Before stepping into the green-green trees of Florida, she brought the coveralls to her face one more time, breathed Rayford in right down to his first lemonade stand.
I sat in the car with Grace-Ellen and Darren, still in the backseat, the Catalina shaking with each big truck that slammed past.
Because it was awkward to sit backward in the seat, leaning over like hanging on a railing at the zoo, I watched them in the rearview.
Darren was showing off.
Half dead, he was still reaching up with his good hand to dab at a mole on Grace-Ellen’s cheek, see if it was real.
When he smiled, he was snaggletoothed now. It made Grace-Ellen wince.
“Not going to be winning any beauty contests,” he said, shrugging, then corrected to, “Not going to be winning any more beauty contests, I mean . . .”
When Grace-Ellen shushed him he told her she might still win a few, though.
If she was ten years older than Libby, then she was ten years older than Darren too. Ten years older than Darren had been, anyway.
When we’d come to Florida, he’d already been a few years ahead of Libby. After his captivity, now, he was just about caught up with Grace-Ellen, I figured.
The way they took him, he said, it was with the bug spray, right in the face. Enough to kill all the termites in Africa, probably, plus most of the ants, and maybe a rhinoceros or two, the horny bastards. By the time he woke from it, he was already in the cage.
“Did you hear her?” I asked, adjusting the vanity mirror down as close to his face as it would get. “Libby, when she was howling?”
“Lib doesn’t howl,” Darren said.
“It was beautiful,” Grace-Ellen said, which got her a more interested look from Darren.
“What?” she said.
“Got to go drop a few quarters,” Darren said, and sat up as best he could.
Now that he knew what his pee was worth, that was going to be the new joke, I knew.
I could live with it.
Maybe I’d even use it someday.
Grace-Ellen let herself be his crutch, then, instead of leaving him out there to totter, she stood with him while he leaned back and peed.
“You shouldn’t change when your bones are broke like that,” she said, helping him zip up one-armed. “It starts the healing all over again, don’t you know?”
“Guess you’ll have to stick around, then,” Darren said, “help me get better. I might keep forgetting, I mean. I might change every night, like.”
Grace-Ellen looked down and smiled what I’d always read about but never understood: a little girl smile.
“Goddamnit,” I said, and then all three of us startled at the dry rustling coming from the trees.
It was Rayford.
He’d been run ragged.
No, I knew: He’d been herded. When Libby’d found him in his blind, she could have taken him right then and there, painted the plywood walls with his insides. And she could have run him down at any point in between, hamstrung him then dragged him around by the back of the neck, never biting down quite deep enough to kill him.
That would be too easy, though.
He didn’t deserve easy.
People say werewolves are animals, but they’re wrong. We’re so much worse. We’re people, but with claws, with teeth, with lungs that can go for two days, legs that can eat up counties.
Rayford lurched out, his compound bow dragging the ground, its strap still circling his wrist. His face was cut from breaking branches, his crotch was dark with pee, and his breath was only coming in rasps.
Still, he stood all the way up when he saw Darren.
“Rayford,” Darren said as easy as could be.
“Gracie?” Rayford said, to Grace-Ellen, and she just glared, her open hand on Darren’s chest now, like protecting him. Like she could.
And then Libby’s low, steady growl rumbled out from the trees.
Rayford flinched away from it, looked up to Darren and Grace-Ellen, said, “Something—there’s something goddamn after me! There’s some sort of—”
At which point Libby snarled hard, even going so far as to shake a greasy Florida bush, which no self-respecting werewolf would ever do on the hunt.
This wasn’t a hunt anymore, though.
The end of Libby’s snarl, it snapped up into a full-on scream, the kind she’d have to set her front feet for, and the bone-deep instincts in Rayford, they responded like his kind had been responding for thousands and thousands of years.
He flinched back more, into the gravel at the shoulder of the road, and then he clambered up onto the blacktop, the fiberglass limbs of his bow scraping the rough asphalt, his eyes set on that sound, that terrible sound, and then what I’d been feeling in the ground for thirty minutes finally registered: the big trucks, the semis slamming past in their steady line back and forth, probably from some construction site.
Libby had been listening to their spacing for miles, I knew. Timing this all out.
I breathed in—to do what, I don’t know, will never know, because the palm of Grace-Ellen’s other hand, it cupped over my eyes at the last minute, so that all I heard was the air horn’s long mournful call, the splat of meat against chrome.
Grace-Ellen’s hand came away from my eyes when she leaned forward, to spit into the road, where Rayford had been. To lean forward and spit and scream after it, like emptying out all her grief and anger for her dead husband at once.
“I think I’m in love,” Darren said, looking over to her.
There was still a red mist in the air, swirling into the wake.
I closed my lips to keep from breathing it in, and flinched from the semi’s air brakes locking up. Its tires were leaving those careful black stripes the cops would need to declare this an accident.
Cops never know the truth, though.
Werewolves, we’re the ones who have to carry that. We’re the ones who remember the grainy wet feel of it settling on our cheeks.
A half minute later, Libby stepped out, just standing up onto two feet, grass and leaves in her hair.
She looked to Darren, her muzzle right at the end of retracting, and, because it hurt to see how broken and skinny he was, she kept walking for the car, for her clothes. For the rest of whatever was left of our lives.
It wasn’t much.
5.
Six, seven weeks later, Libby was a flagger for road construction, so wasn’t around our trailer to monitor what Darren told me when I said I’d never get kidnapped like he had. That my pee wouldn’t scare a mouse.
He’d looked at me for about ten seconds, like deciding. Then he looked to the bedroom door, making sure it was shut, making sure Grace-Ellen was still sleeping off the night before, and then he shook his head like this was stupid. But then he lowered his eyes into the heels of his hands and told me anyway.
It was a story, of course.
It’s all we’ve got.
Imagine you’re a piece-of-shit werewolf pack, he told me. Not like us, but one of those tail-tucker crews that does the whole alpha-thing, and’s always growling each other into submission, wearing flannel shirts, glaring at people through the smoky darkness of roadhouses.
You’d think that behavior would come natural to werewolves, but it’s learned, really. From the movies, mostly, but from nature shows too.
We’re families, not packs.
Some werewolves drink the Kool-Aid, though. Darren told me to remember that.
Anyway, so you’re this piece-of-shit werewolf pack, and one day to show who’s boss, to protect your territory like you think you’re supposed to, you go dig up this one old wolf’s just-dead wife. To teach him a lesson, show him who’s boss now, tell him that what he’s been smelling traces of on his nightly rounds, it’s true: There’s a new wolf in town. A new pack. Let the nightmare begin.
“There’s cocky,” Darren said, holding his still-broke arm out to one side then reaching as far as he could the other way, with his good arm, “and then th
ere’s stupid, right?”
I nodded right, didn’t want to mess this story up.
It was going to be about me, I could tell. It was the answer to the question I’d asked him: What was I?
“So they dig Mom up,” Darren said, wincing from just having to put those words together in that order, “and they don’t eat her like real wolves, they just gnaw on her some, leave her out by the front gate.”
“Did you know?” I asked.
“I was a pup,” Darren said. “All three of us were.”
“Not my mom,” I said. “She was like me.”
“She was my sister,” Darren said, zero give to his voice, holding my eyes until I had to look away, and then he went on: Grandpa, finding his dead wife under a blanket of crows. Grandpa, smelling the other pack on her.
What they expected, Darren figured, was for Grandpa to start running right then, to lose his clothes in the road behind him, to come sliding into their gravel driveway on all fours, long trails of clear spit dangling back from his mouth, his eyes blind with grief and rage.
Instead, because this is Grandpa we’re talking about, he knocks on the door with his hands. Real polite, Darren said, like a Bible salesman. Cocked under his arm, the two over-under barrels broke over like a goose neck, is his prize shotgun. Instead of shot or slugs, though, he’s poured all the silver jewelry he could steal into it. His hands are still smoking from funneling the necklaces and rings and bracelets in.
His first shot takes out half the pack. A diamond stud in a silver setting from a ten-gauge thirty-six-inch barrel, it can pass through the bones of the face like the whole head’s made of butter, and once the poison gets to your brain, Darren said, then ding-dong, you’re dead.
The ones he can’t kill as a man, the ones that slip and fall out the back of the house, he runs them down on four feet, takes his time with them out in the pastures, back in the trees—a night so full of screaming that the newspapers from three counties drifted into Boonesville the next morning. But they were all too late. There was nothing left.
The only reason Grandpa doesn’t kill the last one, it’s that dawn catches him out in the open, in a stock tank, holding the boy’s head under until he passes out, then pulling him up, starting over again.
But it’s always good to leave one alive, Darren told me. As warning.
This was the backside of the story I’d already known versions of for years. This was the version with teeth. But still.
“So?” I said.
So fast-forward ten, fifteen years, Darren said, then shook his head no, said what he meant: “Fast-forward fourteen years.”
Two of those kids cut out of that old wolf’s woman, they’ve got the blood. The third, she doesn’t. It’s a different life for her. Instead of learning to run things down in the woods, she’s going into town.
She dates one boy, she dates another, and when her brother keeps fighting with her callers, she finally just starts meeting them in Boonesville, which is off-limits to Darren, for reasons.
One of those boys, he leaves her with me. Like I’ve always known. Dear old Dad.
“You’re saying it was your fault,” I said across to Darren. “It wasn’t.”
He just looked at me.
“You want to know why she hates sheep so much,” he said at last. “Libby the Liberator. You think it’s okay, that we should just let them live, let them be, that they’re not hurting anybody?”
“Different generation,” I said, trying to shrug it true.
“It’s because of your dad,” Darren said. Just that.
I looked down into the lost-cause carpet of the living room, trying to make the connection that was obvious to him, and when I did my face went cold, my breath too deep.
“No,” I said.
“He’d been hiding in town for fourteen years,” Darren said. “He knew he couldn’t fight your grandpa, nobody could, but—if he planted a pup in his little girl, that’d be worse than killing him, really. Because it would kill her. Because it would rip his heart out. So you—why you haven’t changed yet? It’s probably because you’re part sheep. No offense, man.”
“But sheeps are wolves, inside.”
“You probably are too,” Darren said, holding my eyes with his so I could read that he wasn’t judging against me, here. “You’re old enough now to know. Your dad, that boy Grandpa let go, he hadn’t shifted since that stock tank he nearly got drowned in. He’d probably even forgot how.”
“And my mom wasn’t wolf at all.”
“But she had the blood in her somewhere. Your grandpa’s blood.”
“Your blood.”
“Let’s not get carried away, here . . .” Darren said, getting down in his boxing stance, shadowing a jab that ended in the lightest slap on the underside of my jaw.
I pulled my head away, didn’t want to play.
“Is he—?” I said. “My biological dad, I mean.”
It was a term I knew from television.
Darren not saying anything was answer enough.
My dad was gone, dead, buried, and probably not in that order. I couldn’t conjure the specific afternoon, but Grandpa had told me a story about somebody he knew, once upon a time, who’d done just that to somebody who deserved it worse than anybody.
His hands had shook when he told it to me.
I should have known.
This is how it is with werewolves. Even when they lie, it’s the truth.
And now I knew the truth about myself. I was a murder weapon. I was revenge. I was a burden my aunt and uncle had been carrying around for ten years already, out of obligation to my mom.
I was maybe a wolf, maybe not.
The silver, though. That silver spur, it had nearly killed me.
That had to mean something.
Where Darren couldn’t see, I bit my lip, sucked the blood, whatever kind it was.
This is the year we never left Florida.
Not all of us, I mean.
The thing that finally won me over a little bit about Grace-Ellen, it was that she could smoke me at game shows. That more than any of her lore or stories or lessons told me she’d really been married to a werewolf.
Because she knew somebody who would buy Rayford’s truck, no questions asked, she was able to quit going into work. Not that NMV existed anymore, except as a sign on an abandoned building. Libby had visited all of the other techs in a single night, to see who matched up with the cluster of scents she’d cataloged from Darren’s dungeon.
None of them saw the next morning.
She deposited them as scat all over town, and said even that was too good for them.
“She’s forgetting how to be a person,” I heard Grace-Ellen say about her to Darren one day, when I was supposed to be farther down the hall than I was.
“Just rough around the edges,” Darren had said back. “Like a certain brother you may or may not know . . .”
What Libby said about Grace-Ellen was that at least her hair was red, like their mom’s had been.
“It’s not real,” Darren told her, a snicker riding the slant of his mouth.
“I don’t want to know,” Libby said back, holding her hand up to stop whatever he was going to say next.
“She should enter a hot-dog-eating contest,” he said anyway.
I had been sitting on the edge of my bed for that. The walls of our trailer were cardboard.
Across from me on the backside of the shut door was a mirror. In it I could see the scab across my chest. It was deep and important. It cut my right nipple in half, made me wonder if that nipple would still be twisted if I ever went wolf. It made me wonder if werewolves even had nipples.
A week later I was standing directly in front of the television set, aiming the remote right at it. It only worked if you were practically touching it to the set, and since the numbers and pictures were worn off all the buttons, it was easier to use the dial by the screen, really.
This was the week Darren was fixing the door of Grace-
Ellen’s house for her, the week he was taking care of the dog carcasses in her kitchen, the week he was liberating her a set of tires for her Honda. He was working off what-all Libby had broke that night. Except, after finding the right tires, showing me how a werewolf gets them on a wheel—it involved butane from a hand torch, then a match dropping in slow motion, a blue donut of flame flaring up—he’d parked on the couch, claiming not to be a carpenter, really.
“Hey hey,” I heard him say behind me, and I turned.
Grace-Ellen was in the door, in, of all things, a yellowed-at-the-edges wedding dress.
She had enough lipstick on for two of her.
What she was holding in front of her, holding by its long floppy ears, was a fat struggling rabbit, fresh from the pet store.
Darren met her halfway across the room, the rabbit pressed between them, kicking slow with its paddle feet, and said it right into her mouth: “Marry me.”
She cried even as Darren was unbuttoning her dress, even though those buttons weren’t made for that, I was pretty sure.
“Want I should . . . ?” I said, trying to make motions to my own bedroom.
I did anyway, and tried not to listen, even when the rabbit screamed its last scream.
I was happy for him, I think.
And maybe it could work, even.
Werewolves can’t ask for anything more than that.
When Libby came home, heard the news about the impending nuptials, she just pursed her lips tighter and nodded.
“Nice job,” she said. “You know it can’t work. Start a family, she dies.”
“What?” Grace-Ellen said.
“I’ve seen it happen,” Libby said, not looking at me so purposefully that she might as well have just gone ahead and scratched my mom’s name on the living room wall.
“What are you talking about?” Grace-Ellen said. “Maybe five hundred years ago that’s how it went, yeah,” she went on without waiting, not so much incredulous anymore as just disgusted. She reached back for her purse, and in three shakes of her wallet she’d worked a faded photograph up.
“She’s nineteen this year,” she said. “She’s mine. And she’s Trigo’s.”
“No,” Libby said, taking the picture, studying it like there was some way she could smell the wolf in the print.
Mongrels Page 25