Immortal Lycanthropes - By Hal Johnson Page 0,28

under the white pajamas he’d gotten from the Unknown Men, but it was still chilly.

“I’ve survived plenty of nights in the woods without a lean-to anyway. It’s not my fault you’ve been heading north, and it’s been getting colder,” Myron said as he jammed leaves into the remaining holes in his frame of sticks. “I could totally survive the night,” he said. But that night, which he spent lying beneath the shelter he had made, his head pillowed on the enormous warmth of the moose, was the pleasantest he had spent since leaving home.

In the morning, Spenser, human again, took the toothpaste, squirted some in his mouth, then squirted some more on the toilet paper, and began to polish the bottom of an orange-soda can. He was wearing a T-shirt that said MY PARENTS WENT TO NEW YORK, AND ALL I GOT WAS FETAL ALCOHOL SYNDROME, the only one they’d had in his size.

“Can I have some, too?” Myron asked. “I haven’t brushed my teeth in forever.”

Spenser spat out the toothpaste. “You don’t need to brush your teeth,” he said, still polishing. “You can’t get cavities.” When the toilet paper shredded, he took another piece, and he kept using more toothpaste. But he let Myron have a shot, too, to swish out his mouth. It felt much better afterward, and then they both drank some orange soda.

Myron noticed that the bottom of Spenser’s can was as shiny as a mirror. He pointed at it, his mouth still full of soda.

“The sun’s finally out this morning, so I can show you. You can use this mirror to start a fire.”

(Swallowing.) “Why do I need a fire? I was really warm last night.”

“You’ll need a fire to cook food, and I might not always be here. Lookit.” Spenser held the can’s polished bottom up to the sun, and moved a dry leaf back and forth in front of it. The parabolic mirror of the curved bottom of the can focused the sun’s rays on a point, and when he found that point he held the leaf there until it burst into flames.

Myron screamed. But it was mostly, you know, joy and wonder.

Spenser went over the process again, the polishing, the focal point, and the importance of building up a base of tinder to burn, to which you could add first small twigs and then larger branches. Myron was well versed in the literature of Jack London, so he knew most of this, the part that came after the soda can. “So that’s what the toilet paper’s for,” he said.

“No, the toilet paper is for you. You’ll thank me for that one.”

Spenser had brought with him to New York a backpack full of supplies, but he had left it all behind when he suddenly moosed in downtown Manhattan. The clothes he had been wearing had, of course, been torn to shreds.

“I don’t know what’s in that tube,” he said—not the toothpaste tube, the duct-taped cylinder—“but it smells terrible. I could smell it from a mile away, and I mean that literally. I was crosstown in Alphabet City.”

“It’s a doomsday device,” Myron said.

“Well, keep it in the tinfoil if you have to keep it at all. If I can smell it, someone else can smell it, and you dinna want to attract attention out here.”

Spenser, it turned out, more than anything didn’t want to attract attention. He spent most of his time alone in the woods, as moose or man, and only occasionally ventured into the “human lands.” What he called supplies were obtainable at any number of small towns, but only in New York did he have a connection to obtain his cheese.

“Young” cheese, cheese that has not been aged, is filled with bacteria. It is a health hazard. It is therefore illegal to sell it in the United States, unless it has been made with pasteurized milk. But to young-cheese aficionados, the pasteurization process ruins the flavor. Spenser was, he would assure Myron, a man or moose of simple tastes, but he did love his cheese, and he loved it unaged, bacterial, stench-ridden, and untainted by pasteurization.

It was for the sake of cheese that Spenser made an annual pilgrimage to New York, where a certain cheese shop, unnamed here, permitted the cognoscenti into a backroom stocked with forbidden cheese smuggled from Europe.

“I was lucky you picked that day to go in,” Myron said.

“See what you think is lucky when the snow starts to fall. And as soon as you opened the tinfoil,