“Wait for it . . .” Darren said, to Libby.
Grace-Ellen looked from him to her, like to be sure they were doing this, then pulled her hair on the right side back, to show the line of silver hoops clamped through all around the edge of her ear.
“Keep the silver fresh,” she said to Libby, “clean them every week, and the silver gets in your blood. Not enough to hurt, just enough to kick the wolf in the baby. To keep it down for the birthing process.”
“This is what Dad was always looking for,” Darren said to Libby, trying to infect her with his sense of discovery, of finishing what Grandpa had started.
Libby studied him a moment, then looked back to Grace-Ellen.
“Earlier, at the—the place,” Libby said, directly to Grace-Ellen. “You said that twins were . . . rare.”
“Two pups in one litter,” Grace-Ellen said. “Way it usually works is that one’s born without the wolf. For food. A first meal. Humans have colostrum. Werewolves have blood.”
I looked over to the living room wall. For where my mom’s name would have been scratched. We could all see it—Darren, Libby. Me.
My mom, she never should have even got to grow up. She never should have got old enough to have me.
“What?” Grace-Ellen said into this new and awkward silence.
“Why would she have told this to you?” Libby said, to Darren.
“You can’t smell it already?” Grace-Ellen said, cradling her lower belly.
Darren wasn’t saying anything, was just smiling a smile he couldn’t stop.
“Real silver,” Grace-Ellen said, tapping her right ear.
“Something new every day,” Libby said. But not in a good way.
“So she’s coming with us?” she said to Darren later that night, when Grace-Ellen was down at the gas station, after ice.
Darren shook his head no, slow, and Libby nodded, had to have known this was coming.
“You can stay too . . .” Darren said, reaching across to hold his sister’s hand.
Libby pulled it from him and spun away, her arms tight across her chest.
“We’re werewolves,” she said.
That answers every question.
6.
A week later, the screaming and throwing things all done, Libby’s flagger job over, we were packing the Catalina with blankets and our three cardboard boxes.
It all fit better. I hated that.
On the way gone, we stopped at the docks, and sat staring at the Atlantic Ocean for probably two minutes before standing from the car.
“Well then,” Libby said, about the big ship tied to the big dock.
“Guess so,” I said back to her.
Though Darren’s wedding had been at the courthouse, for the honeymoon Grace-Ellen had earned a free cruise by cutting ten thousand box tops or something. The ocean was her dream, apparently, one she’d never been able to talk Trigo into. And she was the mother of Darren’s unborn pup.
“You’re really going on a ship?” Libby said to Darren, holding both his hands in hers. “You know they go out on the ocean, right? And that the ocean’s made of water?”
“He’ll be okay,” Grace-Ellen said, draped across him like a duffel bag, her shorts so short they were pretty much just a wide belt.
Darren’s eyes weren’t quite as certain—we were at the bottom of the gangplank, I think it’s called—but he tried a smile. His broken teeth didn’t help it any.
I didn’t know where to stand.
I kept looking back to the Catalina, because the passenger door didn’t lock. I kept thinking what if Grandpa could see us right now, right here? And then I remembered Darren’s old CB handle, Wolf Man in the Sky, and then I couldn’t swallow for a few breaths.
“Say bye,” Libby said, passing me, headed back to the car.
She wasn’t even crying. After thirty-one years of having a brother, she was just walking away. I wanted to scream to her, to tell her what was happening here.
Instead I just looked out at the water, at how it went forever.
“I don’t think I can do it,” Darren said, his chin suddenly right on my shoulder from behind, his voice directly in my ear, his eyes following mine.
“You can do anything,” I said to him. “I’ve seen.”
The footsteps on the gangplank were Grace-Ellen’s.
It was just me and Darren, now.
“Figured you might want this,” he said. “Since I’m going to my certain doom and all.”
It was the little black velvet ring box. My mom’s hair.
I looked away from it. From her.
I shook my head no, all I could do, and pushed her back to him. “Take her out there,” I said. “She would have wanted to go.”
It was a lie, I think, because I’d never really known her.
But maybe I had.
She was the girl who went to town, the girl who fell in love. She was the girl raised by wolves.
Darren checked my face to be sure.
“I’ll be back, man, you’ll see,” he said, knocking me on the shoulder. I rolled with it, kept my hands stuffed into my pockets.
“Go,” I told him.
“You’ll wait right here for me?” he said, the smile there in his voice, and before I could say anything he took his middle finger from his mouth, drew a wet X right on my forehead, told me it marked the spot, and then he was walking up that gangplank, his feet single-file-directly-in-the-middle-heel-to-toe, Grace-Ellen waiting for him at the top, his eyes trying hard to watch her the whole time, to take this just step by little step.
I didn’t wipe the X from my forehead until Georgia.
No, I mean, that X, it’s still there, it’s still marking me.
CHAPTER 18
Wolf Like Me
Burn what?” the nephew says to his aunt.
She just told him he’s going to have to burn it.
He’s driving the car now. An ungrand Torino with sprung springs and two too many doors. A real werewolf car. The nephew doesn’t have a license, but at sixteen he’s old enough not to get stopped, anyway, and still young enough to run if he needs to.
“I know you’ve been writing it all down in that shoe box you keep in that old blue backpack,” his aunt says. “About us.”
The nephew changes hands on the steering wheel.
“We never had a camera,” he says. It’s his only excuse.
“It’s sweet,” his aunt says. “And stupid.”
This is Arkansas. The edge of it.
“It’s all different anyway,” the nephew tells her. “The way I did it, I mean. Nobody would know anything, if they found it. If they got it.”
The aunt looks over to him, holds him in her eyes for a moment. “You saying you went around and around the house with it all?”
“You may have fought a bear,” the nephew says.
“I may have,” the aunt says back.
It’s enough.
All four windows are down.
There are no buildings out this far. No people.
“Here,” the aunt says, and the nephew slows the heavy car.
They’re on a dirt road now.
“I’m proud of you,” the aunt says.
The nephew doesn’t say anything.
Three weeks ago in a motel in Texas, where they’d gone to the coast special to see the big ships pass, the nephew woke with something in his mouth he couldn’t at first identify.
It was his tongue.
It was thick and wide and rough, and moving it made him roll over to dry-heave, and hunching over sideways like that, the vertebrae in his back locked together in a tighter way, like a zipper. That was just the clench before they pushed violently against each other, though. He spun over, away from the pain, but there was nowhere to hide. For a few moments, as if electricity were coursing through him, the only parts of him touching the mattress were his head and his heels.
Keep your hands open, some dim part of him remembered.
Not that he could
have closed them.
The claws pushing through, it was like having the long bones of his fingers pulled slowly out. And his teeth, his jaw thrusting forward, taking bone mass from the back of his skull, his memories writhing in there, pale colors shooting across their skies. He tried to hold on to Libby, her teeth at the back of his neck so she could carry him through the woods, but kept falling back into the passenger seat of one of Darren’s trucks, when he’d been hiding below the level of the window.
And then his legs.
His fingers had been nothing compared to the exquisite torture of his knees turning themselves backward one after the other, all that pressure threatening to crack his pelvis in half. He’d shaken his head no, please, that this was enough, and reached for the ceiling of the motel room only to find that the ball-points of his shoulders allowed a more canine range of motion now. It sparked a yellow flash behind his eyes that faded to a smoky grey, and then a soft black like ash falling over his face.
He passed out. He knew it was happening, Libby had told him that there’s a limit past which the mind will shut off to protect itself, but knowing didn’t mean it was anything he could stop.
In his first wolf dream, he was bounding through a field of chalk, and there wasn’t enough air in the whole land of sleep to fill his lungs.
He woke kicking, fighting the sheets.
His claws kept catching in them.
He opened his eyes and the room was alive with scent, with the stories the scent had to tell.
It would take him years to taste each one.
He scratched at the doorknob to get out and run through the night but he couldn’t make it work, so he padded around the room until he chanced on the mirror. He didn’t recognize himself.
He stepped forward on his gangly legs, lurched his front half onto the counter, one paw scraping the plastic bowl of the sink, and this wasn’t really happening until he touched his nose to his nose in the reflection, startled back.
Working on instinct, no thought at all, he yipped a bark out at this other wolf and spun away, his voice loud, terrifying. His big flinch back tangled him in the hangers fixed to the rod somehow, and so he spun harder, heard more than felt himself growling with frustration.
Finally he pulled what he thought was free, but then the hangers and the rod were still dragging behind him.
Now, on purpose, he snapped back with his teeth.
The rod turned to splinters so fast it was more a show of respect than having submitted to the steel-trap snap of his jaws.
The nephew spit the splinters out, had to use his paw to drag them from the side of his tongue.
He could taste the forest in them. He could taste the woods.
He growled again, just to hear the deep rumble.
Outside, in the motel parking lot, two men with hard hats were walking from truck to door. A woman was loudly inhaling smoke through her cigarette by the ice machine. On the second floor a baby was about to wake, but for now it was just kicking through a dream.
The world was alive in a way he’d never known.
There were tiny feet in the walls, soft wings circling the light bulbs, and above it all, the bats with their piercing cries.
The nephew felt like his throat was swelling.
Again he went to the door, but this time just to touch his wet nose to the knob. A spark crossed from it to him and he jumped back again, his haunches landing on the bed.
His skin was quivering. With joy. With speed. With hunger.
The small trash can was empty, though.
Because werewolves know better.
He stepped easily onto the bed that smelled like him, and then he felt himself circling, padding down a soft place. When he laid down it was nose to tail, his eyes still open, still watching. Watching for as long as he could.
There was no panic, no fear. This was like falling deeper into himself.
When his aunt got back from her hunt, two big white birds in her hand, held upside down by the feet they used to have, she tasted it on the air, what had happened, and dropped the birds, their wings opening on the way down.
She pulled the nephew to her, held on tighter and tighter, her breath hot against his chest.
“You know you look more like him every day,” she’s saying from her side of the car now, officially back in Arkansas at last.
The nephew doesn’t know if she means his grandpa or his uncle or his dad.
When the road dies out, the nephew drives through the grass, because he doesn’t want this to be true, what’s happening. His aunt finally puts her hand on the dashboard, though. It tells him to stop.
“You’ll be fine,” she says.
They stand from the car together.
The wind brushes the grass of the meadow over and back.
His aunt is peeling out of her clothes one last time. Just letting them fall away from her.
When I am a werewolf, I will wear jean shorts.
It’s the secret graffiti the nephew’s scratched into a thousand restrooms all across the South.
Sometimes he still finds one, runs his finger over the metal.
“I’ll still be here,” the aunt says, reaching her hand across, taking his.
“Just like Darren,” the nephew says. “Werewolf promises aren’t any good, don’t you know that by now?”
His aunt smiles.
“You’re sounding like him too,” she says, patting him once high on the chest and leaving her hand there for moment.
In all the stories and all the movies, there’s human footprints walking along, becoming wolf prints at the end.
In the heaven of werewolves, there’s just new grass folding back into place. There’s a wolf running across one part of the meadow, her true husband waiting under the shadow of the trees, and there’s a wolf standing behind as well, taking snapshots with his eyes, with his heart, with his nose. With his pen.
It’s hard to remember every single thing. But not this.
I’ll never burn this, Libby.
That’s all.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to those who don’t even know I’m involving them in this: Art Spiegelman, Leslie Silko, Rob Zombie, George R.R. Martin, Gerald Vizenor, Louise Erdrich, Barry Lopez, Good Will Hunting, James Welch, Near Dark; I stole little bits and pieces from you all. Thanks to Joshua Malkin and Zack Wentz, for always talking werewolves, and Bill Rabkin, for showing me how important a first chapter is. Thanks to Ray Cluley, for bedroom-decorating tips. Thanks to William J. Cobb, for telling me early on that you only ever get one novel like this. Thanks to a guy named Craig Wheeler I used to work with at a library; I stole from you as well. Thanks to Sabine Baring-Gould, and to Herodotus, and to Curt Siodmak. Thanks to Wally Charnoff, for sparking one of these chapters, via Tod Goldberg’s Gangsterland. Thanks to Jeff Barnaby’s Rhymes for Young Ghouls. Thanks to Eddy Rathke and Axel Hassen Taiari and Jesse Lawrence and Theo Van Alst and Paul Tremblay for early reads. Thanks always to Warren Zevon, and John Landis, and Gary Brandner. Without The Howling, I’m nowhere, I’m a different person. Thanks to Jesse Bullington, for prompting me to start this, and thanks to Neil Gaiman, for “The Hunt,” which showed me how. Thanks to Laura Payne, for so much research help. Thanks to Bill Pronzini and John Skipp. Thanks to Mud and The Things They Carried and Knockemstiff, models all, that I can never quite match. Thanks to Matthew Hobson, for taking me to a place in Baltimore where I bought a Very Important Werewolf Figurine. Thanks to Carrie Vaughn and Benjamin Percy and Christopher Buehlman and Toby Barlow and the rest of the werewolf people—too many, not enough. Thanks to Cynthia Romanowski. Thanks to Alan Moore, for asking What if superheroes actually existed? There’s a variable in that question special for me, I always thought. Thanks to Deanne Stillman, for introducing me to BJ Robbins, my new agent, who took a little short nothing of a novel and helped turn it into something Kelly O’Connor, my new editor, could turn into something else yet again. Without BJ and Kelly, Mongrels would have stayed a pup, never got i
ts proper teeth, and without the team at William Morrow—Dale Rohrbaugh, Marty Karlow, Barbara Greenberg—it would never have cleaned up proper for the shelf. Thanks to Owen Corrigan, for the beautiful cover, and to Jessie Edwards and Ashley Marudas, for making sure the world saw that cover, and then peeled it back for the story inside. And thanks to my wife, Nancy, for sitting up with my kids, Rane and Kinsey, so many nights when they were young, and couldn’t sleep because, when they’d come into our bedroom certain there were werewolves outside the house, I could never tell them for sure that there weren’t. But I would always go look, just on the chance.
About the Author
STEPHEN GRAHAM JONES is the author of fifteen novels and six story collections. He has received numerous awards including the NEA Fellowship in Fiction, the Texas Institute of Letters Jesse Jones Award for Fiction, the Independent Publishers Award for Multicultural Fiction, the This Is Horror Award, as well as making Bloody Disgusting’s Top Ten Novels of the Year. Stephen was raised in West Texas. He now lives in Boulder, Colorado, with his wife and children.
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Also by Stephen Graham Jones
After the People Lights Have Gone Off
Floating Boy Meets the Girl Who Couldn’t Fly (with Paul Tremblay)
Not for Nothing
States of Grace
The Gospel of Z
Zombie Sharks with Metal Teeth
Flushboy
The Least of My Scars
Three Miles Past
Growing Up Dead in Texas
Zombie Bake-Off
The Last Final Girl
Seven Spanish Angels
It Came from Del Rio
The Ones That Got Away
The Long Trial of Nolan Dugatti
Ledfeather
Demon Theory
Bleed into Me
The Bird Is Gone: a Manifesto
All the Beautiful Sinners
The Fast Red Road: a Plainsong
Credits
Cover design by Owen Corrigan
Mongrels Page 26