Mongrels. Stephen Jones Graham

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      In the back of the house something glass broke, something wood splintered, and there was a scream so loud I couldn’t even tell if it was from Darren or Libby, or if it was even human.

      “They love each other too much,” Grandpa said. “Libby and her—and that—”

      “Red,” I said, trying to make it turn down at the end like when Darren said it.

      “Red,” Grandpa said back, like he’d been going to get there himself.

      He thought it was Red and Libby back there. He didn’t know what month it was anymore.

      “He’s not a bad wolf either,” he went on, shaking his head side to side. “That’s the thing. But a good wolf isn’t always a good man. Remember that.”

      It made me wonder about the other way around, if a good man meant a bad wolf. And if that was better or worse.

      “She doesn’t know it,” Grandpa said, “but she looks like her mother.”

      “Tell me,” I said.

      For once he did, or started to. But his descriptions of Grandma kept wandering away from her, would strand him talking about how her hands looked around a cigarette when she had to turn away from the wind. How some of her hair was always falling down by her face. A freckle on the top of her left collarbone.

      Soon I realized Darren and Libby were there, listening.

      It was my grandma, but it was their mom. The one they’d never seen. The one there weren’t any pictures of.

      Grandpa smiled for the audience, for his family being there, I think, and he went on about her pot roasts then, about how he would steal carrots and potatoes for her all over Logan County, carry them home in his mouth, shotguns always firing into the air behind him, the sky forever full of lead, always raining pellets so that when he shook on the porch after getting home, it sounded like a hailstorm.

      Libby cracked the refrigerator open, pulled out a steak, held it under the water in the sink so it wouldn’t stick to her face.

      Darren eased into the living room, sat on his haunches on the floor past the chair he usually claimed, like he didn’t want to break this spell, and Grandpa went on about Grandma, about the first time he saw her. She was in a parade right over in Boonesville, had a pale yellow umbrella over her shoulder. It didn’t look like a huge daisy, he said. Just an umbrella, but in the clear daytime.

      Darren smiled.

      His face on the left side had four deep scratches in it now, but he didn’t care. He was like Grandpa, was going to have a thousand stories.

      In the kitchen Libby finally turned the water off, pressed the steak up to her left eye. It wasn’t swelled all the way shut yet. Her eyeball was shot red like it had popped.

      I hated Red at least as much as Darren did.

      “Go on,” Darren said to Grandpa, and for two or three more minutes we went around and around the house with him, after Grandma. Until Grandpa leaned forward to pull up the right leg of his pants. Except he was just wearing boxers. But his fingers still worked at the memory of pants.

      “He wanted to hear about how this happened,” he said, and tapped his finger into a deep dent on his shin I’d never noticed before.

      This was when Libby pushed up from the sink.

      Her lips were red now too, and part of me registered that it was from the steak. That she’d been chewing on it.

      The rest of me was watching Grandpa’s index finger tap into his shin. Because I’d asked about the scar by his mouth, not one on his leg. But I wasn’t going to mess this up.

      “Used to have this dog …” he said to me, just to me, and Libby dropped her steak splat onto the linoleum.

      “Dad,” she said, but Darren held his hand up hard to her. “He can’t, not this—” she said, her voice getting shrieky, but Darren nodded yes, he could.

      “You weren’t there,” she said to him, and when Darren looked over to her again she spun away with a grunt, crashed out the screen door, and I guess she just kept running out into the trees. The El Camino didn’t fire up, anyway.

      “What happened?” I said to Grandpa.

      “We had this dog,” Grandpa said, nodding like it was all coming back to him now, moving his fingers up by his eyes like the story was filaments in the air, and if he held his hand just right he could collect enough of them to make sense, “we had this dog and he—he got tangled up with something, got bit, got bit and I had to, well.”

      “Rabies,” I filled in. I knew it from the kid in class who’d had to get the shots in his stomach.

      “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.

      He was laughing, or trying to.

      Darren was leaning his head back, like trying to balance his eyes back in.

      “I like, I like to—” Grandpa said, finding his chair again, collapsing into it, “once I hit her that first time, little pup, I like to have never got that next lick in,” which was the punch line.

      He was the only one laughing, though.

      And it wasn’t really laughing.

      The next Monday Libby took me back to first grade, sat there at the curb until I’d stepped through the front doors.

      It lasted two days.

      When we came back from school and work Tuesday, Grandpa was half out the front door, his cloudy eyes open, flies and wasps buzzing in and out of his mouth.

      “Don’t—” Libby said, trying to snag my shirt, keep me in the El Camino.

      I was too fast. I was running across the caliche. My face was already so hot.

      And then I stopped, had to step back.

      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.

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