Mongrels Read online

  “He never sees her again because it’s probably all bullshit,” Darren liked to say at the end of the story, then he’d lean back, finally pull his left hand up to his mouth, take the curved-up stem of a fancy wood pipe between his lips, and breathe in deep and thoughtful through it, like that showed a line of continuity from the Black Wolf to him, one he was too cool to actually say out loud.

  When I was a kid, it had kind of worked. It was like an out-loud comic book, the way Darren had told it, doing the sound effects, acting out the more amazing parts in slow motion. I even imagined the Black Wolf with a shield strapped to his back. And I never questioned why that pipe was never lit—otherwise he wouldn’t have been able to hide it down between the couch cushions.

  Libby’s theory of werewolves was more direct, called for fewer sound effects, less theater. In her version, a wolf got hungry one day, so dressed up in the clothes of a man he’d just eaten and walked on two feet into town but got lost in the tangle of streets, had to keep walking and walking like that, until he forgot who he was. And now here we were.

  “Why a man?” Darren would say. “Why not a lady wolf?”

  “Because women don’t get that hungry,” she would say back, not even the hint of a grin at her mouth.

  Since I couldn’t pick between either of their stories, I made up my own: the unholy union. Those two star-crossed lovers the world always needs. That werewolves needed them too, that kept us part of the world. The story was simple like Libby’s but sweeping and grand like Darren’s. A wolf and a logger’s daughter meet out in the moonlight night after night, trying to figure out the precise mechanics of their relationship. And the tragedy of it comes when the woman gives birth to the first of us, has to die from it.

  Except I guess that makes love the actual infection in our blood.

  I don’t know.

  One thing we all agree on anyway, it’s sheep. Our traditional enemy, our intended prey.

  Just when you think they’re all gone, another’ll peek around the corner at you, catch you in its dead eyes.

  This one Libby found at a car wash in Augusta. We were living on the Georgia side of the state line, but this car wash was in South Carolina. The plan after the Night of the Bear had been to book it west, start the grand tour all over, do it right this time, but then 95 South had been more downhill, and the Impala’s temperature gauge had needed some downhill.

  It was for the best, probably. Darren said Tennessee had too many horses anyway, and snow in winter, fog for miles.

  Still, even Augusta was more north than we usually kept, this late in the fall.

  But there we were.

  As for that sheep at the car wash—maybe the north is full of sheep, I don’t know.

  I guess it’s where I would go.

  The way Libby told it, she was drying cars and then whipping her rag over her head like victory.

  It was a daytime job. For the first time in years, she had real color in her skin.

  Her cars were always like mirrors on wheels after she was done. Like flying saucers with license plates. And she didn’t have to wear a stupid hairnet either. Just the uniform shirt. The theme of the car wash was bowling. The waiting room was black and white checkered, and, because the geometry of it gave Libby a headache, she’d asked to work the line instead of the register.

  Either way she’d have made the sheep, but, out there with the soap and chemicals, his scent nearly slipped past her, she said. She didn’t cue into it until the exact moment she was handing the car’s green ticket over. Green means go, leave, you’re clean, you’re done.

  The gentleman she was handing the ticket to was carrying a toolbox with a pawn ticket tied to the handle. He was carrying it because people never trust the car-dry crew not to go shopping in the backseat.

  His beard was full-on bird nest, his sunglasses black and thick.

  “Thank you,” he said, tipping a single dollar bill her way.

  Libby took it without looking right at him and walked the dollar over to the big metal tip-jar-on-a-pole like she was supposed to. Because sometimes the tip will be a test.

  But not this time.

  This time, it was a werewolf.

  His hair was perfect.

  Darren was all for what he called going BJ McKay on this werewolf’s town home.

  That meant driving his Freightliner through the living room wall, into the werewolf’s lap.

  Libby said we’d have to find his town home first.

  They had to explain to me what a “town home” was, here. I thought it meant a house in town. Like, if our trailer was in town, it would be a town trailer.

  This werewolf was a town wolf. Just, one who never went wolf.

  It happens.

  When we’re up on two legs, and not around our own kind, then who’s to know we’re not regular citizens, right?

  Especially if you let your beard grow.

  Especially if you let your breath get rank.

  Especially if you don’t start in eating all the dogs in the neighborhood.

  I’d heard of these nonwolves before, from Darren. Real horror stories. They were usually ones who’d been living out in the trees for five or ten years, like Red. After that long, you can’t shift back on your own anymore. Not even when sleeping. Usually what it takes is some massive injury, some real near-death event to bring you back to your human form. Because, when we die, if we’re shifted, then we relax back mostly, if given a day or two to lay there dead. Being born, the shifting back and forth and sticking in the middle is like a seizure. Dying, it’s a lot calmer. Instead of tunneling back in, the hair all over you just breaks off, drifts away.

  With Grandpa, when we’d come back from burying him, the grey hair in the doorway of the kitchen had been floating away like a last breath. It had made Libby blink her eyes fast. Darren had made a face, spitting the hair out.

  These wolves who have been wolf too long, though, who have forgotten how to come back to the man-side, if they get slapped by a truck hard enough, or shot through like half their vital organs, that shock like they’re dying, it kick-starts whatever survival thing it is in us that hides the wolf, that tells the hair to start letting go. And once the hair starts to let go, the wolf does as well, slithering back inside, prepping the corpse for discovery.

  Only, if you take a hit like that, hard enough to shift you back, and you manage not to die from it, then you can wake with a wolf’s mind and a man’s body.

  It can be ugly. Most won’t survive this, or, they only survive it in a padded room for the rest of their lives—“Real lycanthropes,” Darren would spit. “Real sad sacks.”

  A few luck through, though. Except they’ve been so burned by the whole experience that they can’t shift anymore. It’s not a muscle they’ve needed to keep in shape, living out in the trees, so now they don’t know to flex it. The wolf’s still inside them, but it’s sleeping.

  You don’t go vegetarian or anything, but you might take a job changing tires, and then keep that job for the rest of your life, never strip your clothes in the moonlight, race a train just because there’s a real chance you can win, and maybe freak some people out while doing it.

  That’s all understandable. Sad, but there’s nothing to be done, really. And, at least they had a taste of the real life, right? At least they know what the night really smells like. How beautiful it is. How deep.

  And it’s not like working at a tire place is punishment or anything.

  I was a tire expert, by Augusta.

  This was my first sheep, though.

  Darren’s estimation of him, going off Libby’s description, was that he probably couldn’t shift. That, for him, his life as a werewolf was something he was already remembering like a dream, one getting farther and farther behind him.

  Libby wasn’t so sure.

  He’d been at the car wash, for one. It didn’t mean he had extra money to burn, but it did mean he cared if his car was clean or not. It didn’t fit.

  Taki
ng pride in your car?

  Cars are disposable to werewolves, cars are nothing, a necessary evil.

  Darren wanted to argue, I could tell, but his Freightliner was out front, coated in the grime of six weeks, the bumper already pitting with rust.

  So, this sheep having an actually clean car, what this told Libby was that he had bought into town life, and all the standards of town folk. Which meant he was selling all of us out.

  “Why do you care so much?” I’d asked, and Darren had rolled from his chair, ducked into the kitchen for a wine cooler. The kitchen was out of Libby’s line of fire.

  She reeled it in, though, whatever bad history she had with sheep. Though she tracked Darren’s retreat, every cowardly step of it.

  An old boyfriend, maybe? But not Red. Not Morris Wexler.

  One I’d never know about, I guessed.

  Her second argument not in favor of this sheep was that he hadn’t clocked her, she didn’t think.

  Even those werewolves who couldn’t change anymore, they usually kept their nose, more or less. It was part of what drove a lot of them into the state hospitals: They were being overloaded with scent, and it was kicking up associations and impulses that the wolf knows to act on, no matter the current company.

  “Maybe he did and he’s just cool cat enough not to show it,” Darren said, sitting back down in his folding chair.

  “I guess,” Libby said.

  “Maybe it’s for his old lady,” Darren said. “Or maybe he just wanted to grow a beard for once in his life.”

  “Or maybe he’s—what if he’s still hunting?” Libby said.

  Darren took another long pull on his wine cooler.

  “You mean, like, he can still change?” I said.

  “Just never does,” Libby said.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Not everybody’s loud and proud,” Darren said, slapping his bare chest.

  “Because he’s a sheep,” Libby said.

  “As long as he’s not hunting, though . . .” Darren said, and then Libby had to explain that to me as well: Tamp it down as much as you want, pretend you’re not werewolf, it doesn’t matter. The wolf always surfaces.

  That’s okay if you’re in the country, if all you’re going to run down in your sleep are deer and possums. Nobody cares about deer and possums.

  Town is full of people, though.

  You can be a mad dog, never know it. Just like the movies.

  And the thing about mad dogs, it’s that they get put down. They get shot, documented, put on the news.

  “If he is sleepwalking, then it’s time to leave,” Darren said, deadly serious.

  “We’re the ones who found him, though,” Libby said, flashing her eyes up to Darren. Like calling him out.

  “If he even is one,” Darren said.

  “Check under his bed,” Libby said. “See if there’s bones, right?”

  “Find his bed first,” Darren said, accepting her challenge, and that was where they left it, because werewolves aren’t detectives. The way they find their prey, it’s by smell, not clues.

  I already had one, though: the pawn tag on his toolbox.

  If you ever want to find a werewolf, stake out a pawnshop for two or three weeks. Soon enough you’ll see a low heavy car with mismatched wheels roll up, then have to watch some shirtless dude in sunglasses maneuver a big-screen television from the backseat, try to balance it through the front door.

  Pawnshop owners love to see us pull up. They know we’re never coming back.

  That’s us, though.

  Sheep—sheep are a completely different breed.

  They stay in one place, drink from the same still waters day after day.

  But still, no werewolf in the history of werewolves has ever been so rich he didn’t want to see what he could get for this set of golf clubs he just happens to have. For this rifle he found in his dead uncle’s closet. For this spare tire he has to roll two miles to pawn, and air up in secret at the gas station two lots down.

  Without asking permission, I quit going to tenth grade again. It was my second run at it anyway. I’d already made it farther than Darren or Libby, so it wasn’t like they could say anything. In two or three months I would be sixteen, I mean. For werewolves, that’s adult, that’s grown the hell up, that’s don’t let the doorknob hit you on the way out.

  My clock, it was ticking down. It was getting down to do-or-don’t for me. To wolf or not to wolf, that was the question.

  Maybe catching a whiff of this sheep, though, maybe that would raise my hackles. And maybe my teeth and claws would follow.

  Because that pawn ticket was my one, only, and best clue, I staked out the pawnshop down from Libby’s car wash. My blind was the stoop of the book and record store across the street. It was called By Crook or by Hook. I wasn’t sure what that was supposed to mean.

  The pawnshop, though.

  The pawnshop was Gru’s.

  As in, French for werewolf, if you listened just right.

  I figured an American sheep probably would.

  Nearly two weeks later, he finally drifted in again.

  What he drove, the car Libby hadn’t been able to tease up from the hundreds she saw each week, was a pretty pristine old Mercury Monterey. What else she’d forgot to mention was the black fenders, the white doors.

  It was a retired cop car, stripped down and pushed through auction.

  It still had that police package stance, though, like it wanted to move. When the sheep had come through Libby’s car wash, it was probably on some half-off certificate her work had stuck under the wipers of all the cars with lot numbers on them.

  It made me hate him a little less, that he’d paid half price, and that the car wash wasn’t part of his usual rounds.

  His beard was mountain man like she’d said, was really something to see.

  On his back dashboard were two hard hats.

  What he was pawning was a clutch of VHS tapes in colorful sleeves, each with red Xs over their backs, meaning they’d been clearanced once already. He wasn’t flashing them to me or anything, but before he went in, he reshuffled them. Probably trying to get the best ones on the outside.

  I’d guess he got maybe a dollar and a half. And that wasn’t necessarily for the tapes, but for the business—for the next thing he might bring in, if this was a place that would make deals.

  It was lunchtime for him, I was pretty sure. It should have been for me.

  I made my way across, eased past the front of his cop car.

  Just like I’d been hoping, there was a parking sticker on the front glass. Mayfair Village. Because I didn’t want to blow this—I might have been old enough he could smell me over his beard, I don’t know—I kept walking, “Mayfair Village” lodged in my head.

  All I had to do then was plug it into the phone book.

  Our rental, it was out past the outskirts, where you started seeing cars put out to pasture.

  Werewolf country.

  Not the safe green meadows of town. Not Mayfair Village.

  I saved my pennies for three days, then saw Libby off to work, and got on the bus.

  The thing to do—Darren’s complicated idea—was to stalk the sheep. To make his life hell. To leave raw bites of meat throughout his day, to bring his senses back alive. To slip him a raw ingot of silver and tell him to make a fist around it, see how cold it was. See if he flinched from the smoke seeping up through his fingers.

  Then it was going to be dog whistles, blood in his coffee, and Darren was even thinking he could record himself howling one night and play it through the car speakers, just drive back and forth while the sheep slept.

  Libby’s idea was to step into a closed room with him, and step out five minutes later alone.

  One less sheep in the world.

  I just wanted to watch him.

  He didn’t make sense to me.

  At first I’d wanted him to help me, to spur me into shifting because maybe I’d hate him with the same r
awness Libby did, but waiting for him so long, building him up in my head, I’d realized what I was holding my breath for—my transformation—it was exactly what he was pretending he didn’t have. What he was probably having to medicate down with rum and black tea. That was Darren’s special formula for keeping the wolf down.

  Libby’s trick was the breath mints that came in foil tubes with green pull-strings. The string had to be green.

  I didn’t know what mine was going to be. I wasn’t ever going to want not to shift.

  The sheep’s apartment was ground floor, number 110 on the corner.

  He went in, had long enough to warm a can of lunch, maybe, then walked out policing his Brillo pad of a beard for drips.

  It must feel weird to him, I figured, having that after so many years without.

  I shoved my hands in my pockets, rounded my shoulders, and kept walking, not looking behind me.

  He was anywhere, now. At whatever his job was, that he needed a yellow hard hat for. And I didn’t have bus fare back, had forgot to even get a transfer.

  Libby was going to ask, this time. Usually I could beat her home, my backpack strategically slung up onto the counter.

  Coming in after dark, there would be questions.

  It had been stupid, following him here. So I knew where he lived. Great. Now, tell Darren and Libby, or protect him, let him go on ruining it for us all?

  Was I a traitor or was I a killer?

  I walked on, kicking a rock that was supposed to roll into a storm drain.

  Instead it jumped at the last instant, ricocheted off the curb, up into the undercarriage of a cop-white door.

  The Monterey.

  The sheep had gone around the block, was parked in my path, waiting for me.

  I turned hard right, to veer across the empty lot.

  My plan was to jump the fence. To go all the places a car couldn’t. To go places even a cop car with performance suspension couldn’t.

  “You,” he said, and I kept walking. “Think I can’t catch a scent anymore?” he said, quieter, more secret.