After the People Lights Have Gone Off

by Stephen Graham Jones

  By the time I started coming around at eight years old, the scar on the back of Grandpa’s arm from the tick was just a smooth little dab of skin that could have been from anything.

  This is the way werewolf stories go.

  You hear about it, hear about it, are breathing hard it’s so great or so gross or so scary or so close, but then at the end, whoever’s telling it pushes back a little, like in satisfaction of a tale well-told, nods at you like you’ve just got to believe it, now. Because it’s the gospel truth.

  Never mind any proof.

  •

  Where this is going is my grandfather lying to me one afternoon.

  I wasn’t living with him, really. Where I was living was with my Aunt Libby, my mom’s twin once-upon-a-time, but she had a job sewing bags of feed closed out west of town, and said she didn’t trust that her ex-husband wouldn’t come around while she was gone. And she didn’t want me there for that.

  Uncle Darren would have been my fallback there, but school was still in session, and he said the truant officer’d be all over him if word got around I was running produce back and forth to Tulsa with him three times a week.

  “Produce,” Libby had said about that.

  “Produce,” he had said back, but the way he looked away, I could see they were talking about something completely different. Something I was too young for.

  Grandpa it was, then.

  By that time he wasn’t moving from his rocking chair by the fire much, and everything on his shelves I said I liked, he’d tell me I could have it.

  The first time I took something—it was an old ceramic car that was a cologne bottle—I carried it around with me all afternoon, finally had to admit I didn’t have anywhere to take it to.

  My mom had been dead since I was born, and my dad was anybody. Aunt Libby said I was to call her Aunt, not Mom, but I still did sometimes, in my head. Anybody would. She was what my real mom would have looked like, if she’d lived through me getting born.

  Her and Uncle Darren and Grandpa all shuttled me back and forth from school, and because I knew they’d have tried, I never asked them to help with my homework.

  Werewolves aren’t any good with math.

  Not that Uncle Darren or Aunt Libby ever shifted anymore, mind. At least not on purpose. Sometimes, asleep, you can’t help it. Or strung out like Uncle Darren gets on the road.

  He’s wrecked two trucks so far, is with his third company in five years.

  Grandpa understands.

  He’s the one who tells them to save it, their shifts. He’s the one always saying look what it’s done to him.

  You’d think he was eighty or a hundred, as frail and twisted up as he was then, but he was fifty-six.

  It was because he hadn’t had anybody to tell him, to warn him.

  When you’re wolfed out, running around the woods on all fours, snapping at rabbits and birds and terrorizing the villagers, you age like a dog. And Grandpa, as a young man, he’d always preferred to run his dinner down rather than work for wages to buy it at the grocery.

  It had made sense. Until the arthritis. Until his skin turned to rice paper. Until his left eye glaucoma’d up like there was a storm building in there.

  There was.

  Two years after he got stuck with me those three weeks, he stroked out.

  Aunt Libby and me found him half in, half out of the front door. Halfway between man and wolf.

  “He was going for the woods,” Aunt Libby said, looking there.

  I did too.

  •

  Because we didn’t need the questions—and the social security checks didn’t hurt—we burned Grandpa on the trash pile a few times, then Uncle Darren showed up with a front-end loader, pushed the pile back and forth until there was nothing left anybody’d want to dig through.

  This is the way it is with werewolves.

  We don’t have secret graveyards.

  We move a lot.

  And, I say “we,” but my real mom, even though she was oldest, she was the runt of the litter. It’s what Grandpa called her. And he’d always add how she was the lucky one.

  Not all the children born to a werewolf are werewolves.

  Even Aunt Libby and Uncle Darren, they’ve got half of my grandmother in them. You can tell when Uncle Darren lets his beard grow in, to prove to Grandpa he isn’t shifting. It’s tinged red, like Grandma was supposed to have been as a girl.

  How she died, it was in another town, some rival pack. I’d never gotten the complete story of it back then, but I had enough. Grandpa’s gone hunting, and the other crew comes calling, and there’s my grandmother standing in the door with three shots in her rifle, her three kids peeking around her skirts.

  What Aunt Libby claims to remember is shifting for the first time right there in the front part of the living room, shifting a cool seven years before puberty, when it’s supposed to happen. How she screamed and tore at herself, and this made Darren start changing early too.

  And how my mom, she just stood there.

  “Run,” Grandma’s supposed to have whispered down to them, and they did but they couldn’t, they didn’t know how to use their new legs, so my mom—is this why there’s always a human in the litter?—she dragged these two little wolf cubs along, she pulled them by the shirts they were growing out of, she pushed them ahead of her, only stopped for a moment, when three shots fired off behind her.

  That night Grandpa found the three of them, smelled them out from twenty miles of lost woods.

  He was red to the shoulder, the other pack’s blood steaming off him, and Aunt Libby said it was right then she knew nobody she ever married was ever going to be good enough.

  Uncle Darren tells it different, but that’s the way it always is with werewolves.

  We learned thousands of years ago to always keep shifting, always keep the story changing.

  That way nobody can pin it on you.

  •

  I was trying to do my geography, trying to believe that triangles mattered, were going to help me someday, when Grandpa’s voice creaked that way it did, a minute or two before he got wound up enough to start saying whatever it was he’d thought of.

  I waited it out, free-handed the angle of a corner out on my paper and erased it, drew it right beside itself, like tracing a ghost.

  It was a blind stab at the correct answer, a bad guess, I knew, but if you erased enough, Ms. Chamberlain would give you points for effort.

  Sometimes she’d have a baggie of shelled pecan halves for me too, for lunch.

  “It was that time that one with the black tail came in smelling like skunk,” Grandpa started off, laughing behind the words like it was all coming back.

  I looked up to him and past him, to the fire. It was banked low, a “daytime fire,” he called it. An old man fire.

  Such are the last days of mighty werewolves.

  But there had been a time, I knew.

  Each time I looked at him, I would try to see it.

  “No, it was the dock-tail,” he said, nodding to himself about it.

  “Dogs,” I said.

  Dogs, he nodded.

  You’d think a family of werewolves would have a soft spot for farm dogs, but it’s kind of the opposite.

  The dogs know, and never trust.

  You smell like one thing, look like another.

  “It was high summer,” Grandpa said, licking his lips, his one rheumy eye shiny wet. “It was old Doc.”

  “For dock-tail,” I filled in.

  He nodded, shot me with his finger gun.

  I sat back, hooked my arms around my knees.

  “Done there?” he asked, about my homework.

  Aunt Libby’d be all over both our cases if my geography wasn’t done by the time she came in covered in feed dust, half the cattle in the county trailing her in the door.

  “Done,” I said to Grandpa, flipping the textbook closed to prove it.

  He knew I was lying, but he knew that stories are more i
mportant, too.

  “It was high summer,” he repeated again, “and old Doc, he was what you might call an egg-sucking dog. Know what that means?”

  I shook my head no, couldn’t imagine.

  “Chickens,” Grandpa said, smiling in a way that told me clear as day that he was something of an egg-sucker himself. “Some dogs, they can’t keep themself out of the henhouse. They know it’s wrong, they know they’re going to get the business end of the shovel afterwards, but that don’t change a thing, nosiree. Once they look through the fence a certain way, then the deed, it’s already half the way done.”

  “But you said it was a skunk,” I said, squinting like trying to keep up.

  “So I did,” Grandpa said, rocking back. “What you got to understand about this, it’s that Doc, he was of a type. It wasn’t that he liked chicken meat or eggs so godawful much, it’s that he couldn’t ever keep his nose out of trouble. And that’s what finally did his dumb ass in.”

  He was still talking about himself here, I knew.

  Aunt Libby’d told me once that all of Grandpa’s stories, they were really complicated apologies. Most times to people who weren’t even alive anymore. That that’s how it is when you get old.

  But she also said that if I listened, I might learn something.

  I wish she’d been wrong.

  •

  Grandpa’s story as it unfolded went around and around the house. This was what Uncle Darren always said anytime Grandpa got wound up, started remembering out loud.

  “I don’t want to go around and around the house with you, old man,” he’d say, and slap his cap on his pants leg like killing a fly, or hammering a gavel.

  But he did go around and around the house with Grandpa. He would.

  Me too.

  So there’s Doc with his docked tail that hadn’t really been docked with shears or a pocket knife to keep it from collecting burrs—it had been shot off with a twenty-gauge, from a neighbor who cared about his chicken stock—and he’s traipsing through the woods. Partly because it’s shady and cool back in the trees, and partly because there’s nothing going on up by the house.

  “When you’re young, you like to roam,” Grandpa said, looking me straight in the face to see if I was young or not.

  My heart, it was out there with Doc.

  Grandpa winked his blind eye.

  Now Doc’s on the scent of a bitch in heat, he thinks. Or wants to think. His nose to the ground, his ass haunched up in the air, that little tail working like a librarian’s finger. Whining the way a dog will on the trail—exactly the way a wolf never would, Grandpa made sure I understood.

  I might have been the kid of a human, but Grandpa still treated me like a werewolf.

  It meant everything.

  Soon enough, following his nose like that, Doc crosses the creek, winds into the part of the woods the neighbor’s cleared of underbrush so his tree blind has lines of sight on everything.

  Doc too.

  Standing in the middle of the clearing is a king skunk, one of those ones with two stripes instead of just one. One of those kind that don’t back down.

  Doc’s lip quavers, the growl building in his chest.

  The skunk just glares across at him, not remotely concerned. Its feet, though, those tiny black claws—Grandpa held his own hand up to show, and for a breathless moment I thought his fingernails were going to curl around, that I was finally going to see it happen—they were gripping onto the top of the ground.

  “Just like you have to anchor a cannon down on the deck of a ship,” Grandpa said.

  If he’d ever been on the open water or even to the Gulf, I didn’t know about it.

  I did know backhoes by then, though, and they had those robot arms that would reach out on each side, dig in.

  It was the same way for that skunk, I knew.

  He was about to deliver a payload.

  That night, Doc skulked back to the house whimpering.

  His muzzle was still scarred from the last time Grandpa had had to take pliers to the porcupine quills barb-deep in that velvet black skin behind his whiskers.

  Porcupines don’t carry rabies, though. They can, I suppose, I’d just never heard of it.

  No, rabies, it’s what the bats bring to the coyotes, what the coyotes give to the prairie dogs, what the prairie dogs special-deliver to the polecats.

  This skunk Doc had tangled with, it didn’t necessarily have rabies.

  But maybe.

  And, when you’ve got dairy stock and other dogs and bats living in the attic, maybe’s enough.

  Grandpa didn’t want to rouse Darren and Libby and my mom, though. They were still kids, and he didn’t want to deal with the way they’d dive between Doc and the end of the gun, how they’d promise Doc was okay, never taking their own safety into account even for a slip of a moment.

  The only way to tell for sure he didn’t have rabies, it was either to wait for it to be too late or to cut Doc’s head off, mail it into Tulsa for testing.

  Either way, it was the end of the line for Doc. What had started with his tail was going to find completion after all these years.

  Grandpa turned the porch light off, wrapped a bandanna around his face—even when not shifted, the smell of skunk still hurts—and hooked a finger through Doc’s collar, led him past the barn.

  What he had looped in the painter loop of his pants was a ball-peen hammer. Not one a working man would like, with a two-pound head that completes the swing for you, just one to bang something straight on the anvil.

  It would be enough. More important, it would be quiet.

  “Except,” Grandpa said, laughing in his wheezy way—this was the punchline he’d been building towards—“after I hit Doc between the ears that first time, I like to have never got that next lick planted, let me tell you.”

  And he laughed and laughed, and the fire found a few pops of sap, and for a few moments I could see him out there, the silhouette of him anyway, holding the silhouette of a big rangy dog by the collar, that dog pulling him around and around, that long-handled hammer whistling through the air, trying to deliver its kindness down, and then trying again, all through dinner.

  You have to smile, sometimes.

  •

  Three years later, Uncle Darren had found us a place outside Sprayberry, Texas.

  All the trucks were oilfield trucks, their dashboards black with it.

  He was running pipe now, back and forth to El Paso.

  Aunt Libby was clerking at the gas station. They had a video shelf on the back wall, and she’d let me bring home the movies nobody’d rented that night, then sneak them back in her purse, “find” them behind the cereal or the soup cans if her boss was there.

  This is what werewolves do.

  Until one night Uncle Darren walked up out of the highway. It was just like the opening credits of a show I’d been watching on television, so that I felt the ground shift underneath me, like somebody had their hand on the channel dial.

  Aunt Libby heard or smelled, came out, her hands dusted white with flour.

  “No,” she said.

  Yes.

  Hooked over Uncle Darren’s shoulder was the creaky black belt of a state trooper. The pistol was still there in its molded holster, the handle flapping against his side every other step.

  “Go inside,” she said, pushing me away.

  She should have pushed harder.

  We didn’t need anybody to tell us what had happened here.

  For weeks now, Uncle Darren had been coming in from his runs cussing the smokey that’d been dogging him.

  When Uncle Darren drove, he liked to drink wine coolers. Just to stay awake.

  He’d been doing it so long that he’d become a real and true marksman, could hang a bottle out the window on his side, flip that bottle over the top of his rig, nail the mile marker reflectors each time.

  And he never got drunk. It was just wine coolers, right? I wasn’t near old enough, was just pushing twel
ve, but I knew they tasted like watered-down something else, I just wasn’t sure what. But they sure weren’t beer, or anything stronger.

  This one state trooper who worked 20 just east of Stanton, he didn’t agree.

  Uncle Darren had taken to muttering how bears and wolves, they weren’t meant to get along.

  Whenever Aunt Libby heard him, well. It was on, like Grandpa would have said. Screaming and cussing, one of them storming out into the mesquite darkness.

  Aunt Libby was right, though, I knew.

  She’d always been able to control transforming better than Darren. Like, she could get mad at somebody and not wolf out on them.

  It kept the gas station from becoming a killing floor. It kept her boss alive, day after day. It kept his grabby hands connected to his pale wrists.

  Uncle Darren, though, he’d taken to long-haul trucking specifically to avoid those kinds of confrontations.

  Until this one state trooper.

  Fifty miles behind him, I knew, his rig was cocked over in the ditch, the running lights on, the door swinging, the dome light glowing down on three or four bottles of what had been a six-pack. Of strawberry wine coolers.

  That big chrome gas tank, it would be tacky with blood, I knew.

  Maybe some splashed up onto the mirror, and the backside of the windshield.

  Uncle Darren had torn through that trooper like the human sheet of tissue he was, and come out the other side with that thick black belt in his teeth, a prize.

  Then he’d run up the yellow stripes until the pads of his feet were raw.

  And then he’d stood, a man.

  Aunt Libby didn’t even stop from him being both naked and her own brother. She walked right out into the road, straight-armed him direct in the chest, nearly dislodging his trophy of a belt.

  Uncle Darren was ready, but still he had to give a bit.

  He tried to keep sliding past her, for the house, for clothes, for the suitcases because we were moving again, we had to, but Aunt Libby hauled him back, and I should have gone inside, I should have been inside watching a stolen movie about ninjas, I should have been inside already packing.