Joseph Ponce

Werecat

Logan showed up to our Saturday morning shift with big hospital bandages on his knuckles. The doors to the store opened at nine, but there would be plastic-wrapped floor palettes and blocking off parts of the aisles of the superstore for the next few hours. Logan didn’t want to make a big deal of it, so we didn’t talk about the bandages until an hour into our shift, after we’d done the count.

“Some bad guys,” Logan said. “We got into it ‘cause one of them was giving this girl a hard time.”

“But you don’t go to bars.”

“Wanted to see what it was like.”

The edges of several wrappings were red, looking like the sluice underneath a styrofoam serving of ground beef near the back of the store.

Logan’s shaved head grew in patchy, and a bump jutted from the crown of his forehead, lips thick and purpled, eyes and voice both droopy and low. At that point we’d only been working together in the superstore a few months. Like the items inside the store, we exaggerated our value.

I could only ever make $300 a week there, even on a good day of sales. The commissions were a joke.

“Like,” I said to Logan, as a clarification, “you got into a fight with these two guys in a bar? A physical altercation? And then one of them used a knife on you? And that’s why you’re wearing bandages on your hands?”

He had a twitch in his eyebrow that read as a dare. “Sure, Ellis,” he said. “I saw a situation developing, and I handled it. They were giving a woman at the bar attention she didn’t want. I told them this, and they asked me to step outside to kick my ass, and so I stepped outside. They did not kick my ass.”

Sometimes we talked about Werecat, the new villain in the multi-billion-dollar international blockbuster series based on the Indomitables comic books, about a team of gritty superheroes contending with their powers in the modern world. Werecat had made his first appearance in the comic as a superhero: superstrength being his bag, like a lot of the other rest, but also possessing a short fuse and an easy charm that let him slip back and forth from hero to antihero. The tagline to the movie was, sometimes justice is the best revenge.

Werecat was interesting to the both of us because in his first movie, instead of something like the Crusader or the Minx, Werecat had a no-gray-area moment with the villain of that movie, a man who’d killed his father. Unlike other movies, Werecat threw his quarry off a roof.

The man didn’t die, setting up the sequel, but still.

Half the things Logan said seemed like a brag, like the indignant musings of a younger man. (I was in my thirties, Logan just out of high school.) Every story he told jumped quickly from the unlikely to the absurd. He had shot and hunted most weekends. Shot machine guns at refrigerators in the mountains outside Denver. “We shot explosives out there, too,” he said. He’d caused a fire, gotten kicked out of a school because of it. Some kids threw rocks at him in a park. He told me how he'd pulled out this karambit knife and stalked towards them, to scare them, staring them down. “That did the trick,” he said.

Logan wanted to be a cop. The superstore was a step on his path to the police academy. My dad was a cop in the Chicago suburbs, a detective for most of his life. Logan turned his nose up at that. “Not real crime in the suburbs. Have to go into the city for that,” he said. “Real jungle in there.” He was taking criminal justice classes at a community college on the Front Range. He didn’t like this outspoken dude in his class, who had what Logan described as “a real backwards view of police work.”

We were setting up a decorative plaque for the new Indomitables movie, shoving stacks of identical DVDs into the small, demarcated squares under the white eyes of the Werecat.

“We were reading about civilian review boards,” Logan said, “and this guy said that cops needed to have authority or else they couldn’t do their jobs. Just do what they say and nothing bad will happen to you, Supreme Advocate Style.”

Logan huffed, adding a row of collector’s editions, which promised an additional 24-hours of behind-the-scenes commentary, documentaries, and interviews with the cast. “Watched a video of a sketchy police stop. Cop blows the guy away.”

The Supreme Advocate was a more obscure comic book that had been made into a shlocky action movie within an at-the-time A-lister. It was bad, but bad in that way I’d enjoyed as a kid: a hyper-capitalist dystopia, overcrowding causes crime to become so rampant that the cops are forced to become Supreme Advocates, administering death sentences on the streets. The Supreme Advocate was an old form of policeman brought out of cryo to administer justice, again mostly death. To watch it now, I just saw the Watts riots, Rodney King, and the movie written to respond to it. In 1993, the writer of the movie seemed to be saying, to deal with all the shit in the streets, we needed someone willing to kick some ass.

The sequel was interesting though: the enemy was instead a rogue policeperson, someone not just corrupt but insane, who wanted to create a clone army of insane police officers to patrol the streets. It was hard to think that this movie, which came out four years later, wasn’t in direct response to things like Rampart, Cali’s Three Strikes Law, politicians and their wives warning of the dangers of superpredators.

Weird that Logan felt the same way, though. We’d both grown up on it, taken it in.

“You don’t like the Supreme Advocate?”

“As a metaphor for how bad things could get, sure,” he said. “But there’s a reason lawyers go to school for so long: you need some nuance to do the job.”

His favorite was the Werecat.

In The Indomitables: Four Corners of the World, the Werecat really comes into his own, not as a hero, but as the villain. Convinced now that the only way to combat crime is to rid the world of criminals permanently, he seeks the Four Elements so that he’d have the power to do as he wished, without The Indomitables stopping him.

Here, they fill in more of Werecat’s backstory, too. Now these are things that are only alluded to in the comic books. While in a lot of ways he was the most ethical of the Indomitables, he did not balk when the situation called for nuanced decisions, even resorting to brutal violence to get the job done. Later, when asked by other heroes to assess his own decisions, it’s his certainty that’s troubling. Kind of proving that point that the best villains are just screwed up heroes. Though often the movies pull away from the notion that anybody with that kind of power is troubling, as that says things they might not want to say.

The movie opens on one of the heroes shadowing Werecat on a bust, a flashback. Vantablack sprints up a stairwell, his bodysuit reflecting no light, and finds Werecat huddled over the body of a criminal. Beaten to death. We never learn what the person did.

Later that month we got a notice from our manager that there was a pair of people using phony, out-of-state IDs to sign up for phone plans and stealing the brand-new, thousand-dollar phones. Logan took the whole thing very seriously. While I was behind the counter transferring data between a woman’s flip phone and her new smart phone, Logan stood behind the register, holding the ID up to the light. He eventually set it down but started drumming his fingers on the countertop. He rubbed his head, fingers playing in the Brillo texture. The older woman tried to make a joke of it. “Oh, it’s real,” she said. “I assure you. But the age might be a decade or so older than I feel.”

Logan held up her ID again. “This says you’re 145 pounds,” he said. “But looking at you, I’d say you’re probably closer to 160.”

The manager gave Logan a warning. She took her business elsewhere.

9/11 changed the superhero movies. Logan and I shared the same weird childhood PTSD. Smoke and ashes, a brutal demolition that made all the adults close their eyes so tightly. That day, in grade school, our whole class spent the afternoon in the chapel praying.

It wasn’t long, maybe five years after, when the same imagery started making its way into the superhero movies: smoke and ashes, people pulled out of the rubble, a city invaded and destroyed. Supreme Advocate, always a bit campy, bright and colorful, seeking out terrorists with dirty bombs (at one point even pouring buckets of water on towel-faced men). The previous iteration of Vantablack was even campier than Advocate (who can forget him charging to his Vantacard™?). But in the new superhero movies, there was that same bleak color scheme: greys and browns, smoke and ashes.

No blood of course (to dodge the R rating,) but lots of dead people on the ground.

It wasn’t surprising people took to the new movies: superheroes were saving the city that we’d seen destroyed.

The security team warned us about shoplifters. He had become friends with Walter, the 30-something head of Theft Prevention, who walked the store in plainclothes, and bitched perpetually that he wasn’t allowed to put his hands on somebody, even if they stole. It was a job that Logan didn’t want, either, despite how seriously he took shoplifting. He had no interest in being a glorified security guard who couldn’t throw down. But it was also ethical. “And,” he said, “I just don’t know what I’d do if someone was stealing, like, bread or milk. Let them go?”

“You ever stolen yourself?” I asked him.

“Heck no,” he said. “I’m not some hood.”

When I was a teenager I worked in an arcade, where my friend was the assistant manager. We knew that the games in this restaurant-arcade were rigged—the “skill-based” ones that had prizes like a $50 bill or a gaming console. Rigged to pay out within an allotted amount of time: weekly, monthly, yearly. So, the assistant manager let me know one month when it was ripe for a payout, and he went into the game’s console and changed the payout cycle from “Every four months” to “Every hour.” It didn’t take us long to win. I got a handheld gaming console. For a long time afterwards I expected something to happen. When it didn’t, it wasn’t like I slept soundly. I eventually gave it away.

When I told Logan this, his brow furrowed, like he’d gotten bad news. 

“But you cheated.”

I almost laughed. My feet ached; it was almost closing time and we hadn’t seen a customer in hours. “The game’s a cheat, Logan,” I said. 

“They were screwing people out of money, so I screwed them.”

He thought for a while. Behind us, the four jumbo monitors on the wall cycled to a K-pop single that had been drawing teenagers to our counter begging for collector’s versions of the new single. They sought out four different filigreed designed boxes, named for the Four Elements, in line with the merchandising done for the new Indomitables movie, the sequel, where the Werecat did a heel-turn, becoming the full villain after crippling Vantablack by throwing him in front of a subway train.

Logan’s eyes had a hardness when he looked at me.

“I don’t think we can be friends anymore, Ellis,” Logan said.

And he went and took his break.

The phone thieves showed up one day when Logan wasn’t working. He was taking the physical portion of the police test. He failed, I later found out. They came in, this older white couple wearing matching pea-coats over exercise gear—the husband telling me they’d heard about the gift card deal and just had to get the newest, just-released smart phones.

I checked their IDs, excited for a sale, excited for the commission money that would eventually show up in my bank account for the two phones. It was only $10 a phone, but I wasn’t in a position to complain. I’d only been in town a few months and didn’t want to make waves.

The man’s gelled hair in his ID looked almost identical. But it was out-of-state. Arizona. It felt flimsy in my hand. “It’s out-of-state,” he said. “Just in town skiing. Hope that’s okay, bro.”

“Gosh,” the lady said, “These phones are so beautiful.” She leaned forward on the counter, smiling at me. “Do you have one yet?”

Their IDs were hella fake, I found out later. After they left, they never made any payments on the plan they’d signed up for in fake names, and so the phone company dinged the store the $2,112.25 in revenue I’d lost.

They don’t give fucking commissions on stolen merchandise. So yeah.

Time passed.

I got another, better job. It was contract work with the promise of a potential, permanent position, which at three months seemed very likely and a year later was definitely a lie. I was learning “contract work” was as bad as “plus commissions.” I was too naïve to get anything additional in writing, too stupid to ask for more even after the 1% commission I realized I was earning at the superstore.

Out of nostalgia I went by the store that next summer to see the big screen televisions now blaring country music, the fluorescent lights beaming down as the jumbo televisions showcased the Werecat television series spin-off of the Indomitables. I don’t think I wanted to run into anyone I knew, just to walk the antiseptic, ordered aisles of the superstore, where I’d spent an aimless summer a year ago trying to sell phones. It was nice to see Werecat on the screen, how far the both of us had come in the past year.

I ran into Walter. He was wearing a uniform rather than plainclothes. The button-up shirt was too large on him, the ironed-on patch of security folded along the shirt’s fold crease. It made him look like a poorly-cast police officer on a TV movie, someone in the background for a few frames.

He’d heard from Logan that I’d been fired for stealing from another big box store.

I was confused. “No,” I said, “just got another job.”

Walter pursed his lips. “Figures,” he said. “Logan kinda turned out to be unreliable anyway.”

Walter told me Logan joined the Theft Prevention team, as a uniform who stood by the front door and checked people’s receipts against their items. He’d done okay, until he got into it with a shoplifter. This kid who’d taken an apple from produce, took a bite out of it, and put it back.

Walter rubbed a scuff mark from the tile with the toe of his work boot.

“Logan busted his nose and his eye. Concussion, is what someone said. I heard brain damage but,” Walter said, trailing off. “You know how people exaggerate here. Lucky, I guess. This place coulda been sued.”

“So he’s not a cop now?” I asked.

“No man, didn’t you hear? He’s dead.”

A cold spike stabbed into my neck, an electric jolt. “What?”

Walter talked like giving the plot of a movie. “Yea, I guess that kid had an older brother. Not like a criminal or anything, I guess. Just mad. He confronted Logan outside the superstore one night. Out in the parking lot. They fought. Kid had a knife. Stabbed Logan in the stomach. Crazy.”

I had nothing to add. “Crazy.”

I tried to imagine it as it happened, walking an aisle of discounted Werecat DVDs, all showing the cowled protagonist against a cloudy background with flying debris, sparks in the air in front of them but never seeming to hit. Werecat’s movie had been a bomb, and I had a feeling the series would be, too. Too complicated. The last monster the Indomitables fought was some great purple space dictator with a ridiculous premise. The darker tone might have been of the moment, in the 2000’s, but it seemed to be too much for people. Too much and too close.

It must have been dark, the parking lot. Lit only by the ticking sodium lights buzzing above them. Logan hustling to his car, hands deep in his pockets, no doubt glancing around the parking lot in that practiced way, holding his keys, in that way he said he could use them as a weapon. Where was his karambit knife, or those years of ju-jitsu he’d always wanted to test out on me? In my imagination, he’s shocked as it happens. He doesn’t say anything. No time to front. There’s no artistry to it, no climax. Just a sharp pain in his stomach, then a warm wetness underneath him as he falls.

I didn’t buy anything. I left Walter in the aisle of the superstore, still scanning back and forth up each of the aisles, watching over the shoppers with a practiced vigilance. There wasn’t a story that I hadn’t already seen in any of these aisles.