Mongrels Read online

  CHAPTER 13

  Sad Eyes

  If Arkansas is heaven for werewolves, then North Carolina, that’s our hell.

  It was for us, anyway.

  Every quarter mile or so, Libby would slam the heel of her hand into the top of the steering wheel and try to push the gas pedal of our Impala even deeper.

  Her hair was everywhere.

  If we went any faster, we were going to outrun our headlights.

  If we went any slower, Darren was going to be dead.

  I rolled my window up so the Impala could be more of a bullet. In the new quiet, Libby looked over to the dingy mirror on my side, her hair floating but still now, like she was falling, and in that moment, the way she was holding her face, her eyebrows, the way her eyes were set, I could see her at ten years old, looking across Grandpa’s kitchen, watching her brother’s muzzle push out through his mouth, and feeling her tongue swelling against her teeth in response.

  Until that moment, had she thought she might slip through? Be like her sister, get to have a normal life in town? Never mind that Grandpa had told her what she was.

  When you’re a kid, facts don’t matter. It’s how hard you believe. How much you wish.

  For Darren, shifting that first time, it was the dream coming true.

  For Libby it was the nightmare, starting.

  And she had to see it happen to her brother first.

  Had my mom really held them back with a broom all night, before Grandpa got home, or—or had Libby shifted to protect her, to at least let one of them get the dream?

  I didn’t have to ask. I knew each time she looked at me.

  She’d stepped into the nightmare to keep her sister out of it.

  For fifteen years now I’d been pretending Libby was my mom, because they were mirror images. I think she’d been pretending too, though. She’d been planning on watching my mom grow up normal. She’d been counting on it.

  And, if not her, me.

  And all I wanted was to betray her. To be like Darren, miles behind us already. In jail. Not for the strawberry wine coolers he was always pinging mile markers with either.

  For graverobbing.

  For cannibalism. According to Grandpa, Darren and Libby and the rest of the werewolves of their generation, they’d all been born too late.

  They’d missed what he called the grave-y days.

  Later Darren told me the old man was just trying to gross me out, to scare me, to make me into some boy version of a Red Riding Hood, nervous about stepping from the safety of the path.

  He was probably right.

  But still.

  Grandpa was a hunter, definitely, could run down anything bold enough to stand up out there in the woods, run it down and hamstring it, tear its throat out, bathe in its blood.

  That was the Grandpa I believed in.

  There was another version, though.

  There was the Grandpa who had every farmer for five counties lobbing buckshot at shapes in the night. There was the Grandpa driven farther and farther back from the world of people. There was the Grandpa who knew what proper revenge tasted like.

  When he’d been a young wolf, burial practices were different.

  People in Darren and Libby’s generation, and mine, they get all their blood drained after they’re dead, then get filled back up with the medical version of antifreeze, their lips and eyes glued shut, their fingernails painted, makeup brushed onto their faces, their new perm hairsprayed so hard it’s like a helmet against the worms.

  Not that the worms can even get that close anymore.

  After the airtight casket’s bolted shut, it’s lowered into a concrete box.

  Dig one of these corpses up ten or twenty years later, and it’ll look just the same. Unless you touch it, need to see the jelly your mom or your brother’s become.

  It wasn’t always like this, though.

  Used to, when people were just buried in pine boxes or bags, or just their clothes, used to when they were delivered into the ground as soon as possible, well.

  Werewolves aren’t proud.

  If we were, we’d have died out centuries ago.

  Grandpa’s story—he never could have told me if Libby hadn’t been at work that day, sewing bags of seed shut—it was that he went to church on a particular Sunday, like a good little worshiper, and he even touched the silver of the offering plate when it came around, like that was a test the congregation was waiting for him to fail.

  When everybody else filed out for Sunday picnics, though, he took a different hall, then a narrow stairway up to what he called the sinner’s roost. For two days he hid in the attic with all the hymnals that had been decommissioned, from some talented individual drawing naked people in the margins.

  Grandpa read the words, hummed the songs to himself, and shaded the pictures in where he could, giving the naked people pointy ears and sharp teeth.

  In the living room in the glow of his old man’s fire he’d crooked his fingers on top of his head to show what he meant, and raised his lips away from his yellowy teeth.

  Darren was leaned against the doorway to the kitchen, listening.

  He’d heard it before, he had to have, so maybe now he was just seeing how many times Grandpa was going to take me around the house.

  Finally we got to the funeral that had to happen in this story. Grandpa watched it through a round window up in the attic, so that everybody through the glass was stained red and blue and pale yellow, and, when they moved from ripple to ripple of the glass, it was like they were melting ahead.

  That night, the church empty, a wolf padded down the stairs, its lips drawn back from its teeth.

  Grandpa stalked down the main aisle to the altar, a steady growl in his chest.

  No Bibles caught fire, no statues bled from the eyes.

  The only reason he didn’t lift his leg at the pulpit, he said, it was that he’d just gone two days and two nights without a drink of water.

  Not that he didn’t try.

  And then—and this was the part Darren leaned forward out of the kitchen doorway to hear—Grandpa couldn’t get out of the church. Because of doorknobs.

  “Always wait until you’re outside,” he said to me, but it was Darren who nodded once, lodging this.

  Because Grandpa didn’t want to attract the kind of attention a window breaking at night would, he finally shifted back, even though it hurt five times worse to do it again so quick, before all the bones were even set. To make it worth it, he pretended the whole congregation was sitting there in the pews, watching. And then he stood, walked naked to the door, and let himself out into the cemetery, the full moon making the pale headstones glow.

  What he wanted me to remember was that it had been two days since he’d had a single bite.

  And that this was still the grave-y days. That meat’s meat.

  That, instead of standing vigil with shotguns around their chicken coops and feedlots, now the men of the county would be watching their dead.

  Darren took in every word.

  Neither of us had that story on repeat when we’d coasted over the border on fumes, though. At least I didn’t. I don’t even know for sure that Libby knew it.

  What we were thinking was had we come too far at last.

  North Carolina was a foreign country for us. It was the farthest north I’d ever been.

  I expected snow, and moose, maybe a white owl watching us with huge yellow eyes.

  What I got was sticky air and clouds of lovebugs, rusted-out trucks and run-down tourist traps at every third exit.

  “It’s all one Carolina, isn’t it?” Libby said.

  At the first truck stop Darren stood from the Impala and looked across the gas-pump islands. He drummed his hands on the roof slow, like he was thinking. Like he was considering. Like he was trying to get a feel for this state.

  The plan was to wait for a camper to pull in, for the perfect family to pile out for the bathroom, then for the dad to gas up, park the camper out in t
he long slots, with the big trucks.

  It meant they were there for the restaurant. That they were ordering from the menu. That the kitchen was going to take twenty minutes or so to get their food to them, and then there’d be another half hour of eating, of settling into a room they didn’t have to set their feet for, balance against.

  Plenty of time.

  And campers, they’re the big white eggs of the interstate—so easy to crack into. Parking them back with the big rigs might feel manly, a job well done, but all those forty-eight-foot trailers, they’re just a series of walls between the front windows of the truck stop and a certain fifteen-year-old werewolf, who maybe needs a moment or two alone with this door, with that window. And all the truckers, they’re either inside at the showers or crashed out in their sleepers, and they don’t like this camper parking in their slots anyway, are inclined to let what happens to it happen to it.

  We stepped up into that family’s life, took food, clothes, and cash. What we’d been hoping for was enough to fill the Impala with gas. We got enough for that and a motel room. And the cans of chili Darren had the belly of his shirt filled with now, it was his favorite brand.

  He dumped them casually into the floorboard behind his seat, was easing the Impala out to the pumps, skating the sole of his left boot on the slick concrete, when we all keyed on a certain Grand Marquis coming in off the road, all four heads in there turned toward a kid a few steps too many behind his mom.

  Darren identified them as werewolf before they even parked.

  It was from the heavy way that Grand Marquis sat on its springs.

  It was how sun-faded the cardboard box on the back dash was.

  It was the hungry look in their eyes.

  They didn’t see us, we were pretty sure.

  We waited to fuel up until all four of them had unfolded from the Grand Marquis, sloped inside. All women, but one of them older. Maybe a mom and her three daughters?

  Libby had her window down, to catch their scent.

  “We know them?” Darren said down to her.

  Libby shook her head no, once.

  They were the first ones like us I’d ever seen.

  That night in the motel room we knew all the answers for Wheel of Fortune. Not because we were smart. It was a rerun of a rerun of a rerun, the commercials not even at the usual places but cutting in halfway through a phrase.

  Was this punishment for pushing this far north?

  The cash left over after gas was on the dresser. Fourteen dollars, three of those dollars in change. Libby was reading the classifieds, for a job.

  “We need something faster,” Darren said. “Keep us in hot dogs and ketchup, yeah?”

  He was bouncing on the soles of his boots, was ready to explode out into the night.

  “No liquor stores,” Libby said, not looking up.

  Darren smiled, rubbed it in with the web of his left hand.

  His jawline was stubbly and grey-flecked. He hadn’t shifted for nearly a week. It was from seeing how white Brittany’s granddad had been, I was pretty sure. It had been enough months ago that he should have already forgot. But he hadn’t.

  A week’s a long time to balance up on two feet, though. And it was turning out expensive too.

  Part of the reason our gas money had barely got us here, it was that we were having to eat from drive-throughs and gas-station freezers. Because Darren wasn’t running dinner down out in the trees.

  Everything’s a trade-off when you’re a werewolf.

  It’s like the world wants us to be monsters. Like it won’t let us live the way normal citizens do.

  Darren sat down with the phone book, flipped through fast, stood with a page.

  “Laundromat,” he said, like asking Libby for permission.

  It wasn’t to run a load through—we had new clothes from that perfect camper family—it was for the bulletin boards laundromats always have. It’s where people post for somebody to move boxes, or dig a ditch. A hundred things, some of them in code, all of which Darren could say sure about, that that was his specialty, he grew up doing that, his last job, he’d been fired for doing that too well, as a matter of fact.

  He had to go tonight, though, because we’d only have the motel phone until eleven in the morning, and it would probably be a thing where he’d call, leave a message, then they’d call him back. We could do that all from a pay phone, but staking out a booth at a gas station is a good way to have conversations with police officers.

  “Go,” Libby said, shooshing Darren out.

  He didn’t need to be told twice.

  “Be good,” he said, tipping the brim of his cap in farewell, and the only reason Libby and me were free two hours later to jam the Impala back south at a rattly-loose hundred twenty miles per hour, it was that, in remembering to write the motel phone’s number on the inside of his wrist, he’d forgot to pocket the motel key.

  As far as the police knew, he was just drifting through, was alone.

  It was all we had to save him.

  That and a bear.

  We wouldn’t know the rest of the story until morning, but here’s how Darren got picked up.

  Like he’d practically promised Libby, like he knew was best, he was just walking down to where the phone book in the motel had said the first of the two all-night laundromats was. His pockets were even jingling with our quarters, in case he needed a sudden reason to be in that laundromat.

  You’ve got to think of everything when you’re a werewolf.

  At that first laundromat there was an old index card tacked up, about somebody needing their rain gutters cleaned out for a reasonable rate.

  Darren took the card.

  He was reasonable, sure. Especially if there was a ham sandwich in there somewhere.

  The second laundromat was all lawn mowers for sale and tax courses he could take and haircuts he could get. He walked his fingers from phone number to phone number, being sure, and it took long enough that a taste on the air cut through the detergent and fabric softener.

  Those other werewolves.

  They’d been here.

  Darren followed their scent to the washing machine one of them had stood at. He had his nose to the coin slot when he noticed a woman watching from her industrial dryer.

  “What soap is that?” he asked, acting like that’s what he was sniffing in.

  She turned back around, kept stuffing her bedspread into the dryer like it was a dead body she was trying to hide.

  Darren breathed in again, making sure he had this scent.

  It didn’t make sense, right?

  If you’re scamming for food, for gas—and they were werewolves—then wouldn’t bothering with a load of laundry be pretty low on the to-do list? And, if there was blood on the shirt, then washing it wasn’t going to do any good anyway.

  Darren finally stood, rattled the quarters in his pocket, then nodded to himself that it was none of his business. On the way back to the motel, though, that rain-gutter index card held in both his hands so he could be sure not to lose it, he cut across that same scent again, like a line drawn in the air.

  They’d come this way too.

  And not on two feet.

  The tang on the back of his throat, it was from them just shifting.

  They’d run right down Main Street, all four of them.

  Darren looked the way they’d gone, licked his top lip to cement the taste of their smell in his head.

  Because he didn’t want to lose it, he folded the rain-gutter index card between two bricks of the wall, and then he turned to the right, instead of following the brick road back to the motel.

  Because he was focused so hard on the scent, he didn’t see the police cruiser parked a block down, its engine off, a cigarette glowing red over the steering wheel.

  He didn’t hear its parking lights roll on, either.

  What turned out to be at the end of the road he was following was a Jewish church. No, temple. It said it right there on the sign. Maybe t
he only Jewish temple in North Carolina. The first one Darren had ever been this close to, anyway.

  He tipped his cap to it and kept walking.

  Fifty paces past it, the scent faded.

  He cut back, picked it up again. Right in front of the temple.

  Jewish werewolves?

  Could they not come here to pray in the daytime, so had to sneak in at night?

  Darren smiled where nobody could see, shrugged his shoulders like settling an argument, and leaned forward, over the holy line of the temple’s grounds.

  Maybe this was why they’d stopped to wash their clothes. They were going to church.

  It was something Darren had to see, he was pretty sure.

  Werewolves, we aren’t that religious. Religion doesn’t have a very good history with us. It tends to burn us at stakes, really.

  When it can catch us.

  Darren looked both ways like for permission, and all he saw from the direction he’d come was a pair of headlights, turning on like two eyes opening in the darkness.

  They made the decision for him.

  Rather than get caught casing a holy building at two in the morning, he slipped forward, into that temple’s bushes, and felt around the side of the building for where the other werewolves had broke in.

  As it turned out, the temple wasn’t what they were after.

  It was the fresh burial out back.

  Grandpa had been wrong. The grave-y days weren’t gone, they were just Jewish now. While everybody was prettying up their dead, making time capsules of their caskets, Jewish practice was the same as it had always been. A pine box, and don’t mess with the body, and get it in the ground fast.

  Jewish cemeteries are a werewolf buffet.

  And these other werewolves, they’d figured that out, probably watched the newsletters. It was why they’d rolled into town on this of all days.

  Of course they did laundry every chance they got, Darren figured. They smelled like the graveyard. Even after shifting and showering, that grave dust would still make its way into their denim, their flannel.

  Right now, with Darren watching, they were making a meal of a dead woman, probably died in labor from the looks of the baby blanket buried with her. All the dirt from her grave was sprayed out across the rest of the cemetery.