Mongrels

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 right at her. “Already, sis?”

Libby shoved her plate across the table at him and didn’t say another word.

Darren lifted her plate with his good hand and slurped her eggs off, smiling the whole time.

“What?” I said when she stomped back to her bedroom for her hairnet. It was so she wouldn’t wax any more of her black hairs into the lobby floor. There’d been complaints.

“When you change,” Darren said, wiping the yellow from his lips with his bandaged hand, “your tongue’s the first thing to go.”

He hung his tongue out the side of his mouth and panted, to show.

“That’s because the human tongue has more muscles—” I started, but he looked to the side like checking if I was for real, came back with: “You think we’re talking human tongues, here?”

“But she’s not even—” I started, meaning to say she wasn’t shifting. She was maybe changing her shirt or something, but she was coming back up the hall on two feet, not four. Before I could get into all that, Darren made his eyes big to keep me quiet.

Libby’s footsteps.

“Not that they don’t taste good when they’re fresh,” he said like she was catching us midconversation, just another discussion about tongues. But the way he smiled behind it, I didn’t know if he was funning me or if that’s what you’re supposed to do with a kill: muzzle into its mouth, clamp on to the tongue, stretch it back out until that white tendon down the underside snaps.

It made me gag a little.

Darren shh’d his swollen finger across his lips and, like always, I kept his secret.

“And don’t bring back anything sick this time,” Libby said right to him. To punctuate it she threw down a dollar and a half on the table, most of it in change.

The change was for me, for the ketchup I would definitely need for whatever Darren ran down in an hour or two. For the first few weeks in Texas, she’d been just swiping packets from the condiment tray at the gas station that fronted the junkyard, but now she couldn’t go back in there anymore, and they’d learned to keep an eye on me as well.

The change she threw on the table, I was pretty sure it was from the office building. It had to be. From the ashtrays and drawers and drains of people who knew how to tie a tie, even without a mirror. I cupped my hand over the quarters and dimes and pennies. They were still wet. She’d just washed them in the bathroom. Because werewolves who aren’t werewolves yet, they can still die from normal human sicknesses.

“So …” Darren said, like figuring this out as he went, “so you mean I’m only to get a raccoon with a clean bill of health like tied to its neck? They still make those? Good thing you told me, I was probably just going to get the first thing I saw down at the animal hospital.”

Libby stared at him.

This was the tenth or fifteenth week of him being around too much. Of her bringing home half the money that was supposed to go twice as far.

It didn’t help at all that Darren was shifting every night, to try to get his hand to forget it was infected. What that meant for us was that he was spending his days mummied up on the couch. And werewolf sleep, that’s caterpillar-in-a-cocoon deep, about as close to coma as you can get and not flatline.

Another way we always die? House fires. Come in from a night of blood and carnage, burn most of those calories shifting back to human, then dive headfirst into your pillow, go deeper down than dreams, down so far that, when the smoke starts building from the stove or the cigarette or the villagers’ torches, well, that’s that. Barbecued wolf, babydoll.

That was one of Darren’s words since we’d hit Texas: babydoll.

It made Libby’s top lip snarl up in a way Darren couldn’t get enough of.

He usually woke right around Wheel of Fortune, and, even though he’d yell the solutions to make them right, none of them ever were.

It didn’t help Libby sleep.

We weren’t going to be in Texas for much longer, I could tell. Texas was bad for werewolves. We’d been there not long ago already, coming back from Florida, so should have learned. But Texas was so big. That was the thing. If we wanted to get back into Louisiana and Alabama and all those places without ice and snow, we had to drive across Texas, hope none of the cowboys were watching.

Just, werewolf cars aren’t made to go that far in a single push. The LeSabre back by the propane tank was proof of that. There was grass growing up all around it already, and probably coming up through the holes in the floorboard, like Texas was doing everything it could to keep us here.

Not because it wanted us to find work, to make lives. It was because it wanted to eat us.

And it was working.

After Libby was gone, that little Datsun’s four-cylinder screaming in pain, Darren hung his tongue out again, panted in imitation of her in the most profane way, somehow getting his head involved.

“Maybe a deer,” I told him, because Libby wasn’t here to defend herself.

“Bambi’s mom again,” he said, looking out the window like considering this.

So far he’d brought back two skinny does, but they’d each been roadkill. I could tell, but didn’t say anything. If I did, then we’d both have to see him darting between headlights, just another dog, a big rangy one, trying to drag this bounty off the highway. Instead of running it down like we’re meant to.

Three paws aren’t fast enough, though. You can’t corner hard, just flop over onto your chin instead.

“Up for some good old USDA beef?” Darren said.

“Libby says no,” I told him.