Mongrels

“Fifty-five,” Darren said. “This is what happens.”

Libby heard his bottle break into whatever it broke into, and traced it back to us. She ran over, her hands in a steeple over her mouth.

“He thinks he’s shifted,” Darren told her, disgusted.

“Help me!” Libby said, falling to her knees by her dad, trying to get his head into her lap, her long black hair shrouded over both of them.

That was one day.

I quit going to school for that week, and promised myself to keep Grandpa alive.

The way I did it was with stories. By keeping him talking.

“Tell me about Grandma,” I said one night after Darren had left, after Red had come and stood at the gate like a statue until Libby drifted out to him. She couldn’t help it.

I was asking about Grandma because if he thought he was really shifting into a werewolf, then talking to him about it wasn’t going to make him any better.

“‘Grandma,’” he said in his new halfway slur, then shook his head no, said, “she never ever got to be called ‘Momma,’ did she?”

I wanted to take my question back. To start over.

Grandpa breathed a deep important breath in, then out. He said, “You know werewolves, they mate for life, right? Like swans and gophers.”

He pretty much only sat in his chair now. Used to when he smiled one side of his mouth, it meant something good was coming. Now it meant something bad had happened, Libby said.

“Gophers?” I said.

“You can smell it on them,” he said, snuffling his nose to show.

I’d never seen a gopher. Just the mounds.

“Grandma,” Grandpa said then, clearer. “You know when she first figured me out, what I was, she thought it meant I was married to the moon, like. That that was the only time I would go out howling.”

I narrowed my eyes and he caught it, added, “That’s not how it works, little pup. Too short a leash. We’d starve like that. Anyway. I was married to her, wasn’t I?”

A log in the fire popped sparks up the chimney. Darren called it an old-man fire. It was September.

“Another thing about werewolves,” Grandpa said at last. “We age like dogs. You should know that too.”

“Like dogs,” I repeated.

“You can burn up your whole life early if you’re not careful. If you spend too much time out in the trees, running your dinner down.”

I nodded. As long as he was talking, he wasn’t dead.

“Grandma,” I said again, because that’s where we’d been, before the werewolves.

Grandpa swallowed a lump, coughed it back up and spit it in his hand, rubbed it into the blanket on his lap.

“There used to be a secret,” he said. “A way for them, for the wives, for them not to …”

Not to die, I knew. Since Grandpa’d started living mostly in the living room, he’d decided to solve the family curse. It was what all the stolen library books by the couch were for. So he could find the old way for a human woman to live with a werewolf and not die from giving birth.

His research was the big reason Libby stayed mostly in the kitchen. She said nothing he did was going to bring her mom back, was it? There wasn’t any big werewolf secret. Grandma had just died, end of story.

Darren thought Grandpa’s books were funny. They were all strange stories, amazing facts.

“We buried her in the church graveyard,” Grandpa said then, on some different part of the Grandma-story running in his head. “And they—they dug her up, little pup. They dug her up and they—they—”

Instead of finishing, he lurched forward so I had to push back to keep him from spilling out of his chair. I didn’t know if I could get him back into it.

By the time he looked up, he’d forgot what he’d been saying.

He’d told it to me before, though, when Libby wasn’t around to stop him.

It was another werewolf story.

After Grandma had died giving birth, a rival pack had dug her up as a message to him. It was about territory.

Grandpa had taken the message back to them on the end of a shovel, and then used that shovel on them.

This had all been his territory back then, he usually said, to end that story out. His territory as far as he could see, as much as he could fight for. Some days he’d claim all of Arkansas as his, even, ever since the war had spit him up here.

But I wasn’t stupid. I wasn’t at school that month, but I was still learning. Libby had finally told me that the scar on Grandpa’s arm, it was probably from a cigarette he’d rolled over on once. Or an old chickenpox. Or a piece of slag melting into his sleeve, burning down into his skin.

What I had to do to get to the truth of the story was build it up again from the same facts, but with different muscle.

Grandma had died and been buried. I knew that. Even Libby said it.

Probably what had happened—no, what had to have happened, the worst that could have happened—was that some town dogs had got into the cemetery the night after the funeral, when the dirt was still soft. And then Grandpa had gone after that pack with his rifle, or his truck, even if it had taken all month. And then used his shovel to bury them.

I preferred the werewolf version.

In that one, there’s Grandpa as a young man, a werewolf in his prime. But he’s also a grieving husband, a new and terrified father. And now he’s ducking out the doorway of the house this other pack dens up at. And his arms, they’re red and steaming up to the shoulders, with revenge.

If Libby grew up hearing that story, if he told it to her before she was old enough to see through it to the truth, then all she would remember would be the hero. This tall, violent, bloody man, his chest rising and falling, his eyes casting around for the next thing to tear into.

Ten years later, of course she falls for Red.

Everything makes sense if you look at it long enough.

Except Darren showing up at the house two or three hours later. He was naked, was breathing hard, covered in sweat, his eyes wild, leaves and sticks in his hair, one shoulder raw.

Slung over his shoulder was a black trash bag.

“Always use a black bag,” he said to me, walking in, dropping the bag hard onto the table.

“Because white shows up at night,” I said back to him, like the three other times he’d already come back naked and dirty.