Mongrels Read online

  “Of course what?” the mechanic says, in spite of himself.

  “He wants to steal it on the way out,” the uncle says, whispering it true. “After he’s got his coffee.”

  The trucker peels his sunglasses off once he’s stepped all the way inside. Then he ducks down the hall leading back to the pay showers.

  “Just wait,” the uncle says, his eyes twin slits.

  The shirt he’s wearing is a defect. It’s supposed to say BARWOLF. What it says, what the mechanic’s aunt just shakes her head about, is BRAWOLF. There are either wolf or shark teeth circling the words.

  Probably wolf.

  The mechanic’s shirt is the ones they were handing out at school. His school is the Lobos. At the pep rallies everybody howls at the moon.

  This is Alabama. It smells like old water, so everybody smokes cigarettes all the time.

  “She watching?” the uncle asks the mechanic, about the waitress.

  The mechanic shakes his head once, no.

  The uncle nods and, without quite looking down, pours the rest of his strawberry wine cooler into the water cup he drank empty in one gulp.

  “Oh, oh,” the uncle says then, about the parking lot again, but it’s just another trucker walking past. “Close one,” the uncle says.

  The mechanic spoons another bite in.

  He’s pretty sure that, because his uncle only sees him every other week or so, that he thinks the mechanic’s only growing up half as much as he really is.

  “You know why we both like that new grab bar better than that old rusted one?” the uncle asks then.

  The mechanic looks up with just his eyes.

  Usually his uncle figures some way to steal back the ice cream he buys.

  “Because we’re werewolves,” the uncle says, leaning forward to keep it quiet. “In the old days,” the uncle says, his hands flat on the table under his chin, “in the old days—you know about silver, right?”

  When the mechanic doesn’t answer, the uncle threads his thermometer out from behind his ear. It’s what he’s training himself to chew on this month, instead of toothpicks. Because the wet splinters he spits out, somebody with the right nose could track him by that. And the thermometer, it reminds him not to bite too hard. To always be careful. To be—a word he stole from a karate movie—mindful.

  It also let him discover he always had a fever. So did the aunt, after the uncle cleaned the thermometer in the sink and let it cool back down to normal.

  The mechanic doesn’t have a fever.

  He’s just supposed to wait, though. Here in a few years he’ll run hot like a real werewolf. That he doesn’t now, already—that’s how werewolves hide themselves from school nurses, right?

  It makes sense, sort of.

  “Silver’s kryptonite,” the mechanic finally says, about the mercury in the glass of the thermometer.

  The uncle nods, reaches across to dip it into the mechanic’s ice cream, taking a whole big chunk. He slips it into his mouth.

  “Used to,” he says once he’s swallowed the ice cream down, “like, back in the old days when everybody said ‘ye’ and ‘thee’ and you weren’t born, you were begot, back then nobody wanted werewolves to come to dinner anymore.”

  The mechanic pulls his bowl a little closer to his side of the table.

  “They didn’t want us coming to dinner because we ate everything,” the uncle says. “The goose, the duck, the old-timey hamburgers from when they hadn’t invented ketchup yet so everybody had to make a face like this when they ate them. And then we’d just leave, our bellies full. Back then we didn’t even have to hunt. We’d just go from house to house and ask what was for dinner, and the rule was, if you were hungry, they had to feed you. Villagers were all polite like that. But they were running out of food. They were starving.”

  “Did they have hot dogs?”

  “They had woolly-mammoth hot dogs.”

  The mechanic can’t help smiling.

  His uncle nods, says, “But it was good, what finally happened. We were forgetting how to hunt. How to smell and listen and see. We didn’t have to chase our food anymore. We just waited for it to come out from the kitchen.”

  The mechanic looks down at his ice cream. It came from the kitchen too.

  “Well, what the people with the houses finally did, it was they started laying out the fine forks and knives and spoons. The silver ones. So every time we would reach down for the soup spoon, or for the knife to cut a slice of ham, it would burn us. And if we touched it to our mouths, it would burn our lips. Pretty soon we quit going from door to door.”

  “What happened?” the mechanic asks.

  “A lot of werewolves starved. But the ones that didn’t, well, that’s where we come from. And that’s why we like shiny things. They make us think of all-you-can-eat.”

  The mechanic’s uncle drains his cup of strawberry wine cooler, like to prove what he’d just said. And then he steals the mechanic’s bowl, slurps up the melted last bit of ice cream.

  “Let’s go before somebody nabs it,” he says then, tipping his head out to the grab bar, and they’re almost to the front door when the first trucker, the one with the dirty hat, is stepping out of the bathroom.

  “Hurry,” the mechanic’s uncle says, looking back to that trucker, trying not to laugh, and the mechanic plays along, runs with him. It’s better than getting left behind.

  “Ah, still there,” the uncle says, jumping up onto the running board of his rig with one boot, grabbing on to the shiny bar. Then, to show how tight those four bolts are, to show how good of a job the mechanic’s done, he pulls and yanks and jerks, finally planting his feet up on the side of the cab like a cartoon, the nails in one of his boots gouging into the red paint.

  The grab bar doesn’t come off.

  And the trucker with the dirty cap, he’s standing there now, watching the mechanic’s uncle. “I’d save my energy, I was you,” he says, working a wad of chew into his mouth, lots of the grains and strings falling down.

  The uncle, still holding on, looks down, then makes sure where the mechanic is.

  “You might have to push-start this one, I mean,” the trucker says, cocking his boot up onto the bumper hard enough that some of the flakes of rust come off.

  “Get in the truck,” the uncle says to the mechanic, coming back down to the running board with one boot, his right hand still grabbing the chrome bar, like for strength.

  “Bra Wolf?” the other trucker says, leaning forward to spit a brown stream onto the shallow tread of the uncle’s front tire.

  “In, now,” the uncle says again, playtime over, and the mechanic does, and the last thing he sees before his uncle lowers himself from even with the window on that side, it’s that his uncle’s bitten through the thermometer, so that the silver is running down his chin with the blood, and the mechanic closes his eyes, knows that the people still don’t want werewolves coming to dinner.

  But they are anyway, he says to himself, to help his uncle.

  And they’re hungrier than ever.

  CHAPTER 11

  Bark at the Moon

  We didn’t know how she kept finding us.

  Libby called her Darren’s secret admirer.

  That was fine with Darren.

  The love letters he sent her were sparkly. They were colorful.

  It was all a big joke.

  We were in South Carolina for the first time. Darren was driving back and forth from Tulsa, just delivering civilian goods for once—“mall runs,” he called them. Pallets of sweatshirts, boxes of mixed electronics, seasonal decorations. He’d had to get a Social Security number, even. It had somebody else’s name on it, but still, he was paying taxes. Because he wasn’t married, didn’t have kids, could work the holidays the other truckers shied away from, the company wanted him to stick around, maybe make a career of it. They leased him a shiny Peterbilt and gave him all the caps he could wear.

  Darren played along. Even werewolves know a good gig w
hen they’ve got it—Libby too. She was working the register at a lube place. It was out on the interstate. Some of the bays were caverns, for the big trucks to rumble through at all hours. The pits under the bays seemed to go for miles. Because truckers are around the clock, the lube place was too.

  Like Darren, Libby pulled the night shift, when the rest of the crew wanted to be home.

  This left me at our trailer alone most of the time.

  I was going to school some—tenth grade still—but now it was just a place to walk through, a way to keep from turning a wrench in a dingy shop. I didn’t have anything against the pep rallies, and the cafeteria food was like a dream that happened on a schedule, but I knew not to let myself get too attached. I didn’t want to get in another Georgia situation. Another Brittany situation. Or maybe she really was Layla now. C’s were easy enough to pull in South Carolina, anyway. They didn’t attract attention. They worked for metal shop, for social studies, for history.

  Mr. Brennan wouldn’t let me slide in English, though. He said he didn’t want me to fall through. That I had something the other kids didn’t.

  A werewolf gene, yeah.

  I didn’t say it out loud.

  English was fourth period.

  To be safe, I would skip it and fifth together.

  Sorry, Mr. Brennan.

  It worked out for the best, though. Because I didn’t have essays to write each night, I could walk out through the pastures and the trees, my hands open, the seed heads of the grass scraping my palms. And because I was out there, I was the first one to see her this time. Darren’s secret admirer.

  She was driving a different RV, but it was definitely her. Who else would be out picking through the grass with a flashlight, her belt clinking with mason jars, her fingers long and chrome?

  Not forceps, quite. They were closer to tongs, but sturdier and more delicate at the same time.

  She moved like a water bird in the shallows, hunting frogs, and she moved so slow you could zone out, watching her, so that soon she would be walking through a dream you were having with your eyes open.

  It didn’t help that her hair was always pulled back in this frizzy French braid. When she pooled her flashlight in the jars so she could better see a specimen, the light would wash back up into her face and her hair would become this halo. It made her look like an angel, or an alien.

  Because she was always staring into the grass, she didn’t even see the silhouette of me standing there, frozen with terror.

  The last time she’d found us had been Texas.

  I was about fifth grade, I guess. It had taken us one long drive to get from Arkansas to Florida after Grandpa died, but it had taken us three years to make it back even that far. “Riding the yo-yo,” Darren called it, talking about how all we did was swing back and forth from the East Coast to Texas or New Mexico then back again, trying to stay ahead of the cold. Trying to hide our footprints.

  Libby said it was more like riding the pendulum in a clock, one that was ticking our lives away, one that was counting us down.

  Clocks and yo-yos weren’t the real reason we were in Texas, though. We were in Texas because Texas touched Arkansas. Wherever we found ourselves, whatever state we were in, Arkansas was the direction Libby would always be looking when she thought nobody was watching.

  Red was still there, or he might be.

  Even the chance was enough for her.

  Darren would just thin his lips, shake his head, even when Libby told him that someday he’d get it.

  “What, love?” Darren would say, lowering into his boxer stance, ducking and weaving like bring it.

  “Dad never planned on getting hitched either,” Libby would say on her way out of whatever room this was happening in, and that was that.

  The secret admirer wasn’t why we left Texas that time, though. We’d left Texas because I’d burned our trailer to the ground. But according to Darren, we’d been going to split out of there anyway. It was because, a couple of weeks before the fire, a clerk at a grocery store had asked Darren if he wanted any strawberry wine coolers to go with that can of store-brand chili. Instead of looking up to this clerk, Darren had looked out the front window to me, waiting in our rusted-up GTO that didn’t have any get-up-and-go. My forearms were scraped red from forcing my hands between the seats, for the money for that can of chili.

  What Darren was doing at that register, he told me afterward, was measuring paces. Timing things out, just like Libby had been saying all along.

  That the grocery-store clerk knew about his taste for strawberry wine coolers could only mean that clerk was a former liquor-store clerk—one of those liquor stores that back up to a creek or a bluff or a pasture, some terrain no stickup artist could possibly escape into. Not on two legs. Darren had probably robbed him at some point. And now he’d migrated down to Texas.

  “Wine coolers?” Darren said across the register. “You calling me a woman?”

  The clerk didn’t even blink, didn’t look away.

  “Not a woman, no,” the clerk said at last, and dropped the change into the drawer, pushed it shut. “Anything else, sir?”

  Which was when Darren said he decided we’d outstayed our welcome in Texas.

  One thing we didn’t need was our GTO’s description on the radio, or smokeys in the air, bubble lights in the rearview. I mean, we’re werewolves, being hunted’s part of it. But no need to stand up and wave to the hunters.

  But this secret admirer, the way she hunted us, it was different.

  She didn’t carry a gun, for one, just a canister of what Darren said was pepper spray. It made him curl his lip away from his teeth when he said it. I didn’t ask.

  For two, she was off in a way that didn’t track. Like, she didn’t fit the mold we all had in our heads, of somebody with an assortment of boot knives, somebody who chews on blue-tipped matches in a very methodical way, and threads them from their lips every little bit, like to study the square wood shaft, see if this match is going to be different than every other match in the box. In Georgia, where Libby had been sweeping and mopping an office building in the daytime for once, the secret admirer had come in to the records department. In the lobby she’d eaten three pieces of butterscotch candy and drank half a cup of coffee. Instead of just leaving the wrappers where the doors had blown them, behind her padded bench, she got down on her knees to fish them out, deposit them in the trash.

  Werewolves notice this type of behavior.

  It made the secret admirer a mystery.

  To solve it, and because he had time then, had still been healing from a dustup with Red, Darren drifted out into the night to spy, under strict orders from Libby to leave the woman be. To be sure of it, she came home with a side of clearanced brisket, left it raw on the propane tank behind the trailer. Wolfed out, Darren couldn’t resist a feast like this, right in his path. It kept the edge off his hunger like Libby wanted, let him remember what he’d promised.

  One thing about werewolves that none of the movies ever get into, it’s that their intestinal tract is more canine than human. Humans’ intestines go back and forth like a sack of snakes, so they can wring every last bit of nutrition from their precious grains and vegetables. Meat doesn’t take nearly as long to process. With a wolf or a dog, a meal can pass through them in eight or nine hours.

  Werewolves, we burn faster. That trick about the bladder shrinking when you wolf out? It’s to make room for the stomach, I think. Darren said he ate a whole just-born lamb once—though Libby told me later he’d had to dig that lamb from the momma sheep’s belly. So it might not have been quite full size. She never would tell me the most she’d ate at once, said it wasn’t ladylike, but she would say she’d seen Grandpa splash out into a pond after a swan once, a big white bull swan like swoop through once in a decade, and there hadn’t been anything left afterward but feathers, floating above the pond like a pillow fight.

  If you don’t push a meal that size through quick, then you might get caught in
the morning with a ruptured gut.

  Which is to say, Darren’s brisket, it cooked out of him in about four hours that night, while he was ghosting around upwind of the woman with the French braid, to see if she could catch his scent or not.

  When Darren came back, he told us he figured she was pushing forty with a pretty big stick, had been blond at one point, didn’t grow her nails long—nails were always the first thing Darren noticed—and, for the first couple of hours watching her, he was pretty sure she was the worst firefly hunter ever. Instead of going where the fireflies were, she was looking down in all the tall grass. Like maybe that’s where firefly nits hang out? Is a baby firefly a glowworm?

  Neither Libby nor me had any kind of clue.

  Just because you’re in nature doesn’t mean you know the encyclopedia of it.

  “She married?” Libby asked, and Darren had to turn his head to the side, to track up from the memory of the secret admirer’s fingernails.

  She did have a ring on, yes. On her wedding finger. Darren rubbed his own to show.

  “But she’s alone,” I said, because I was the one who’d seen the RV first, through the trees, when I was running away.

  That was the time Libby’d ghosted me, I think. Probably because the RV was lurking around.

  All we wanted was for her to make sense.

  We’d have been more comfortable with some scarred-up soldier of fortune on a rattletrap Harley, probably. You know to run, then. You know not to just keep watching through the trees.

  Werewolves aren’t related to raccoons, I don’t think, but when I saw the RV that first time, my light blue backpack hooked over my shoulder, there’d been a raccoon out there with me, watching the RV as well. Casing it like they do.

  I hissed at it to split, and it hissed back.

  Just wait, I’d told it in my head.

  Darren’s story a few nights later didn’t have any raccoons in it. In typical werewolf fashion, his real discovery was last, and kind of loud-whispered, for dramatic effect, his eyes bugging out as much as he could. And he only leaned forward to deliver it after we’d gone around and around the house with him, looking over his shoulder while she inspected this tree, while she drank from that thermos. With him, we watched her look at the sky, even. Like for the mothership. For giant bats blotting out the moon.