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“You really want an A?” the uncle says. “An A-plus, even?”
In the kitchen the aunt clears her throat with meaning for the uncle. The reporter’s already up past his bedtime for this assignment.
So far she’s pulled two melted Hot Wheels from the oven. They don’t roll anymore.
“If he doesn’t pass school—” she starts, her voice as big as the inside of the oven, but cuts herself off when her fingertips lose whatever it is they’ve latched on to. Another Hot Wheels?
“I remember school …” the reporter’s uncle says, his voice dreamy and half asleep. Like it’s dragging out across the years. “You know the ladies love our kind, don’t you?” he says, talking low so his sister won’t have anything to add.
“I’m supposed to ask you the questions,” the reporter says, his lips firm.
Because he lost his sheet of interview questions, he’s made up his own.
“Shoot,” the reporter’s uncle says, yawning so wide his jaw sounds like it’s breaking open at the hinge.
“Why do you always pee right before?” the reporter asks, no eye contact, just a ready-set-go pencil, green except for the tooth marks. It’s from the box of free ones the teacher keeps on the corner of her desk.
“Pee?” the uncle says, interested at last. He looks past the reporter to the kitchen, probably with the idea that the reporter’s aunt is going to prairie-dog her head up about werewolf talk.
No such aunt tonight.
The reporter’s uncle shrugs one shoulder, leans in so the reporter has to lean in as well, to hear. “You mean before the change, right?” he says.
Right.
“Easy,” the uncle says. “Say—say you’ve got a pet goldfish. Like, one you’re all attached to, one you’d never eat even if you were starving and there was ketchup already on it. But you have to move, like to another state, get it? ‘State’? You don’t put the whole fishbowl all sloshing with water up on the dashboard for that, now do you?”
“You put it in a bag,” the reporter says.
“Smallest bag you can,” the uncle says. “Makes the trip easier, doesn’t it? Shit doesn’t get spilled everywhere. And the fish might even make it to that other state alive, yeah?”
In his notebook, angled up where his uncle can’t see, the reporter spells out fish.
“But, know what else?” the reporter’s uncle says, even quieter. “Wolves, werewolves like us, we’ve got bigger teeth to eat with, better eyes to see with, sharper claws to claw with. Bigger everything, even stomachs, because we eat more, don’t know when the next meal’s coming.”
In the reporter’s notebook: four careful lines that might be claw scratches.
“Bigger everything but bladders,” the uncle says, importantly. “Know why dogs always end up peeing on the rug? It’s because a dog can’t hold it. Because they’re not made to be inside. They’re made to be outside, always peeing all over everything. They never had to grow big bladders, because there’s no lines to wait in to get to pee on a tree. You just go to a different tree. Or you just pee where you’re already standing.”
“But werewolves aren’t dogs,” the reporter says.
“Damn straight,” the uncle says, pushing back into the couch in satisfaction, like he was just testing the reporter here. “But we maybe share certain features. Like how a Corvette and a Pinto both have gas tanks.”
A Pinto is a horse. A Mustang is a car.
In the notebook: nothing.
“So what I’m saying,” the uncle says, narrowing his eyes down to gunfighter slits to show he’s serious here, that this really is A-plus information, “it’s that, if you shift across with like six beers in you, or six cokes, six beers or cokes you already needed to be peeing out in the first place, then you’re going to be trying to fit those six cokes into a two-beer fish bag, get it?”
The reporter is trying to remember what the next question was.
“We got any of those balloons left?” the reporter’s uncle calls into the kitchen, for the demonstration part of this lesson.
Balloons? the reporter writes in the notebook in his head.
His aunt answers with a rattle on the linoleum: Hot Wheels number three. This one rolls into a chair leg, is the best of the lot, the real survivor.
“Corvette,” the reporter’s uncle says, nodding at that little car like it’s making his case for him.
Before the reporter can remember his next question, the aunt comes slipping around the half-wall counter between the kitchen and the living room. Her hand is on the top of the half-wall counter for her to swing around, and 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 (#ulink_5f3ff6ed-cd19-5e28-89ae-494e3042104b)
Billy the Kid (#ulink_5f3ff6ed-cd19-5e28-89ae-494e3042104b)
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 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.
