Mongrels Read online

  “I’m sorry,” Libby said, somewhere in all of it.

  “Shoot, babydo—babyface,” Darren said back to Libby. “Everybody goes to jail at some point, don’t they?”

  In the rearview mirror Libby blinked once to me, thank you.

  I pushed the gas pedal of the LeSabre hard, stabbed us deeper into the night.

  CHAPTER 6

  Werewolves on the Moon

  Call me ‘Mom,’” the criminal’s aunt tells him just before walking up the wide stairs, into his elementary school.

  This is second grade for the second time, even though he’s already nine. It’s because Alabama needed school records to prove third grade, and Georgia knew the criminal by a different name.

  “And we’re not werewolves,” she says back to him at the double doors, “we’re not anything,” and heats her eyes up so he knows this is important. Then she takes his hand in hers.

  Mrs. Luc-Casey’s classroom is all the way at the end of the hall. His aunt’s heels click on the concrete floor. The janitor stops mopping for them to pass. His name is James Kent. He lives in a rhyme but doesn’t know it. The criminal does. He sings it in his head as they pass by.

  The reason he’s a criminal is that he told the truth.

  Mrs. Luc-Casey is waiting for them behind her desk.

  She looks up when she gets to the bottom of a page, straightens her current stack of papers in that way she has like she’s making a decision, then stands, meets the criminal’s aunt halfway across the classroom.

  “Mrs. Baden,” she says.

  It’s the name for Alabama.

  “Ms.,” the criminal’s aunt corrects, gently.

  “Of course,” Mrs. Luc-Casey says, and leads the three of them to the front row of the classroom.

  The desks are too small for her and the criminal’s aunt. They slide them out before sitting, so they can face each other.

  “Sit,” the criminal’s aunt says to the criminal.

  “Thank you for coming in,” Mrs. Luc-Casey says, studying the criminal like the criminal he is.

  “I always like to meet his teachers,” the criminal’s aunt says.

  She hadn’t prepared the criminal for this particular lie, but a good criminal knows when to keep quiet. When to just shuffle his sneakers, look anywhere else.

  “Would he rather use the playground?” Mrs. Luc-Casey says to the criminal’s aunt. “It’s not quite dark yet, is it?”

  “He needs to hear this as well,” the criminal’s aunt says.

  “It’s not uncommon,” Mrs. Luc-Casey starts in. “Perhaps it’s even commendable, or indicative of . . . of better things to come.”

  “Better things?” the criminal’s aunt says.

  “Imagination shouldn’t be a handicap,” Mrs. Luc-Casey says.

  “Of course, of course,” the criminal’s aunt says.

  “So long as there’s clear division between the imaginary and—and where we all have to live, right?”

  “Right?” the criminal’s aunt passes on to the criminal.

  He looks from face to face, being sure what they want to hear, then nods.

  “So . . .” Mrs. Luc-Casey says, like her voice is shifting gears, “the assignment was two pages, front and back. ‘What I want to be when I grow up.’”

  “You know he’s supposed to be in third grade?” the aunt asks. “We’re just waiting for the paperwork to catch up to us.”

  “If I hold this to third-grade standards—” Mrs. Luc-Casey says, then cuts herself off: “No, if he’s in second grade, I have to consider him a second grader. It’s only fair. And I haven’t seen anything to suggest—”

  “I’m just saying if he messed up on the assignment, maybe it was because—”

  “The assignment was to draw pictures,” Mrs. Luc-Casey says.

  The aunt looks to the criminal about this. “This is about not following instructions, then,” she says.

  The criminal tries to make himself smaller. More invisible.

  “Not exactly,” Mrs. Luc-Casey says. “It’s . . . well. Most boys will default to their father’s profession, see.”

  “That’s not an issue for us,” the criminal’s aunt says.

  “Which is of course where the imagination comes into play,” Mrs. Luc-Casey says. “He had to make that profession up, as it were. I’m starting to understand.”

  “Surely he wasn’t the only astronaut, was he?” the criminal’s aunt asks, leaning her elbows onto her small desk. “You had firemen and policemen as well, didn’t you?”

  “He was the only one who went into such . . . detail,” Mrs. Luc-Casey says, and slides the guilty piece of paper from her yellow folder.

  The criminal’s aunt looks over to him and takes the evidence into her own lap.

  She studies it for nearly as long as it had taken to draw them, and then flips it over for the rest of the story.

  The front side is the criminal on the surface of the moon. You can tell it’s the moon because it has craters, and because of the stars all around, and it’s because it’s only a quarter full, a sliver of itself leaned back in the sky. The criminal’s rocket is parked in the background.

  What’s happening is one of the other astronauts is running up the steep top of the bowl, trying to reach the point so he can climb over, jump back to Earth.

  Chasing behind him is the criminal, being what he’s going to be when he grows up.

  On the back side of the page, the one he’d had to hurry to finish, so had just red-crayoned over everything because blood floats in space, he’s caught that other astronaut in his long jaws, is ripping at his stomach and somehow howling at the same time. The howl is letters filling the sky. Mostly the letter O, in a kind of kite-tail ribbon.

  At first, when Mrs. Luc-Casey had sent the note home, the criminal thought the mistake was that he’d drawn another moon above, to howl at. It’s hard to remember every single thing.

  “Well,” his aunt says, and folds the drawings into her purse before Mrs. Luc-Casey can get them back. “I can assure you this won’t be happening again.”

  “Does he—did his father hunt?” Mrs. Luc-Casey asks. “Sometimes children who come from that culture will—”

  “His father is out of the picture,” the criminal’s aunt says for the third time, her lips tighter.

  “And it’s not that I don’t appreciate the humor of it,” Mrs. Luc-Casey says, sitting back but keeping the aunt in her teacher-stare. “If werewolves were real, then of course putting one on the moon would have disastrous effects.”

  The criminal and his aunt are walking across the room by now.

  The aunt stops them, has to close her eyes.

  Only the criminal sees this.

  It makes him hold on to her hand harder.

  “I’m sorry,” he says.

  His aunt looks down to him, her eyes starting to fade to yellow, and she gives his hand a squeeze, then turns back to Mrs. Luc-Casey, her face so pleasant, so ready. So public.

  “If werewolves were real, Mrs. Luc-Casey,” the criminal’s aunt says, giving her words teeth, “then they would know better than to go to the moon, don’t you think? They wouldn’t have lived this long otherwise, would they have?”

  It’s exactly what the criminal’s real mom would have said.

  “If they were real . . .” Mrs. Luc-Casey repeats, studying the criminal’s aunt for the first time, it seems. How much taller she is than a fourth-grade teacher. How empty the school is at this hour. And were her eyes like that before?

  “Thank you,” the criminal’s aunt says, and ushers the criminal out the door.

  The clicking of her heels fills the hall.

  It’s dark outside, now. It’s always getting dark in werewolf stories.

  And the floor is still wet in the exact same place.

  Stepping through it, the criminal’s aunt stops, her nostrils flared, and looks over with just her eyes to the janitor, watching her as well without quite looking up.

  He’s wear
ing a scented paper pine tree from his neck like he’s a car.

  But he isn’t a car.

  He’s more.

  The criminal’s aunt nods once to him and the janitor takes that nod like the best gift ever, looks back to his mopping.

  Two miles down the road the criminal clicks his seat belt off, lets it reel up, then pulls it across his chest again, pushes it shut without pinching his hand like usually happens.

  “Was he—?” he asks, afraid to say it because they’re still so close to school. “Was he a—?”

  In reply his aunt looks up into the rearview mirror, like the criminal is supposed to look there too.

  He unclicks his seat belt again, turns around to look behind them.

  Pacing them on the other side of the fence is a shadow. It’s running on all fours, going faster and faster, having to pump its head with the effort of keeping up.

  The speed limit here is fifty-five.

  “Faster,” the criminal whispers, and his aunt does it for him like a secret, smiling, both hands on the wheel.

  When the shadow on the other side of the fence jumps a dry creek, something from that shadow’s neck floats up into the air above him and hangs for a snapshot of an instant.

  A pine tree.

  Because gravity isn’t the same for astronauts.

  Nothing is.

  CHAPTER 7

  The Lone Ranger

  The only fight I ever saw Darren lose was in the daytime in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, by an ice cooler at the gas station. The ice cooler had a polar bear on it. I was thirteen.

  I was holding my hot dog and, now, Darren’s six-pack of strawberry wine coolers. The wine coolers weren’t why the fight was happening. The wine coolers were all still in their cardboard carrier, for one. For two, the guy Darren was fighting never even saw them, and probably wouldn’t have said anything about them if he had.

  This fight was all Darren’s doing.

  Or, it was his werewolf blood’s doing, anyway.

  Part of being deathly allergic to silver is a deep-seated hatred of the Lone Ranger. According to Darren, he was the first werewolf hunter. It’s how he made his name. “But, see how he always wears gloves?” Darren would say, pleading his case.

  “Sure?” I said the first time he took me through it.

  “It’s because he can’t touch his own bullets!” Darren said. “And you never see him at night, do you? Why is that, do you think?”

  I shook my head no, that this was too far, too much.

  Darren nodded his head yes. Yes yes yes.

  You never saw him at night for the obvious reason that he was out running through campfires, because he was out barking at the moon.

  For that last gasp of the Old West, when trains and horses were both there at once, and hand-crank movie cameras too, the Lone Ranger was a werewolf, and the worst kind: a self-hating one. A werewolf who hunted down other werewolves. A werewolf too weak to just start with himself.

  So when Darren saw the linebacker walking into the gas station he was just walking out of, and that linebacker had a shiny-black domino mask painted on his face for some football game, Darren tried to pretend this hadn’t just happened.

  That lasted for about three steps. Three of my hot-dog-chewing steps, anyway.

  Darren was standing still, I think. Telling himself not to.

  But then he did.

  He slapped the wine coolers into my chest like a newspaper he was done with and reached back to catch this big Lone Ranger by the shoulder, spin him around, make him answer for his many and serious crimes.

  “Watch this,” he said, smiling what I know he thought of as his wolf smile, and I did watch. All of it.

  This Lone Ranger might have been a linebacker, but he was a scrapper too, and maybe some breed of cage fighter as well.

  Darren tagged him with the first punch out of nowhere, but that was just hello, as it turned out.

  Over and over, this Lone Ranger finished the conversation.

  The problem was, Darren had gone up against black bear boars and momma cougars and bull alligators and wild hogs, just to prove he could, and he’d tore his way through cops and werewolves and ex-husbands because he had to, but that was all when he had sharp teeth, and claws.

  On all fours, you couldn’t take Darren down without a truck rolling at seventy, and even then he’d crawl up out of the tall grass of the ditch for round two.

  In town, though, in the city, on the front stoop of a gas station in the daytime, it was a different story. A worse story.

  His balled-up fists weren’t as hard as fists are in the movies. There wasn’t that same two-by-four crack when they landed. Even when this Lone Ranger was sitting across Darren’s chest, pummeling his face, it sounded more like meat slapping meat than it did a movie punch.

  “Enough?” this linebacker Lone Ranger said to Darren after a couple minutes of it, and Darren—I could see him do this, I could see it happening—he looked up through the blood and the haze and saw that oily black domino mask looking back at him across history, looking down at him from the sky, where it had been mounted.

  Darren shook his head no, tried to spit through his torn lips, and then there were more meat sounds. Less tender meat sounds.

  Afterward I dragged Darren around the corner of the gas station and stole one of the ten-pound bags of ice for him. He was propped against the cinderblock wall in exactly the same ragdoll pose as the polar bear on the side of the ice cooler.

  I twisted the cap off one of his wine coolers, folded his fingers around it, guided his hand to his mouth. His effort to drink bloomed a swallow of deeper red back into the bottle, and then he drank that too. It was like the tank part of a hypodermic getting plunged, flushed, injected.

  “Your—your hot dog,” he said when he could, because it was gone.

  “I ate it.”

  Of all the lies I’ve told, this is the one I always come back to, to listen to again. To watch. It’s the only one that’s ever really been perfect, the only one I didn’t have to hesitate before saying.

  From where we were sitting the rest of the afternoon, we could hear the crowd at the football game, their cheers swelling and falling, cresting and crashing.

  “Hope they lose,” Darren said, and toasted his wine cooler that direction.

  “Me too,” I said, and arranged the blanket I’d found over his legs, so he’d stop shivering.

  Because my smell was still normal, wouldn’t cause a panic, Darren and Libby sent me into the pet store for the rabbit.

  It was supposed to be a juicy one. A fat one with floppy ears, a soft throat.

  It wasn’t for them.

  Darren said he would have got it himself, damn the racket, but his face still looked like Frankenstein, and the stump finger of his right hand was a terror to little kids.

  Libby tried to fake like she was amused.

  What she wasn’t saying was that, if her or Darren stepped one foot inside that pet store, it would be a riot. The cats would bite the dogs, the dogs thrash through the fish tanks, and the birds would end up flapping all around everywhere, screaming about the end of the world.

  Because animals know the smell.

  The reason I was the one going in was that I didn’t have it yet.

  Libby’d humored me, leaning in, her nose snuffling right at my throat in a way that made me feel weird.

  I stood fast from the car, fourteen dollars in singles wadded in my hand.

  “Just one?” I said.

  “One’s enough,” she said.

  Mississippi wasn’t the bull’s-eye we were aiming for, slipping east out of Texas in the nighttime—the plan was to push until the Bonneville we’d picked up in Louisiana cried mercy, then look for work—but Hattiesburg was the home of an old friend of Libby’s.

  The way she said “old friend,” I could tell there was a different, better term hiding under there. One she didn’t have to say aloud to Darren.

  I knew she didn’t have any friends,
anyway.

  The rabbit was a gift, she said. An offering.

  I pushed the door of the pet store open, sure at least one of the dogs in their cages would know me for what I was.

  Instead, the pet-store clerk did.

  The same way animals and cops know werewolves, so do security guards and salespeople and clerks. If you asked them why, they might not say “werewolves,” would probably just shrug, say there’s something shady about us, isn’t there? Something that says keep this one on camera, keep this one in the mirror. Don’t let him go into the dressing room without offering to count his items first. Tell him the bathroom’s out of order. Watch that bag he’s carrying. Keep an eye on the bulge of his pockets.

  What it made me want to do was stuff iguanas and hamsters and canaries down the front of my pants, try to wriggle and bluff my way out the front door.

  With this particular clerk, there was an immediate sadness to his eyes. It was that I was wearing a shirt, and shoes. That he was going to have to go to the effort of manufacturing some excuse to usher me out.

  I did what I’d seen Darren do: flashed my fold of bills, assuring the clerk I was here for a cash transaction.

  He still watched me.

  Werewolves can feel that kind of constant attention. It’s a special radar we’re born with, that gets more and more sensitive every year.

  “You old enough to buy one of those?” the clerk asked, suddenly close enough to look over my shoulder into the rabbit bin, far enough to not have to touch my back with his chest.

  “How old do you have to be?” I said back.

  He didn’t answer.

  There were all-size rabbits in the bin. All kinds and ages mixed together, like a survival test, a proving ground.

  I reached down, pushed one hand flat onto the straw bedding so I could lift the fattest rabbit up by the ears. It was like unplanting a carrot.

  The rabbit pedaled at the air sluggishly with its snowshoe feet.