Scowler

by Daniel Kraus

“Yes.” Jeremiah’s voice was phlegmy. “No one’s asked me anything for the longest time.”

  “Well.” Jo Beth nodded as if this was what she had been waiting to hear. “How are you with cars?”

  “Mom,” Ry said. “It’s not me; it’s the part.”

  “Right,” she said. “I keep forgetting.”

  “I’m no help with engines,” Jeremiah said. “I never was a farmer.”

  “You’re in the wrong part of the country then,” Jo Beth said.

  Jeremiah nodded at the ground. “I expect I am.”

  “Bluefeather?” Jo Beth ducked her face to try to find the truth in his eyes. “That’s where you lived before now, isn’t it?”

  Jeremiah nodded. His shoulders shook so violently that Ry wondered if the old bones might jar loose from their whittled sockets. Bluefeather—the word was familiar, though Ry couldn’t remember why.

  “And they didn’t give you a set of civilian clothes when they released you? That doesn’t seem very kind.”

  The man looked bewildered. He angled his head but held his tongue.

  “My husband’s in Pennington,” Jo Beth said. “There’s a man who doesn’t deserve to be released. But that is simply not the case with everyone. That’s probably hard for you to believe after so many years, but you have to try.” She gave him a small smile. “Why didn’t you wait until we were asleep and just take what you wanted?”

  “I thought it,” Jeremiah said. “Lord forgive me, I thought it.” He raised his woeful face to blink at each of them in turn. “You look like such fine folk. I couldn’t do it. I swear to you I couldn’t do it. I’ll sit—” With his spittle-covered chin he indicated the drainage ditch. “I’ll sit beneath the telephone pole. Anyone drives by, I’ll hide. You can bring out whatever you want and I’ll be grateful.”

  A breeze sent the hair on his head flying. The hand Jeremiah brought out to pat it down was not a hand at all. It was a pincer. Sarah gasped and Ry dug his nails into her shoulders. A few seconds later Ry realized it was not a deformity; rather, the man’s index, middle, and ring fingers were gone, and in their absence the surviving pinkie and thumb seemed abnormally long. Loosed from its clasp, Jeremiah’s other hand now hung free at his side and it was just as troubled, though in different formation: Only the index and thumb remained, giving the hand the look of fleshy tweezers.

  Silence fell across the group and it took the man a moment to realize the cause. He looked down at his insectile appendages and turned them over in the fading light. “Cell doors, that’s what done it,” he said. “Would I have clung so hard if I were guilty?”

  Bluefeather—Ry finally remembered. It was the prison in nearby Lomax County. When Marvin Burke had been sent far across the state to a facility known as Pennington nine years ago, Ry had become aware, for a brief period, of the state’s penal system. Bluefeather, if Ry’s memory was accurate, was high security. This man’s striped pajama bottoms and slippers were state-issued prison garb; that nice new overcoat was stolen; and those missing fingers had been sacrificed by a man desperate not to hear the cold finality of a door locking into place. It was the worst thing Ry could imagine—a wandering ex-convict happening upon their defenseless farm—yet he saw the tension escape from his mother’s bearings.

  “I was just about to get started on supper,” she said. Ry knew it was the man’s hands that had clinched it. Jeremiah was old and weak and those were points in his favor. But hands like that could not wield a weapon. This man was at their mercy, not the other way around.

  “There’s chicken,” Jo Beth said. “Dumplings, green beans, milk. Come along and we’ll fix you a plate. Then you can be on your way.”

  12 HRS., 56 MINS. UNTIL IMPACT

  It was a strange hour filled with the rattle and thuds of Jo Beth’s food preparation, the wheeze of the old fan on top of the fridge, and the incessant stream of chatter and coughing coming from Sarah. While Jeremiah sat hunched at the table with his hands in his lap, the girl crawled like a monkey over the rest of the furniture. Jeremiah tried to answer her first couple questions—What is your middle and last name? and Do you like our dog?—but before he could arrange the correct order of syllables, Sarah hurried on to topics of even greater import. Within minutes a pattern was set that both of them could live with: She would ask questions and he would sit there too shell-shocked to respond.

  There must have been at least a few boys of Ry’s age in Bluefeather, because Jeremiah found him the easiest to behold. Dozens of odd moments passed between them; it was as if the man could sense the convict blood that beat just beneath Ry’s skin. While Sarah badgered their guest with more rhetoricals—If you could be shorter, how much shorter would you be?—Ry wondered what this man had looked like before prison had stolen his fingers, bent his back, sucked the color from his flesh and the life from his eyes.

  “You could stay in the TV room,” Sarah said. “We have a couch in there that’s pretty good for sleeping.”

  “Sarah,” Jo Beth said.

  “What? It would just be for one night.”

  Jeremiah shook his head miserably.

  “Did they have beds in jail?” Sarah asked.

  He nodded his head.

  “Were they hard? I bet they were hard.” The tip of her tongue explored the new vacancy in the corner of her smile. Ry found it hard to look at. “If the sofa’s too soft there’s lots of floors. We have so many floors!”

  “Sarah, this man has places he has to be.”

  “We have wood floors, we have cement floors, we have carpet floors.”

  Jo Beth turned from the counter, her red hair shades darker because of sweat, and approached the table with a serving bowl of green beans. Sarah recoiled as if the beans had made threats against her life.

  “Do you have somewhere?” Jo Beth asked. “If not, maybe it’s best you do stay one night.”

  “I’ve no fear of grass.”

  “Well, we have a barn for that matter. At least you’d be out of the elements.”

  “No. No.”

  “I understand. I do.” Jo Beth turned back to the counter and produced the sound of knife against board. “It just doesn’t seem Christian to let you out there tonight, that’s all.”

  “No.… No.… ”

  It took them too long to realize that Jeremiah was crying. Unwilling to display his hideous hands, he did not wipe away the tears that carved four distinct paths through his face paint of dust. His warped back jagged in silent hiccups and his bottom lip fretted around as if attempting to gather the tears and stow them.

  Jo Beth set the knife down and turned. “I’m sorry. It’s not my business.”

  “I knew it from the road. I could tell you were kind. I passed so many homes, went so many miles.”

  “Don’t cry.” Sarah’s voice was hushed and fragile. It had been so long since anything but irritable outbursts had disrupted the farm’s atmosphere that Ry had forgotten how his sister became awed by shows of emotion.

  “My shoes split,” Jeremiah continued. “My ankles bloodied up.”

  “We’ll get you a new pair. Ry’s got some old clothes that I bet would fit you. Don’t you worry. And you’re staying here tonight and that’s final.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “We’ve got an old army cot somewhere.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “It’s in the attic,” Sarah offered. “Hey, that’s another place you could stay.”

  Ry hoped that his mother would recommence her work at the cutting board; she did not. He hoped the sizzle from the stove-top chicken would continue to distract everyone, but it had been removed from the burner. Even Jeremiah’s sobs had softened, so all that remained was the echo of Sarah’s words. If her legs hadn’t been curled up beneath her, Ry would have given them a hell of a kick.

  One did not make cavalier offers about going into the attic. You didn’t even talk about it without first measuring the temperature of souls. Not because it was a room associated with Marvin’s crue
lty but because it was the exact opposite: a closed-off space that housed the most sacred object owned by any of them.

  It was a dress. Sarah, who named everything, had been four when she dubbed it the White Special Dress, and the name more than stuck—its infantile moniker was the only thing that made it bearable to speak of at all, because you could laugh at such a name, make fun of it. These were bluffs. It was not a folly, this dress. It was as radiant and as real as the sun and just as easy to feel—all you had to do was go into the attic and remove the dustcover.

  People all over the region knew that Jo Beth Burke could sew. Her domination of county fairs throughout her school years marked her as someone with the kind of blind artistic instinct that in the country was treated with the same wariness as mental retardation. In one way or another Jo Beth had sewn her way into most of the families in her school district, and she hand made the long skirts she wore to school dances, the dresses she donned while being courted by Marvin Burke, the gown she wore while getting married. It was a shock to her that once the honeymoon was over, Marvin wanted her sewing kept limited to the darning of his socks, the replacing of his buttons, the pressing of his shirts. It took only one transgression—the letting out of the waist of a neighbor’s pair of slacks—for Marvin’s threat to become physical. As quickly as she had become ingrained into the lives of those around her, she vanished. I don’t have time anymore, she told them. Farm life, she said, it is what it is.

  Marvin Burke had insisted on tidiness, but Jo Beth Burke preferred the inspiration of chaos. Nine years had gone by now with nearly every inch of tabletop in the dining room blanketed with her commissions. She repaired jacket elbows right through lunch if the fancy struck her, and hemmed skirts with hands still soapy from the baths she gave Sarah. Neither Ry nor his sister would ever think to ask her to give it a rest. The looping motions of her fingers were the circulation of her blood, and the tightening of fabric was the pursing of her heart’s ventricles. As long as she sewed she was alive.

  The idea of some kind of special project was laughable at first. Not when the farm was falling apart, not when money was so scarce. But it was born of frugality, of leftovers. A scrap of chiffon from a confirmation dress taken in a few sizes. Eight feet of diamond lace left over from the repair of a set of heirloom place mats. A beehive of yarn flecked with the brightest silver. An entire skirt’s length of silk duchess satin. A scattering of ivory pearls—she had no memory of their origin.

  From these hoarded remainders grew the first gestures of art. Nightly she placed pieces together to evaluate their collage potential, pinning by hand and passing sections beneath her machine, only to rip free the stitches with her teeth the next day and start over. The project was eventually moved to a dressmaker’s dummy in the attic, supposedly because it was delicate but really because it had the force to command a room of its own.

  After three years of intense but sporadic work, it looked more or less like a wedding dress, though whose wedding remained unclear. After five years, anyone else would have sworn it was finished—if anyone else were allowed to see it, which they were not. After seven years, the dress hit you with a beauty that was almost rageful. Hundreds if not thousands of hours of toil had passed since its inception and still, almost weekly, Jo Beth adjusted and tweaked. Now it had an empire waist. Now it had leg-o’-mutton sleeves. Unlike every other aspect of life, over this one their mother exercised total control. White Special Dress, the labor of her life, of all of their lives, would never be finished, and Ry was only beginning to appreciate its constant change as fundamental to its power.

  This was the real risk of an apartment in town. Where would White Special Dress live? Surely not in the open, thought Ry, not on a coatrack, not draped over some ratty chair, not in a closet or trunk—its fire would be snuffed. The only solution was sale or abandonment, and Ry wasn’t willing to entertain either option. If it meant the dress could have enough space, he would finally strike out from his mother and sister and face the noxious world. He felt made of scraps too, but none so breathtaking.

  12 HRS., 28 MINS. UNTIL IMPACT

  Supper was a spectacle. Jeremiah’s left hand, the one with pinkie and thumb, was useless except for providing balance. It clamped the plate edge in order to anchor it. The right hand, the one with index and thumb, was his primary weapon. The mushiest of the green beans he was able to spear, and he was able to scrape off bits of potato. The chicken breast, however, was a conundrum. Orbs of sweat dotted the man’s scalp as he fought for decorum. In Bluefeather he would have gobbled it down in any way possible, but he was a free man now, and if he couldn’t play by society’s rules then he did not belong. He sighed and palmed his roll, his only true friend.

  Sarah broke the silence. “Where’s Bluefeather?”

  Jeremiah looked thankful for the excuse to drop his fork. He wiped his brow with a forearm. “Couple hours’ drive. Roundabout. Don’t recall exactly.”

  “Yeah, but what town is it in?”

  His eyebrows drew so close that opposing strands, long and white, interlocked. “It weren’t in any town.”

  Sarah turned to her mother. “It’s got to be in a town. You can’t be nowhere.”

  Jeremiah took advantage of the split second of inattention. Ry saw him swipe his potatoes with his thumb and transfer a dollop into his mouth. The thumb was instantly sucked clean and returned to the side of the plate, looking innocent.

  “That’s true,” Jo Beth admitted. “I suppose it’s closest to Bloughton.”

  “Well, why isn’t it in Bloughton?” Sarah twirled her knife against the table as if it were a top she was trying to keep spinning.

  “Stop that; that’s bad for the table,” Jo Beth said. “And you eat those potatoes or you’ll have to eat them cold.”

  Sarah carved a pea-sized bit of potato with her knife and inspected it like a jeweler. “But why, Mom?”

  “Because they’re vegetables and vegetables are part of life.”

  “No,” Sarah groaned. “Why’s the prison not in Bloughton like it should be?”

  “Warden’s from there,” Jeremiah offered. “Staff, too. Just a ways outside of town is all.”

  Sarah transported the bit of potato into the spot where her tooth had been. It was a convincing replacement.

  “Some people,” Jo Beth ventured, throwing a tentative glance at their guest, “might not feel comfortable with a prison near their home or close to their school. So even though technically the prison is in Bloughton, it’s easier on everyone if it’s out of eyesight. You understand?”

  “Yeh, ah uhuhstah.” Now that she had a potato tooth, she didn’t want to mess it up.

  “It was the kind of thing that drove my husband crazy—people trying to hide how they made a living,” Jo Beth said. “I don’t like to agree with anything Marvin said, but in this one case, I do. Bluefeather provides a lot of people with good wages and there is nothing wrong with that. There’s nothing wrong with prisons, either—people serving their time, becoming better people.” She turned to Jeremiah with a smile. “Nothing wrong at all.”

  Jeremiah’s mouth hung open. The slime of green bean coated his tongue. They all watched as his thumb and forefinger slackened and the stem of the fork slid away, crashing to the ceramic.

  “Marvin?”

  Jo Beth flinched. Hearing her husband’s name from a stranger’s mouth was like taking buckshot.

  “Marvin Burke.” He said the full name as if it were a psalm.

  Jo Beth swallowed whatever was left inside her mouth and it went down hard.

  “He’s in Pennington.”

  “No.” Jeremiah was saying it before she finished. “He’s much closer.”

  Ry tensed for the violinistic terror that should accompany this threat, but instead his body felt heavily blanketed. Sounds dwindled; physical awareness of his family faded to nothing.

  “Bluefeather?” Jo Beth’s head made vague circles. “He’s in Bluefeather?”

  The alien appendage
s twitched. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “Had I known your name was Burke—”

  “How dare you.” She tried to close her mouth but her upper set of teeth rattled off the lower.

  “If it were on the mailbox, I didn’t see—”

  “How dare you frighten my children.”

  “No, ma’am, oh, no—”

  “In my house. My house.”

  Tears sprung to his eyes. “Please … oh, please, I meant nothing by it. You … you are upset. I spoke too … I don’t know why; I’m not accustomed to … my mouth is not accustomed to talking. You should not forgive me. You don’t even know what I’ve done. What I’ve done is terrible. If I told you, you would not find it in your heart to forgive me and you would be right. You’re all so lovely and kind.”

  Jo Beth found she was still holding her knife. She placed it alongside her plate of useless food.

  Jeremiah swatted down the bad air that had risen; his four digits worked the air like large albino insects. “You’ve been so kind and I wanted to be kind too, not to make you or your children scared—not of me, not of Marvin Burke, not of anything.”

  Jo Beth was pressed into the back of her seat. The soft placement of her voice was for Sarah’s benefit. “Tell me why we might be afraid of you.”

  “Because I did not serve my time, not all of it.” It came out fast, as if it were the only way he could bear it. “I got out. There was an explosion. I got out.”

  The metal fan rang with each fatigued revolution. Ry was grateful. It gave a measurable length to a silence that was otherwise endless. He remembered a snippet of high school Shakespeare. My kingdom for a transistor radio.

  “An explosion?” Half-chewed food sat cooling in Sarah’s mouth. “Like a bomb?”

  Ry’s lips moved over the same syllables—An explosion? A bomb?—but the dryness of his mouth prevented sound.

  Jo Beth whispered as if to herself. “What are you talking about?”

  “A hole in the wall. An explosion. I didn’t see it. You don’t see anything in there. Just your four walls. Or a different four walls if it’s supper. Or a different four walls if it’s shower time.”