Mongrels. Stephen Jones Graham

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      “He was going for the trees,” Libby said, looking there.

      I did too.

      When Darren walked up from wherever he’d been, he was still buttoning his shirt. It was so it wouldn’t be sweaty when he got wherever he was going, he’d told me.

      I’d believed him too.

      Used to, I believed everything.

      He stopped when he saw us sitting on the El Camino’s tailgate.

      We were splitting the lunch I hadn’t eaten at school, since the teacher had sneaked me some pepperoni slices from a plastic baggie.

      “No,” Darren said, lifting his face to the wind. It wasn’t for my half of the bologna sandwich. It was for Grandpa. “No, no no no!” he screamed now, because he was like me, he could insist, he could make it true if he was loud enough, if he meant it all the way.

      Instead of coming any closer, he turned, his shirt floating to the ground behind him.

      I stepped down to go after him but Libby had me by the shoulder.

      Because we couldn’t go inside—Grandpa was in the doorway—we sat in the bed of the El Camino, Libby’s fingernails picking at the edge of the white stripes that came up the tailgate. There was faded black underneath them, like the rest of the car. When night cooled the air down we retreated to the cab, rolled the windows up so that soon we were breathing in the taste of Red’s cigarettes. I pushed the pad of my index finger into a burn on the dashboard, then traced a crack in the windshield until it cut me.

      I was asleep by the time the ground shook underneath us.

      I sat up, looked through the rear window. The trees were glowing.

      Libby pulled my head close to her.

      It was Darren. He’d stolen a front-end loader.

      “Your uncle,” Libby said, and we stepped out.

      Darren pulled the front-end loader right up to the house, lowered the bucket to the doorway, and then he swung down, stepped around, lifted Grandpa into the bucket, Grandpa’s mouth hanging open, his legs shaped more like they had been. His mouth was still trying to push forward, though. Into a muzzle.

      “He was too old to shift,” Libby said to me, shaking her head at the tragedy of it all.

      “But what if he’d made it?” I said.

      “You’re not going to be stupid too, are you?” she said, and the way she tried to smile I knew I didn’t have to answer.

      Darren couldn’t call to us because the front-end loader was too loud, but he stood on the first step, hung out from the grab bar, waved us over.

      “I don’t want to,” Libby said to me.

      “I don’t want to either,” I said.

      We climbed up with Darren, sat on the swells to either side of his bouncy, ripped-up seat, the glass cold on my left arm.

      Darren drove right out into the field and followed it until there was only trees, and then he pushed through the trees back to a creek. He lifted Grandpa out, cradled him down to the tall dry grass, and then he used the bucket to dig out the steep side of the bank.

      He picked his dad up in his arms, looked across to Libby, then to me.

      “Your grandpa,” he said, holding him right there. “One thing I can say about his old ass. He always liked to run his dinner down instead of getting it at the store, didn’t he?”

      He was kind of crying when he said it, so I looked away.

      Libby bit her lip, pulled at the hair on the right side of her face. Darren lowered Grandpa into the new hole, and then he used the front-end loader to drag all the dirt back down over him, and he piled more on, finally even digging up the creek and dripping that silt down, then crushing that mound down harder and deeper and madder and madder, breaking all Grandpa’s bones, so it wouldn’t matter if anyone dug them up.

      This is the way it is with werewolves.

      “What about me?” I said on the way back, in the cab of the front-end loader.

      “What do you mean what about you?” Darren said, and when I looked over the moon had just broke over the top of the trees, was bright and round. It outlined him perfect, the way he leaned over that steering wheel like he’d been born to it.

      Every boy who never had a dad, he comes to worship his uncle.

      “He means what about him,” Libby said, angling her words at Darren in a different way.

      “Oh, oh,” Darren said, throttling up now that we were out of the trees. “Your mom, she—”

      “Not all kids born to a werewolf are a werewolf,” Libby said. “Your mom, she didn’t catch it from your grandpa.”

      “Some don’t,” Darren said.

      “Some are lucky like that,” Libby added.

      The rest of the ride was quiet, and the rest of the night too, at least until Darren started sucking air through his teeth at the kitchen table, like he’d been thinking of something the whole time and finally couldn’t keep it in his head even one minute more.

      “Don’t,” Libby said to him.

      I was sitting with her at the hearth, the fire banked high for as late as it was.

      “Don’t wait up,” Darren said, his eyes looking away, and then walked out before Libby could stop him.

      I don’t think she would have, though.

      The front-end loader fired up, dragged its lights across the kitchen window, and was rumbling back toward town, the bucket lifted high, to look under.

      “Pack your things,” Libby said to me.

      I used a black trash bag.

      When Darren came back in the morning I was standing at the El Camino’s tailgate, looking for my math book.

      Werewolves don’t need math, though.

      Darren was naked again.

      Instead of loose cash and strawberry wine coolers, what he had over his shoulder was a wide black belt.

      “Remember when you used to want to be a vampire?” he said down to me, watching the house the whole time.

      His hands and chin were black with dried blood, and he smelled like diesel.

      I nodded, kind of did remember wanting to be a vampire. It was from a sun-faded old comic book he’d let me read with him when he first got back.

      “This is better,” Darren said, his infectious smile ghosting at the corners of his mouth, and then Libby was there, her hands dusted white with flour, СКАЧАТЬ