After the People Lights Have Gone Off (17 page)

It meant everything.

Soon enough, following his nose like that, Doc crosses the creek, winds into the part of the woods the neighbor’s cleared of underbrush so his tree blind has lines of sight on everything.

Doc too.

Standing in the middle of the clearing is a king skunk, one of those ones with two stripes instead of just one. One of those kind that don’t back down.

Doc’s lip quavers, the growl building in his chest.

The skunk just glares across at him, not remotely concerned. Its feet, though, those tiny black claws—Grandpa held his own hand up to show, and for a breathless moment I thought his fingernails were going to curl around, that I was finally going to see it happen—they were gripping onto the top of the ground.

“Just like you have to anchor a cannon down on the deck of a ship,” Grandpa said.

If he’d ever been on the open water or even to the Gulf, I didn’t know about it.

I did know backhoes by then, though, and they had those robot arms that would reach out on each side, dig in.

It was the same way for that skunk, I knew.

He was about to deliver a payload.

That night, Doc skulked back to the house whimpering.

His muzzle was still scarred from the last time Grandpa had had to take pliers to the porcupine quills barb-deep in that velvet black skin behind his whiskers.

Porcupines don’t carry rabies, though. They can, I suppose, I’d just never heard of it.

No, rabies, it’s what the bats bring to the coyotes, what the coyotes give to the prairie dogs, what the prairie dogs special-deliver to the polecats.

This skunk Doc had tangled with, it didn’t
necessarily
have rabies.

But maybe.

And, when you’ve got dairy stock and other dogs and bats living in the attic, maybe’s enough.

Grandpa didn’t want to rouse Darren and Libby and my mom, though. They were still kids, and he didn’t want to deal with the way they’d dive between Doc and the end of the gun, how they’d promise Doc was okay, never taking their own safety into account even for a slip of a moment.

The only way to tell for sure he didn’t have rabies, it was either to wait for it to be too late or to cut Doc’s head off, mail it into Tulsa for testing.

Either way, it was the end of the line for Doc. What had started with his tail was going to find completion after all these years.

Grandpa turned the porch light off, wrapped a bandanna around his face—even when not shifted, the smell of skunk still hurts—and hooked a finger through Doc’s collar, led him past the barn.

What he had looped in the painter loop of his pants was a ball-peen hammer. Not one a working man would like, with a two-pound head that completes the swing for you, just one to bang something straight on the anvil.

It would be enough. More important, it would be quiet.

“Except,” Grandpa said, laughing in his wheezy way—this was the punchline he’d been building towards—“after I hit Doc between the ears that first time, I like to have never got that next lick planted, let me tell you.”

And he laughed and laughed, and the fire found a few pops of sap, and for a few moments I could see him out there, the silhouette of him anyway, holding the silhouette of a big rangy dog by the collar, that dog pulling him around and around, that long-handled hammer whistling through the air, trying to deliver its kindness down, and then trying again, all through dinner.

You have to smile, sometimes.

•

Three years later, Uncle Darren had found us a place outside Sprayberry, Texas.

All the trucks were oilfield trucks, their dashboards black with it.

He was running pipe now, back and forth to El Paso.

Aunt Libby was clerking at the gas station. They had a video shelf on the back wall, and she’d let me bring home the movies nobody’d rented that night, then sneak them back in her purse, “find” them behind the cereal or the soup cans if her boss was there.

This is what werewolves do.

Until one night Uncle Darren walked up out of the highway. It was just like the opening credits of a show I’d been watching on television, so that I felt the ground shift underneath me, like somebody had their hand on the channel dial.

Aunt Libby heard or smelled, came out, her hands dusted white with flour.

“No,” she said.

Yes.

Hooked over Uncle Darren’s shoulder was the creaky black belt of a state trooper. The pistol was still there in its molded holster, the handle flapping against his side every other step.

“Go inside,” she said, pushing me away.

She should have pushed harder.

We didn’t need anybody to tell us what had happened here.

For weeks now, Uncle Darren had been coming in from his runs cussing the smokey that’d been dogging him.

When Uncle Darren drove, he liked to drink wine coolers. Just to stay awake.

He’d been doing it so long that he’d become a real and true marksman, could hang a bottle out the window on his side, flip that bottle over the top of his rig, nail the mile marker reflectors each time.

And he never got drunk. It was just wine coolers, right? I wasn’t near old enough, was just pushing twelve, but I knew they tasted like watered-down something else, I just wasn’t sure what. But they sure weren’t beer, or anything stronger.

This one state trooper who worked 20 just east of Stanton, he didn’t agree.

Uncle Darren had taken to muttering how bears and wolves, they weren’t
meant
to get along.

Whenever Aunt Libby heard him, well. It was
on
, like Grandpa would have said. Screaming and cussing, one of them storming out into the mesquite darkness.

Aunt Libby was right, though, I knew.

She’d always been able to control transforming better than Darren. Like, she could get mad at somebody and
not
wolf out on them.

It kept the gas station from becoming a killing floor. It kept her boss alive, day after day. It kept his grabby hands connected to his pale wrists.

Uncle Darren, though, he’d taken to long-haul trucking specifically to avoid those kinds of confrontations.

Until this one state trooper.

Fifty miles behind him, I knew, his rig was cocked over in the ditch, the running lights on, the door swinging, the dome light glowing down on three or four bottles of what had been a six-pack. Of strawberry wine coolers.

That big chrome gas tank, it would be tacky with blood, I knew.

Maybe some splashed up onto the mirror, and the backside of the windshield.

Uncle Darren had torn through that trooper like the human sheet of tissue he was, and come out the other side with that thick black belt in his teeth, a prize.

Then he’d run up the yellow stripes until the pads of his feet were raw.

And then he’d stood, a man.

Aunt Libby didn’t even stop from him being both naked
and
her own brother. She walked right out into the road, straight-armed him direct in the chest, nearly dislodging his trophy of a belt.

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

He tried to keep sliding past her, for the house, for clothes, for the suitcases because we were moving again, we had to, but Aunt Libby hauled him back, and I should have gone inside, I should have been inside watching a stolen movie about ninjas, I should have been inside already packing.

But I wasn’t.

I heard.

Not the growling—it wasn’t the first time I’d heard it from Aunt Libby—but the words. The human words.

At first Aunt Libby was talking low and steady, about how she had a good job this time, how this was a good place. How they were going to know who did it.

Like Darren, though, I wasn’t really listening, here.

What I was doing was watching him.

I could see Grandpa rising up in his son. I was seeing 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.

Darren’s skin was jumping in folds, cringing back from the shift. Aunt Libby was pushing his every last button, and—he’d never been a talker—he didn’t even have any good defense, aside from that Trooper Dan had been asking for it, that he’d been asking for it his whole life, and that they could go back now if she wanted, they could steal a truck, fake a wreck. Pretend Trooper Dan had been doing a ticket when a drunk veered, and, and—

Aunt Libby slapped him.

Her claws were out, too.

My eyes took snapshots of every single frame of that arc her hand took. It was the first real wolf I’d seen. It was what I’d been waiting for ever since Oklahoma, ever since Arkansas. Ever since ever.

It proved that these weren’t just stories, that they weren’t just excuses.

A piece of Uncle 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!”
Aunt Libby yelled, stepping forward, taking him by both wrists, driving her knee up into his balls.

It’s another thing about werewolves.

Mid-shift, a knee to the balls can bring you back to the human side of things. Pain is a weight. It anchors you.

Uncle Darren balled up, curled on his side there on the asphalt where anybody could drive by.

Aunt Libby stood over him breathing hard, still growling, her skin jumping in the most beautiful way.

All that bullshit about packs and dominance, alphas and submission?

Right then I believed the hell out of it.

“You can’t just say whatever story you want and make it true,” she said, finally, about the wreck Uncle Darren wanted to stage.

“Learned from the best,” Uncle Darren said, and Aunt Libby whipped her eyes up. Right to me.

“‘I found all three of you out there by the old—by the creek’… is that what he used to say?” Darren managed to get out. “I mean, I mean, is that what he used to
sell
?”

Aunt Libby was still staring at me. With her real self.

“Three shots,” Uncle Darren laughed, still holding himself, speaking directly down into the hot black rock. But I could hear him. “There were three shots in that rifle, Lib, three shots, three shots and three
ki
—”

Aunt Libby kicked him before he could finish, but it was too late.

Three
kids
.

You don’t tell your children to run, not when the wolves are at the door.

No kid can outrun a werewolf, much less a riled-up pack of them.

What you do is you deliver the only kindness you’ve got left. What you do is you hold each of their little heads and kiss them on the forehead, and then replace your lips with the open mouth of a gun.

But my grandmother hadn’t gone all the way through with it. Grandpa had come home right at that moment, or they’d slipped away out a side window, or the other crew had come through the door, or Libby and Darren had changed, and fought her back with their sharp baby teeth, or—or a hundred other things.

None of which mattered.

Once you make a decision like that, you can’t take it back.

And, because Grandpa loved her and not hated her, I guess—because he understood—he’d made a lie up about that day. He’d made it sound good.

And it probably wasn’t the first time.

I could see it in the way Libby had slashed her eyes to me, tried to hold me with them. Tried to keep me from understanding. From seeing through.

“Doc,” I said, in the new quiet Uncle Darren’s pained breathing was spreading all around. “There never was a dog named Doc.”

“Don’t,” Aunt Libby said, her mouth tight, like keeping a secret.

I turned, I ran.

She let me.

•

The next few weeks were quiet.

We were living in the panhandle of Florida, slapping bugs off our necks every few soggy breaths. Uncle Darren was working the boats at night, like Grandpa never had. There weren’t any cannons on them. Just contraband. It was why he had to work naked: so they’d know he wasn’t smuggling anything himself.

Aunt Libby was taking coupons and making change at an oil change place. I worked down in the pit. I wasn’t old enough, but they didn’t have to pay me as much, so it all kind of worked out.

Down there turning my wrenches, that liquid clicking of the ratchets swelling up all around me, I ran through Doc’s story from every angle I could, trying to peel it back to a different truth, a better truth.

All I kept hearing, though, it was what Grandpa had really been telling me, his one eye pressuring up to burst back into his brain.

All I kept hearing was what he’d really been apologizing for.

My mom.

It had to be.

If Aunt Libby hadn’t thinned her lips that night when I said Doc’s name, I probably never would completely flashed on what Grandpa was saying.

But she had.

Still, there was some assembly required.

Another story Grandpa told me, it did have proof, is maybe the only werewolf story in the whole history of werewolves to ever have proof.

It was where dew claws come from. Why they are.

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

It was about birthing, about being born.

Just like baby birds needed a beak to poke through
their
shells, or like some baby snakes have a sharp nose to push through their eggshells, so did werewolf pups need dewclaws. It was because of their human half. Because, while a wolf’s head is made for slipsliding down a birth canal, a human head—all pups shift the whole time they’re being born, can’t help it—a human head is big and blocky by comparison. And the momma-wolf’s lady parts, they aren’t made for that.

That’s the reason for the dewclaws. So the pup can reach through with his paw. So that one claw up on the back of their forearm can snag, tear the opening a bit wider.