I could be angry. But when I had a job and an apartment and a girl friend I was still miserable. On the outside people would have said everything was fine. But I was ready to put a gun to my head and pull the trigger like my father did. I would never choose to have things fall apart the way they did. But living on the streets I found Garvey.

After my mother died of cancer and my father drank himself crazy and then killed himself, I lived with my maternal grandmother in Moscow. To keep me quiet during the long winter nights, Grandma told me stories about the king of the werewolves. I would listen, sitting at the kitchen table eating her delicious meat pies fresh out of the oven.

The last king of the werewolves lived in northern Siberia, in a town called Salekhard. He was the most vicious and powerful of all the werebeasts. He ripped the guts and drank the blood of the powerful and the mighty as well as of the weak and the nameless. A merchant from Arkhangel once sent him a dead buck with an offer of a million rubles if he would leave the merchant's agents unmolested. The merchant was found by his servants in his bathtub with his arms and head gnawed off and a million rubles in the bloody water.

"Your father was stubborn too," Grandma would say. "When they made him give up his post at the University, he would have liked to tear off some heads. Perhaps he would have if he had had the werewolf blood in him."

The boundaries of the werewolf kingdom did not extend beyond the edges of the night, because when the sun rode high in the sky the werewolf king dressed and walked on two feet as an ordinary man. He lived in an ordinary cabin on the outskirts of Salekhard. And his clan eked out their living as ordinary men and women, as trappers and woodsmen, reindeer herders, fishers and traders.

But when the sun sank below the horizon he threw off all his clothes and ran naked on the hunt with his clan. His huge body was covered with thick, black fur that sprouted out of his skin from his snout to his claws. He haunted a lair in a forest grotto, a dark, forsaken place where you could hear no birds singing and no insects chirping and trespassers risked all. When he was not on the hunt with his clan, he crouched on a throne fashioned there from the bones of his victims, etched into a skull at the head of which were the words, "The truth no man will face."

Salekhard is on the Arctic Circle. In the winter there is no sun there and the sky never glows brighter than just after sunset. The Arctic Ocean freezes and the pack ice expands until it connects the northlands of Siberia, Scandinavia, Greenland, Canada and Alaska to the North Pole in one continuous frozen mass. The werewolf king and his army of werekodiak would cross the ice, traveling the same routes countless werewolf kings had traveled generations before, to visit other werebeast clans in Tromsø and Godhavn, Inuvik and Nome. With their extraordinary strength, endurance, and speed, they did not need provisions or plans or maps to cross the pole. They were so fast and fierce that, in the time of one earth's rotation, they could run hundreds of miles across the glaciers, even in sub-zero cold, stifling snow and blistering winds.

Grandma told me, "I remember when the famous explorer Amundson disappeared in the Arctic. I was a little girl. I believe that the last face he saw was the face of the werewolf king."

After the Soviet Union fell, Grandma decided we needed to go live with her cousin in Minnesota because things were falling apart in Russia. "Werewolves do not live just in Russia," she said on the train to Berlin, "There are werewolves in America too."

The werebeasts were once powerful in many lands. Cats and jackals ruled in Egypt; tigers in India; coyotes in the plains of North America. During the middle ages the werewolves of Europe were hunted down and destroyed. Silver crosses blessed by Christian priests were broken into shards, loaded into muskets and blasted into the werewolves' flesh. Suspected werewolves were burned at the stake or torn on the rack. They came to be hunted throughout the world, until they were driven into the shadows of the northlands, where they kept the way of human flesh eating. But they have not forgotten their old power.

When a werewolf king died the werebeasts held a carnival. Representatives from all the werebeast clans gathered in the Ural mountains near Salekhard to eat the flesh of the king under the full moon so that his spirit and power would survive in them. They consumed every part of him. They devoured the flesh and fat and sinews and drank his blood. They gobbled up the vital organs, the intestines, the liver and the lungs. They even brought the bones home for others to chew and suck. But the brains and the heart and the privates were reserved for the one worthy to be the next king. No one came forward unless they knew in their marrow that they were worthy. Any who doubted could challenge the one who came forward in a combat to the death.

The last werewolf king ascended to the throne of bone in the time of the last Czar. There was a story that Cossacks had raped his sister and burned his village in the Ukraine, that his mother and father were anarchists exiled to Siberia by the Czar, and that he passionately hated the Czar and thirsted for his blood. He hated the "Whites" who wanted to put the Czar back on the throne after the Russian revolution. But more than the Czar and his supporters, he hated the foreign devils, the British, the French and the Americans, who invaded northern Russia at the end of World War I when his homeland was in the flames of civil war.

In the last winter of the war he brought the most trusted warriors in his werebeast army to Murmansk, where they spread out into the countryside and ambushed allied soldiers and Whites who wandered too far from their encampments. The werewolf king himself burst into the British headquarters in the city, killing six soldiers before almost biting out the throat of the commander of the British expeditionary force. The werewolf left deep claw marks in the commander's chest and on his face before the nine strongest men in the garrison pried him off, threw him onto the ground and emptied their guns into him. Even with scores of oozing bullet holes in his body and his dark, tangled fur slick with his own blood, he leapt to his feet, smashed through a window, and killed two more guards before springing past the barricades and disappearing into the sunless tundra. The commander survived, but so did the king of the werewolves.

When the Whites and the foreign interventionists were finally defeated and driven out of northern Russia the werewolf king celebrated by kidnaping the former czarist mayor of Salekhard and gobbling his intestines out of him while he was still alive.

"Your grandfather was murdered by Whites," Grandma told me. "He was hiding in his cousin's attic when they found him. They dragged him out of the house, half-naked, into the snow, and they shot him. Right there in front of his cousin." She would sigh sometimes, "He never lived to see what happened to the people's revolution. It would have broken his heart."

It was rumored that Josef Stalin employed werebeasts in his secret police and that he was obsessed with capturing the werewolf king and eating his heart in order to become a lycanthrope himself. Stalin sent to Salekhard one of his most cunning agents, a werehyena from Tbilisi, to find the werewolf king, kill him, and bring his corpse back to Moscow.

This agent was also a necromancer who could read the breath of the dying in the night wind and draw echoes of a soul's last throes from the rocks and the grass. At night on the tundra he could detect the pungent scent of fresh human blood from dozens of miles away. He knew just how far it was and in which direction.

The werewolf clan of Salekhard hunted as a pack, and the honor of the kill always belonged to the king. So each time there was a hunt, the werehyena tracked the clan by the smell of their victims. After the clan had gorged and left and after the king had eaten his portion and stolen away last of all, the werehyena ate from what was left and then plucked a morsel from the carcass, a digit or a spleen or an eye, to take home and cast into the corner of his cabin behind the stove. Gradually the pile of rotting parts coagulated into the image of the man he sought.

On a spring morning the necromancer walked the main street of Salekhard until he found a small child with long, red braids. He said, "Little girl, I am looking for a man, a kind, quiet, gentle man, who lives on the edge of town. He has a red beard with a white streak down the middle. He walks with a bit of a limp and his front tooth is chipped and looks like a jagged little pebble. Do you know who I mean? He is a cousin of mine and I have urgent business with him."

The girl said, "You must mean Uncle Anatol." She told the agent exactly where he lived.

He patted her on the head and said, "Good girl." Then, following her instructions, he walked down a road, which led to another road, and then a winding path, straight to an ordinary house on the outskirts of the town. He pulled an ax out of the wood cutting block next to a tidy shed in the front yard and strode through the front door of the house. There he found an ordinary man sitting at a plain wooden table between the stove and the window, facing away from the door, reading a book. And he killed him right on the spot with the ax.

"It was men like that who drove your father to suicide," Grandma told me.

The agent delivered the corpse to the Kremlin. But it was too late for Stalin, who died the very evening his secret police delivered the body. After that, it is uncertain what happened to the corpse. Some say it eventually found its way to Africa, brought there by KGB agents in Angola. Others say it went to Fidel Castro's Cuba, and then to central America. It is equally possible it went east, to Vietnam. At some point perhaps it fell into the hands of the CIA. It could have gone anywhere, always under a curse that will never allow one to possess it who is not worthy. Since the abduction and murder of their king, werebeasts have been sending spies after his remains to find them and bring them home so they could rebuild the old werebeast kingdom.

We left Russia, Grandma saying, "This land never belonged to us. We are children of the world now." But America was just as broken as Russia, with its hideous poverty surrounded by its sleepless pursuit of happiness. And long after we moved I was haunted by memories of finding my father in the bathroom after he had shot himself in the head, haunted by my childish worry that they never did find all the pieces of him. Grandma told me before she died, "Your father did not know how to let go of things he had no control over. Don't you be the same way." But I always lived under the shadow of my father, until I met Garvey.

When I first met Garvey, I never thought he would last. Not necessarily because he was so young, because there are a lot of kids living on the streets. But you can tell the ones who are tough enough to survive, and Garvey was not one of those. He always seemed a bit off. You'd ask him a question, like, "You want some coffee?" and he'd answer a different question, like, "I used to live over by Franklin and Twenty-Fifth Street." He wanted to latch on to whomever paid attention to him, which meant people usually avoided him. And he was a handsome kid; I worried he'd be taken advantage of. He disappeared from time to time and then suddenly showed up again. He'd win the lottery for a thirty-day bed at one of the shelters, and then three days into his stay he'd miss a couple of nights and lose his place. Then five days later you'd see him on the streets again, no place to stay and looking real beat up — not usually physically beat up, though sometimes I've seen him looking pretty bad that way too. When I asked him, "Where were you? You lost your place at the shelter," he just shrugged his shoulders and looked at me funny, like he was hoping I could bail him out of whatever mess he was in. Once he disappeared for months. I attended the annual memorial service at Simpson Church for homeless who have died, half expecting to hear his name read.

One night after I'd lost my place in the shelter, I decided to head to the river. At First Avenue and Thirty-Second Street I saw Garvey crawling into a basement window in a big boarded up house that was half burned out. I figured, "At least he's found a place to stay. Just hope the cops leave him alone." I knew Jerry had been around there, so I asked him, was it safe there. Jerry's eyes got big, and he said, "Las' time I was over there, there was a dead body in there, in the basement. I ain't been in there since." I said, "Dead body?" And he said, "More like a mummy, all dried out and leathery looking, no clothes on and all hairy from head to foot." I said, "Did you tell anyone about it?" And he said, "Course not, I wa'n't suppose' to be there in the first place." And he added, "I jus' figure somebody died in there and no one been in there since, ‘cept maybe to steal his clothes. I di'n't recognize ‘im, ain't seen ‘im on the streets." I said, "Are you sure you weren't just imagining things?" And he just stared back at me and said, "I ain't crazy yet, and you know I ain't smoked or drank in years." I said, "Then how could Garvey stand to spend a single night in there?" And Jerry said, "Maybe he ain't been in the basement yet, or maybe it ain't there any more. But I can tell you I sure as hell am not going back in there. Plenty o' other place to stay."

A week later I was in that neighborhood again, and I saw a dozen police cars, lights flashing, and barricades with yellow "CRIME SCENE DO NOT ENTER" tape all around the block, between Thirty-Second and Thirty-Third on First Avenue. I saw Jose walking from that direction, and I said, "What happened?" And he said "I think there was shooting, and three guys dead." And I said, "Shot each other?" And he said, "No, shot at some thing. Their heads were torn off." I said, "Torn off?" And he said, "Ripped. Like by an animal. Some people heard shooting and they called the cops, but when the cops got here, it was all over and these guys were dead." If there was something on TV or in the papers about it, I didn't see it or hear about it.

And then a week after that was the big massacre down on the river flats. A half a dozen police men were killed. There was no way they could keep that out of the news. But the media were calling it "the worst gang-related shoot-out in Minnesota history." But none of us believed a word of that, because we knew the only folks down on the river flats at night are homeless folks looking for a place to camp or homosexuals looking for sex. The cops were down there doing one of their "clean-ups." Cops know how to handle a dangerous situation and they're generally prepared for anything and there is no way that six cops could be killed in a gang shoot-out. If those cops are dead, it's because they ran into something they were completely unprepared for, something they never expected in their wildest nightmares.

So the next time I saw Garvey was sometime in late November. And I was shocked when I met him. He looked completely different, so different I barely recognized him. There was a coolness and a confidence in his stride, head up, looking me right in the eye as I approached him. He wore a new jacket, a big red down-filled jacket and new, felt-lined, leather boots, and mittens and a warm hunting cap with flaps. His voice was smooth and calm when he spoke to me, with no stammering. He smiled and said, "Yuri, it's nice to see you. What you been up to?" I stumbled over my words, I was so surprised, "Garvey, is that you?" He nodded and smiled impassively. "What have you been up to?" I parroted back. "I'm gettin' outta here tomorrow," he said. "Good for you," I replied, "Where are you going?" He said, "Canada. But I'll be back next summer." My jaw dropped. "Canada? You're going to Canada for the winter? It's not cold enough for you in Minnesota?" He shrugged and smiled again, a big toothy smile, and patted me on the back as he continued down the sidewalk.

I couldn't get my mind off Garvey and Canada that whole day. There was something electrifying in the way he had looked at me. I had wanted to talk to him some more, to try to find out what this spark of new life in him was. And maybe it's because I was thinking about him that toward sunset I found myself wandering over to the boarded-up house on First and Thirty-Second. I thought, "He's probably not sleeping here any more any way, but I wonder if I'll see him . . ." It was cloudy that evening, so the streetlights were already glaring brighter than the sky. I stopped in front of the big chain link fence that surrounded the yard of the house and strained my eyes in the shadows to see what I could see. It was completely quiet, no song of birds, no crickets or frogs. Suddenly I heard a loud clank and an animal snarl, and I fell flat on my ass, screaming and holding the side of my face. And towering over me on the other side of the fence was a huge, gray dog, like a husky or a German shepherd, at least six feet tall on its hind legs, growling. Something wet was dripping off my right eyebrow into my eye, blinding me. I wiped it off with my hand and squinted at it and realized I was bleeding, and then I knew that the dog had bitten me on the forehead. It stopped growling and jumped down off the fence and slowly backed away from me, never taking its glowing, green eyes off of me. I was trying to control my breathing and wondering if I was about to have a heart attack, and shaking too violently to stand up. And I noticed another huge dog and then another and another. One was lying under a large fir tree and another behind a bush, one sat on the dilapidated porch, and there was the one that bit me prowling back and forth just on the other side of the fence, watching me. I slowly stood up and backed away from the fence and then crossed the street and scurried back the way I came from.

I knew I was obsessed now, but I had to go back first thing the next morning, to see if the dogs were still there and to see if there was any sign of Garvey. There was no sign of any dogs, but I saw a black van parked in the alley behind the house, and two men in black suits and ties sitting in the van, one of them talking on a cell phone, and a bunch of men wearing helmets, guns, and bullet proof vests moving back and forth between the van and the house. They were gone later that morning.

That night I had a dream about my grandmother. She was sitting on her favorite chair on the balcony of her small apartment in Moscow, telling me stories about the werewolves in northern Siberia, about the king of the werewolves in Salekhard, where she grew up, and I was sitting just across from her. I watched the sun set while she spoke, and I suddenly interrupted her and said, "Grandma, look how beautiful the sunset is!" There was no answer, and I turned to look and Grandma was a great big black wolf. She leaped out of her chair and knocked me to the floor of the balcony and growled, "Yuri, don't forget your grandmother." And then I woke with a start, remembering all the old stories. The terrible thought dawned on me, "He's here now, the king is here." I looked around me in the shelter to see if anyone heard my crying out. But the shelter was quiet. Jose in the bunk next to me groaned and turned over, pulling his pillow over his ears and moaning, "Be quiet you crazy Russian."

I remember my grandmother. I remember that she died saying, "I wanted to find something better for my grandson in America."

Every night now there are the nightmares. I have one dream that I am in that boarded up house on First and Thirty-Second in the basement. There is an unearthly light emanating from the dried up, leathery, naked corpse of a man covered with coarse red hair from the crown of his head to the soles of his feet. Someone has written in blood on the cinder block wall behind him, "The truth no man will face." Large dogs surround him, whining and growling, and in the moonlight shining through a basement window where the boards have been torn away I see Garvey. He is nude, crouched on all fours, every muscle tense, skin shiny with sweat. He throws himself on the corpse, tearing at its chest with his teeth until I hear a crack, until he is jerking the rib cage open, burrowing into the open chest cavity with his face, rooting, gnawing and moaning. He is straddling the corpse, his face and torso spattered with blood and his mouth full of scarlet meat. Then another crack as he lifts the head with both hands and smashes it against the floor and the skull splits open and the brains start to protrude like a boiled egg squeezed out of its shell. The dogs tear at a thigh, an elbow, they bite into a hand, and I am joining with them. And that is when I wake up yelling.

In the shelter I would wake the other men with my crying out. I would look around me at them lying like rag dolls in their cots. I would see light bleeding into the room from the dingy yellow bulb in the stairwell where a man sits on the steps sucking on a cigarette and staring into an ashcan on the floor between his feet. I would hear coughing and the echo of the footsteps of someone pacing sleeplessly in the hallway. I would smell sticky air thick with cigarette smoke and sweat and kitchen grease and the breath of three dozen men huddled under blankets in a church basement. And I would start to howl, to vent all my anger and empty my lungs into my howling. Then the men would start shouting, "Shut up! Shut up!" And the night attendant would call the shelter director and the director would come and make me get up and get my stuff and leave the shelter. That happened three times before they banned me from the shelters. So now I am forced to sleep down on the river flats where I can howl at night all I want.

Garvey was back in Minneapolis last summer just as he had said. I ran into him down on the river flats.

He smiled and said, "Not staying in the shelters any more?"

"No," I replied, "I'll try my luck camping on the flats."

Garvey looked me in the eyes and said, "No more disrespect, Yuri. No more brothers dying all alone, feeling like life has abandoned them. No more memorials for the homeless."

In the winter the nights are frigid on the flats. When I sleep I dream that I am rolling naked in the snow and singing to the moon. Other nights I dream that I am waiting calmly with the others in some shadowy alley in the warehouse district, listening to the laughter of late-night theater-goers and the jingle of car keys being lifted from pockets. I am watching for shadows on the icy sidewalk signaling an approach. I am waiting for his signal to rip with my claws and mangle with my teeth and baptize my bristly fur in blood.