out, same as you can smell new bread or the mud in the Mississippi. You can fool your grandpapa and you can even fool old Granny Miette,” she would tell me, leaning so close I could smell the odour of singed violets on her skin. “But you cannot fool the rougarou. His nose follows pain, same as a hound follows blood. And when he sniffs you out, you can’t outrun him. You can try, chou-chou, you can run hard and you can run fast. But no one outruns the rougarou forever.”
It was that moment when I made up my mind to try. I knew the rougarou would come for me. I had always been a naughty child. I left candles burning long into the night to read. I stole pocketfuls of penny candy when Grandfather said I had had enough. And when Mossy’s mother, the bricked-up saint who never left her rooms, summoned me to say the rosary with her, I skipped every third bead because I knew God would never notice. As I grew older, my crimes grew more audacious. I swam naked in the creek, knowing the sharecroppers’ sons would get whipped for watching. I stole Mossy’s favourite pair of earrings and lost them at a masked ball I wasn’t supposed to attend. I strapped a flask under my garters and kissed boys in shadowy gardens. I rolled my own cigarettes and smoked them under the house while I read trashy novels that Granny Miette warned would wreck both my morals and my eyesight.
The rougarou never came for me. I packed away the story of him like everything else in my childhood. I thought I’d gotten away with it all, but the rougarou keeps careful accounts. He bided his time, waiting for me, always waiting, as patient as a wolf stalking a lamb. He sniffed out not my pain but my happiness, and that was when he lunged, snatching Johnny from me. I sobbed over the pieces of his uniform that came back, and in those sobs I heard the howl of the rougarou. I set off running then, and I hadn’t stopped running since.
“It doesn’t exist.” I repeated the lie stubbornly.
The babu shrugged.
“He says that your belief does not make this thing true or not true. It is what he sees.”
“I thought he saw a man in a uniform waiting with Death,” I said. “Now he sees a werewolf. I think the babu needs better spectacles.”
The babu didn’t understand sarcasm, or if he did, he chose to ignore it. He laughed when Gideon translated my words, treating it all as a big joke. I stood up, my face hot.
“The babu says that you have run all the way to Africa, Bibi, but you do not have to run anymore. The wolf-man cannot hurt you here.”
“That’s what you think,” I said bitterly.
I walked off then, but Gideon followed me, and I was glad. Tears blurred my vision and I was so tired I kept stumbling into the pig holes where warthogs ran to ground. Gideon walked patiently beside me, his stride easy and loose, his spear held at the ready.
I tripped once more, and Gideon put out his hand, one fingertip barely grazing mine. It was the first time Gideon had ever touched me. I twined my fingers in his and we both stared down at the linked hands, so different, and yet were they? Strip away the skin and you would find the same bones, the same blood, the same web of nerves and tendons and everything that made a person human.
“I am sorry,” I told him again, wiping my eyes with my free hand. “You are my best friend here, Gideon.”
“You are my friend as well, Bibi.”
“You know, you might knock off the Bibi business and just call me Delilah.”
“Such a thing is not correct.”
“It is correct when people are friends. You could do it when we’re alone if it makes you uncomfortable to say it otherwise.”
He pondered this. “Very well, Delilah.” The name sounded peculiar in his mouth, but he said it anyway, and for the first time that day I smiled.
We withdrew our hands then, and I thought of the girl he planned to marry and how simple it all was for them. And I wondered why it had to be so complicated for the rest of us.
“Gideon, tell me the truth. Is there anything that you’re afraid of? I mean, really afraid, so afraid that if you think of it in the dark