Mongrels Read online

  “And?” Libby prompted, because her shift was about to start.

  Darren smiled.

  “Then I had to, you know,” he said, “off-load some of that brisket.”

  Libby sat back into the couch shaking her head, disgusted with herself for having trusted him again.

  He wasn’t done, though.

  In two hours, the secret admirer’s careful grid delivered her to that pile.

  Usually, werewolf scat will be roped with grey hair, from whatever we’ve run down. The stomach acid bleaches all the hair grey, doesn’t matter if it was brown or black or red going in. Tonight the prey had been hairless, though. Cut meat from the grocery store, the fat even trimmed off.

  The woman fell to her knees. When she lifted her hand, her chrome tongs, they were shaking.

  “No,” Libby said.

  Yes, Darren nodded. Yes all the way.

  She was a scat collector, like the people who hoard owl pellets, just to dissect them later.

  Just, she was after bigger game, as it were.

  It was why, when Darren came back from his next Tulsa run and had a night off for once, instead of the two of us watching monster movies Libby wouldn’t approve of, he fired up his Peterbilt and took us to the dollar store.

  Back by party supplies, we found the glitter and the tinsel and the confetti.

  Because he was flush from a run, we bought it all.

  It was the best joke ever.

  That night while Jeopardy! was playing and Darren was yelling true answers—no, yelling his answers true—I stood at the counter in the kitchen and massaged all the shiny bits into whatever random meat we’d had in the refrigerator. Other families, I’ve heard they keep their steaks in the freezer.

  Not werewolves.

  We might buy more than we can eat if it’s on the day-old rack and we’ve got the cash, but when we want it, we want it now, not after stupid defrosting.

  “I don’t want to see it,” Darren said when I was done, had the sparkly meat all laid out on the counter like a constellation. He blocked the side of his face so none of the light would twinkle his direction.

  I’d seen him bite the heads off squealing prairie dogs, I’d seen him lower his face into day-old roadkill on a dare, but the idea of eating glitter made him cough and gag.

  At least when he was standing on two feet.

  I took the steaks and ground beef outside, sat it all on top of the barbecue grill concreted into an old tire. The grill was too rusted to cook on, but the big dome of a top was the perfect height for Darren to reach—in about an hour.

  “You’ll be good?” he said after the second Jeopardy!, arcing a loud line of pee out the back door. “Do your homework, all that?”

  “Already done,” I told him.

  “Not going to go out to the highway, hitchhike into town?”

  I shook my head no, obviously.

  It was a play we were both acting in. He was being the responsible adult, I was being the diligent student. It let us feel less like we were lying to Libby, when she’d ask later.

  “Well then,” Darren said, hauling his shirt over his head, leaving his hair a mess. “Time to leave a sweet nothing for my lady, I guess.” He wowed his eyes out and it would have been a classic moment, except his nose started bleeding. It happens some of the time, with transformations you flex like a muscle, that you have to think about it. It’s like something in the nasal cavity jumps the gun, goes out of order. When you’re shifting from instinct, there’s never a nosebleed. The wolf comes like clockwork, then.

  I was keeping track of every bit of this.

  “Any the hell way,” Darren said, looking at the nose blood he’d just rubbed onto his forearm, and, just to gross me out, he licked the flat of his tongue along all of it, keeping me in his stare the whole time, daring me not to watch. And then he stepped down from the trailer, into another body.

  When I looked out the window like I still couldn’t keep from doing, he’d already slurped the shiny meat from the grill, was running off into the night with it flapping from either side of his muzzle.

  Early next week, our biology teacher, the one who made us call her “Daisy” instead of Ms. or Mrs., she brought in another special guest.

  So far we’d had the director of the wild bird refuge, we’d had a forensic specialist because Daisy’s brother was a state trooper—he’d talked about decay and insects—and we’d had a chemist from the local seed company who never once looked up from her prepared paper.

  This time, it was a scat collector. This time, it was the secret admirer.

  As it turned out, she was a wildlife biologist.

  I looked over to the door, waiting for her to fill it. At one time, that’s what I’d thought I could be, a wildlife biologist. That it would be perfect, that I’d always have an excuse for running around in the woods. That I could take better and closer pictures than all the other wildlife biologists. That I could secretly use my nose to find the animals.

  I was going to be a star.

  It never involved using a probe to dissect my uncle’s glitter-flecked crap.

  My uncle’s secret admirer made us all take a turn.

  “Is the tinsel for—for instructional purposes?” Daisy asked, holding her hand up like the most polite periscope.

  If she didn’t always wear a lab coat, I’d have thought she was just a senior.

  I didn’t look up for the answer, but listened with every part of my body. It’s a special ability known only to werewolves and fourteen-year-olds.

  “I think the creator of this specimen has learned to pick through human litter,” the secret admirer said. “Like a bear at a national park. Like the monkeys in Costa Rica or Bangladesh. Like—”

  “—like somebody had a party,” Daisy said, hopefully. Cheerfully.

  “Somebody’s always having a party,” the secret admirer said. “This isn’t the first time I’ve encountered this particular animal’s scat.”

  “What is it?” a student asked.

  “Good question,” the secret admirer said, and cued up the slide show she’d had locked and loaded, just to answer this specific question. It was a version of the children’s book I’d seen in a hundred truck stops: Who Pooped in the Park?

  Going by size, the secret admirer estimated this particular animal weighed about a hundred and seventy pounds.

  The correct answer: “Who is Darren?”

  The movies always make werewolves so much bigger than their human versions. It’s all bullshit. Conservation of mass. If anything, after shifting you’re a few ounces lighter, taking into account all the calories you just had to burn through. All the saliva you’re now stringing down to the ground.

  “A bear, right?” that same student said, a measure of disgust working its way into his voice.

  “The diameter is about right, yes,” the secret admirer said. “But”—click: next slide—“I’ve encountered this scat across three states, now. Bears are much more territorial. They find a place they like, they stay there.”

  “Panther?” Daisy said then, her smile becoming less sincere somehow, probably because she wanted her students to be right, not stupid. At least not for special guests.

  “Again, right size,” the secret admirer said, tapping her pencil against her chin. “But, and I’ve been doing this for quite some time now, cougar or mountain lion scat is notoriously difficult to find.”

  “Because they’re a cat,” a different student said.

  “Exactly,” the secret admirer said, pointing her pencil at that student like a magic wand. One that made her right. “They bury it, and it’s gone before I can dig it up. But . . . how many of you have dogs?”

  “It never goes away,” one of the football players said in the most dejected tone possible, and everybody laughed like they were supposed to.

  “Correct,” the secret admirer said. “Dogs are, shall we say, more proud of their scat?”

  “So this is a dog?” the football player asked.
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  It made the part of the class bunched around the specimen give it more room.

  This wasn’t exotic, this was just like all of their backyards. Eww.

  “Dogs are travelers,” the secret admirer said. “And they do sometimes attain this size. But I’m looking for a different answer, from . . .”

  Me.

  Her pencil had singled me out. Not because of my blood, I didn’t think, and not because she knew my silhouette, but because I was the quiet one. I was the one she could save, the one she could transform into a hero, right here in front of everybody.

  I looked up, caught in the headlights.

  “Mr. Tolbert?” Daisy said.

  We called her by her first name, she called us by our last. I never understood.

  I swallowed, was sure it was a tidal wave everyone heard.

  “What’s bigger than a dog, and might range across three—is it three?—states?” Daisy said, waiting for me to finally speak my first word aloud in her class.

  “Wolf?” I had to say.

  “Exactly what I would have said,” the secret admirer said, and I somehow even heard it above the pounding of my heart. “Except that, when I do the hematrace on it—have you done ABA cards with them yet?” she said to Daisy.

  “Umm . . . not yet,” Daisy said.

  “But you did have a forensic tech in to speak to them?”

  “Was it a wolf?” a football player asked.

  “According to visual identification,” the secret admirer said, “yes, a very, very large canid. But the hematrace disagrees, and ABA cards aren’t fooled by visual similarities. They will occasionally get false positives, but only in the case of higher apes. And ferrets.”

  “Was it a ferret, then?” Daisy asked hopefully.

  “Or a hyena?” the football player asked.

  “False positives with what?” one of the science stars said, just thinking out loud, it seemed.

  “Exactly,” the secret admirer said. Then, to all: “Any guesses?”

  Daisy smiled around to all of us, waiting for one of us to be smart, to prove she was a good teacher.

  She’s still waiting.

  “Human,” the secret admirer said, a thrill in her eyes.

  The cheerleader currently operating the probe let it clatter to the specimen tray in what felt like slow motion, like this probe was teasing apart the life she’d been living from the life she would now have to endure, and then she turned around and calmly threw up into her hands, tried to carry her thin vomit to one of the sinks stationed between the lab tables.

  Through the laughing, coughing, gagging mob of sophomore and juniors that swelled out from her efforts, Daisy squealing above the din, what I remember best is the secret admirer sitting prim and proper on her stool, her hands crossed over one another in her lap. She was looking calmly through all the student bodies. She was looking right at me.

  I should have smiled, or made myself gag. I should have pretended to be what I wasn’t. It’s Basic Werewolf 101.

  Instead, I couldn’t look away from that silver tinsel, woven through the specimen. Tinsel I’d put there. Tinsel the secret admirer could find on the shelf at the dollar store if she wanted. It was four packs for a buck.

  It was just a joke.

  One I couldn’t smile about anymore.

  That night I broke into the secret admirer’s RV. It was parked right there in the high school parking lot.

  Werewolves are good with locks, good with windows.

  I pulled the flimsy door shut behind me and stood there, waiting for my eyes to adjust.

  If the windows on one side suddenly glowed with headlights, I was sure I would finally shift. That I would claw my way up through a panel in the ceiling and launch off the top of the RV, fly over the car, land perfect on all fours, look back to her just long enough that she could know she was right, that the wildlife biology she’d learned at college had been incomplete, that she could have learned more in folklore.

  If I didn’t shift, I’d be expelled. Simple as that. No more cafeteria lunches. No more pep rallies. No more surprise guests.

  But that would be okay too.

  We’d already been in one place for eight months. It was the new record. Darren was paying his truck down, Libby’d got two raises and earned some vacation time she had no idea how to use—you don’t go on vacation from being a werewolf—and I had three report cards stuck to the refrigerator.

  In werewolf families, report cards aren’t on the refrigerator because of the good grade you got. The report card is the A.

  When my eyes wouldn’t adjust enough, I risked it all, flipped the light on.

  It was a kitchen and a bedroom and a laboratory and a shrine and a cab and a living room all at once.

  I studied the lab first.

  One whole cabinet was just mason jars, bungee-corded to the back of the cabinet that was a pegboard.

  One row of jars was all love letters from Darren. Six of them, maybe. This was the shrine.

  The RV’s stiff leaf springs had shaken the glitter from some of the drier ones, so that it had settled at the bottom of the jar like fairy dust.

  Darren’s idea was always that she would think it was unicorn shit.

  I’d seen her find it once or twice, even. The glitter pulled her light toward it.

  I didn’t know if this was funny or sad, now.

  I knew what I was supposed to do, what Libby had always told me to do: Destroy all evidence. Shatter the jars, or carry them out armful by armful, drop them in a ditch.

  I had a shoe box of important stuff too, though. Of secrets and dreams. Of unicorn shit.

  Libby would have done it herself, I knew—burned this place down, or had Darren do it—except we thought the secret admirer was burying everything she found, that she was hiding the evidence for us.

  It was what made her a freak, what made it all so funny.

  In Texas that time, we’d followed her in the car once, at night. Her RV was a carnival of lights.

  Where she was taking it was cemeteries. She’d walk in with a jar and a trowel, and walk out with just the trowel.

  “I never knew I was that special,” Darren had said.

  That was when he started eating the glitter, the tinsel, the confetti. You realize you’re onstage, you dress things up.

  But now I knew what she was doing. What she thought she was doing.

  She was burying the dead.

  She knew what wolf scat looked like, and she knew how to read “human” from lab results. She knew what had been digested. What could have been digested.

  A time or two, she might have even been right.

  I reached out for a jar, to do what I was supposed to, but stopped, lifted my nose to the air like was natural now. Not that I could smell any better, really. But . . . the bedroom.

  It felt wrong, like a violation, like real and meaningful breaking and entering, but I stepped in all the same.

  It smelled like eye crust, like a thousand nights of sleep.

  Once I was all the way through the short door, I looked behind me, at the wall. At what she had on the wall to go to sleep to.

  It was all newspaper clippings.

  There was an angel out there on the interstates of the South. Someone, a trucker probably, secretly taking care of the dead animals on the roads. Not the deer and alligators or the bears and armadillos and rabbits, but the dogs, the coyotes.

  A real Wolf Man in the Sky.

  It made me remember Darren from years ago, acting the toreador in the living room one night. In his story, the trucks were his bulls. And it was his job to stand out there with the smushed animals, balance sideways on the white stripes so the big trucks could sweep past, inches from the tip of his nose.

  Between headlights he would drag the dead over to the ditch.

  Used to, apparently, that had been part of the state troopers’ duties, to scoop dogs and coyotes into the ditch.

  Now the Angel of I-20 was doing that for them.
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br />   I wanted this Angel to be the secret admirer, taking samples, doing whatever an “ABA card” was to them, jigsawing skeletons back together, doing what she considered science, but then I saw it as she had to be seeing it—as she had to be associating it.

  Was there usually less roadkill on the interstate right around wherever she was finding the unicorn shit again?

  That was how she kept finding us, state after state. Because Darren always climbed down from the cab, to see if this was anybody he knew, splatted across the road. All she had to do was drive and drive until the roadkill thinned out, and then start walking through the tall grass, wait for her flashlight to sparkle something up.

  Shit.

  I turned away from the wall, to the bed. To her nightstand.

  Screwed down by the lamp was a metal-framed photograph from years ago, the glare from the RV’s weak overhead light washing it into a negative of itself: somebody in a driveway, like a thousand family snapshots I’d seen in RVs all across the South. Because it’s never the department-store portraits that really capture who someone was. It’s that time you caught him smiling just right over by the fence. That perfect slice of an afternoon that now has to stand in for a whole life.

  Meaning whoever this was in the photograph the secret admirer had been carrying across so many states, he was dead.

  I looked closer, made to pull the frame up to me but, when it wouldn’t budge, when it was screwed down against all the bumps and potholes the RV would hit, I had to reorient myself to it.

  At first I thought it was Daisy’s brother, the one who’d come in to talk to us, who’d never taken his chrome sunglasses off, like it was important we all think he was a robot, that he had no feelings.

  Except this state trooper, he was from the decade before Daisy’s brother. His cruiser gave it away. It was a black-and-white Matador, the front wheels cocked over to show the right amount of attitude. No hubcaps because a high-speed chase could happen at any moment.

  This photograph was day one on the job, then. It had to be. Look, Ma, I made it. Shined shoes and a burr cut, a mouth a little too cool to grin but about to anyway. Eyes like mirrors.