Mongrels Read online

  Except for me.

  It’s why Libby was trying so hard to save me, I think. Like, if I never went wolf, she’d be keeping some promise to my mom. Like she’d have saved one of us.

  I’m not sure I wanted to be saved.

  I stood there in the doorway, too grown-up for hugs, too young not to have been drawn to the sound of a big rig, and Darren lifted his chin to me, pulled me out into the driveway with him. He had a box of frozen steaks in the sleeper. We were going to eat like kings, he said, messing my hair up and pushing me away at the same time.

  All those movies, where the werewolves eat their meat raw? Libby at least seared our steaks on the outside. I didn’t have a taste for it yet, but I could pretend. Darren cued into how long I was having to chew and planted a bottle of ketchup right by my plate, and nobody said anything.

  Each veiny, raw bite swelled and swelled in my mouth, but I swallowed them down hard. Because I’m a werewolf. Because I’m part of this family.

  After dinner, after Libby’d gone in to work the counter at the truck stop, Darren pulled out the next way to die but, before showing it to me, made me promise I wasn’t a cop, a narc, or a reporter.

  “I tell you if I was?” I said to him.

  “You report back to Lib about this, it’s both our asses,” he said, then added, “But mostly yours.”

  I flipped him off at close range.

  He guided my arm to the side, opened the fingers of his other hand one by one and dramatic.

  On his palm was a throwing star, like I’d seen at ten thousand flea markets.

  Only this one, Darren said, it was silver.

  That’s a word werewolves kind of hiss out, like the worst secret.

  Every time he spun it up in the air, reaching in to pinch it on both sides and stop its spinning, it was in slow motion for me.

  Not just the points were sharp either. Somebody’d ground the edges down, then used a small, patient whetstone on them. Just the weight of this star, it was enough to pull those razor edges down the middle of Libby’s magazine pages. We’d taken turns doing it, just to prove that something so small could be so dangerous, so deadly, so wrong.

  When we were done Darren passed it to me reverently, holding it sideways. With a knife, you usually hold the blade yourself, offer the handle like’s polite. There was no safe part of this throwing star, though.

  Even the slightest nick and our blood would be boiling.

  Darren being careful with it when he handed it across, watching my eyes to make sure I understood what we were playing with here—my heart swelled, my throat lumped up, and I wondered if this is what it feels like, changing.

  He was only telling me to be careful because this was dangerous to me as well.

  I was part of this family. I was in this blood.

  So he wouldn’t see the change happening to my eyes, I tilted my head back, gathered up the trash, and walked the eighty-nine steps to the burn barrels.

  The trash was all bloody cardboard from the steaks and fluttering pages from Libby’s magazines we’d cut all to hell.

  When I heard the thunk from inside, I knew what was happening. Darren thought he was a ninja. He always had. The first of the new breed, deadlier than either a werewolf or a ninja. He was diving across the living room, falling in slow motion through the movie playing in his head. Diving and, midfall, flinging his throwing star at the paneling of the walls.

  With a throwing star, you can’t miss. It’s all edges.

  I scratched a flame from my book of my matches, held it to the celebrity gossip magazines Libby would never admit to, and stood there in the first tendrils of smoke, watching my uncle’s blurry silhouette against the curtains.

  I watched him finally stop, jerk the index finger of his right hand to his mouth, to suck on it.

  I turned back to the fire and held my palms out, waiting for the heat, and I remembered what I saw on a nature show once: that dogs’ eyes can water, sure, but they can’t cry. They’re not built for it.

  Neither are werewolves.

  CHAPTER 4

  The Truth About Werewolves

  But this is for class.”

  The reporter doesn’t start with this. This is where the reporter finally gets to.

  The reporter’s second-grade teacher said interviewing a family member would be easy.

  Teachers don’t know everything.

  The reporter’s uncle has been awake, he says, for sixty-two hours now. To prove it he holds his hand out to show how it’s trembling, at least until he wraps it around the top of a make-believe steering wheel.

  This is right before the move back to a different part of Florida in the nighttime. This is Georgia homework.

  “Just do it already,” the reporter’s aunt says to her brother. She’s in the kitchen rehabbing the stove, trying to coax Christmas from it.

  The reporter’s uncle drags the weak headlights of his eyes in from the road he can still see, settles on the blue spiral notebook the reporter’s holding.

  “You really want an A?” the uncle says. “An A-plus, even?”

  In the kitchen the aunt clears her throat with meaning for the uncle. The reporter’s already up past his bedtime for this assignment.

  So far she’s pulled two melted Hot Wheels from the oven. They don’t roll anymore.

  “If he doesn’t pass school—” she starts, her voice as big as the inside of the oven, but cuts herself off when her fingertips lose whatever it is they’ve latched on to. Another Hot Wheels?

  “I remember school . . .” the reporter’s uncle says, his voice dreamy and half asleep. Like it’s dragging out across the years. “You know the ladies love our kind, don’t you?” he says, talking low so his sister won’t have anything to add.

  “I’m supposed to ask you the questions,” the reporter says, his lips firm.

  Because he lost his sheet of interview questions, he’s made up his own.

  “Shoot,” the reporter’s uncle says, yawning so wide his jaw sounds like it’s breaking open at the hinge.

  “Why do you always pee right before?” the reporter asks, no eye contact, just a ready-set-go pencil, green except for the tooth marks. It’s from the box of free ones the teacher keeps on the corner of her desk.

  “Pee?” the uncle says, interested at last. He looks past the reporter to the kitchen, probably with the idea that the reporter’s aunt is going to prairie-dog her head up about werewolf talk.

  No such aunt tonight.

  The reporter’s uncle shrugs one shoulder, leans in so the reporter has to lean in as well, to hear. “You mean before the change, right?” he says.

  Right.

  “Easy,” the uncle says. “Say—say you’ve got a pet goldfish. Like, one you’re all attached to, one you’d never eat even if you were starving and there was ketchup already on it. But you have to move, like to another state, get it? ‘State’? You don’t put the whole fishbowl all sloshing with water up on the dashboard for that, now do you?”

  “You put it in a bag,” the reporter says.

  “Smallest bag you can,” the uncle says. “Makes the trip easier, doesn’t it? Shit doesn’t get spilled everywhere. And the fish might even make it to that other state alive, yeah?”

  In his notebook, angled up where his uncle can’t see, the reporter spells out fish.

  “But, know what else?” the reporter’s uncle says, even quieter. “Wolves, werewolves like us, we’ve got bigger teeth to eat with, better eyes to see with, sharper claws to claw with. Bigger everything, even stomachs, because we eat more, don’t know when the next meal’s coming.”

  In the reporter’s notebook: four careful lines that might be claw scratches.

  “Bigger everything but bladders,” the uncle says, importantly. “Know why dogs always end up peeing on the rug? It’s because a dog can’t hold it. Because they’re not made to be inside. They’re made to be outside, always peeing all over everything. They never had to grow big bladders, because there’s no l
ines to wait in to get to pee on a tree. You just go to a different tree. Or you just pee where you’re already standing.”

  “But werewolves aren’t dogs,” the reporter says.

  “Damn straight,” the uncle says, pushing back into the couch in satisfaction, like he was just testing the reporter here. “But we maybe share certain features. Like how a Corvette and a Pinto both have gas tanks.”

  A Pinto is a horse. A Mustang is a car.

  In the notebook: nothing.

  “So what I’m saying,” the uncle says, narrowing his eyes down to gunfighter slits to show he’s serious here, that this really is A-plus information, “it’s that, if you shift across with like six beers in you, or six cokes, six beers or cokes you already needed to be peeing out in the first place, then you’re going to be trying to fit those six cokes into a two-beer fish bag, get it?”

  The reporter is trying to remember what the next question was.

  “We got any of those balloons left?” the reporter’s uncle calls into the kitchen, for the demonstration part of this lesson.

  Balloons? the reporter writes in the notebook in his head.

  His aunt answers with a rattle on the linoleum: Hot Wheels number three. This one rolls into a chair leg, is the best of the lot, the real survivor.

  “Corvette,” the reporter’s uncle says, nodding at that little car like it’s making his case for him.

  Before the reporter can remember his next question, the aunt comes slipping around the half-wall counter between the kitchen and the living room. Her hand is on the top of the half-wall counter for her to swing around, and her bare feet are skating, rocking the chairs under the table, two red plastic cups that were on the table knocked into the air and, for the moment, just staying there.

  In this slowed-down time, the reporter looks from them all the way across to his aunt. Her face is smudged black with a thousand pieces of burnt toast, and there’s a look in her eyes that the reporter can’t quite identify. If it were on a test, the kind where you have to put some answer to get partial credit, what he might write down is “reaching.” Her eyes, they’re reaching.

  Her feet, though.

  That’s what the reporter can’t look away from.

  They’re not slipping anymore now, just only one step later. They’re gripping. With sharp black claws.

  Before he can be sure, time catches up with itself and she’s flying across the coffee table, her whole entire body level with the floor, her arms collecting the reporter to her chest and then crashing them both into the reporter’s uncle, who only has time to make his mouth into the first part of the letter O, which is just a lowercase O.

  The three of them are halfway over the back of the couch when the spark the reporter’s aunt must have seen in the blackness of the oven does its evil thing and the whole kitchen turns into a fireball that blows all the windows in the trailer out, that kills all the lights at once, that leaves the three of them deaf against a wall, feeling each other’s faces to be sure they’re all right, and if there are any real answers about werewolves, then it’s a picture of them right there doing that, a picture of them right there trying to find each other.

  CHAPTER 5

  Billy the Kid

  Everybody goes to jail at some point.

  Werewolves especially.

  And even just one night in the tank, that can be a straight-up death sentence. For all the other drunks locked up, who don’t know any better than to push you, who think they can steal your blanket and keep their throat, sure, a death sentence for them, but for you as well, once you’re the only one standing knee-deep in the blood and the gore, your chest rising and falling with the rush of it all. And, that deep into the night, it doesn’t matter if you’re standing on four feet or two. Either way the cops on duty’ll line up into a firing squad, give you that twenty-one-gun send-off.

  That’s a warning Darren gave me. Not Libby. Her jobs were always aboveboard, with set hours, sometimes even a uniform or apron.

  Darren, he always got paid in cash.

  Thirteen years old, I would sit at the table with him, help straighten out his tens and twenties, get them rubber-banded into coffee tins and tucked behind baseboards. On a flush night there might even be a tip involved. Kind of just sneaked across the table after it was all said and done, Darren’s eyes telling me not to say anything—that, by sharing this with me, he was including me in the danger.

  Libby knew, I think, could probably hear that giveaway scrape of cotton-paper from the living room, but you pick your fights.

  What she didn’t know was that Darren was teaching me to flex the ropy muscles of my wrists out like a puffer fish. What she wasn’t home to see was Darren with those dummy cuffs from the dollar rack, me pushed up against the wall of the living room, hands behind my back to see if I could slip a middle finger up under that plastic silver jaw. It was an old Billy the Kid trick, according to Darren. Billy the Kid was the first werewolf. He was probably even the one who figured out you could bite your own thumb off if you absolutely had to and then go wolf around that next corner, pray that the transformation won’t be counting fingers this time.

  It was gospel. I lapped it up.

  We were in the alien part of Texas then, north of Dallas, west of Denton. The Buick we’d had in New Mexico hadn’t been able to take us any farther. Bridgeport looked like another planet, especially with the ice storm. All the long branches the trees had been growing for forty years had snapped off from the weight, shattered over the broken-down fences, breaking them down even more. Dallas was more than an hour away, and a dogleg at that, and too bright besides. Decatur was closer and a straighter shot, and it had cheaper groceries. Because the junkyard three miles down the road from us had fired Libby for not coming into the job knowing which wheel would fit what year of truck, she was pushing a mop at a two-story office building on the north side of Decatur. What she was driving back and forth was a rehabbed Datsun minitruck from the yard. It had been spray-painted bright blue ten or fifteen years before, and had the number 14 carefully paintbrushed onto the driver door, “41” on the passenger side.

  Some mysteries you never solve.

  Darren wasn’t working then. It was because of his right hand. It was still infected from that throwing star—and it had been months, long enough for me to have a birthday. Watching game shows in the daytime, he would lick the side of his index finger constantly, like a huge fleshy blow-pop that swelled up instead of ever going down.

  “It’s what werewolves do,” he told me when I was staring.

  “What is a tank?” I told him.

  The question on the game show was about panzers.

  “Ding ding ding!” he chimed, not a hint of a smile at the corners of his mouth.

  Where I could read, and did, Darren just listened to talk shows on the radio. It made sense: You don’t drive truck with a paperback open on your thigh.

  Or with a hand that can’t work a shifter, as it turned out. He’d tried wrong-handing it—right on the wheel, left crossed over his body for the stick—but it had ended in a jackknife, with Darren just walking away from it, his hand up by his shoulder like a throbbing lantern that could light his way home.

  We’d got to town a couple of weeks earlier, running on stolen gas, the Buick’s temperature gauge hovering deep in the red, but instead of checking me into school like usual, to keep me on the straight and narrow path to a sophomore year, Libby was giving me January off. I was angling for February too. Then I might just make it all the way to summer.

  I liked reading enough, but what was I supposed to do with a diploma? Getting a degree would be like I was deciding to trade in my heritage, my blood. And if I started making those kinds of gestures, then that was the same as asking to never change, to just stay like this forever, not need all Darren’s advice.

  Later that night we were sitting at the table with Libby. For her it was breakfast, but for us it was dinner. Except we didn’t have any.

  “You’ll
run something down for him?” Libby said to Darren, her runny eggs balanced on her fork.

  They were the last three eggs.

  “Say what?” Darren said, scrunching his face up.

  I’d understood Libby, but it had taken some effort: She was talking like her mouth was hurt. Like she had a big wad of chewing gum.

  She said it again, pointing her words harder.

  “Oh,” Darren said, biting his lower lip in, staring right at her. “Already, sis?”

  Libby shoved her plate across the table at him and didn’t say another word.

  Darren lifted her plate with his good hand and slurped her eggs off, smiling the whole time.

  “What?” I said when she stomped back to her bedroom for her hairnet. It was so she wouldn’t wax any more of her black hairs into the lobby floor. There’d been complaints.

  “When you change,” Darren said, wiping the yellow from his lips with his bandaged hand, “your tongue’s the first thing to go.”

  He hung his tongue out the side of his mouth and panted, to show.

  “That’s because the human tongue has more muscles—” I started, but he looked to the side like checking if I was for real, came back with: “You think we’re talking human tongues, here?”

  “But she’s not even—” I started, meaning to say she wasn’t shifting. She was maybe changing her shirt or something, but she was coming back up the hall on two feet, not four. Before I could get into all that, Darren made his eyes big to keep me quiet.

  Libby’s footsteps.

  “Not that they don’t taste good when they’re fresh,” he said like she was catching us midconversation, just another discussion about tongues. But the way he smiled behind it, I didn’t know if he was funning me or if that’s what you’re supposed to do with a kill: muzzle into its mouth, clamp on to the tongue, stretch it back out until that white tendon down the underside snaps.

  It made me gag a little.

  Darren shh’d his swollen finger across his lips and, like always, I kept his secret.