Mongrels Read online

  “Think I about had a job,” he said, then: “Why does it smell like bear in here?”

  “Smells like prisoner now,” I said, instead of that I loved him.

  He cocked his vanity mirror down, a move he’d practiced to perfection in dozens of cars over thousands of miles, and held my eyes with his a moment telling me I was the prisoner.

  “That doesn’t even—” Libby said, and was cut off by the lane beside us suddenly rumbling with a low and heavy Grand Marquis.

  Four faces turned slow over to our Impala, their eyes hot.

  We’d ruined their dinner. Maybe there were hardly enough dead Jews in both Carolinas to keep them in meat. Maybe they were going to get caught stealing live ones, now.

  The three girls in the backseat had their hands grabbed on to the front seat, like they were set to explode out the driver’s-side door as soon as their mom opened it. And Darren and Libby were each too wasted to fight.

  “Can we outrun them?” I said from the backseat, my skin alive in a way it never had been.

  “We’re werewolves,” Darren said, pulling the brim of his cap even lower, and Libby smoked the mismatched tires of that perfect impossible Impala and we surged forward into the night, diving for the interstate, no lid on our trunk, the temperature gauge climbing into the red like always, no seat belts across our laps, the rearview mirror crowded with certain death.

  Someday when I’m telling my grandkids about the one time we went to North Carolina, I’m going to end right there, I told myself. I’m going to end with three werewolves running hard for their homeland.

  As if there had ever been such a thing.

  CHAPTER 14

  The Werewolf of Alcatraz

  One eight-hour shift isn’t going to get her fired, the prisoner’s aunt says in the kitchen over and over. Bosses expect workers to get sick, don’t they?

  The prisoner’s uncle says this isn’t about clerking at the gas station, sister.

  They’re both walking back and forth on the crackly linoleum.

  The aunt’s plan is to drive the four hours straight east to Mississippi, to go to visiting hours in the morning, and then to drive back. And not to get fired.

  “If you even make it back,” the uncle says.

  “I can’t be this close without trying,” the aunt says.

  “You don’t owe him anything,” the uncle says. “He got what he deserved. Do you not see a pattern here? You know how moths fly into a light bulb over and over, until they die?”

  “He wasn’t like Red,” the aunt says. “He was just in the wrong place, wrong time of my life.”

  “If that’s what you call breaking your jaw.”

  “I didn’t say he was perfect,” the aunt says, and before she leaves, she kneels down and straightens the prisoner’s shirt for him.

  “Do what your uncle says,” she tells the prisoner even though he’s been eleven for two weeks, and adds, loud enough for the prisoner’s uncle to hear, “unless it’s stupid.”

  Then she kisses the prisoner on the forehead and leaves without looking back.

  “I’ll show her stupid,” the prisoner’s uncle says, lifting his pink wine cooler to toast her good-bye even though she’s already gone.

  Ten minutes later the prisoner and his uncle are walking down the road to the gas station, for what the uncle says is probably going to be the least stupid hot dog in the history of the world.

  On the way there the prisoner’s uncle smells something that makes him guide the prisoner behind him.

  They find the smell in the tall grass past the rusted fence.

  A pig.

  The uncle lowers his face to the black hole chewed in its side, blows the flies away.

  “I goddamn knew it,” the uncle says.

  “What?” the prisoner says.

  “He still wants that stupid El Camino back.”

  The prisoner doesn’t say his aunt’s ex-husband’s name aloud. But he doesn’t have to. They’re both already hearing it in every rustle of the grass, every sigh of the wind.

  “He doesn’t even need it,” the uncle says. “You don’t need El Caminos out in the trees, do you? What he really wants is her. They’re both moths.” He looks down to the prisoner, says, “You’re not a moth, are you?”

  “Werewolf,” the prisoner says.

  It’s what they always say back and forth.

  The prisoner looks to the tall grass behind him. How did his aunt’s ex know they were even in Louisiana? Is it because it touches Arkansas?

  The prisoner tries not to think of the hole chewed in the side of the pig. When he does anyway, he finds his teeth grinding together, so he can imagine what it must have been like, doing that.

  At the gas station, instead of buying a hot dog like usual, the prisoner’s uncle buys all the honey buns eight dollars can buy, not including the three in his pocket or the two down the front of his pants. Then, because the prisoner isn’t fast enough, he slings him over his shoulder, carries him back to the trailer. It makes the prisoner feel like a little kid.

  “I’m not supposed to do anything stupid,” he says.

  “She’s the one being stupid,” the uncle says, looking around for the sunglasses he wears when he drives his truck. “I told her he was here somewhere. He’s following her right now, probably, just like he followed us to Florida.”

  Then the uncle looks hard at the prisoner, spins away, walks to the other wall but’s back just as quick, looking at the prisoner again.

  “Listen,” he says. “I need you to stay here. This is too—I can’t take you. But you’ll be fine. You’ve got enough honey buns to live for a year.”

  Before he leaves he uses the screwdriver to turn the television on. He’s the only one with the right touch.

  “Cool?” he says to the prisoner, and when the prisoner nods—he is eleven—the uncle locks him in, drives away before the turbo of his truck is even ready. He’s always talking about the turbo.

  The prisoner opens the refrigerator door. Inside is the glass Gatorade bottle his uncle keeps his cold water in. The prisoner doesn’t want the bottle, he wants the metal cap. He sits on the couch with it, popping it in and out, in and out.

  He eats two of the honey buns for dinner.

  The television is still talking the whole time. The trailer came with it because the knobs were all twisted off. But then the uncle had a skinny pair of pliers made for snap rings that would reach all the way inside, turn to the one channel the antenna could pull in.

  So far all the uncle watches is commercials, because they’re great, and all the aunt watches is news about actors.

  This is different. It’s a game show, the one the prisoner’s uncle always says is too hard.

  The prisoner parks on the carpet and calls out prices anyway, just saying what everybody in the audience is already saying, and then he eats half of another honey bun, looking at the price tag first, to memorize it, and then he falls asleep watching the stripes the television goes to at night, that his uncle used to say was the flag for the land of sleep.

  It’s dark when he wakes from the door knocking. Or the door shaking. It was doing one of the two, he’s pretty sure.

  The porch creaks a few breaths later but the door doesn’t move again.

  The prisoner puts his fingers to the lock to twist it open, see the sound, but then he sits down on the couch instead. Because he’s not doing anything stupid.

  On the side of the trailer a minute or two later, metal tears like a can of ham opening.

  “The skirt,” the prisoner says, in his aunt’s voice.

  It’s always blowing in from a storm.

  There’s no storm tonight.

  Then the prisoner feels it under his feet. Something is walking under the trailer, its back brushing against the bottom of the floor like it’s trying to map the floor plan.

  No, like it’s looking for a weak point. Like it’s looking for a way in.

  The prisoner has to gulp his heartbeat down.
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br />   The pig. The pig knows they were smelling of it. Now it’s coming to smell of them. In the daytime, the prisoner knows this would be a stupid thought.

  It’s like he’s a first grader again. It’s his uncle’s fault, for leaving him alone. It’s his aunt’s fault, for going back to Mississippi.

  To show how wrong whatever’s down there is, something it does makes the television go off for a few seconds. When it comes back on, it’s not the stripes anymore, but one of the game shows.

  Does this mean it’s morning already?

  The prisoner pulls his feet up beside him then steps across from the couch to the wooden apple box his uncle says is a good enough table. The prisoner stands on it.

  Now there’s another metal-tearing sound, this one right under the living room. The prisoner flinches, almost balances off the apple box.

  “Go away,” he says out loud.

  Next, the heater vent in the floor under the big window behind the television goes up then down, like a test. Then it tumps up all at once, tips sideways onto the carpet.

  There’s just a hole in the carpet now. A black rectangle.

  A pig eye is watching him from that under-the-trailer darkness, the prisoner knows.

  “Two ninety-nine,” he calls out to the game show. Just to hear a voice.

  The price is $4.50. A woman from Minneapolis jumps up and down.

  The prisoner can smell the pig now. He can hear its hard breathing.

  On the couch with fuzz on its glaze is half the honey bun he started after dinner.

  The prisoner peels the plastic off, throws it to the hole.

  It doesn’t make it.

  The prisoner lays down, reaches ahead to push the honey bun, keeping his face as far away as possible.

  Right when it gets to the edge of the hole, a mouth racked with teeth slashes up, takes it.

  Sharp teeth. Wolf teeth. Long red hair for a moment. Beautiful red hair.

  The prisoner scuttles back to the box, stands on it with his heart beating all over his body, with his right pants leg warm from new pee, with his breath catching in his throat.

  In his head, he’s counting the days until someone unlocks the door, scoops him up.

  It’s what all prisoners do.

  CHAPTER 15

  The Sheep Look Up

  The reason we don’t know where we come from, it’s that werewolves aren’t big on writing things down. On leaving bread crumbs.

  It kind of makes all the movies true.

  Maybe that is how it is, right? Or how it was.

  Darren never bought it, of course.

  His theory of werewolf genesis was from Grandpa. If you could believe him, he’d lied about being eighteen years old in order to get to World War II. Meaning, at sixteen, late in the war, he’d slipped across enemy lines one night in France. Slipped across on all fours.

  According to him, America doesn’t win the war without him back there, tearing out every throat he could, making the Axis look behind themselves instead of over their rifles, to aim. The Nazis hated him, would bomb towns they already held just on the rumor that the dreaded Black Wolf was there.

  I don’t know.

  What I suspect is that Darren gave the story some color, in the telling. And that it probably wasn’t exactly told in black-and-white in the first place.

  Maybe Grandpa did go to war, and he did make it back, of course—otherwise there’s no Darren, no Libby, no me—but those years in between, those years between shipping out and straggling back home, those are story years. Years without any photographs or paperwork or newspaper articles to prove them. Years in which a werewolf could have ridden rockets all across Europe, and probably climbed the Eiffel Tower and ate the Mona Lisa between kills, then got blessed by the pope.

  Growing up hearing that kind of historical record, it makes me understand Darren a little better, I guess. He had that to live up to. Only, he was never quite Army material. And Army’s the only military werewolves are any good for. Put us in the Air Force and we parachute down a man, can’t pull the rip cord with wolf paws. Put us on a Navy or Marine boat, and when that boat pulls into port, there’s blood on the gunwales. Whatever a gunwale is.

  Army’s the only place that could take our particular kind of stir-crazy. We’re ground troops. We’re meat to feed into the big grinder.

  Only, with our teeth and our claws, we might make it out the other side. We might even stick around, make a meal of some of that ground-up meat.

  But: the Amazing Adventures of the Black Wolf, Secret Weapon of World War II.

  That it involved a fortune-teller in an actual horse-drawn cart made it even more amazing.

  Darren would usually pick the story up with the Black Wolf gravely wounded, limping on two feet through Italy, or backwater Poland, or some bombed-up landscape or another. The Black Wolf’s limping along after a few days of heroics when he hears hoofbeats behind him, so crawls over to a bush to hide. The horse sniffs him out at the last instant, starts screaming and slashing at the air.

  The little old woman at the reins cuts the horse loose because she doesn’t want him to run the wheels off her cart.

  “He’ll come back in the morning,” she tells the Black Wolf, who, at the moment, is just a naked, bleeding soldier who hasn’t eaten in four days.

  She invites him into her wagon and gives him a blanket to wear around his shoulders, offers him tea and some dried meat she claims is an aurochs, which she says his kind used to feast on.

  “That a kind of yak?” the Black Wolf asks.

  “What’s a yak?” the woman asks back.

  Darren has various jokes and sound effects to get the story through this part. At the end of it all, the old woman’s telling the Black Wolf the secret of where a certain cave is. That it’s near. She says that his kind used to use it in times past. It’s a place men never go.

  The Black Wolf keeps chewing, looks out the back of the wagon.

  “Then I shouldn’t go either,” he says.

  She has to laugh about this.

  “You think because I’m old I don’t see,” she says.

  “I’m a soldier,” the Black Wolf says.

  “Never said you weren’t,” the old woman says. “But your blood is from a long line.”

  At this the Black Wolf gives her his full attention.

  “Wolves,” she says, lighting her pipe. “Wolves used to pester the villages, the city walls. Run off with a child once or twice a year.”

  “That’s wolves,” the Black Wolf says, his patriotism rising in his voice.

  “That’s all there was then,” the old woman says, breathing smoke out, watching it leave the wagon. “There were wolves, and there were men, and they each tried to keep to themselves, except in times of hunger. But there was also an old woman not unlike me, a woman who knew herbs and potions, a woman who knew where the corner of the curtain of the world was, so she could pull it up, look behind, into the mysteries.”

  “A witch,” the Black Wolf says, suddenly aware of the strange meat in his stomach.

  “A healer,” the old woman corrects. “But there are many names, and none of them matter. What does is that a madness was sweeping through the wolves around the woman’s village.”

  “We call it rabies.”

  “As I said, many names. There were different strains of the madness back then too. There was one from the rats, one from the dogs. This one was from the bats, is the kind they show up with when their numbers get low enough that they need to, in your soldier terms, conscript. But then a wolf caught it, which had never happened before. He gave it to his whole pack. And, as there usually is, there was one wolf among them bolder than the rest, who tried to run off with a child from the village, but was too weak from what the madness was trying to do to him from the inside. The arrows sprouting from his side didn’t help either.” To show she does her fingers from her own side. “But the child was grievous wounded. And that child’s mother, she offered her life in service to the old
woman, this healer, if she would but heal the child.”

  “Nobody cures rabies,” the Black Wolf says. It’s the one thing he’s afraid of.

  “And neither could she,” the old woman says. “But never before had rabies been allowed to run its complete course. She couldn’t fight the madness, this healer, but she was skilled enough to keep the child alive, though each day his teeth grew more pointed. Though each day the hair sprouted on his body. That was what the madness had always been trying to do. That’s what it did for the bats, to help them make other bats. It changed the bitten into the biter, as close as it could, only it usually killed the bitten in the process, since their body couldn’t hold the new shape. But it didn’t kill this one. Because this healer was old, and needed help with her pots, she mustered all her arts, all her songs and chants, all the hard-fought potions she’d been saving for herself.”

  “You’re not saying—”

  “On the day this boy could walk,” the old woman goes on, brooking no interruption, “it was on all fours. And he ran into the forest quick as that, never to return, but, to keep her deal, his mother served the rest of her days at the healer’s house, always watching at the doorway for her lost son. And the healer didn’t hold it against her that she would some days leave choice cuts of meat on a cast-off footstool beside the road. Such are mothers for their sons. They want the best for them, whatever life they choose. And this is where the old custom of—”

  “So what happened to him, this kid?” the Black Wolf asks, pulling the rough blanket tighter around him.

  “Nothing, it would seem,” the old woman says, indicating the Black Wolf, born all these generations later. “But I fear my horse won’t return until you’ve left. Have you had enough to eat?”

  The Black Wolf looks to his hands, surprised the meat’s all gone.

  “Always feed a wolf his fill,” the old woman quotes out loud, “lest you wake with your throat in his jaws.”

  And so the Black Wolf takes her directions up the side of the mountain and sleeps in the cave of his ancestors that night, and traces his fingertips over faint charcoal drawings that seem to confirm the old woman’s story, and though he returns to that cave many times throughout his many amazing adventures during the war, he never does see that old woman’s brightly colored cart again, but he does hear her horse’s hoofbeats some nights, and taste her pipe smoke on the air.