Night of the Mannequins

by Stephen Graham Jones

  I didn’t have everything figured out, no.

  I was kind of getting through this on a night-by-night basis, now. A friend-by-friend basis. I probably wouldn’t even get to go to JR’s funeral either, I knew. If I tried, everybody would form a ring of bodies around me to keep me safe, right? But that would just get more people crushed when Manny stands up from the lake, brings his big foot down . . . maybe not on me, but close enough where he thinks he can like lean down, let me crawl up onto his hard plastic palm.

  Oh, the fun we’ll have then.

  That’s my sarcastic voice, yes.

  When Manny takes you into the lake, you drown in the cage of his hands, I have to think.

  We should have left him lying there in JR’s creek. We never should have been rolling down that hill in those boxes. We should have been, I don’t know, stealing chickens from backyard barbecues. Playing video games, fishing, making out, shooting endangered woodpeckers with BB guns, a hundred other things.

  Every time I sneaked a look up at all the mourners watching me, too, I kept expecting one of those faces to be wearing the mannequin mask. I wouldn’t think it was Manny—I knew where he was, and what size he was—but I would think that whoever was flashing that blank face at me, they’d be doing that because they knew I was faking it, that I was the one responsible for all this.

  It seems so obvious when you’re the one with blood on your hands, right? Like everyone’s watching you. Like everybody’s waiting.

  Even if I did get caught, though, then that would still just be one family wrecked, not five. Well, not four, I guess, since Shanna’s family did get literally wrecked.

  I don’t want to have to do any more math, please.

  I also didn’t want to have to do what I knew I had to, to finish this out.

  I could see JR’s eyes darting around in his mask of grief the same as mine, I mean. I can only imagine how terrifying it must be to know you’re for sure in the victim pool but not be able to see the face of the legs walking around and around that pool. The blank plastic face.

  I’m sorry, JR, I said to him in my head, standing right there beside him. I really am, man. One hundred percent.

  It’s just—you’re one person, not a whole family. And Manny doesn’t care, man. I don’t think he’s mean, he’s just huge and clumsy and lost. In Frankenstein—you haven’t read that yet, have you?—they never kill the monster there, I mean. He just ends up way up in the Arctic, snow islands floating all around him, like he’s going to freeze, right? Just sleep it out till later.

  I think that’s what Manny’s going to do too. Just, he’ll do it in the lake.

  For all we know, that’s what he was doing when he turned up in the slime of that creek, even. For all we know, some covered-wagon kids or some other Indian kids were best friends with him a hundred years ago, and finally left him behind too when they grew up, and he just waited it out. Waited for us.

  And, for a while, we were so perfect for him. We were everything to him, weren’t we? He was the perfect toy, until he wasn’t. Until we started groaning when one of us had dressed him up in some hilarious outfit, left him on somebody else’s lawn.

  He was always willing, though.

  We loved that guy.

  And it was probably mean to bring him back for just one prank, I know. If I don’t think of that, we’re all alive, I mean, we’re going to be seniors and graduate and have lives and kids and affairs and everything.

  That’s why I’m taking it on myself to do what I have to do.

  It’s not my fault exactly, but it sort of is, too, if you look at it from just one side, like.

  Anyway—this is what I was also whispering in my head at the funeral, and what I told myself JR had to be whispering the same, right beside me—anyway, I didn’t even really want to live if all my friends were dead. Better to be with them than to be without them.

  In the inside of my new blazer I had special for the funeral, slid down into the liner I’d cut a secret slit in, was the mannequin mask. Just for in case the adults or whoever decided JR and me needed some time alone, at our old haunts or whatever.

  But, no.

  The rest of the day there was a crowd of people thronging around us the whole time.

  It wasn’t until eight days later that I was able to get JR sort of alone.

  Except then that all blew up too.

  12

  THE ORIGINAL PLAN WAS to arrange a sleepover, be the one to “find” JR dead, and have a big crying screaming terrified breakdown from it, run away into the woods before anybody could ask any real questions.

  The sleepover was easy to arrange, with about six hundred paranoid phone calls from my mom, with my dad sitting there ready to tap in, his serious face on. But it had to be like that. JR’s dad’s this big gun nut prepper guy who’s currently not working, so there was no way I was sneaking into that house. Not with locks on every door, and probably locks on the keys that went to those locks. No ceramic frogs for him. More like land mines.

  Still, prepper or not, he didn’t deserve Manny’s big hand coming down on him, all his bullets puny and useless against a giant department-store kaiju. Neither did JR’s mom, the home nurse, and neither did his little sister, Gwen. Nobody deserves that hand coming down on them, I mean, but nobody especially deserves it just for having JR or me for a son, for a brother. It wasn’t them who walked away from Manny at the end of that summer, it was us. Cause and effect, action and inevitable reaction, man, knocking us down like dominoes.

  Anyway, the way this night was supposed to have gone—part one was hiding the distributor caps for both my mom’s minivan and my dad’s truck, so that when I ran off into the woods, they’d be the last ones to show up. This was important, because I didn’t want to hear my mom calling out into the trees for me, right? What kid can not stop running away when he hears that?

  Next was just to come over to spend the night as usual, like a hundred other times, JR’s dad swinging by to pick me up like he always volunteered to do. Like a hundred other times, too, nobody would check my backpack for any items I’d have to explain. And even if they had, right? I had, what, a cheap Halloween mask I was probably only carrying for if I started crying, couldn’t stop? I had some underwear and an extra shirt like my mom always insists on, I had a coil of green string probably left over from some school project, and I had a toothbrush wrapped in Saran wrap because I can never get the baggies to seal? No knives, no guns, no lists of what to do and when, no big long notes explaining everything from the movie prank on up.

  I mean, that list existed, for sure, but it was in my head.

  So, after settling in with whatever JR’s dad cooked, which was guaranteed to be the best last meal ever, because that’s the way he’d always been doing their dinners since he got fired, like he could prove himself at the table if not the car lot, after dinner my plan was to pop in the third installment of the superhero series I’d rented special on DVD, to keep everything the same as the other times, like this wouldn’t work without that movie playing, like the movie was the cause of it, really. Not me, the movie. If that movie hadn’t been playing, all those kids might have lived, right?

  Next was to wait JR out, the guy who can famously never make it through a two-hour movie without conking, much less a three-hour epic that makes you keep the previous two playing in your head the whole time, so you can’t remember who’s alive again and who’s still dead.

  After that, just slip the mask on, watch his chest rise and fall, rise and fall. I planned on giving myself time to reconsider, yes. JR was, I thought then, the last of us except for me. Did I really and for sure want to rub all of us out of existence, just like that? Like we never even were?

  It was never about us, though, that’s what I kept having to remember, even in the moment. It was about the little brothers and little sisters who still needed to grow up, it was about the moms and dads who never did a single thing wrong, except for the usual parent stuff they couldn’t help. All I’d
been doing ever since Shanna, it was saving lives left and right. Yeah, the superhero movie was on DVD in my bag, but I was also in a superhero movie, as that superhero. Not the one everybody wants, no, but real life isn’t always like the movies. Sometimes the real heroes, the sacrifice they make is their own legend or memory, or even their life, right? Sometimes the way you know you’ve done good is that the whole town hates you and wants you dead. That there even are still people to hate you and want you dead, that’s success right there.

  Anyway, JR. Instead of using the glow string—I wasn’t sure, in this closed-door situation, that I’d be able to flush it, be able to keep it from matching up with the telltale welt around JR’s neck—this time I was just going to unwind a wire clothes hanger from his closet. You know how sometimes where the big machine at the factory cut them off they’ll still be sharp enough to grab your skin, tear your finger open while you’re hanging shirts up? I’d feel along the pole for one of those ones, and probably let the shirt fall on the floor. Nobody was going to be thinking about shirts in the morning.

  So, after unwinding it with just my fingers then bending it as straight as I could, I could either stab it down into JR’s ear, or up his nose. Both are, as near as I could search up, direct avenues to the brain. I finally decided on the nose, since that’s one of the ways they used to do lobotomies—thanks, internet—and I knew that whatever you hit when you pushed high enough and hard enough, it kind of mellows the patient out permanent. With a wire in the ear, I wasn’t so sure. I might just be tearing through memories or a list of colors or something, giving JR’s hands time to come up and fight this, bring his dad down on me.

  The nose, then. And I was going to have to remember to swirl once I punched through whatever membrane was at the top of that nasal passage, the kind of swirl that would take my whole shoulder, to get as much movement at the other end of that clothes hanger as possible, which would be a kindness, like. Because this was JR. And, because the injuries would be internal, not visible, nobody would think to look for the guilty clothes hanger hidden under the carpet or wherever, and I could blast off into the woods like I was supposed to.

  But of course I never got the chance.

  Blame JR’s dad.

  I was already running my hand along the top of JR’s nice shirts in his closet when his dad’s voice boomed through the house for us to pile in, he was taking us to the movies, popcorn all around.

  “Shanna’s theater?” I asked.

  “Fate,” JR said, and I understood: the drive-in ten or fifteen miles out into the scrub. Ten or fifteen miles from the lake.

  “O-kay . . .” I said, maybe liking this.

  “Listen,” JR said when we went to his room to gear up, and leaned the side of his head to the wall between his bedroom and his parents’, telling me to do the same, to listen.

  From the other side, there were . . . clicks? For a bad moment I had to picture his dad snapping his legs together with dowels, his dad just wearing a torn-off human face over his mannequin one, but of course life’s never that complicated. The simple explanation was that JR’s dad was Armying up, same as always. Pistols and knives and probably grenades for all we knew. His dad had always been kind of out there, and, since finding the church of guns, he hadn’t veered any closer to earth. I knew what he was proving with them this time, though: that he could take the last of the five—that’s what JR and me were—that he could take us out in public and keep us completely safe, never mind the promises my mom had extracted from him. That was then. This was now.

  Or maybe it had something to do with proving that his unemployment was unfair, I don’t know for sure. But it’s not like he’d been a bodyguard before, or a daycare worker. Taking down bad guys probably wasn’t in the job description for “car salesman,” I mean. I think, at the car lot, he’d maybe even sort of been the bad guy.

  I would say I’ll figure it out someday when I’m an adult, but, well.

  Anyway, I got like a literal and real chill when we eased up into the drive-in line, everything painted red from taillights, and I saw the movie that was playing. It was the same one we’d taken Manny to, the same one that had been playing when Shanna’s window became a truck, the same one Tim had ready to watch and the same one Steve had taken Danielle to, the same one tucked into the side pocket of my bag back at JR’s place.

  What are the odds of that, even? The same movie popping up for each kill?

  Sometimes you just know what you’re doing is the only thing to be doing. That the world is conspiring all around you to make it happen, like, not just giving you permission, but herding you the direction you need to go, giving you secret nods and obvious hand signals, and getting everything out of the way so you have the clearest path possible.

  So, fast-forward through JR’s dad leaving the car to explain to some of the seniors about how there were families here, and kids in those families who didn’t need demonstrations of pot smoking, JR and me along as those impressionable kids, then fast-forward through two Rockwall dads having popcorn sent to our car, which JR’s dad took as the deepest possible insult, since he could pay for popcorn if he wanted popcorn, and get just a little bit past JR’s sister, Gwen, conking out against her mom, and that sleepyhead disease spreading through the front seat, across even to JR’s dad, who’d probably been up for hours polishing bullets and cleaning slides, acting out moves and shots, doing the sound effects with his mouth, his wife pretending this would all get better when he found another job.

  I had to get JR alone, right?

  There were too many people in all the cars beside us, too many potential witnesses, and I had to consider those potential witnesses too, didn’t I? With JR and me both in the same place, Manny could come stomping through, casualties under every giant footprint. Accidental deaths, innocent bystanders, collateral damage. Like JR’s dad had been saying to the pot smokers and beer drinkers: families.

  You might wonder why that’s what I’m all the defender of why I care about “families” so much, being a teenager and all, who’s only supposed to want to get away from his family, but . . . do I really need to explain it? It’s not that my mom and dad almost split when I was in sixth grade, my dad skidding off on the Kawasaki, my mom cooking everything in the pantry and then throwing it all way, which I guess was the year we found Manny, too, and it’s not because Shanna had to go to therapy during third period for two years because her dad left. It’s because of math: a family is usually two or three or four or five people, and each of us was only one person. Five friends all together, yeah, we counted as much as a family for sure if you look at it like that. But still, that’s just one family dying, versus five other families, and the numbers make the decision there. It’s easy, right? It’s logical. It’s the way I’m supposed to think. I should get a medal for thinking like that, I should be a model thinker for some public service announcement.

  Anyway, so JR and me sneak out the back side window, crawling like one inch at a time for twenty minutes, and I admit I kind of let a drop or two of pee out when I made too much noise somehow and JR’s dad’s whole body like spasmed, his hand coming up with a pistol from who knows where. But he was still asleep. That pistol hand lowered down into his wife’s lap, stayed there. And, I mean, as far as he would have known if he’d have gotten me in his sights, JR and me were just going for the bathroom, not anything secret and bad and murdery.

  There was most definitely going to be a murdery part, though. The bathrooms are on the back side of concessions, and there’s about six steps of darkness back there, and a whole open field beside them. In a pasture nobody cares about, when everybody’s watching the magical huge movie screen in front of them, anything can happen, right?

  In my front right pocket I had my trusty glow string, the only thing I knew I could sneak out of JR’s house without any certain paranoid dads freaking out and radioing in for air support, and I guess the symmetry or continuity or whatever of me using the same weapon for all of them, it was another knoc
k of validation for all this.

  We would have made it, too, I know we would have made it to that dark empty pasture, but then, as bad luck would have it, the assistant manager from the movie theater in Rockwall was in line for a popcorn refill or whatever—more likely he was there to complain about the coke/ice ratio—and he saw us seeing him, and, first, he actually recognized us, right? On top of that, he smiled like we were the best gifts ever: here were the problem cases who had messed up his weekend with his son, who had left him shorthanded at his own theater, who had never really paid for sneaking in. At least not enough.

  “Um, hey, you two,” he said, using a tone that made everybody around look to him, then from him to us.

  “What?” JR said, stepping ahead like to fight, like, now that we were on neutral ground, now that the assistant manager didn’t have boss-power, the playing field could be a lot more level.

  “C’mon,” I said, trying to guide him away, make as little eye contact in this scene as possible, so maybe nobody would remember it.

  At which point this assistant manager of a completely different movie theater in a completely different town did this harsh loud little whistle. Not at us, but somehow into the big long window of the concession stand, so that the workers there stood at attention, waiting for the next order, their hands and rags and whatever on the sticky counter.

  “I’m going to need to speak with your manager,” the assistant manager said, looking to all these scared-straight workers but pointing at JR and me, his long fingers somehow managing to keep us there, even though he had no power in Fate, at the drive-in.

  “You can’t—” JR started, using the same tone he would for somebody giving us grief at the park or wherever, somebody our age, but the assistant manager cocked his head to the side like “Seriously?”

  It shut JR up.