Mongrels. Stephen Jones Graham

just the right age, had just the right smile.

      The long white scar under his neck, he told me, leaning back to trace his middle finger down its smoothness, that was Red. And the one under his ribs on the left, that cut through his mermaid girlfriend? That had been Red too.

      “Some people just aren’t fit for human company,” Darren said, letting his shirt go, reaching down to two-finger another bottle up by the neck.

      “And some people just don’t want it,” Grandpa growled from his chair, a sharp smile of his own coming up one side of his mouth.

      Darren hissed, hadn’t known the old man was awake.

      He twisted the cap off his wine cooler, snapped it perfectly across the living room, out the slit in the screen door that was always birthing flies and wasps.

      “So we’re talking scars?” Grandpa said, leaning up from his rocking chair, his good eye glittering.

      “I don’t want to go around and around the house with you, old man,” Darren said. “Not today.”

      This was what Darren always said anytime Grandpa got wound up, started remembering out loud. But he would go around and around the house with Grandpa. Every time, he would.

      Me too.

      “This is when you’re a werewolf,” I said for Grandpa.

      “Got your listening ears on there, little pup?” he said back, reaching down to pick me up by the nape, rub the side of my face against the white stubble on his jaw. I slithered and laughed.

      “Werewolves never need razors,” Grandpa said, setting me down. “Tell him why, son.”

      “Your story,” Darren said back.

      “It’s because,” Grandpa said, rubbing at his jaw, “it’s because when you change back to like we are now, it’s always like you just shaved. Even if you had a full-on mountain-man beard the day before.” He made a show of taking in Darren’s smooth jawline then, got me to look too. “Babyface. That’s what you always call a werewolf who was out getting in six different kinds of trouble the night before. That’s how you know what they’ve been doing. That’s how you pick those ones out of a room.”

      Darren just stared at Grandpa about this.

      Grandpa smiled like his point had been made, and I couldn’t help it, had to ask: “But—but you’re a werewolf, right?”

      He rasped his fingers on his stubble, said, “Good ear, good ear. Get to be my age, though, wolfing out would be a death sentence now, wouldn’t it?”

      “Your age,” Darren said.

      It made Grandpa cut his eyes back to him again. But Darren was the first to look away.

      “You want to talk about scars,” Grandpa said down to me then, and peeled the left sleeve of his shirt up higher and higher, rolling it until it was strangling his skinny arm. “See it?” he said, turning his arm over.

      I stood, leaned over to look.

      “Touch it,” he said.

      I did. It was a smooth, pale little divot of skin as big around as the tip of my finger.

      “You got shot?” I said, with my whole body.

      Darren tried to hide his laugh but shook his head no, rolled his hand for Grandpa to go on.

      “Your uncle’s too hardheaded to remember,” Grandpa said, to me. “Your aunt, though, she knows.”

      And my mom, I said inside, like always. Whatever went for Libby when she’d been a girl, it went for my mom.

      It was how I kept her alive.

      “It’s not a bullet hole,” Grandpa said, working the sleeve of his shirt down. “A bullet in the front leg’s like a bee sting to a real werewolf. This, this was worse.”

      “Worse?” I said.

      “Lyme disease?” Darren said.

      Grandpa didn’t even look across the room for this. “Diseases can’t touch you when you’re wolfed out either,” he said down to me. “Your blood, it’s too hot for the flu, the measles, smallpox, cancer.”

      “Lead poisoning?” Darren asked, in a leading-him-on voice.

      “When you change back, the wolf squeezes all that lead back out,” Grandpa said, no humor to it anymore. “Unless it’s in the bone. Then it kind of works around it, like a pearl.”

      Darren shrugged a truce, settled back to listen.

      “What, then?” I said, because somebody had to.

      “A tick,” Grandpa said, pinching his fingers out to show how small a tick is. How little it should matter.

      “A tick?” I said.

      “A tick,” Darren said.

      “It probably came from this fat doe I’d pulled down the night before,” Grandpa said. “That tick jumped ship, went to where the beating heart was.”

      “And then when he shifted back,” Libby said, standing all at once by the kitchen table, my faded blue backpack in her hand so she could drop me off at school on her way to work, “when he shifted back, when the werewolf hair went back into his skin to wrap around his bones or wherever it goes, it pulled the tick in with it, right?”

      “You do remember,” Grandpa said, leaning back.

      “Like trying to climb a flagpole that’s sinking,” Darren said, probably reciting the story from last time Grandpa had told it. He did his bored hands up and up the idea of a flagpole to show, the bottle cocked in his fingers not even spilling.

      “The word for it is ‘impacted,’” Libby said right to me. “It’s when something’s most of the way into the skin. A splinter, a tooth in your mouth—”

      “A tick,” Grandpa cut in. “And I couldn’t reach it. That was the thing. I couldn’t even see it. And your grandma, she knew that the fat ones like that are full of babies. She said if she grabbed it with the needle-noses, popped it, the babies would all go in my blood, and then they’d be like watermelon seeds in my stomach.”

      “That’s not how it works,” Libby said to me.

      “So you went to the doctor,” Darren said over her. “In town.”

      “Doc, he heated up the end of a coat hanger with his lighter,” Grandpa said to me, trying to be the one to tell the story right, “and he—” He acted it out, stabbing the burning-hot bent-out coat hanger down and working it around like stirring a tiny cauldron. “Why there’s a scar there now, it’s that I wouldn’t let him dress it, or stitch it. You know why, don’t you?”

      I looked from Libby to Darren.

      They each directed me back to Grandpa. It was his story, after all.

      “Because you’ve got to be born to the blood to take it,” Grandpa said, his voice nearly at a whisper. “If that doctor had got even one drop into a cuticle, he’d have turned into a moondog, sure as shooting.”

      My heart was thumping. This was better than any bullet hole.

      Libby was making lifting motions with her hand for me to get up already, that she was going to be late, she was going to get fired again.

      I stood from this dream, still watching Grandpa.

      “Let him finish,” Darren said to Libby.

      “We don’t have—”

      “If you’re bit, or if you get the blood in you,” Grandpa said anyway, “then it burns you up fast, little pup, and it hurts. All you can do is feel sorry. Those ones, they just have these wolf heads, a man body. They never understand what’s happening to