Mongrels Read online

  “Hunh . . .” the uncle says, taking his hand off the wall to rub his smooth chin. “Like, what do you mean, strange?”

  “I’ve lost two calves,” a face in the mob says.

  “Crisp’s wife saw it the other night,” another says.

  The villager leans sideways to look down the tunnel the mob is making. One guy is at the end of it.

  “Crispin?” the villager’s uncle asks.

  “Just Crisp,” the man says. He’s the one with the pitchfork. The rest of the mob is carrying shotguns. Two of them in back have dogs. The dogs are already screaming.

  “What did she see?” the villager’s uncle asks.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Crisp says, looking around at the mob. “It was late.”

  They’re all ready to laugh.

  “Bigfoot,” one of them says.

  “Bigfoot?” the villager’s uncle says, stepping out onto the plank that’s the last step before getting into the trailer.

  “Whatever it was,” the leader says, “it’s eating the livestock, scaring the women.”

  “You need some light, don’t you?” the villager’s uncle asks, having to bite his lip to keep from smiling all the way.

  The villager looks back to his aunt, who’s shaking her head about this. Who’s trying to wish herself back in time, it looks like. Into a different family.

  “I got a light right here,” the uncle says, stepping over for the big flashlight in the windowsill. On the way back to the door he drops the two batteries from the back of the flashlight.

  “Man, I don’t know why this won’t . . .” the villager’s uncle is saying now at the door, slapping the head of the flashlight into his palm.

  Next he’s running back to the stove to turn a burner on, light the dishrag he’s wrapping around the rubber part of the brand-new plunger.

  “This is perfect, perfect,” he’s saying, bouncing to make the flame catch. He looks up to the villager’s aunt, who isn’t looking at him, so he looks down to the villager instead. “I’m going to find Bigfoot,” he says. “With a mob.”

  When the torch is lit he holds it over the sink, is captivated by it.

  In the refrigerator is what’s left of the second calf.

  In the mud behind the house are clear wolf prints, deep enough that the water’s seeped back in to fill them. They’re part wolf prints, anyway. There’s the heel of a person connected to them too. Because the villager’s uncle was still shifting when he left those tracks.

  As the uncle’s passing back through the living room, the villager’s aunt reaches up, has his wrist in her hand.

  The villager’s uncle is almost too excited to stop.

  “What?” he says, pulling. “What what what?”

  “Just Bigfoot,” she says, making sure he hears. “Don’t get them started looking for anything else, got it?”

  “Wolfenstein . . .” the villager’s uncle says, loving the way it sounds.

  He’s still pawing, trying to get past.

  The villager’s aunt opens her hand and holds it high, fingers spread, letting the villager’s uncle go.

  “You’re not going to be stupid when you grow up, are you?” the villager’s aunt asks after the noise of the mob has gone.

  The villager doesn’t answer.

  He picks up the two batteries, stands them up beside each other in the windowsill where the flashlight was.

  Half an hour later, lying on his back in front of a game show, he looks up to the ceiling during a commercial. Where the uncle passed with the torch is a smudgy black line, like the smoke stuck there. In the middle of it is dim red line.

  Instead of saying anything, he just stares at it.

  “You know that one,” his aunt says about the question on the game show.

  “This is a rerun,” the villager says.

  “Then why are you watching it?” the aunt says, closing her celebrity magazine because she’s got to get to work.

  At first the villager thinks she’s talking about him watching the red line in the ceiling. But it’s already gone anyway.

  At least until his aunt’s gone to her job.

  Just to see if it’s really dead, the villager balls a clump of toilet paper to a coat hanger, pushes it into the black smudge in the ceiling.

  There’s a wisp of smoke, then nothing.

  “Figures,” the villager says, and sets the coat hanger down, goes to get a wet clump of toilet paper. By the time he walks back into the living room, the toilet paper he left on the floor has caught fire. He drops his clump of wet toilet paper, picks up the coat hanger, and holds the torch away from the carpet.

  It doesn’t matter. The carpet smokes for a moment, then licks a fast flame up.

  The villager steps on it with his shoes but it’s already too wide. And his uncle is still out in the pasture playing Wolfenstein, sure he’s seeing Bigfoot there, and there, the mob following him deeper and deeper.

  The villager watches the flames jump across the carpet. He shakes his head no, please, he’ll take it back, he didn’t mean to, but it doesn’t matter, it’s already too late.

  He runs to his bedroom for his light blue backpack with the shoe box in it, and is standing outside watching the trailer burn when the uncle gets back, minutes ahead of the mob.

  Because he’s running so fast, his footprints half and half again, he doesn’t stop for the villager, sitting between the burn barrels because that seems like the one part of the pasture that might not burn tonight.

  Instead of stopping there, the villager’s uncle dives straight through the burning door, already screaming the villager’s name.

  His throat is wrong for words, so it’s just a tangled howl.

  For the first time ever, and mostly because he’s hidden between the burn barrels, the villager lifts his own mouth, howls back.

  The rest of the mob finally crashes out of the bushes breathing hard, their shotguns and pitchforks useless against the fire.

  “Is he—” the one called Crisp says to the villager, shaking him from his daze.

  Inside, in the fire, things are cracking, things are exploding. Everything’s sparks that keep puffing up into the black sky.

  “Did you find him?” the villager says, his voice like in a dream.

  Crisp shields his face from part of the trailer falling down into itself and says, “Who?”

  “Bigfoot,” the villager whispers, instead of the real word.

  CHAPTER 17

  The Mark of the Beast

  1.

  For a lot of years we’d been pallbearers, carrying my mom from state to state.

  What we had, what I never looked at because I was scared that it wouldn’t be enough, was a lock of hair in a black velvet ring box.

  Things go away, though.

  That’s how it is with werewolves. You have something, then you just have the story of it.

  We were in Florida again. Ten years ago it had been the farthest place we’d been able to get from that creek bank Grandpa was buried in, from that trooper dead in a parking lot. From Red.

  Parts of us had been peeling off already, even, that first night out of Arkansas. Driving fast across a forever bridge, the wind had curled up from the surface of the lake passing beneath us and all our cardboard boxes in the bed had opened to that pull, lifting our lives up into the rearview, spreading it out across the moon-dark water.

  Darren had been driving then, and he’d nodded about what was happening behind us and finally just punched the El Camino faster, sucking the headlights back in with a distinct click.

  “This isn’t your best trick, you know,” Libby had told him, about driving blind. “Someday it’s going to get you killed.”

  “Some night,” Darren had corrected, looking over just long enough to flash his devil-can-go-to-hell smile.

  That’s the picture of him I wanted to put on a flyer, staple to a utility pole, to every utility pole Jacksonville had.

  Darren was missing.

  When yo
u live with a trucker, you get used to him being gone for days at a time. It means that, when he really is gone, you can have pieces of your day that are just normal. But then you remember.

  After the first few days of him being gone, Libby quit her job stocking the grocery store. That’s how I knew this time was different. Over the years she’d had exactly one grocery-store job, and she’d dug her claws deep into that one. All the damaged boxes of cereal, all the meat past its date, all the bread with the wrong-color twist tie, somebody had to take it home.

  We didn’t even know where to start looking for Darren, either.

  We walked the pound, we called the jail, we watched the ditches for roadkill.

  If it wasn’t town, Libby might have been able to track his scent.

  If I were a detective, it would have been easy, finding him. The detective stepped into the room and knew immediately which door the perp had taken.

  I wasn’t a detective, though. I was almost sixteen. I was tall and lanky, hair in my eyes, scruff on my jaw that rasped in my ear when I pushed the pad of my thumb along it. It was a sound I couldn’t stop making, a sound just for me, a constant reminder of what I wasn’t becoming. What I was probably never going to become.

  I wanted to bare my fangs to the world, wanted to show Darren and Libby and everybody what I had coiled up inside me. No matter how hard I scratched, though, the wolf wouldn’t surface.

  “If I knew my dad,” I said to Libby one no-Darren afternoon, both our eyes tracking each blade of grass in the ditch, traffic stacking up behind us. “Maybe he was a late bloomer too. For a villager, I mean.”

  Because Libby didn’t think I was watching, I caught her face in the mirror. The way her lips thinned and tightened at the same time. It wasn’t because I was using Darren’s terminology. It was because my dad was strictly off-limits. Anybody is who gets a fourteen-year-old pregnant.

  “Wish in one hand,” Libby said, her voice just usual.

  “Wish in one hand,” I agreed.

  Sort of.

  We heard about the hot-dog competition on the radio. Kind of in early memoriam, we had the Catalina’s dial set to what had become Darren’s favorite station. Classic rock, corny DJs.

  The radio station was holding a hot-dog-eating contest.

  I looked up to Libby about this.

  “He’s always saying,” I told her.

  She knew.

  Darren’s big plan if trucking ever fell through was to get rich and famous being a competitive eater. The advantage he’d have is that he could shift before and after. It would make him ravenous enough to win, then would burn all the calories away he’d just swallowed.

  He even had his signature trick planned: Twelve or fifteen hot dogs in, he would hold up his right hand and fall back in pain about his missing finger. About the finger he’d just ate.

  He would win on style and ability both. The crowd favorite and the best athlete at the table.

  All his life he’d been waiting for a radio ad like we’d just heard.

  The contest was two days away.

  We checked the pound again, and then the clipboard on the wall, listing roadkill that had already been scooped out into the marsh, for the alligators.

  “We shouldn’t have come back to Florida,” I said. “Florida and Texas are always bad news.”

  “We’re running out of places,” Libby said back.

  While she was walking back and forth in the living room reading the same page of her book over and over, I called the two alligator farms in the area. To ask if they had any new wrestlers, any new wranglers. Any who didn’t even want money, were just doing it to show off.

  There was the zoo, of course, but just that I could hear them on the phone when I called meant Darren wasn’t there.

  I couldn’t even dream where he might be.

  “Think he found somebody?” I said at last to Libby, because she had to be considering it too. He’d shacked up with women on the road before, for days at a time, even, and this year he was the same age as Grandpa had been when he’d seen Grandma in that parade. But still. “Do werewolves do that, just leave?” I added, when Libby wasn’t answering.

  Her eyes when she looked up to me, they were ancient and tired and sad and mad all at once.

  “Men do that,” she said.

  “But he’s your brother,” I said.

  “He’s your uncle,” she said back.

  I shouldn’t have asked. Just—when Darren had announced that, about him being Grandpa’s age when he met Grandma, the way he’d lilted his voice up, it had been like he was testing out how this sounded. Like there was going to be more.

  Maybe this was it.

  One morning, he’s in training for NMV Exterminators—“No More Vermin”—and that afternoon he doesn’t come back from work.

  Had he just kept walking? Had he even looked back, like to catch one last scent?

  When Libby’d gone into NMV’s front office, asked after him, one of the exterminators had come in from back, his goggles on his forehead, the pesticide rolling off him in waves thick enough that her eyes watered.

  The story he finally admitted to was that Darren had started drinking at lunch, and had been asked to take it home by midafternoon. End of training, end of story, he was sorry.

  “He’ll show up,” the exterminator told her. “But we can’t let him—he won’t be working here. If anything, you know, happened, we’d be liable.”

  Libby understood. Darren belonged on the interstate, not in a shop, not on a crew.

  The night before the hot-dog contest, she walked out the back door. To read one of her paperbacks under the floodlight, I thought, but when I looked, her clothes were folded on the rusty lawn chair the way she always did, for when she came back.

  Ten minutes later, and for the rest of the night, her howling filled every nook and cranny of the city, seeped into every pore.

  It’s not something werewolves do just all the time, like in the movies. And it’s not at the stupid moon either.

  You howl like that when your brother’s gone.

  You howl like that when you want him to hear you. When you need him to.

  I don’t know if she was saying good-bye or where are you?

  The next morning all the DJs were talking about the wolf. They were even playing clips, piping in specialists, mixing Libby in with songs.

  “Good,” Libby said.

  She was still on the exact same page of her book.

  The contest was down at the water, with the cruise ships like giant walls out against all that scary blue.

  The hot-dog contest went the way they usually do, except this time one of the contestants had a white canvas sack over his head, with eyeholes cut into it. It made him look like a scarecrow. The DJ hosting the event made a big production of pinching the cloth away from his mouth, using scissors to snip a mouth out.

  When the bell rang to start the eating, I tried counting how many hot dogs the mystery contestant was dunking and downing, but I also wanted to see his fingers at the same time. It made me lose count, and it didn’t matter anyway. The mystery guest didn’t win, and Darren would have. Even before the DJ pulled the hood off, showed it was the morning DJ, I knew we’d made the trip all the way out here for nothing.

  “They never look like they sound,” I said to Libby.

  She was pulling her hair beside her face, trying not to cry.

  I led her to the car.

  “What does ‘Catalina’ even mean?” she said, slamming the heel of hand into the dash. Darren had pried the car’s name off the side, screwed it to the glove compartment because, he said, this was Florida, and we needed a real boat to get around, right?

  “Catamaran” is the boat, though. Not “Catalina.”

  And werewolves don’t go on boats anyway.

  Because it was town, Libby was having to drive. Because she couldn’t, we just sat there.

  “Sometimes you can forget,” she said, finally.

  I looked over
to her, waited.

  “Dad told me about it. That—that if you get hurt bad enough as a wolf, that when you come back in the morning, back to a person, that you can come back not knowing anything.”

  “Amnesia,” I filled in.

  “Sort of,” Libby said. “But he said he’d even seen it happen once that a guy’s face . . . like, forgot. When he came back, his jaw was different. Like, since he couldn’t remember who he was, the wolf was just putting him back together however. It didn’t have directions to follow, didn’t have memories to go on, so one face was as good as the next.”

  “Did he still know he could change?”

  Libby didn’t answer.

  I tried to imagine Darren with a different face. I remembered touching his face with my fingertips in the darkness once, to be sure it was him. I could still see him crashing through the wall of my bedroom to save me. I remembered every swimming pool his favorite used-car salesman had fallen back into, and the look in that salesman’s eyes each time.

  I stood up from the car, took off walking.

  Libby let me.

  It was all falling apart, I could tell. It was just going to be me and her. It was enough, but it wasn’t.

  I hated Darren, and I would have chewed my hand off just to see him one more time.

  Where I spent the night was under the stoop of an abandoned strip mall across from NMV Exterminators. All their vans were parked out front like giant white beetles. They even had comical feelers sprung up from above their windshields. It was how you knew you were getting NMV.

  I was the first one through the door at nine.

  “I’m looking for my uncle,” I told the woman at the desk.

  She was maybe ten years older than Libby, I thought, kind of a honky-tonk reject, too many cigarettes, not enough sunlight, fingernails curved over like talons, fake red hair, her left ear pinched through with probably twenty silver earrings all in a row. This wasn’t the annoying high schooler who had helped Libby. I hadn’t been hoping for the high schooler, though. I was hoping for answers.

  “Does he work here?” she asked, holding my face with her eyes in a way I had to look away from, because she would read everything.

  “He used to,” I said. “For a day or two.”