After the People Lights Have Gone Off

by Stephen Graham Jones

  But I wasn’t.

  I heard.

  Not the growling—it wasn’t the first time I’d heard it from Aunt Libby—but the words. The human words.

  At first Aunt Libby was talking low and steady, about how she had a good job this time, how this was a good place. How they were going to know who did it.

  Like Darren, though, I wasn’t really listening, here.

  What I was doing was watching him.

  I could see Grandpa rising up in his son. I was seeing Grandpa as a young man, itching to roam, to fight, to run down his dinner night after night, because his knees were going to last forever. Because his teeth would always be strong.

  Darren’s skin was jumping in folds, cringing back from the shift. Aunt Libby was pushing his every last button, and—he’d never been a talker—he didn’t even have any good defense, aside from that Trooper Dan had been asking for it, that he’d been asking for it his whole life, and that they could go back now if she wanted, they could steal a truck, fake a wreck. Pretend Trooper Dan had been doing a ticket when a drunk veered, and, and—

  Aunt Libby slapped him.

  Her claws were out, too.

  My eyes took snapshots of every single frame of that arc her hand took. It was the first real wolf I’d seen. It was what I’d been waiting for ever since Oklahoma, ever since Arkansas. Ever since ever.

  It proved that these weren’t just stories, that they weren’t just excuses.

  A piece of Uncle Darren’s lower lip strung off his mouth, clumped down onto his chest. The lower part of his nose sloughed a little lower, cut off from the top half.

  His eyes never moved.

  By his legs, his fingers stretched out as well, reaching for the wolf.

  “No!” Aunt Libby yelled, stepping forward, taking him by both wrists, driving her knee up into his balls.

  It’s another thing about werewolves.

  Mid-shift, a knee to the balls can bring you back to the human side of things. Pain is a weight. It anchors you.

  Uncle Darren balled up, curled on his side there on the asphalt where anybody could drive by.

  Aunt Libby stood over him breathing hard, still growling, her skin jumping in the most beautiful way.

  All that bullshit about packs and dominance, alphas and submission?

  Right then I believed the hell out of it.

  “You can’t just say whatever story you want and make it true,” she said, finally, about the wreck Uncle Darren wanted to stage.

  “Learned from the best,” Uncle Darren said, and Aunt Libby whipped her eyes up. Right to me.

  “‘I found all three of you out there by the old—by the creek’… is that what he used to say?” Darren managed to get out. “I mean, I mean, is that what he used to sell?”

  Aunt Libby was still staring at me. With her real self.

  “Three shots,” Uncle Darren laughed, still holding himself, speaking directly down into the hot black rock. But I could hear him. “There were three shots in that rifle, Lib, three shots, three shots and three ki—”

  Aunt Libby kicked him before he could finish, but it was too late.

  Three kids.

  You don’t tell your children to run, not when the wolves are at the door.

  No kid can outrun a werewolf, much less a riled-up pack of them.

  What you do is you deliver the only kindness you’ve got left. What you do is you hold each of their little heads and kiss them on the forehead, and then replace your lips with the open mouth of a gun.

  But my grandmother hadn’t gone all the way through with it. Grandpa had come home right at that moment, or they’d slipped away out a side window, or the other crew had come through the door, or Libby and Darren had changed, and fought her back with their sharp baby teeth, or—or a hundred other things.

  None of which mattered.

  Once you make a decision like that, you can’t take it back.

  And, because Grandpa loved her and not hated her, I guess—because he understood—he’d made a lie up about that day. He’d made it sound good.

  And it probably wasn’t the first time.

  I could see it in the way Libby had slashed her eyes to me, tried to hold me with them. Tried to keep me from understanding. From seeing through.

  “Doc,” I said, in the new quiet Uncle Darren’s pained breathing was spreading all around. “There never was a dog named Doc.”

  “Don’t,” Aunt Libby said, her mouth tight, like keeping a secret.

  I turned, I ran.

  She let me.

  •

  The next few weeks were quiet.

  We were living in the panhandle of Florida, slapping bugs off our necks every few soggy breaths. Uncle Darren was working the boats at night, like Grandpa never had. There weren’t any cannons on them. Just contraband. It was why he had to work naked: so they’d know he wasn’t smuggling anything himself.

  Aunt Libby was taking coupons and making change at an oil change place. I worked down in the pit. I wasn’t old enough, but they didn’t have to pay me as much, so it all kind of worked out.

  Down there turning my wrenches, that liquid clicking of the ratchets swelling up all around me, I ran through Doc’s story from every angle I could, trying to peel it back to a different truth, a better truth.

  All I kept hearing, though, it was what Grandpa had really been telling me, his one eye pressuring up to burst back into his brain.

  All I kept hearing was what he’d really been apologizing for.

  My mom.

  It had to be.

  If Aunt Libby hadn’t thinned her lips that night when I said Doc’s name, I probably never would completely flashed on what Grandpa was saying.

  But she had.

  Still, there was some assembly required.

  Another story Grandpa told me, it did have proof, is maybe the only werewolf story in the whole history of werewolves to ever have proof.

  It was where dew claws come from. Why they are.

  On dogs, they’re useless, just leftover. From when they were wolves, Grandpa insisted.

  It was about birthing, about being born.

  Just like baby birds needed a beak to poke through their shells, or like some baby snakes have a sharp nose to push through their eggshells, so did werewolf pups need dewclaws. It was because of their human half. Because, while a wolf’s head is made for slipsliding down a birth canal, a human head—all pups shift the whole time they’re being born, can’t help it—a human head is big and blocky by comparison. And the momma-wolf’s lady parts, they aren’t made for that.

  That’s the reason for the dewclaws. So the pup can reach through with his paw. So that one claw up on the back of their forearm can snag, tear the opening a bit wider.

  It’s bloody and terrible, but it works. At least for the pup.

  And I’m reminded now each time I reach up to wrap the strap around a dull orange oil filter.

  On my forearm, there are two pale slick scars that I’d grown up thinking were from the heating element of a stove in Arkansas, when I’d reached in for toast before I understood anything. Two slick little divots in my life that I always figured were my secret connection to Grandpa: he had a scar from a stupid tick, I had one from some stupid toast. It was the story I’d been told. I’d never had call it to question.

  Until now.

  It wasn’t a skunk-bit dog Grandpa dragged out behind the barn that night, to take care of in the most personal way.

  I can see it now, in his words.

  Some days it’s the only thing I can see.

  A woman starts to have a baby, a human woman starts to have a human baby, only, partway through it, that baby starts to shift, little needles of teeth poking through the gums months too early. It’s not supposed to happen, but the wolf’s in the blood.

  The thing about that night in Sprayberry, when Uncle Darren came up the road naked, when Aunt Libby slapped him down, the thing I hadn’t questioned at the time but couldn’t get over now, w
as that I’d heard him talking low into the asphalt, from all the way back at the house.

  I’d heard him without thinking, from farther away than a human should be able to.

  My mom, I didn’t just tear her open, I probably infected her.

  Werewolves that are born, they’re in control of it, or they can come to be, at least. They have a chance.

  If you’re bit, though, then it runs wild through you, it burns you up fast, and hurts the whole time. All you can do is feel sorry for those wolves. They never understand what’s happening to them, just run around slobbering and biting, trying to escape their own skin.

  That skunk, it did have rabies, Grandpa.

  That skunk, it was me.

  And so, the real story, it’s that a father carries his oldest daughter out past the house, he carries her out and she’s probably already changing for the first time, but he holds his own wolf back.

  This is a job for a man.

  He raises the hammer once but isn’t decisive enough, can’t commit to this act with his whole heart, but he has her by the scruff, and she’s on all fours now, is snapping at him, her infant son screaming on the porch, her twin sister biting those baby-sharp dew claws off for him, and for the rest of that night, for the rest of his life, this husband and father and monster is swinging that little ball-peen hammer, trying to connect, his face wet with the effort, the two of them silhouettes against the pale grass, going around and around the house.

  We’re werewolves.

  This is what we do, this is how we live.

  If you want to call it that.

  so that all the mourners flinched and ducked. Sai included.

  Of everybody seated in rows and standing at the edges, though, Sai was the only one looking back to the parking area at that exact instant. Because Marissa was there, propped up in the passenger seat. Because she’d insisted, just as she’d insisted Sai come up to the grave like this, to see Mark off for the both of them.

  Sai hadn’t heard anything the priest had said and hadn’t looked at Mark’s casket for more than a glance.

  Marissa. He had to keep watching the car.

  The last ten months, ever since the diagnosis, if he didn’t have a clean line of sight on her, panic started to well up in the back of his throat.

  This wasn’t the farthest he’d been from her. But it was far enough. And the clock, it was definitely ticking. His plan was to hug Dava for a three-or four-count and then scurry at right angles across the cemetery to Marissa, and after lunch there was another specialist, and then after that the next thing would happen, and then the next, and if he tried to think too far into the future, he’d stop thinking altogether, he knew.

  Moment-by-moment. It was the formal greeting at Group. And the farewell, each meeting, each phone call.

  Moment-to-moment.

  It worked.

  Or—Sai could still function, anyway. Life had become a series of discrete tasks instead of an avalanche he was trying to wade into.

  And soon enough, if the specialists were right, there would be the task of selecting Marissa’s casket, of boxing up her life—

  No.

  Sai had told Marissa he didn’t want to come to Mark’s funeral. That it was the wrong place. That it would be like walking through shadows for him, shadows of an event not happening quite yet.

  Marissa had laughed and told him a funeral was a celebration, silly, and how could he argue? What if he won that argument?

  It didn’t mean he couldn’t watch her the whole time, though.

  Which is why he was the only one to see.

  •

  When the thunder cracked and all the mourners did that thing where they covered the back of their necks from this gunfire or out-of-control truck or crashing plane or whatever that sound was, Sai flinched too, he couldn’t help it, but, unlike everyone else, he kept his eyes steady on where they’d been.

  It was training. Conditioning. Over the past ten months, the world had become a negotiation: if he could catch this door in six steps, then maybe the specialists were wrong; if he held his breath until that commercial was over, then there might be some good news later in the week; if he could remember the singer on the radio before the song got to the chorus. If if if.

  Not looking away from Marissa in the parking lot, it was a way to keep her alive.

  In a straight line between Sai and the car, though, were the three mourners who had crept in during the eulogy. They were wearing standard-issue funeral attire: overcoats, black gloves, ties, sunglasses. Two men and one woman.

  In that instant between the rest of the crowd ducking and the sound registering, everyone looking sheepishly up to the sky, smiling at themselves, unfurling their umbrellas, these three… didn’t.

  It was as simple as that.

  When the thunder cracked, not one of them flinched or had any kind of response. Or, Sai told himself, time moving past him in still frames, that wasn’t exactly it. It was more like this human response they did finally fall into, it had to roll back across the funeral. Like, it needed time for them to see it, to take their cue from the crowd, and adjust appropriately.

  The thunder was already dying when two of the three did their exaggerated pantomimes of flinches, and the third—the waveringly tall man—only jerked his shoulders up when the woman pinched his sleeve, gave a sharp tug.

  And then the alarm on Sai and Marissa’s car went off. From the storm.

  The rest of the cars chimed in, their headlights flashing in the daytime.

  Where the rest of the mourners unholstered their key fobs, aimed them at the parking lot, Sai broke formation, ran hell for leather across the dead, to make sure Marissa was all right.

  The woman at the back of the funeral placed her hand in the chest of the tall man and guided him back, out of Sai’s way, and, for two weeks, Sai completely forgot about them, and how they hadn’t understood what to do with the thunder.

  •

  The next funeral was for Dava.

  It was suicide, but everyone in Group knew better.

  Just like Mark, she was a victim of the disease. At the last meeting, Sai had tried to recast it, say that Marissa —and Mark, and the rest—they weren’t so much victims of the thing in their blood as they were victim of being born when they had been. Were Marissa being born now, Sai argued, or in five years, then, thirty years later, when her genetic alarm clock rang, there would probably be a cure, right?

  It wasn’t rationalization, Sai told himself, enduring the polite applause. It was true. It was obvious.

  Marissa insisted on being wheeled graveside, for Dava.

  Sai had two umbrellas, just in case.

  The sky was clear, though. The sky was perfect.

  The funeral went off without a hitch. It wasn’t a celebration, but still, they were together now, maybe, Dava and Mark.

  Their guest speaker at Group had told them not to think like that, that if they allowed themselves to think like that, then that made the rest of the steps easier to fall into, but still. It made a certain kind of sense, Sai knew.

  After Marissa’s gone, wouldn’t he want to join her?

  It didn’t matter. After the news about Dava, Marissa had made Sai promise, and, because he was still in negotiations, Sai had made the promise real in his head, not just a placating group of random words.

  Marissa’s argument was that, wherever she went after death, if it was in fact eternal, then that would also mean it was timeless, wouldn’t it? As in, all the moments are the same moment. One big long moment, a now that goes forever. So, whether Sai showed up five minutes after her death or fifty years, it would be the same to her.

  “Probably,” Sai had said. “Sure.”

  She hadn’t made him promise anything about accidents, though.

  Maybe he was going to get into base jumping the week after her funeral. Maybe he was going to become an alligator-feeder at a second-rate carnival. Maybe spelunking alone was how he would manage his grief.

&nbs
p; When the preacher—Dava had been vaguely Baptist—shut his bible, the meager crowd dispersed, trailing away to the rest of their lives.

  Except Group. Except the Survivors.

  They held their own ceremony. It was just clasped hands around the casket, each of them saying something nice for Dava to take with her if she was listening, but it was right, and it was good, and Sai found his eyes heating up in spite of his efforts.

  He was supposed to be the strong one. For Marissa.

  He shook his head and looked away, to find something to center on, to suck his attention away for a five-count.

  What he saw were two tall men standing what had been three rows behind the folding chairs.

  Sunglasses, ties, overcoats. Those black gloves in the heat. No sense of protocol whatsoever.

  One of them was leaned over to whisper something to the other, but when Sai looked back, he stopped but kept his hand up, his mouth still covered. Like, the instant Sai looked away, he was going to continue.

  Sai had to chuckle.

  “You,” he said, too quiet for either of them to possibly register.

  Except they did.

  “Wait, wait,” he said, turning down to Marissa in her chair, to make sure the wheels were locked, and when he turned around he was already breathing deep, for whatever this confrontation was going to be.

  Except they were gone.

  “What?” Marissa was saying, craned around in her chair in her awkward way.

  Sai panned across the whole of the cemetery, the parking lot, the street beyond, the buildings past that.

  The two men were gone.

  “Nothing,” he said back to Marissa.

  It was his first lie to her in ten months.

  •

  There was no way to research the interlopers, Sai finally figured out. After three nights of thinking on it. On them.

  Interlopers was the right name for them, too.

  The problem was, funerals were made for interlopers. Death guilts distant relations and tangential connections out of the woodwork. There’s usually a guest book to sign, but if you choose not to, nobody presses you. Whereas at a wedding you’ll get asked if you’re there for the bride or the groom, at a funeral, you’re just there for the dead. And, if you don’t want to talk about it—of course, of course. We understand. We miss him too.