After the People Lights Have Gone Off (16 page)

caked with blood, his whiskers not grown in like you’d think, him having run off into the woods without a razor.

When the hair pulls back in to wrap around your bones or wherever it goes, it’s like a reset button, I guess. If you had a beard before, you’ll wake without one.

One of those mornings he had to go into town to the doctor, though.

Another thing you don’t expect is the bugs. If it’s summer or even a late fall without a hard enough freeze yet, the insects’ll still be crawling, and if you pull a deer down, then, well, ticks, they just care that you’ve got warm, drinkable blood, and can’t reach all your scratchy places.

What my Aunt Libby figured happened was that, while Grandpa was rooting around in the slit-open belly of a fat deer, one of that deer’s ticks jumped ship, went to where the beating heart was.

It wasn’t Lyme Disease that sent Grandpa to the doctor, though. Wolfed out, his system probably could have kicked smallpox.

No, what sent him to town was that tick. When Grandpa fell to sleep on the porch and his hair started slithering back into its pores, that tick was a cartoon character, climbing a tree that was sinking into the ground as fast it could climb, and then just riding that hair down.

It impacted itself in one of the wide pores on the back of Grandpa’s arm, just under the shoulder. If it hadn’t been headfirst, then it would have starved, shriveled up, turned to dirt.

Headfirst like it was, though, it could slurp and slurp and slurp, its sides and back swelling lighter and lighter gray, stretching that one pore wider than any pore was meant to, making Grandpa’s whole shoulder throb.

The doctor took one look and said it was either pop her—he knew the tick was female, somehow—let her little ticklings all pour out onto Grandpa’s skin, and maybe into his blood, or he could lance her with something hot, killing the mama and boiling all the babies at once. Grandpa wasn’t exactly sold on either option, so the doctor made the decision for him, heating up a piece of baling wire with his lighter and stabbing it in slow and thorough, then digging the head of the tick out with what looked like a dental hook.

Before he could antiseptic it Grandpa rolled his shirtsleeve down over the fleshy crater so the doctor couldn’t dab away the blood, maybe get some on himself.
In
himself. If you’re born into the blood, you’re fine, but if you catch it, then it’s bad. Those werewolves, they never last long.

By the time I started coming around at eight years old, the scar on the back of Grandpa’s arm from the tick was just a smooth little dab of skin that could have been from anything.

This is the way werewolf stories go.

You hear about it, hear about it, are breathing hard it’s so great or so gross or so scary or so close, but then at the end, whoever’s telling it pushes back a little, like in satisfaction of a tale well-told, nods at you like you’ve just got to believe it, now. Because it’s the gospel truth.

Never mind any proof.

•

Where this is going is my grandfather lying to me one afternoon.

I wasn’t living with him, really. Where I was living was with my Aunt Libby, my mom’s twin once-upon-a-time, but she had a job sewing bags of feed closed out west of town, and said she didn’t trust that her ex-husband wouldn’t come around while she was gone. And she didn’t want me there for that.

Uncle Darren would have been my fallback there, but school was still in session, and he said the truant officer’d be all over him if word got around I was running produce back and forth to Tulsa with him three times a week.

“Produce,” Libby had said about that.

“Produce,” he had said back, but the way he looked away, I could see they were talking about something completely different. Something I was too young for.

Grandpa it was, then.

By that time he wasn’t moving from his rocking chair by the fire much, and everything on his shelves I said I liked, he’d tell me I could have it.

The first time I took something—it was an old ceramic car that was a cologne bottle—I carried it around with me all afternoon, finally had to admit I didn’t have anywhere to take it
to
.

My mom had been dead since I was born, and my dad was anybody. Aunt Libby said I was to call her
Aunt
, not Mom, but I still did sometimes, in my head. Anybody would. She was what my real mom would have looked like, if she’d lived through me getting born.

Her and Uncle Darren and Grandpa all shuttled me back and forth from school, and because I knew they’d have tried, I never asked them to help with my homework.

Werewolves aren’t any good with math.

Not that Uncle Darren or Aunt Libby ever shifted anymore, mind. At least not on purpose. Sometimes, asleep, you can’t help it. Or strung out like Uncle Darren gets on the road.

He’s wrecked two trucks so far, is with his third company in five years.

Grandpa understands.

He’s the one who tells them to save it, their shifts. He’s the one always saying look what it’s done to him.

You’d think he was eighty or a hundred, as frail and twisted up as he was then, but he was fifty-six.

It was because he hadn’t had anybody to tell him, to warn him.

When you’re wolfed out, running around the woods on all fours, snapping at rabbits and birds and terrorizing the villagers, you age like a dog. And Grandpa, as a young man, he’d always preferred to run his dinner down rather than work for wages to buy it at the grocery.

It had made sense. Until the arthritis. Until his skin turned to rice paper. Until his left eye glaucoma’d up like there was a storm building in there.

There was.

Two years after he got stuck with me those three weeks, he stroked out.

Aunt Libby and me found him half in, half out of the front door. Halfway between man and wolf.

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

I did too.

•

Because we didn’t need the questions—and the social security checks didn’t hurt—we burned Grandpa on the trash pile a few times, then Uncle Darren showed up with a front-end loader, pushed the pile back and forth until there was nothing left anybody’d want to dig through.

This is the way it is with werewolves.

We don’t have secret graveyards.

We move a lot.

And, I say
“we,”
but my real mom, even though she was oldest, she was the runt of the litter. It’s what Grandpa called her. And he’d always add how she was the lucky one.

Not all the children born to a werewolf are werewolves.

Even Aunt Libby and Uncle Darren, they’ve got half of my grandmother in them. You can tell when Uncle Darren lets his beard grow in, to prove to Grandpa he isn’t shifting. It’s tinged red, like Grandma was supposed to have been as a girl.

How she died, it was in another town, some rival pack. I’d never gotten the complete story of it back then, but I had enough. Grandpa’s gone hunting, and the other crew comes calling, and there’s my grandmother standing in the door with three shots in her rifle, her three kids peeking around her skirts.

What Aunt Libby claims to remember is shifting for the first time right there in the front part of the living room, shifting a cool seven years before puberty, when it’s supposed to happen. How she screamed and tore at herself, and this made Darren start changing early too.

And how my mom, she just stood there.

“Run,” Grandma’s supposed to have whispered down to them, and they did but they couldn’t, they didn’t know how to use their new legs, so my mom—is this why there’s always a human in the litter?—she dragged these two little wolf cubs along, she pulled them by the shirts they were growing out of, she pushed them ahead of her, only stopped for a moment, when three shots fired off behind her.

That night Grandpa found the three of them, smelled them out from twenty miles of lost woods.

He was red to the shoulder, the other pack’s blood steaming off him, and Aunt Libby said it was right then she knew nobody she ever married was ever going to be good enough.

Uncle Darren tells it different, but that’s the way it always is with werewolves.

We learned thousands of years ago to always keep shifting, always keep the story changing.

That way nobody can pin it on you.

•

I was trying to do my geography, trying to believe that triangles mattered, were going to help me someday, when Grandpa’s voice creaked that way it did, a minute or two before he got wound up enough to start saying whatever it was he’d thought of.

I waited it out, free-handed the angle of a corner out on my paper and erased it, drew it right beside itself, like tracing a ghost.

It was a blind stab at the correct answer, a bad guess, I knew, but if you erased enough, Ms. Chamberlain would give you points for effort.

Sometimes she’d have a baggie of shelled pecan halves for me too, for lunch.

“It was that time that one with the black tail came in smelling like skunk,” Grandpa started off, laughing behind the words like it was all coming back.

I looked up to him and past him, to the fire. It was banked low, a
“daytime fire,”
he called it. An old man fire.

Such are the last days of mighty werewolves.

But there had been a time, I knew.

Each time I looked at him, I would try to see it.

“No, it was the
dock
-tail,” he said, nodding to himself about it.

“Dogs,” I said.

Dogs
, he nodded.

You’d think a family of werewolves would have a soft spot for farm dogs, but it’s kind of the opposite.

The dogs know, and never trust.

You smell like one thing, look like another.

“It was high summer,” Grandpa said, licking his lips, his one rheumy eye shiny wet. “It was old Doc.”

“For dock-tail,” I filled in.

He nodded, shot me with his finger gun.

I sat back, hooked my arms around my knees.

“Done there?” he asked, about my homework.

Aunt Libby’d be all over both our cases if my geography wasn’t done by the time she came in covered in feed dust, half the cattle in the county trailing her in the door.

“Done,” I said to Grandpa, flipping the textbook closed to prove it.

He knew I was lying, but he knew that stories are more important, too.

“It was high summer,” he repeated again, “and old Doc, he was what you might call an egg-sucking dog. Know what that means?”

I shook my head no, couldn’t imagine.

“Chickens,” Grandpa said, smiling in a way that told me clear as day that he was something of an egg-sucker himself. “Some dogs, they can’t keep themself out of the henhouse. They know it’s wrong, they know they’re going to get the business end of the shovel afterwards, but that don’t change a thing, nosiree. Once they look through the fence a certain way, then the deed, it’s already half the way done.”

“But you said it was a skunk,” I said, squinting like trying to keep up.

“So I did,” Grandpa said, rocking back. “What you got to understand about this, it’s that Doc, he was of a
type
. It wasn’t that he liked chicken meat or eggs so godawful much, it’s that he couldn’t ever keep his nose out of trouble. And that’s what finally did his dumb ass in.”

He was still talking about himself here, I knew.

Aunt Libby’d told me once that all of Grandpa’s stories, they were really complicated apologies. Most times to people who weren’t even alive anymore. That that’s how it is when you get old.

But she also said that if I listened, I might learn something.

I wish she’d been wrong.

•

Grandpa’s story as it unfolded went around and around the house. This was what Uncle Darren always said anytime Grandpa got wound up, started remembering out loud.

“I don’t want to go around and around the house with you, old man,” he’d say, and slap his cap on his pants leg like killing a fly, or hammering a gavel.

But he did go around and around the house with Grandpa. He would.

Me too.

So there’s Doc with his docked tail that hadn’t really been docked with shears or a pocket knife to keep it from collecting burrs—it had been shot off with a twenty-gauge, from a neighbor who cared about his chicken stock—and he’s traipsing through the woods. Partly because it’s shady and cool back in the trees, and partly because there’s nothing going on up by the house.

“When you’re young, you like to roam,” Grandpa said, looking me straight in the face to see if I was young or not.

My heart, it was out there with Doc.

Grandpa winked his blind eye.

Now Doc’s on the scent of a bitch in heat, he thinks. Or wants to think. His nose to the ground, his ass haunched up in the air, that little tail working like a librarian’s finger. Whining the way a dog will on the trail—exactly the way a wolf never would, Grandpa made sure I understood.

I might have been the kid of a human, but Grandpa still treated me like a werewolf.