Mongrels. Stephen Jones Graham

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СКАЧАТЬ a line of white off her face, then looked down the road behind Darren and all the slow way back to him. To his hands. To his chin. To his eyes.

      “You didn’t,” she said.

      “Wasn’t my fault,” Darren said. “Wrong place, wrong time.”

      The creaky black belt hooked over his shoulder was a cop’s. You could tell from all the pouches and pockets. The pearl-handled pistol was even still there in its molded holster, the dull white handle flapping against his side, flashing a silver star with each step.

      “Bet we can get seventy-five for it at the truck stop,” he said, hefting it out like to show what it was worth.

      “Go inside,” Libby said, pushing me toward the house.

      She should have pushed harder.

      “This is the end of the liquor stores,” she said to Darren, her voice flat like the back edge of a sharp knife, one she could flip around to the blade in a flash.

      “Bears and wolves aren’t meant to get along …” Darren said. The cool way he looked to the left and touched a spot above his eyebrow when he said it, it sounded like a line he’d been saving, his whole long way home.

      Libby shoved him hard in the chest.

      Darren was ready, but still he had to give a bit.

      He tried to sidestep past her, for the house, for clothes, for a wine cooler, but Libby hauled him back, and because I was close enough, I heard one of them growling way down in their chest. A serious growl.

      It made me smaller in my own body.

      But I couldn’t look away.

      Darren’s skin was jumping on his chest now.

      It was Grandpa, rising up in his son. What I was seeing was 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. Because his skin would never be wax paper. Because fifty-five years old was a lifetime away. Because werewolves, they live forever.

      And then the smell came, the smell that’s probably what birth smells like. Like a body turned inside out. A body turning inside out.

      “Dad’s dead, Lib,” Darren said, and all his pain, his excuse for whatever had happened in town, it was right there in his voice, it was right there in the way his voice was starting to break over.

      “And he’s not,” Libby said, flinging a hand down to me. Darren flashed his eyes over to me, came back to Libby. “We can’t just do whatever we want anymore,” she said, her teeth hardly parting from each other. “Not until—”

      I balled my hand into a fist, ready to run, ready to hide. I knew where Grandpa’s creek was.

      “Until what?” Darren said.

      “Until,” Libby said, saying the rest with her eyes, in some language I couldn’t crack into yet.

      Darren stared at her, stared into her, his jaw muscles clenching and flaring now, his pupils either fading to a more yellowy color or catching the morning sun just perfect. Except the sky was still cloudy. Right when he flashed those dangerous new eyes up at Libby, she slapped him hard enough to twist his head around to the side.

      Her claws were out too, pushed out not from under her fingernails like I’d been thinking but from the knuckle just above that. I hadn’t even seen it happen.

      My eyes took snapshots of every single frame of that arc her hand traced.

      A piece of 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!” Libby yelled, stepping forward, taking him by both shoulders, driving her knee up into his balls hard enough to stand him up on tiptoes.

      Darren fell over frontward, curled up there naked and skin-jumpy on the caliche, and Libby stood over him breathing hard, still growling, the canine muscles under her skin writhing in the most beautiful way, her claws glistening black, and what she told him, her tone taking no questions, was that his liquor-store days, they were goddamn over, that he was a truck driver now, did he understand?

      “For Jess,” she said at the end of it all—my mother, Jessica, named for her mom—and then wiped at her eyes with the back of her hand, another dab of claw-shiny black showing on her inner forearm for the briefest instant, for not really long enough to matter.

      Except it did. To me.

      It made the world creak all around us, into a new shape. This moment we were standing in, it was a balloon, inflating.

      Inside of ten minutes, we’d have the bed of the El Camino piled with cardboard boxes and trash bags, Grandpa’s house burning down to the cement slab, the three of us stuffed into the cab of the El Camino, to put as much distance between us and this dead cop as we could in a single night.

      Now, though.

      In this moment where everything went one way, not the other.

      Because of that dab of shiny black on my aunt’s inner forearm, I was listening to my grandpa again.

      This is one of the first stories he ever told me, right before Darren rolled back into town to keep Red off Libby. His left eye then, it was probably already pressuring up to burst back into his brain.

      The story was about dewclaws.

      And none of Grandpa’s stories were ever lies. I know that now. They were just true in a different way.

      He had been telling me secrets ever since I could sit still enough to listen.

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

      Dewclaws, they’re about birthing, they’re about being born.

      Just like baby birds need a beak to poke through their shells, or like some baby snakes have a sharp nose to push through their eggshells, so do werewolf pups need dewclaws. It’s because of their human half. Because, while a wolf’s head is custom made for slipsliding down a birth canal, a human head—all pups shift back and forth the whole time they’re being born—a human head is big and blocky by comparison. And the mom’s lady parts, they aren’t made for that. You can cut the pups out like they tried to do for Grandma, but you need somebody who knows what they’re doing. When there’s not a knife, or somebody to hold it, and when the mom’s human, not wolf—that’s the reason for the dewclaws. So the pup can reach through with its paw. So that one flick of sharpness high up on the inside of the forearm can snag, tear the opening a bit wider.

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

      And now I understood, about Grandpa’s tick. That smooth divot of scar tissue he’d shown me on the back of his arm.

      It СКАЧАТЬ