Mongrels

by Stephen Graham Jones

“I didn’t want to wake your sister,” Grandpa said across to Darren. “So I—so I used a ball-peen hammer instead, right? A hammer’s quiet enough. A hammer’ll work. I dragged her out by the fence on that side, and—” He was laughing now, his wheezy old man’s laugh, and fighting to stand, to act this out. “Her?” I said, but he was already acting it out, was already holding that big rangy dog by the collar, and swiping down at it with the hammer, the dog spinning him around, his swings missing, one of them finally cracking deep into his own shin so he had to hop on one leg, the dog still pulling, trying to live.

Grandpa wasn’t just half in and half out of the door from the kitchen. He was also halfway between man and wolf. From the waist up, for the part that had made it through the door, he was the same. But his legs, still on the kitchen linoleum, they were straggle-haired and shaped wrong, muscled different. The feet had stretched out twice as long, until the heel became the backward knee of a dog. The thigh was bulging forward.

A fourteen-year-old girl starts to have a baby, a human girl 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, it never happens like this, she was the one of the litter born with fingers, not paws, she’s supposed to be safe, is supposed to throw human babies, but the wolf’s in the blood, and it’s fighting its way to the surface. My mom, I didn’t just tear her open, I infected her. Werewolves that are born, they’re in control of what they are, or they can come to be, at least. They have a chance. If you’re bit, though, then it runs wild through you.

If you want to call it that.

what an insane first chapter. oh my god

At least until morning, when you shift back. Just like that tick that impacted itself into Grandpa’s skin, a pair of panty hose, they’ll retract with your legs. Except, instead of one tick embedding itself in your skin, flaring into some infection, this time every hair is pulling something back in with it.

The three of them are halfway over the back of the couch when the spark the reporter’s aunt must have seen in the blackness of the oven does its evil thing and the whole kitchen turns into a fireball that blows all the windows in the trailer out, that kills all the lights at once, that leaves the three of them deaf against a wall, feeling each other’s faces to be sure they’re all right, and if there are any real answers about werewolves, then it’s a picture of them right there doing that, a picture of them right there trying to find each other.

“I’m telling—telling Libby,” I said, having to cough it out, and Darren flashed his eyes up hot at me, said some criminal I was turning out to be, then he smiled, pushed me away. I had to fall farther than he pushed to avoid my own puke. He laughed so hard it made him throw up again, and, watching him throw up, I had to throw up some more. When I could I picked up a vomited-on rock, rolled it weakly at him. He pretended to be a bowling pin, fell flat over into the grass with his eyes open like a cartoon character then rose wiping his mouth with his unbandaged hand, reached his other hand down for me just to start it all over again, and, it’s stupid, I know, but if I’d died right then from the poison, died without ever even changing, died with owl feathers stuck all over me, that would have been pretty all right.

He’s the one who finally figured out the real way to recognize a werewolf. They’re the ones who never grow up.

This was fifth grade. Everybody’s stupid when they’re eleven. By Georgia I was fourteen, and had found a different way to escape: high school. Instead of going home, I signed up for everything, came in early for study, stayed late for track.

By the time I got back to the cemetery, Libby had her face down to the bear’s. Her words were thick because her teeth were coming in, but I could still hear her. She was apologizing as best she could. And she was calling the bear a name. Sad Eyes. I cocked my head, dredged that term up. It was what Grandpa had called the moondog baby he’d brought back in a cardboard box, as a lesson for his three pups. I’d thought the name was a corruption from some other language. I was wrong. It’s how werewolves say they’re sorry. It’s how you acknowledged the person inside the animal. How you tell them that you see them in there, yes. And you’re sorry it has to be like this.

“We’re werewolves,” Darren said, pulling the brim of his cap even lower, and Libby smoked the mismatched tires of that perfect impossible Impala and we surged forward into the night, diving for the interstate, no lid on our trunk, the temperature gauge climbing into the red like always, no seat belts across our laps, the rearview mirror crowded with certain death. Someday when I’m telling my grandkids about the one time we went to North Carolina, I’m going to end right there, I told myself. I’m going to end with three werewolves running hard for their homeland. As if there had ever been such a thing.

Since I couldn’t pick between either of their stories, I made up my own: the unholy union. Those two star-crossed lovers the world always needs. That werewolves needed them too, that kept us part of the world. The story was simple like Libby’s but sweeping and grand like Darren’s. A wolf and a logger’s daughter meet out in the moonlight night after night, trying to figure out the precise mechanics of their relationship. And the tragedy of it comes when the woman gives birth to the first of us, has to die from it. Except I guess that makes love the actual infection in our blood. I don’t know.

“And it is,” he said. “But there’s a price. It’s not a gift, the blood. It’s a curse, the way I hear it. The way I’ve lived it.” He was ready to go now, but I asked it: “The way you hear it?” “We’re all bastards,” he said. “Mutts, mongrels. Here’s how it started—how we all started. A woman who was dying anyway, she decided to make her death count. This is back when, peasants and scythes. So she drank a bellyful of some poison plant, then walked naked out to the wolves who had been snatching the village’s children. To kill them. But, because she offered herself to them, the wolves didn’t want her, wouldn’t eat her. Instead, they invited her into the pack, and when she died from the poison, they licked her eyeballs hard enough to roll them back around from the whites. She came back to life, and she bore litter after litter for them, and she never put clothes on again.”

“Being a werewolf isn’t just teeth and claws,” she said, her lips brushing my ear she was so close, so quiet, “it’s inside. It’s how you look at the world. It’s how the world looks back at you.”

My heart hammered once in my throat, and my hand pulled into a fist, my head turning half away, like to avoid a blow coming in fast. “No,” I said. But yes. It was the El Camino. It was our El Camino.

“This isn’t happening,” Libby finally said. It was, though. It had been happening already for ten years.

She was at the freezer. There was meat in there, but it had been there a while. Her husband, frozen between man and wolf. Stashed here after his usefulness had run out. Stashed here when he wasn’t saving NMV money anymore.

“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 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.