Mongrels. Stephen Jones Graham

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СКАЧАТЬ her bare feet are skating, rocking the chairs under the table, two red plastic cups that were on the table knocked into the air and, for the moment, just staying there.

      In this slowed-down time, the reporter looks from them all the way across to his aunt. Her face is smudged black with a thousand pieces of burnt toast, and there’s a look in her eyes that the reporter can’t quite identify. If it were on a test, the kind where you have to put some answer to get partial credit, what he might write down is “reaching.” Her eyes, they’re reaching.

      Her feet, though.

      That’s what the reporter can’t look away from.

      They’re not slipping anymore now, just only one step later. They’re gripping. With sharp black claws.

      Before he can be sure, time catches up with itself and she’s flying across the coffee table, her whole entire body level with the floor, her arms collecting the reporter to her chest and then crashing them both into the reporter’s uncle, who only has time to make his mouth into the first part of the letter O, which is just a lowercase O.

      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.

       CHAPTER 5

       Billy the Kid

      Everybody goes to jail at some point.

      Werewolves especially.

      And even just one night in the tank, that can be a straight-up death sentence. For all the other drunks locked up, who don’t know any better than to push you, who think they can steal your blanket and keep their throat, sure, a death sentence for them, but for you as well, once you’re the only one standing knee-deep in the blood and the gore, your chest rising and falling with the rush of it all. And, that deep into the night, it doesn’t matter if you’re standing on four feet or two. Either way the cops on duty’ll line up into a firing squad, give you that twenty-one-gun send-off.

      That’s a warning Darren gave me. Not Libby. Her jobs were always aboveboard, with set hours, sometimes even a uniform or apron.

      Darren, he always got paid in cash.

      Thirteen years old, I would sit at the table with him, help straighten out his tens and twenties, get them rubber-banded into coffee tins and tucked behind baseboards. On a flush night there might even be a tip involved. Kind of just sneaked across the table after it was all said and done, Darren’s eyes telling me not to say anything—that, by sharing this with me, he was including me in the danger.

      Libby knew, I think, could probably hear that giveaway scrape of cotton-paper from the living room, but you pick your fights.

      What she didn’t know was that Darren was teaching me to flex the ropy muscles of my wrists out like a puffer fish. What she wasn’t home to see was Darren with those dummy cuffs from the dollar rack, me pushed up against the wall of the living room, hands behind my back to see if I could slip a middle finger up under that plastic silver jaw. It was an old Billy the Kid trick, according to Darren. Billy the Kid was the first werewolf. He was probably even the one who figured out you could bite your own thumb off if you absolutely had to and then go wolf around that next corner, pray that the transformation won’t be counting fingers this time.

      It was gospel. I lapped it up.

      We were in the alien part of Texas then, north of Dallas, west of Denton. The Buick we’d had in New Mexico hadn’t been able to take us any farther. Bridgeport looked like another planet, especially with the ice storm. All the long branches the trees had been growing for forty years had snapped off from the weight, shattered over the broken-down fences, breaking them down even more. Dallas was more than an hour away, and a dogleg at that, and too bright besides. Decatur was closer and a straighter shot, and it had cheaper groceries. Because the junkyard three miles down the road from us had fired Libby for not coming into the job knowing which wheel would fit what year of truck, she was pushing a mop at a two-story office building on the north side of Decatur. What she was driving back and forth was a rehabbed Datsun minitruck from the yard. It had been spray-painted bright blue ten or fifteen years before, and had the number 14 carefully paintbrushed onto the driver door, “41” on the passenger side.

      Some mysteries you never solve.

      Darren wasn’t working then. It was because of his right hand. It was still infected from that throwing star—and it had been months, long enough for me to have a birthday. Watching game shows in the daytime, he would lick the side of his index finger constantly, like a huge fleshy blow-pop that swelled up instead of ever going down.

      “It’s what werewolves do,” he told me when I was staring.

      “What is a tank?” I told him.

      The question on the game show was about panzers.

      “Ding ding ding!” he chimed, not a hint of a smile at the corners of his mouth.

      Where I could read, and did, Darren just listened to talk shows on the radio. It made sense: You don’t drive truck with a paperback open on your thigh.

      Or with a hand that can’t work a shifter, as it turned out. He’d tried wrong-handing it—right on the wheel, left crossed over his body for the stick—but it had ended in a jackknife, with Darren just walking away from it, his hand up by his shoulder like a throbbing lantern that could light his way home.

      We’d got to town a couple of weeks earlier, running on stolen gas, the Buick’s temperature gauge hovering deep in the red, but instead of checking me into school like usual, to keep me on the straight and narrow path to a sophomore year, Libby was giving me January off. I was angling for February too. Then I might just make it all the way to summer.

      I liked reading enough, but what was I supposed to do with a diploma? Getting a degree would be like I was deciding to trade in my heritage, my blood. And if I started making those kinds of gestures, then that was the same as asking to never change, to just stay like this forever, not need all Darren’s advice.

      Later that night we were sitting at the table with Libby. For her it was breakfast, but for us it was dinner. Except we didn’t have any.

      “You’ll run something down for him?” Libby said to Darren, her runny eggs balanced on her fork.

      They were the last three eggs.

      “Say what?” Darren said, scrunching his face up.

      I’d understood Libby, but it had taken some effort: She was talking like her mouth was hurt. Like she had a big wad of chewing gum.

      She said it again, pointing her words harder.

      “Oh,” Darren said, biting his lower lip in, staring СКАЧАТЬ