Mongrels

by Stephen Graham Jones

  The clerk looked at me about this one.

  “You probably want a younger one,” he said. “If you’re looking to breed.”

  “A her or a him?” I asked, trying to see between the furry legs.

  “He’s a buck,” the clerk said.

  “I just want a pet,” I told him, unprompted. “Not a dad.”

  “Do you have supplies?” the clerk said.

  This was how he’d been taught to separate the dinner-plate crowd from the animal lovers.

  Werewolves are both, of course.

  “My last one just died,” I said, or heard myself saying. “His name was Tolbert.”

  “Tolbert,” the clerk said, collecting the rabbit from me. Cupping it under the front legs, supporting it by the rump.

  “It’s an elf from a book I used to read,” I lied.

  “Tolbert the Elf,” the clerk said, making his way back to the counter, the rabbit held up to the hollow of his chest, so its nose would be right at the side of his neck.

  That’s not how you carry a rabbit.

  They’ve got teeth too.

  I followed him to the register, running my hand along the top shelf, finger-jumping the price-tag holders.

  I straightened my fourteen dollars out on the counter.

  It was just enough, the way the clerk rung it up. In spite of the thirty-dollar price tag on the rabbit bin.

  He wanted me out of his store, and was willing to pay half a rabbit to get it done.

  I didn’t thank him.

  “Do you want to know his name?” he asked, pushing the rabbit across the counter.

  “Tolbert,” I said, picking the rabbit up the same way he had, under the front legs. “They’re all Tolbert.”

  “Lawrence,” the clerk said, his voice flat with disappointment, and I left.

  Libby passed a paper sack up from the window of the car for the rabbit, because it was already screaming and thrashing. It knew where it was going.

  I finally had to just put it in the cavernous trunk of the Bonneville, under a winter coat. Then I settled into the backseat.

  “So?” Darren asked, looking at me in his vanity mirror.

  Because his face would attract cops, Libby was driving.

  What he was asking was what did I steal. It’s what he always asked. Because, if that’s what the clerks are expecting, that’s what the clerks’ll get.

  I passed the baby rabbit ahead to him.

  It had been so easy, such an obvious grab with my off-hand, the one I was using to push against, to haul the distraction of the big rabbit up.

  If the baby rabbit had been a mouse, which it practically was, it would have crawled out of my pocket, sky-dived for the floor, scurried away to lick its broken foot and be cat food.

  The baby rabbit was too young to fight my pocket, though. Too young to know.

  Darren took it, held it in his hand like half a burrito, and looked it in the eye.

  “What do you call baby ones?” I said.

  Not kit, not cub, not joey or pup or fawn.

  “Tasty,” Darren said, and bit in.

  Libby knew the way to a motel that took cash.

  “Been eight years,” Darren said. “Think it’s still there?”

  “It’ll be there,” Libby said.

  “Who is it?” I said from the backseat. “Some cousin I don’t know?”

  Darren sneaked a look over to Libby, like saying he could get this but checking if that was all right.

  “Kind of a cousin,” he said, and wiped the bright red blood from his lips, caught the way Libby had speared him with her eyes. “More just a . . . an old acquaintance.”

  I couldn’t tell if the blood was the baby rabbit’s or if his face was seeping again, from the Lone Ranger.

  I’d never seen someone cry red before.

  His pee was no better.

  Libby hauled our wounded Bonneville around a corner. It was wounded and cockeyed because, when Darren had been driving us out of Alabama two nights ago, he’d eased over onto the shoulder, tagged a calf just enough to shatter its pelvis, leave it pulling itself around in slower and slower circles in our taillights.

  You could do that between places, sometimes. All the rancher would find would be a coyote-scavenged calfsicle in the ditch if it was winter, a pile of bird-coated red smear if it was summer.

  Libby hadn’t eaten.

  It was because of this, because of coming to Hattiesburg. She’d been quiet ever since she announced we were stopping here if it worked out. Now she was starving herself too.

  It was why Darren and me had left her at the motel, gone to the gas station alone. She needed room to think, Darren had told me. Someday I’d understand. “Hopefully not, I mean,” he added, but then shrugged like I would, someday, have to understand.

  “Just tell me already,” I told him.

  Darren stretched his arms back, popping his chest like he could, like what he had for a sternum was a bone zipper, and did his gunfighter eyes across all the vacant islands of the gas station.

  Then he came back to me, like gauging was I old enough.

  “You remember that story your grandpa used to tell,” he said, “about having to go into Little Rock that time?”

  It was a war story.

  Darren had just been a pup then, too young to make the trip. Too young to carry a rifle, anyway.

  This had been a job for men, the way my grandfather told it. Not wolves.

  What had happened was a werewolf had tore into somebody, and then not finished it. Grandpa spat after he said it, just thinking of the idea of doing that.

  It wasn’t about mercy or sportsmanship, like it is with deer hunters. It’s about self-preservation. It’s about protecting the species.

  You put an arrow through a deer’s gut and it runs off into the twilight, all that happens is that deer probably dies alone out there, panting its last breaths into the leaf litter, the coyotes already tying their bibs on.

  Or, if the territory’s right, one of us will be circling downwind for a good pull of air, to be sure.

  Hunter-shot deer tastes just as good as anything you run down yourself.

  You bite some punk, though, tear away a bite of meat and keep on running down the road, then there’s a chance that punk’s caught the blood, is going to start experiencing strange urges, going to start growing hair he’s not expecting, is going to start staying out later and later. It’s like a second puberty, only, the adult that comes out of this one has teeth, and is a bitch to put down.

  I’ve never seen one, but these man-wolves, these moondogs, they’re what the movies are based on. They can’t go the full distance, can’t transform like you can if you were born into it, but they can get half the way there, anyway. The claws, too much hair, the ears and the snout. The teeth. Their body, it’s trying to fight the blood, to keep it down. But the moon, it sings that blood up to the surface like a tide.

  Since they’re not born into it, the transformation, it’s like being killed for hours. It’s like they’re trying to shift between granny gear and second, but are getting ground up between the whole time. Chewed up from the inside. So then they try to chew the world up, the same way a dog with rabies bites just because it feels good, because the world is pain. Might as well spread it around.

  Darren can shift in the time it takes a spilled can of coke to empty all the way out, and come out with most of himself still locked between those new ears. It hurts enough to leave him with a definite edge, and there’s the smell, there’s a thousand instant tastes and smells and sounds to try to corral, and there’s the hunger to deal with, the mouthful of saliva to help ease the new teeth into place, but it’s all doable. Or, it’s all worth it, anyway.

  These half wolves, though, the man-wolves of the movies, the shift takes them hours, and the searing, dragged-out pain of it, all their bones breaking and re-forming, trying the whole time to stay human, the hundreds of hairs forcing their way out, pores or not, the sharp teeth stabbing through
a mouth not fitted for them, the bone structure of their skull creaking and cracking, pressing their brain into flashes and seizures, tapping open memories buried for a reason, it erases who they used to be completely, so that only the animal remains. They’re lumbering around on two feet, now, but they’re all wolf.

  Worse, shifting for hours, it leaves them even more blind with hunger than a real werewolf is after the change.

  All they know is eating. If they don’t, they keel over, they die.

  It’s easy to see this is where the legends come from.

  They’re monsters, sure. But you feel sorry for them at the same time. They don’t know any better. And they didn’t ask for this.

  All they want is to live, and to live they have to eat, and because they’ve probably gone wolf in their own bedroom, the first meat they go after is their own family.

  So, killing your kill all the way, it’s not about mercy, no. It’s about responsibility.

  Grandpa’s war story, it’s that some twenty years ago in Little Rock, Arkansas, some werewolf had forgotten his or her duty. Either that or some werewolf had fallen hard for a human—happens all the time, Darren said, had happened with Grandpa and Grandma—so was trying to bring her or him over to the blood instead of just throwing some pups with her then walking away.

  It’s never worked even once, though, bringing somebody over to the werewolf side of things. With a werewolf, loving and killing, they’re the same act.

  That’s the curse part of this life. It’s why Darren was never going to settle down, he said. Because it’s murder, basically.

  “What if you marry one like you?” I’d asked him once.

  “I’m one of a kind,” he’d said back, tipping his wine cooler like toasting himself.

  “A werewolf, I mean. It’s got to happen, doesn’t it?”

  “Too much blood,” Libby cut in. Darren shrugged it true.

  The way they explained it, tag-teaming because the facts were so ugly, the wolf blood was strong enough that, if every grown werewolf is half full of it—half man, half wolf—and they throw pups with some human, then that kid should just be a quarter wolf, right? Wrong. Because the wolf blood, it’s hungry. Even a quarter is enough to really be half. That’s just the way it is. But if a werewolf and a werewolf try to start a family, well. The pups live, but they never shift up to two legs. Being born half full of wolf blood, it’s like being nearly all the way wolf. There’s not enough man in there to rise.

  “So we’re parasites?” I’d said. “We can only breed in hosts of a different species?”

  “Look who’s a scientist now,” Darren said back.

  It had been his favorite dig lately, making fun of the classes I was taking, the books I was reading—“Like werewolves need algebra to know which way the wind’s blowing?”

  I just took it.

  Getting called a bookwolf, it meant I wasn’t a worm, anyway.

  The gist of their explanation, though, the place where Grandpa’s Little Rock war story started, it was that anybody stupid enough to try to bring someone across, into the blood, that would have to be some lone wolf, operating on his or her own. To be that blind. That in love.

  Not that how it happened changed what was happening.

  There was one of these man-wolves ravaging its way through the suburbs of Little Rock, making the tabloids, but, instead of chewing through all the dogs, it was impregnating them.

  It can happen.

  Libby and Darren didn’t like to talk about it, but we’re enough like a dog for it to happen. And so are the man-wolves. Only, the little hybrids that wake up in that momma dog’s belly, they grow too fast, they chew their way out in two weeks.

  The ones that live through that, they’re seriously dangerous, are faster than us, even. According to Darren, they’re kind of like starved-down, wrong-shaped coyotes. Bald coyotes. Burn-victim coyotes. Tails-tucked-under coyotes. Darren said that Grandpa’s name for them was Sad Eyes, but I’d always thought he heard wrong. They’re supposed to have these human-looking eyes, but “Sad Eyes” feels like a corruption of something Arabic. Like they’ve known these animals over there as well. If they even are animals. Thing is, they’re too smart. They’re not rabid-in-the-head like their fathers, anyway. They’re distinct, they’re their own thing, they can throw litters and everything. And if you don’t wipe them all out down to the last hidden baby, then they’ll infest a whole county, leave the nighttime flashing with teeth.

  Grandpa’s war story is of him and a buddy cruising the streets of Little Rock, Arkansas, each of them with rifles they’re so careful not to angle down even at their own feet, because it’s not about where you get shot with silver, it’s that you get shot.

  The man-wolf was easy to find, of course. Moondogs always are. They don’t know to hide.

  Grandpa pops him the first night, then drags him to a culvert until the thing’s snout can lower back down into its face, and when the wolf doesn’t leave it all the way human, they use a cinderblock to hide the evidence.

  The babies are another matter.

  My grandfather and his buddy are gone for five weeks, the way he told it. Setting bait and popping Sad Eyes after Sad Eyes between the ears. Just with normal bullets. Silver doesn’t matter with them. That’s how removed they are from us.

  According to Darren, to show him and Libby and my mom, to teach them a lesson they needed to learn, he’d brought a just-born one back in a cardboard box.

  Its eyes hadn’t even been open yet, and its skull had been pinched together like you do when you kick into a litter of them. It gave Libby and Darren and my mom nightmares for months.

  “I should have known better than to look,” Darren said, settling in behind the wheel of the Bonneville, the tank sloshing with regular because the alcohol in unleaded would vapor-lock the carburetor.

  “How many toes did it have?” I asked.

  Darren looked over to me, said like he was just now figuring it out all over again, “You are a scientist, aren’t you?”

  “Dogs have four,” I said, and then held up my own hand, fingers spread, to show we had five.

  “Really?” he said, and held up his right hand, complete with the finger stump that hadn’t grown over right.

  The whole way back to the motel to get Libby, he kept himself leaned over onto the wheel, as if he were driving us into a storm.

  I think he was.

  It wasn’t a cousin Libby was going to visit.

  It was someone she’d bit.

  Darren was just like Grandpa, telling me one story, meaning another.

  Libby’d left a moondog behind. She’d been coming to Mississippi to see it for years.

  When she stepped out the hotel door, her hair was blowing across her face. She slung the mass of it away to clear her eyes, thread her sunglasses on, and I wish I hadn’t been watching her so close.

  “Remember when you used to think werewolves couldn’t cry?” Darren said.

  “I never thought that,” I said.

  In that half second before her sunglasses were in place, we’d both seen her eyes. How she wasn’t crying. Not anymore. Now her lips were firm, just a straight line. And now her eyes were hidden.

  I didn’t want to go with her anymore.

  Not for this.

  We were all three so nervous about going into the huge hospital that we forgot the rabbit.

  In the lobby waiting for the elevator, I said it aloud, what had to be true: “It wasn’t just any—any werewolf in Little Rock that time, was it?”

  Because all of my grandfather’s stories were apologies.

  I hadn’t forgotten this.

  “Everybody makes mistakes,” Darren said.

  Meaning that man-wolf, it hadn’t been some lone wolf’s failed romance. It had been Grandpa’s partial kill. He’d been cleaning his own mess up, not playing hero for a whole species. Meaning that that Sad Eyes he lugged home in the cardboard box, its skull pinched together, its front paws tucked under its stubb
y muzzle, that had been, by blood anyway, Libby and Darren and my mom’s baby brother or baby sister.

  This is what it means to be a werewolf.

  “There didn’t used to be that desk there,” Libby said, studying the information counter, then she turned to Darren: “You get it?”

  Darren patted his pockets like for a pack of cigarettes, then made a show of looking out to the parking lot, to the idea of the rabbit.

  “Seventh floor,” she said, lobbing him the Bonneville key.

  “We’re splitting up,” I narrated to Libby in the elevator.

  “So?” she said.

  “Nothing,” I told her. Because the answer would have been movies, and I wasn’t supposed to be watching them.

  The seventh floor on the east side was the coma ward.

  “You,” a nurse behind the desk said.

  “Me,” Libby said, and signed her name on a clipboard. “My brother’s coming up too. He looks just like me.”

  “He’ll have to sign himself,” the nurse said.

  I signed my name—the last name that matched the one Libby had used—and followed her down the antiseptic hall, planted in a waiting room chair beside her.

  The television was on like they always are, so you can have somewhere else to look. Something to lose yourself in.

  Because we were the only ones there, we could hear it for once. It was an unsolved-mysteries episode. We caught the spooky-voiced end of a tornado segment about a kidnapped girl, then, after the commercial, it was the firsthand account of how Bigfoot had robbed a liquor store in Arkansas eight or nine years ago. The spooky voice had some joke to it, now, like this was an intermission, after the seriousness of the missing girl. Like this was the joke part of the program.

  The woman recounting the story of the robbery was dragging on a cigarette every three words, and was careful to keep to the side, so the front of her liquor store was over her shoulder. There was a carved wooden Bigfoot by the front door, the wood still raw. It was holding the carved shape of a pistol, pointing it into the stomach of anybody standing in front of it.

  According to the spooky, amused voice, the case was still open, pending evidence. Pending explanation. If anybody had information concerning these daring heists, there was a toll-free number to call. Then they flashed the dates.