted like heaven opened up to in his poor calorie-, flesh-, and fat-deprived grad student body. Everything tingled and the beer spread like a warm tide through his human tributaries.
Wavering with pleasure, he stood billowing though nowhere near drunk and so he left through the front door onto the semi-desolate street wishing only that propriety had not forbade him ordering yet again. He hungered and he thirsted, still.
“Pulled pork?” he said holding up his finger to an imaginary waiter in the air outside, which was surprisingly chill-tipped. “Fuck you. Texas? Your awesome brisket wins.”
He walked across the street to a dim liquor store and bought a half pint of something in the whiskey family rather too expensive for this neighborhood. He smoothed it into his student corduroys and walked diagonally over to the club called Memmo, which the kids called Meme-y. (Who knew why?) He joined a small unexpected queue inside, showed ID, got patted down and yet got away with the booze smuggle, paid a small cover, tripped awkward on brick flooring inside and stumbled clumsy right into gorgeous her.
Ready to keep reading? Werewolf, Texas
