Mongrels Read online

  This made me stop.

  He’d smelled me. Or who I was living with.

  But maybe me.

  I cut my eyes up to him, not a hint of a smile on my face.

  “Get in,” he said. “I’ll drop you back at your bookstore.”

  One thing werewolves can’t say is that they’re not supposed to take rides with strangers. Werewolves are the strangers.

  “I don’t bite,” the sheep said, stepping back to the rear door on his side. To open it for me. “Not anymore,” he added.

  “How do you know I was at the bookstore?” I said.

  “You look like a reader,” he said, and sat back in his driver’s seat, his hands on the wheel, the back door open in invitation.

  I looked right, and left, and over the top of the car.

  It was just us in the world.

  A werewolf, a sheep.

  I bared my teeth, crossed the sidewalk, stepped in.

  The first thing I realized, before he’d ever turned back onto the main road, was that the door handles in the backseat, they were dead, they were props.

  This was a cop car.

  He angled the rearview mirror onto me, through the cage wall that was still his headrest.

  “How old are you?” he said.

  “Where are you really taking me?” I said back, sliding to the center of the bench seat.

  The sheep settled the mirror on me again.

  “You want to know why,” he said.

  “Why you’re hiding,” I corrected.

  He nodded, accepted this.

  “People with—with tuberculosis, they used to go to these asylums, like,” he said. “This is all back when. Do you know why?”

  “Is that like leprosy?” I asked.

  He chuckled, his generous frame shaking with it. “You don’t know TB, but you know leprosy?”

  I stared at his reflection.

  “Same principle,” he said. “Lepers and coughers, they knew what they had, so they went to where their own kind were. To keep from killing their families.”

  “I don’t smell any of our kind around here,” I said.

  It was a bluff—that I could smell. He didn’t call me on it.

  “It’s the ‘killing their families’ part you should maybe pay attention to, here.”

  “I don’t need a lesson, thanks.”

  “That’s good,” he said. “Because I’m the last dude to have one to give. But I do know what happened to me.”

  “You let the world tame you,” I said. It was straight from Darren’s mouth.

  “If that’s what you want to call it,” he said. “Imagine you fall for someone . . . outside the pack, as it were.”

  “A human.”

  “A woman. A wife. And you try to make a go of it. No more barking at the moon. But it builds up inside you, doesn’t it?”

  I nodded the grimmest nod I had.

  It meant yes, I knew this, because I’d had to hold back the change too.

  I could understand where he was coming from. Completely.

  “It builds up until you wake in the bedroom one night, only it’s a slaughterhouse, it’s a killing floor. It’s a feeding trough.”

  I looked away.

  This was what Libby and Darren had been saying, down to the letter. The wolf, it always claws its way to the surface.

  But this was different too.

  “Say, then, after a night like that, after a morning like that, you maybe get a strong inclination to let your beard grow. Like, all the way to your boots, if that’s what it takes.”

  “If that’s what what takes?” I said.

  We were almost to the pawnshop parking lot.

  “To get the taste out of your mouth,” he said. “You think it’s this great thing right now.” He eased over, keeping me in the mirror the whole time. “It’s the best thing ever, isn’t it?” he said.

  I nodded, still living that lie.

  “And it is,” he said. “But there’s a price. It’s not a gift, the blood. It’s a curse, the way I hear it. The way I’ve lived it.”

  He was ready to go now, but I asked it: “The way you hear it?”

  “We’re all bastards,” he said. “Mutts, mongrels. Here’s how it started—how we all started. A woman who was dying anyway, she decided to make her death count. This is back when, peasants and scythes. So she drank a bellyful of some poison plant, then walked naked out to the wolves who had been snatching the village’s children. To kill them. But, because she offered herself to them, the wolves didn’t want her, wouldn’t eat her. Instead, they invited her into the pack, and when she died from the poison, they licked her eyeballs hard enough to roll them back around from the whites. She came back to life, and she bore litter after litter for them, and she never put clothes on again.”

  He stepped up from his seat, pulled my door open.

  It was the first time anybody’d ever done that for me.

  “That’s us,” he said. “That’s what we are, kid. Animals that never should have existed. Accidents. Reminders about who should mount who, and who shouldn’t.”

  “It’s the same thing you were doing, then,” I said.

  Standing up, I was as tall as him.

  “You went cross-species just like she did,” I said, and before I could even get my arm up, before I could even think it, he’d punched me so hard in the stomach that I lifted up off my feet.

  And he kept me there, lifted on his fist, his knuckles probably outlined in the skin of my back.

  “Stay away from me, kid,” he said right into my face. “I’m not as soft as you think. We won’t meet again.”

  When he drove away, I was still face-to-the-asphalt, trying to breathe. His second punch had been across my face. It had sounded just like the movies.

  I felt better after puking, and then worse again.

  Across the street, the By Hook or by Crook owner was out on the stoop watching me, like waiting for a Polaroid to develop.

  I waved her back inside, closed my eyes.

  That night it was Darren’s favorite brand of chili. He’d hauled a case of it back from Georgia.

  We ate in silence. Nobody said anything about my face. This is how it is with werewolves. So I’d caught a black eye at school again. Hearing about it, that would make them feel like they had to do something permanent about it. And then we’d have to move again. Anyway, this was my thing. I was old enough for that.

  Over the six o’clock game shows, Darren went into this long, made-up story about a chicken Grandpa had tried to raise one time. It ended with Grandpa finally coming in one night hungry, and reaching down, taking that chicken between his jaws. The punch line was that chicken squeezing out an egg that wasn’t all the way ready yet, so it had a clear shell.

  Darren had wanted to play with that egg, to grease it up, try to put it in some other bird to let it cook, but Grandpa had slurped it up before he could, see-through shell and all.

  Libby wasn’t listening, was just reading her paperback.

  At the car-wash break room, there was a whole shelf of books people would leave. She was burning through them all. This one was a western.

  “Your hair’s going to be white,” she said when she finally stood, stretching for bed.

  Darren ran his hands through his stubble, shrugged. “Think I’ll finally get some respect around here?” he said.

  “Bring something back that’s not that,” she said, about the plundered case of chili, and Darren tossed a couch pillow at her as she was leaving for her bedroom. She caught the pillow, flung it across at me. I let it bounce off.

  The black eye had earned me the right not to play tonight. Not to talk.

  “Me too,” I said, and eased off to my bedroom.

  “What, do I smell?” Darren said, but he kept the volume down, and didn’t say too many answers out loud.

  I lay in the bed that had come with the trailer and pulled my blanket up over my mouth, trying to imagine what a mountain-man beard would feel like.
And then I wondered how long your beard would have to get before it made you forget about killing your wife. And eating her.

  Sheep was the wrong word, I was pretty sure.

  More like Sleeping. Sleeping Wolf.

  “I won’t tell,” I told him out loud, because that would make it real. Even though he’d cracked some bone around my eye, I was pretty sure.

  And then I tried to imagine that dying woman, that wolf mother, the first of us, walking out into the woods, her insides swirling with poison, her eyes set on certain death.

  If they’d just eaten her like they were supposed to, like she’d wanted them to.

  Darren’s howl shook me awake in the morning.

  He was hanging sideways in my doorway, the worst alarm clock ever.

  “Going to miss the bus,” he said.

  You still go to school, I told myself, and rolled out, into that charade, and halfway through brushing my teeth, instead of checking my tongue like I always did, for if it was flattening out, if it was getting that blurry black stripe down the middle, this time I rubbed my jaw in the mirror.

  I was just like the sheep, walking through the steps of a life where I was just pretending.

  I wasn’t a sheep, though. I bared my teeth to prove it.

  In the kitchen ten minutes later, five minutes after I should have caught the bus, I looked up to Libby, told her I was quitting school. That it wasn’t doing me any good.

  She kept mixing her coffee, finally nodded.

  “I can’t make you go,” she said.

  “You mean you’re never going to be smart like me?” Darren said.

  He wasn’t in this discussion.

  “I can get a job, help out,” I said.

  She didn’t disagree, just raised her cup to her face, the steam washing over her.

  “I’ll ask Hector at the car wash,” she said, and that was that.

  I wasn’t in danger of being a sheep. I was living my real life, not a pretend one.

  “But you could have told me two weeks ago,” Libby said, and left me with that.

  Half an hour later, Darren’s game shows blasting through the house, I eased out onto the plywood and cinderblock porch for my shoes.

  They were black with ants.

  I flinched back but they were my only pair.

  “What you been walking through?” Darren said, suddenly in the doorway again, his first wine cooler of the morning hanging from his door-hand.

  “Town,” I said.

  He looked down to the ants, raised one slow motion foot above the, fixing them in his shadow.

  “It’s like I’m a giant,” he said, then started in quoting: “‘The villagers ran left and they ran right, but there was nowhere they could—’”

  “Tokyo doesn’t have villagers,” I told him, disgusted.

  “If you’re not a beautiful monster, then you’re a villager,” he said matter-of-fact, his real attention on bringing his foot down, flattening a city block in slow, crunchy motion.

  “Thanks,” I said, bringing his eyes up to my tone.

  “Said the monster-in-waiting,” he added, and began the complicated process of guiding his mouth up to his wine cooler but stopped right at the last moment, his head cocked over for the game-show host’s question. “Kenworth,” he said, in pure wonder, his eyes to me like a question, like to be sure this could really be happening. Then he smiled, let his bottle drop. “Kenworth. Kenworth Kenworth!” he said, louder each time, holding me by the shoulders, shaking me with each syllable.

  He’d finally got an answer right. Good for him.

  I used a stick to pick up my right shoe, and shook it. The ants calved off in sheets. I brushed the clingers away with the side of my hand.

  On a nature show, I’d seen somebody in South America use ant-mouth pincers as stitches. Just hold them to the cut, let them clamp down, then pinch the head off.

  These ants, it would have to be like a paper cut.

  I shook the shoe some more, and a black negative of the tread fell out. I had stepped in something.

  The ants I’d shaken off were already massing toward it.

  I stood up to let Libby pass, on her way to work.

  “Another car, another dollar,” she said, then, about my shoe: “Oh, that’s where that ground meat went.”

  I looked down to it, didn’t even say bye to her.

  The beef from the refrigerator?

  When could I have stepped on it?

  I picked my other shoe up, its tread just as packed with ground meat, and eased inside with it, held it up for Darren, on the couch, waiting for the next question. Two in a row would be the new world record for his age division.

  “Why would somebody pack hamburger into my shoe?” I said, holding it up.

  “Old werewolf trick,” he said, still in game-show mode. “You can follow somebody anywhere like that. But you’ve got to mix some of your own blood in too, so the dogs know to stay off the trail. Only thing at the end of a trail of werewolf blood’s a hurt, pissed-off—”

  The next answer in this “kategory”—words that start with K—was Kamchatka. Darren hissed, fell back into the couch, wronged again.

  “Why?” he asked, about the shoe.

  Why.

  I looked to the idea of the road Libby was walking now, to work. Her big purse looped over her shoulder.

  “She went out last night,” I said.

  “Oh, yeah, almost forgot, man,” Darren said, biting his lower lip with excitement. “She found him, I think. That one sheep.”

  I nodded. Of course she had. She’d tracked him down. She’d tracked me to him. I’d as good as led her right there.

  “Hey, hey,” Darren said then, pinching me closer with his voice. “That reminds me. What do you get when you cross Lib with one of them? You know, with a sheep?”

  I just stared at him.

  “You need to get a new sheep,” he said, slapping his thigh, and, because I was locked into a pattern, I went down to the bookstore again, taking the long way around the car wash this time.

  I couldn’t see Libby yet.

  She’d used me. She’d been using me. Worse, she’d known I wouldn’t smell the meat on my shoe.

  I wanted to run away, but I come from werewolves. Our life is already running away.

  Give it a week, or two, and we’d be gone again. And maybe it was for the best.

  I didn’t know everything. She probably had her reasons.

  It didn’t make it any better.

  I ran my fingers over my black eye. Soon it would be gone as well.

  I walked down to the bus stop, just drifting, and got off at my usual stop, stood there like seeing what was different.

  Everything.

  For the first time, then, I stepped into the air-conditioned pawnshop, the bell clanging over my head from the door.

  “Help you with anything?” the big man behind the counter said.

  “Just looking,” I said, no eye contact, standard procedure.

  Touching all the same things the sheep might have touched would have to do, I figured. It would have to serve as apology, as good-bye.

  Mostly apology.

  The big man behind the watches and handguns moved along his counter with me, so he had a clear view down whatever aisle I was on. Today wasn’t a stealing day, though. This was a funeral.

  Still, to keep him on his toes, I picked up this spark-plug socket, that spray-painted chisel, and inspected them on each side, like seriously considering. I made sure they made noise when they went back into their trays, and I kept my hands far from my pants.

  “See anything you like?” the big man said, when I’d shopped the place dry.

  I looked to the wall of guitars behind him, then scanned the glass counter. For binoculars I couldn’t afford, watches I’d lose inside of a day, knives with wolves scrimshawed into the blade.

  And movies.

  The sheep’s six VHS tapes were right there on the glass, red clearance tape and all. They w
ere a complete set. The big man had even propped it up on both sides with bookends.

  “Got a little girl already?” he said, seeing where I was looking.

  I shook my head no, but was smiling too, smiling too much, my eyes heating up about it.

  She was out there somewhere, this girl, this daughter. She was out there and she was close. Living with his dead wife’s parents, probably.

  Maybe wolf, maybe not.

  No, I told her, in what I knew was my Black Wolf voice, no, your dad’s not coming home.

  But remember him. Remember him hard.

  CHAPTER 16

  Never Say Werewolf

  But that makes me one too, doesn’t it?” the villager says, about to cry even though he’s eleven and a half.

  “Nope,” the villager’s uncle tells him, parting the curtains just enough to sneak a peek outside, at the mob. “You’re like us. You know that. Give it another year or two, bub.”

  “That’s what you said last year,” the villager says.

  “This isn’t happening,” the villager’s aunt says.

  “You’re not going to believe this,” the villager’s uncle says back to the villager’s aunt, his smile as wide as the villager’s ever seen. “One of them’s got a pitchfork.”

  This is Texas. It’s right under Arkansas.

  “If they knock—” the villager’s aunt says, right exactly when the knock comes.

  The villager steps back, his lips thinned out.

  The reason he’s a villager is that you’re either a villager, like the mob outside, or you’re a werewolf.

  “Don’t answer that,” the villager’s aunt says, reaching her arm across the living room like her arm’s long enough to stop the villager’s uncle.

  He’s still smiling from the pitchfork, though.

  It’s easy to smile when you’re already a werewolf.

  “I’ll just ask if they need a torch,” he says, and licks his lips to normal his mouth down, opens the door the way he always does, with one arm hooked high above.

  “Gentlemen,” he says, his head moving because he’s going from face to face.

  The villager watches through the window.

  “You heard anything strange around here?” the leader of the mob asks. “Maybe at night?”