Mongrels Read online

  “And don’t bring back anything sick this time,” Libby said right to him. To punctuate it she threw down a dollar and a half on the table, most of it in change.

  The change was for me, for the ketchup I would definitely need for whatever Darren ran down in an hour or two. For the first few weeks in Texas, she’d been just swiping packets from the condiment tray at the gas station that fronted the junkyard, but now she couldn’t go back in there anymore, and they’d learned to keep an eye on me as well.

  The change she threw on the table, I was pretty sure it was from the office building. It had to be. From the ashtrays and drawers and drains of people who knew how to tie a tie, even without a mirror. I cupped my hand over the quarters and dimes and pennies. They were still wet. She’d just washed them in the bathroom. Because werewolves who aren’t werewolves yet, they can still die from normal human sicknesses.

  “So . . .” Darren said, like figuring this out as he went, “so you mean I’m only to get a raccoon with a clean bill of health like tied to its neck? They still make those? Good thing you told me, I was probably just going to get the first thing I saw down at the animal hospital.”

  Libby stared at him.

  This was the tenth or fifteenth week of him being around too much. Of her bringing home half the money that was supposed to go twice as far.

  It didn’t help at all that Darren was shifting every night, to try to get his hand to forget it was infected. What that meant for us was that he was spending his days mummied up on the couch. And werewolf sleep, that’s caterpillar-in-a-cocoon deep, about as close to coma as you can get and not flatline.

  Another way we always die? House fires. Come in from a night of blood and carnage, burn most of those calories shifting back to human, then dive headfirst into your pillow, go deeper down than dreams, down so far that, when the smoke starts building from the stove or the cigarette or the villagers’ torches, well, that’s that. Barbecued wolf, babydoll.

  That was one of Darren’s words since we’d hit Texas: babydoll.

  It made Libby’s top lip snarl up in a way Darren couldn’t get enough of.

  He usually woke right around Wheel of Fortune, and, even though he’d yell the solutions to make them right, none of them ever were.

  It didn’t help Libby sleep.

  We weren’t going to be in Texas for much longer, I could tell. Texas was bad for werewolves. We’d been there not long ago already, coming back from Florida, so should have learned. But Texas was so big. That was the thing. If we wanted to get back into Louisiana and Alabama and all those places without ice and snow, we had to drive across Texas, hope none of the cowboys were watching.

  Just, werewolf cars aren’t made to go that far in a single push. The LeSabre back by the propane tank was proof of that. There was grass growing up all around it already, and probably coming up through the holes in the floorboard, like Texas was doing everything it could to keep us here.

  Not because it wanted us to find work, to make lives. It was because it wanted to eat us.

  And it was working.

  After Libby was gone, that little Datsun’s four-cylinder screaming in pain, Darren hung his tongue out again, panted in imitation of her in the most profane way, somehow getting his head involved.

  “Maybe a deer,” I told him, because Libby wasn’t here to defend herself.

  “Bambi’s mom again,” he said, looking out the window like considering this.

  So far he’d brought back two skinny does, but they’d each been roadkill. I could tell, but didn’t say anything. If I did, then we’d both have to see him darting between headlights, just another dog, a big rangy one, trying to drag this bounty off the highway. Instead of running it down like we’re meant to.

  Three paws aren’t fast enough, though. You can’t corner hard, just flop over onto your chin instead.

  “Up for some good old USDA beef?” Darren said.

  “Libby says no,” I told him.

  “‘Libby says no,’” he repeated, mocking her thick tongue again.

  If we even stole a calf away from the pastures all around us, not even a whole cow, still, ranchers would come asking, and we’d be the new tenants, the hungry tenants, the ones with big thick bones stashed in the crawlspace.

  Not that a calf wouldn’t taste exactly like heaven.

  Darren stood up, started peeling out of his clothes. It’s what you do when your sister can’t steal enough nickels and dimes for new pants. He kicked the back door open, arced a splattery line of pee out into the night.

  “How old do you have to get for it to stop hurting?” I asked, pretending to watch the news on television. Pretending this was no big deal. Just casual conversation.

  Darren rolled his head away from his right shoulder, something in there creaking and popping unnaturally loud.

  Inside, he was already shifting.

  “It’s worth it,” he said, then pulled the door shut so he could part the see-through curtain, make sure there was nobody hiding behind the LeSabre. Before he stepped out he looked back to me, said, “Lock that door?”

  Because I didn’t have sharp teeth, or good ears. Because I couldn’t protect myself.

  And then he was gone.

  I rushed to the back window like every time, to try to see him halfway between man and wolf, but all I caught was a shadow slipping across the pitted dull silver of the propane tank.

  Instead of ketchup, I bought a whole hot dog off the little Ferris wheel on the counter at the gas station. I pointed out which one I wanted. The old man working the register looked up to me, asked was I sure?

  It’s what he did every night, like he was trying to direct me away from what was probably the oldest hot dog in the case.

  I told him a different one, then a different one, and by the end of it I didn’t know if I had the oldest worst hot dog or the one that had just cycled in.

  I wasn’t supposed to go out on my own, not without telling Darren or at least leaving a note—he could read that much—but there weren’t going to be any truant officers here. Libby was a werewolf, wasn’t she? Not a mother hen.

  I’d thought of that one myself.

  I sat on the far side of the ice machine and savored that hot dog. I’d put every condiment on it the gas station had, except mustard, and even doubled up on some, just because the old man couldn’t say anything about it. With Darren or Libby around, I’d pretend not to like this bland human food, would make a big production of wanting something with blood, something for wolves.

  The hot dog was so good, though.

  I scooped some relish off my pants, onto my finger, into my mouth again.

  When I looked up, three kids from my grade were watching me.

  “Animal boy,” the one in the red hat said, showing his own teeth.

  “Don’t mess with him,” the girl of them said.

  “Might catch something,” John Deere Hat agreed.

  “He Mexican?” the third of them said, a boy with yellow hair. If I stood, we’d have been the exact same height.

  “Still wet,” John Deere Hat said—“piso mojado, right?”—then pulled the girl along with him, heading into the gas station. Yellow Hair stood watching me.

  “Piso mojado?” I said to him.

  “What are you really?” he said back.

  I held my hot dog out to him, not quite straightening my elbow out all the way. When he reached for it I growled like I’d heard Darren growl and lunged forward, snapping my teeth.

  Yellow Hair fell back into the Nissan parked in the first slot and crabbed back onto the hood, denting it in perfectly, in a way he was definitely going to have to answer for.

  I stood the rest of the way, tore another bite off my hot dog and threw the rest down, pushed past the torn-up pay phone, into the night.

  Walking the fence back to our little white rent house, I kept looking behind me. Like I was hearing something. Like I was listening. Like my ears were already that good. Trick is, if somebody’s really
sneaking up on you, then you’ve already made them, you know they’re there, but if you’re all alone, then spinning around every few steps, staring into the darkness, nobody’ll ever know.

  Except Darren.

  “Spook much, spooky?” he said from right beside me, naked as the day he was last naked. I wasn’t sure if that’s how all werewolves were, or if it was just Darren.

  I didn’t even look over, just kept walking.

  “I smell horseradish?” he said, crinkling his nose up.

  I looked down at the commotion by his thigh. It was a big horned owl, probably three feet tall, with a wingspan twice that. A real grandfather of a bird, like from the dinosaur days of birds. It was flapping slow. Darren had bitten the feet off, it looked like, was just holding it by the bloody stumps.

  Because I needed to learn, Darren let me crack the owl’s neck over when we got back to the house. It took three tries. Owls’ necks aren’t like other birds’. There’s more muscle, and they’re made to turn farther anyway. And they don’t blink the whole time you’re killing them. And the skull of a big one like that, it’s as big as your palm, like you’ve got a kid in your lap, clamped between your knees.

  We sat back on the propane tank to pull the feathers out. They drifted around us, stuck in our hair, in the dead grass. It looked like a whole flock of birds had just exploded, flying over. Like they’d suicided into the propeller of a plane. Air chili.

  “Owls taste any good?” I asked.

  “Thought you were hungry like the wolf?” Darren said, throwing a clump of feathers at me.

  Because the oven didn’t work, we cut the breast meat into long thin strips for frying. Because Darren was trying to be polite, instead of sucking them down raw like he probably would have if I wasn’t there, he breaded them up with crushed crackers, dropped them in a pan of butter. He said we could save some this way. Maybe make owl jerky with the leftovers. It would be the only owl jerky in all of Texas, probably. We could open a stand, get rich overnight.

  His finger was seeping again, I could see. And he wasn’t holding the fork with that hand.

  “It’s not going to heal, is it?” I said.

  He didn’t answer.

  Libby’d told him he knew what the cure for a silver cut was, but he’d come back that he needed both hands to drive, thanks.

  The owl tasted like a thousand dead mice.

  Thirty minutes after eating it, we both started throwing up fast enough that we barely made the back door in time.

  “Poison,” Darren got out.

  The owl had got dusted out in some field. It had eaten some house rat, its brain fizzing green with bait. It had seen Darren coming, and taken a secret-agent suicide pill.

  “I’m telling—telling Libby,” I said, having to cough it out, and Darren flashed his eyes up hot at me, said some criminal I was turning out to be, then he smiled, pushed me away. I had to fall farther than he pushed to avoid my own puke. He laughed so hard it made him throw up again, and, watching him throw up, I had to throw up some more. When I could I picked up a vomited-on rock, rolled it weakly at him. He pretended to be a bowling pin, fell flat over into the grass with his eyes open like a cartoon character then rose wiping his mouth with his unbandaged hand, reached his other hand down for me just to start it all over again, and, it’s stupid, I know, but if I’d died right then from the poison, died without ever even changing, died with owl feathers stuck all over me, that would have been pretty all right.

  I was up with the television on by lunch, my stomach as empty as it had ever been. That’s what being thirteen’s about, Libby had told me. It didn’t mean I was changing, it meant I was normal.

  She didn’t know everything, though.

  Darren was dead to the world on the other couch, his mouth open, one skinny leg hooked over a scratchy pillow. The big bad werewolf in his natural state.

  I could have drawn any number of mustaches and eyebrows on his face, and since the light bulb in the bathroom was dead, he wouldn’t even know for a day or two, if Libby could keep from cracking up. To commemorate my right guess on Wheel—“Where’s the Beef Pudding”—I arced a line of pee out the back door, imagined I was telling all the other dogs to stay the hell away. That they didn’t want any of this.

  When we’d moved in, there’d been a bobcat living under the kitchen, raccoons in the pump house, coyotes yipping out in the scrub.

  Once they got a good whiff of who’d moved in, they all found better dens. Even mice and rats know better than to hang around us, and forget horses. Dogs’ll do their back-hair-snarling-and-barking number, ringing the alarm for their humans, but horses, they just watch with their big eyes. Track your every step. And if there’s no place for them to slink off to, then they come in hard, front hooves slashing.

  We’re in their blood, I guess. Or, we’ve been in their blood, anyway.

  Go ahead, horse. Run away.

  Catch you later.

  To keep Libby from Darren’s throat, I pulled my pants on and policed the backyard for feathers. The owl’s leftover beak was neat, all black and shiny. I puppeted my fingers behind it, pretended it was an octopus, snapped at the air with it.

  Like I’d ever seen an octopus except on a nature show.

  The way werewolves won’t go up a tree, even though we’ve got the reach, got the claws, we also won’t go in the ocean. Evidently Darren had tried once our first time living in Florida, while he wasn’t even wolfed out, but he’d lost it, had to splash back, halfway hyperventilating. How far he’d made it was his knees. Among werewolves, making it even that far meant you had nerve to spare.

  Leave the water to the fish, the trees to the cats.

  Everything between, it’s ours.

  Waiting for Jeopardy!, I scoured the kitchen for a sandwich, finally had to make do with store-brand peanut butter on a plastic spoon, sugar sprinkled on top after every lick, the licks shallower and shallower.

  Darren just slept, and slept deeper.

  I licked my peanut butter and watched him. His index finger was shiny. Not from the stretched-out swollen-up skin so much as from the antibiotic cream he’d finally slathered on, because wolf saliva wasn’t cutting it.

  Jeopardy! was a repeat. I knew all the answers, said them in my head to prove it.

  An hour later I was in the bathroom with a lighter, stretching my tongue out in the medicine-cabinet mirror.

  Was it blacker than usual? Flattening out just a little? A dark stripe down the middle? Were my words getting thicker?

  By three, Darren still wasn’t awake.

  I turned the second Wheel of Fortune up louder, so that every tick of that big wheel filled the living room like a roller coaster coasting to a stop.

  Nothing. No response.

  Not even from the back bedroom. And Libby kept a mop handle by her bed special for banging on the wall.

  On ghost feet I crossed to the front window.

  No number 14 Datsun pointed east. No number 41 Datsun ready to watch the sun set.

  I looked down the hall to Libby’s bedroom, flared my nostrils like I’d been training.

  She wasn’t going to be there, I knew.

  Just like I’d been right at the game shows all day, I was right about this as well. It made my heart hammer in my chest, made my mouth dry out even more.

  All her ways to die were flashing through my head faster and faster, until I was sure she’d been scalped for bounty, netted for a sideshow, kidnapped for science, and the hair that had been left behind from her last desperate fight, it was waxed under in the lobby of her office building now.

  I paced from the kitchen to the front door twenty times, fifty times, practicing what I was going to tell Darren. Practicing what wasn’t going to make me sound like a scared baby. Finally I just sat down on the sun-bleached cable spool we called a coffee table, shook him by the shoulder.

  It didn’t change his breathing, didn’t make him roll over.

  I shook him harder, pulled the couch cushion out
from under his head, even cupped a handful of water over from the kitchen sink, let it dribble down onto him, then splash all at once.

  He didn’t wipe it away.

  Had he eaten more of the meat than I had, was that what it was? More of the poison?

  I shook my head no, no, that this wasn’t happening. That any other time, sure, hibernate away, go deep and fall asleep, hide inside yourself, dream your Red Riding Hood dreams. But not now.

  I screamed at him, right in his face, my slobber misting his cheek, and finally pulled the couch forward enough to tump it over backward, him riding it back into the wall.

  Nothing. The ragged, snuffling end of a snore.

  I slapped the wall hard above him, then got our two pans from the sink and clanged them together, then opened the door to go out to the Datsun, honk the horn, but there was no Datsun.

  Libby was gone. She was really gone.

  I sat down on the cable spool, my face in my hands.

  I would have cried, except I’m a werewolf.

  It left me with just one option.

  I stood again, stepped over the upended couch, planted down right over Darren, my knees on either side of his scrawny chest.

  “Don’t kill me,” I told him, and lifted his sick finger up, slipped it into my mouth, and bit down as hard as I could.

  The pus filled my mouth, warm and tangy and medicinal, and probably infectious if I wasn’t already blood, and the next thing I knew I was on my back and Darren was over me, his mouth full of new teeth, a growl coming from his throat that made me into every rabbit that had ever died.

  “No no no!” I yelled, trying to cross my hands in front of my face, and rolled out from under him. Only because he let me.

  He stood breathing deep, his nose tasting everything in the room all at once, I knew. The peanut butter. The owl feathers smoldering out in the burn barrels. The circuits in the television heated up from all the useless vowels people had been buying all afternoon.

  “She’s not here,” I said, my voice breaking up like a kid.

  Darren turned his head sideways to listen down the hall, and then crossed to the front window like I had, parted the curtains just as they lit up with real and actual headlights.