“Werewolf?”
“Yeah, a werewolf.”
“You mean to tell me a werewolf took your hand?”
“Sure looks that way.” His bedraggled face betrayed nary a trace of irony.
“Well, did it or he or she gnaw it off?”
“No, don’t be silly, nephew. He used the machete.” I had suspected the machete was the culprit – never thought a supposed werewolf was the one wielding it. Noticing that the moon had only recently appeared in the night sky, I asked an obvious question.
“Wait, it must have been bright out when the ‘werewolf’ chopped your hand off. How can a werewolf possibly skulk around in broad daylight?”
“That moon and the werewolf is pure superstitious hooey,” once again, no irony to be found. “This fucking son of a bitch is a permanent wolf.”
“Then it was a wolf, who knew how to use a machete that cut off your hand. Not a werewolf.”
“Boy,” Vance would call me boy when he was royally annoyed, “get your head out of your ass. A werewolf differs from a wolf insofar as he possesses marginally human traits, such as the ability to use a fucking machete.” His emphasised expletive made me abandon the fruitless inquiry regarding nomenclature.
“So was there something odd about this werewolf?” I asked. Vance paused, placing his bandage stub to his chin, as if he was about to enter a deep place of meditation.
“Bestand,” he added. “He said ‘Bestand’ over and over again.”
“So it was a German werewolf. This is one screwy werewolf.”
“Bestand…bestand…bestand…it said it three times,” he was an it now apparently. “Then the rat bastard sliced my hand off.”
“Sounds like the werewolf went mad from reading too much Heidegger,” I said rather matter-of-factly.
“Sure could be the case,” Vance replied, slowing exhibiting the effects of blood loss. “She had these oddly rodent features. It kind of looked like Heidegger.”
“Was it wearing a swastika armband?” I asked with utter seriousness.
“Not sure, the blinding pain of losing an appendage kind of muddied that up.”
I thought it appropriate to sum up the details as they stood. “So it was an incomprehensible, proto-Nazi werewolf who knows how to use a machete,” I paused for dramatic effect. “That’s something else, Uncle Vance. You sure it wasn’t bigfoot on a bender?”
“Hey nephew.” His voice started to fade.
“Yeah.”
“Could I interrupt your little anthropological cabinet of wondrous speculations and ask if you can get me to a hospital?”
“Why sure you can, unkie Vance.”
I sat in the helicopter as it ferried Vance to Foothills Hospital. Gazing at the dark landscape below, it struck me: there was some mad wonderfully murderous creature, possibly an anti-Semitic machete-wielding werewolf, somewhere out there. And I was going to find it or him or her.
