Scowler

by Daniel Kraus

  “There was a bomb.” Jo Beth heard her own voice and was awakened by the preposterous ring of it. “There was a bomb?”

  “Please, please, that’s what I want to explain.” Jeremiah took a deep breath and tried to slow down. “Laundry—I was on laundry detail. I was pushing my cart down the hall. There were a noise. A great noise. It sounded like an explosion. And there were shouting. And smoke. So much smoke. I went right into it. I don’t even know why. That’s the way I’m supposed to go with my laundry cart, that’s the laundry hall, and if they caught me heading the other way … I have a good record, ma’am, I’m not violent, I believe in rules.”

  “This was a … what?” Jo Beth looked around the table for help. Ry just blinked at her, empty of words. She licked her lips and forged ahead. “Some kind of prison break?”

  “No, ma’am, please, no. Don’t for a moment think that. Fellows talk about that sort of thing all the time—about dynamite. That doesn’t mean that’s what happened. I don’t believe that were it at all. A boiler, maybe. Bluefeather is old. Or else there’s gas pumps outside the fence. I don’t know; there was nothing to see. I went into the smoke and couldn’t hardly see because of all the light. It was like morning. Only it were too early for morning. Just a hole. And fire. Fire everywhere. The exercise yard—it was on fire as well. You could’ve driven a truck through the hole. Two trucks. The wall was gone also.”

  Sarah was agog. “The entire wall?”

  “If it were dynamite, it were a great amount.”

  “And you ran away,” Jo Beth said. “You escaped.”

  The harder Jeremiah nodded, the more energy that squeezed from his old joints, the veins in his face, the corners of his eyes. “No one else were there with me. That’s not true—I’m sorry, that’s not true. There were one man. A guard, I could tell by his boots. Rest of him was all burnt, though. I’m afraid I kept going. The fence … Mrs. Burke, the fence was—I’d never imagined—it was curled like paper when you burn it. I’d never … I’m sorry. But ma’am. I’d never seen such light. I walked through it. I did.”

  “Others got out. Is that what you’re saying?”

  “The shotgun.” Ry’s voice was a croak. “Where is it?”

  Jo Beth didn’t even look at him. “That thing’s a hundred years old.”

  Ry was numb. “But where is it? I don’t remember.”

  “No.” Jeremiah shook his head firmly. “There were guards everywhere. The hole was in Laundry and Loading, not the cell blocks. No one got through.”

  “Just you.”

  Jeremiah shrugged and in it was a faint note of pride. “I was first at the hole.”

  “It’s too far,” Ry blurted. Everyone looked at him and he became aware of his curled lip and vulture posture. He straightened, exhaled, and tried to temper his thundering pulse. “I mean, that’s like three days on foot. You must have had a car.”

  Jo Beth looked at Jeremiah. “You stole a car, too?”

  Jeremiah covered his face with both hands; the four digits offered beggarly cover. “It were a service truck. The door was open. The engine was running. I suppose the driver ran out when he saw the explosion. I just—ma’am—it was right in front of me.… I just walked into it. Hardly remembered what the wheel was for. Been so many years. But it all came back. Just luck, ma’am, just a little touch of luck after a whole life that had no luck at all, not none.”

  No one said anything.

  “And I was innocent!” Jeremiah proclaimed.

  Jo Beth looked at Ry. Her lips looked very red against her face.

  “You don’t put a man in there for that long for something he did not do,” Jeremiah pleaded.

  Ry looked at his sister. She seemed confused but energized.

  “You don’t do a man like that and then ask him not to walk into a hole that just opened up,” Jeremiah continued.

  “Where’s the truck?” Ry said. “Where’d you leave it?”

  Jeremiah shook his head. “Ran out of gas. I couldn’t say where. Walked all through the day. Kept to the trees, found this coat on a hook. Might’ve asked them for help instead but didn’t much care for the bark of their dog.”

  “On top of everything else,” Jo Beth said, “you stole a coat.”

  Jeremiah hung his head.

  Together the four of them panted in unison.

  “You shouldn’t steal so much,” Sarah observed.

  “But it’s divinity.” Jeremiah lifted his chin, his eyes sparkling with some new notion. “Don’t you see? Divinity brought me here to tell you of Marvin.”

  Jo Beth took up a napkin, wiped her hands with deliberation, and then stood and crossed over to the phone mounted on the wall. Each footstep sounded final. She put her hand to the receiver.

  “No, don’t call,” Jeremiah said. “Not yet, please; they’ll come and take me.”

  “I’m just going to call the prison. Find out what happened. I’m sure you heard wrong; Marvin isn’t there.” She lifted the handset to an ear and lodged a finger in the rotary dial.

  “Shaved head, sometimes.” Jeremiah strained for control. “Glasses. Mustache, when they used to let him grow it.”

  Jo Beth’s frame folded like the closing of an umbrella.

  The old wound between Ry’s eyebrows began to sting.

  Jeremiah’s tears began to dry as he picked up steam. “He used to talk of you. All of you. That’s how I know. That’s how everyone inside knew. If he got within earshot he’d talk and talk—you couldn’t stop him—and he’d always talk about the same thing. Me and Marvin Burke had kitchen duty once. Year or two back. Maybe we shared five, ten words before he starts in. I got this wife, he tells me. This son. And how they wronged him something terrible.”

  “Maybe it was jail talk.” Jo Beth held the wall for support. “Things change in your mind once you’re out. Isn’t that true? Isn’t that how you feel?”

  Jeremiah shook his head slowly. “I can’t say, ma’am. When Marvin Burke talks you feel obliged to believe him. Couple fellas who called him out got beat down—least that’s what they say. And it were not the first time. Marvin Burke transferred from Gingham. Not Pennington. Gingham. You ought to know this. I don’t know why you don’t.”

  “There were letters,” Jo Beth said. It sounded impulsive.

  Ry looked at her in surprise and felt a dagger of betrayal. His mother had known things, important things, and kept them. He saw in her glance a panicked apology, and she leaned in toward Jeremiah—now it was her turn to plead.

  “They come every now and then. I don’t open them. I read one once and it was about something awful he’d done and why on earth would I want to know that?” She appealed to her son. “Why would that be something I wanted to know? So I stopped reading them. You’d do the same thing. The last thing I’ve ever wanted to hear was his name, you know that. I never knew anything about any transfers, I swear.”

  “They done it because he maimed a man in Pennington,” Jeremiah said. “Cut both Achilles. Did one one week, waited for him to return from infirmary, did the other. That takes patience. Of course I’ve also heard that’s hogwash. Men say a lot of things—that don’t mean they’re true. Pennington was no good for him, so off he went to Gingham. Ma’am, I don’t know truth from fairy tale when it comes to Gingham. But they say there’s a Negro in Gingham with half a tongue after Marvin went after it with a fork. By the time—ma’am, I’m sorry, I know he’s your kin—but by the time he got to Bluefeather the boys in charge must’ve lost track where he came from. Or maybe just ran out of options. Or maybe Marvin Burke planned it—there’s men I know who would swear this was all his druthers.”

  “Can I be excused?”

  Ry heard the voice as if it had come from someone else. But he was standing; his chair was backed away from the table; his lips were still parted from the request. Looking up at him were three sets of eyes, all glassy and smooth. He had seen such voids of comprehension in the eyes of sentenced cattle.

  “I’m goin
g to be excused,” he said.

  “Okay,” Jo Beth said. “Okay.”

  He dove from the yellow glare of the kitchen into the comparative murk of the dining room. Four long steps and he was across it. Six steps more and he was down the hallway, tussling with the regular and screen-door locks of the front entrance, and then his feet were clapping across the porch and down the stairs. After that he was lost in the twilight, falling to his knees somewhere beneath the tree he had so often used to escape the abusive sounds of his father. He knelt and let the vomit pour. He was bent so far that gravity ran it through the cleft of scar tissue between his eyebrows. He wiped and blinked. Finally he crawled several feet away and settled onto his back. The first stars of the evening were out, and he wondered if he might see an early meteor—a good omen, maybe.

  He lay there for a while, just him and the screaming birds.

  Palms were used to wipe clean his face and neck. Grass was chewed and spat to conceal the bilious odor. Sniggety came around to investigate the puke.

  Ry’s legs were shaky up the stairs; they were stronger in the hallway; in the dining room, the purple dining room, they mimicked how they were supposed to move and sound. He seated himself wordlessly at the kitchen table. The others noticed nothing—he had been gone no longer than an ordinary bathroom visit.

  “Ma’am, there is no need for panic,” Jeremiah was saying. “He’s there, yes. But he is not getting out. His behavior, ma’am—it’s not the kind to earn parole. You have yourself such a wonderful house of kindness. You can’t even think of leaving it.”

  “We already have so much packed,” Jo Beth mused.

  “Such a shame,” Jeremiah said. “So much beauty around these parts. But you know the best path—don’t listen to a word I say.”

  Ry felt a kick under the table.

  “You barf?” It was Sarah, whispering in a frequency that sheared beneath that of adults.

  He glanced at her and felt a surge of comfort from her squirrelly presence.

  “No, I’m Ry.”

  She grinned. Her potato tooth was gone.

  Jeremiah stood up.

  “Of course,” Jo Beth said. “I’ll fix up the cot.”

  “No,” he said. “Oh, no, ma’am. I ruined supper. I’ll be on my way.”

  “I won’t tell them about you,” she said. “When I call Bluefeather. Which I have to do. You understand that. I have children.”

  Jeremiah’s chin bobbed curtly, but he did not look convinced. “Obliged. But I’ll be on my way.”

  Jo Beth held her head in one hand and sighed. “At least let me find you a change of clothes. At least let me do that.”

  Jeremiah looked longingly through the window at the night that had fallen, newer and darker than even his filched overcoat. Ry saw the calculations of risk and reward tug at either ends of the man’s temples, and then the hopelessness that rounded his back.

  “I’ll wait out on the road.” He spoke it as if it meant defeat. “That’s what I’ll do if it’s all right with you.”

  11 HRS., 39 MINS. UNTIL IMPACT

  Ry walked with Jeremiah down the gravel driveway, past the machinery shed on their left and the defunct orchard on their right. Both of these areas had automatic floods, which raged with moths just as they always did, only this night the illumination seemed weaker, as if a power grid somewhere had strangled the voltage. Each step they took sounded like the snap of dry bones.

  There was a certain silence that went agreed upon among men. Ry counted on this to get him through the next few minutes beside the mailbox as they waited for Jo Beth. Not a single word had been spoken since they’d left the kitchen, so it was a surprise when he felt Jeremiah’s hand upon his shoulder. The pinkie and thumb pressed into him like jaws of a vise.

  “It’s you most of all,” Jeremiah said.

  “I know.” Again Ry was surprised by the words that came out of him.

  “He’s not getting out. Not now. But someday—he changes his ways, plays by the rules, who knows? He never killed anybody. They can’t keep him forever. He gets parole, it won’t matter where you live.”

  “Understood.”

  “You make your mother read those letters when they come. You read them to her.”

  “I will.”

  Jeremiah shook his head as if Ry’s assurance was insufficient. “He told me you played him a fool. Attacked him like a coward.”

  “That’s … I don’t think that’s—”

  “He told me it was you who would get the worst of it.”

  “I wasn’t a coward. I was a kid.”

  “Awful things he told me he would do to you. I did not want to say it in front of the females.”

  Ry turned with enough briskness to buck the man’s hand. He was becoming scared, and that angered him.

  “Why’d they lock you up?” he asked.

  Jeremiah looked stricken. “I told you. I did nothing.”

  “What did they say you did?”

  The old man furrowed his bushy brow with a resoluteness that surprised Ry. When Jeremiah took an indignant breath, his bottom lip nearly touched his nose.

  “They said I killed a boy.”

  “A boy?” Ry felt superior and it was like choking on fire. “You’re as bad as him—as Marvin. You’re worse.”

  “No.” Jeremiah shook his head sadly. “I’ve got no vengeance in my soul. I’m clean. He’s got so much that his soul’s nearly gone. You can see that plain, just by looking. No, son, the question is you. Do you have vengeance?”

  Jeremiah leaned in and began to sniff the boy—a long, dry inhale that lasted as long as it took the old man to inch his nose across Ry’s face, neck, and shoulders. Revolted, Ry stood motionless. Finally Jeremiah exhaled with a disappointed smack of his bloodless lips. The wafted breath smelled of pickles and yeast.

  “You haven’t got any,” he said.

  It was a judgment and a challenge. Ry was up to neither because the drawn conclusion was true. He had frustration and petulance and jealousy and shame and impatience and resentment; he had these in gory torrents. Even added together, though, they were not equal to a single rich lode of vengeance. There was one time, as a boy, that he had held such power in his hands, and though it had saved his skin it had been but a brief interlude in a life of gutlessness. Standing in the open air, with the lush cologne of Black Glade loosening his will, Ry could no longer hold back the memory: the bat, the woods, the Unnamed Three. He shut his eyes.

  Interlude

  JULY 1971–JANUARY 1972

  Marvin treated his son as a man even when he was far too young to accept the burden. His father took him everywhere, and not just the fields and the pastures and the barns. He took him into the bathroom: This is how you hold your dick to pee. He took him to the store: This is how you squash men a dollar at a time. He took him into the church: This is how you hum through a hymn so later you can pump the hands of your enemies in the foyer. Ry was expected to learn things on the first try and when he didn’t, it’s true, sometimes he was struck. The hits stung, but that’s it.

  It was Jo Beth who got the real beatings, crisp and dutiful and applied with the same brisk relish as aftershave. From the time of Ry’s first memory to the age of nine, the sound of these smacks against his mother’s cheek or arm or back were no different from the occasional spanks farmers gave to their misbehaving pets and livestock. They were the sounds of progress.

  Everything changed with the introduction of the bat in the summer of 1971. The white ash of the Louisville Slugger was stained a rich burgundy. Maybe lots of bats were red, though Ry didn’t think so. Holding the Slugger before him like a sword, Marvin stood before a twenty-five-foot castle of baled hay that exhaled dust into blinding beams of sunlight. It was a spectral sight and the nine-year-old Ry approached with awe. The passing off of the bat was done with as much tenderness as when Jo Beth would hand Ry his baby sister. For a moment Ry was sure that he and his father were going to hug. Then Marvin’s eyes flickered, became co
oler. It had been a silly thought—they had never hugged, not to Ry’s knowledge, and at this point it was better not to open that door. Ry convinced himself that this was true.

  He spent a week of early evenings swinging away at a stringed ball he had hung from the branch of his favorite tree, with the assumption that it would be an irresistible lure for Marvin, who would come out, smoothing his mustache in appreciation, and expound upon the physics of a good curve-ball. Instead, the shouts and slapping noises from inside came more frequently than usual.

  For the first time in Ry’s young life, the yields were off. The recent wheat harvest was thin and the hay crop seeded beneath already showed signs of frailty. If the hay was weak, the cows would eat poorly. If the cows ate poorly, their milk production would suffer. If Grade A production suffered, more time would be spent outside the milk barn to compensate, and they might be caught off guard when the state health inspector made his surprise visit. In fact, a jealous neighbor might see to it. Each night Ry heard these theories coming from the eastern windows. He could not think of anything to help the cause, aside from becoming a better batter.

  That was not to happen. One night after supper Marvin stormed outside in bare feet and ripped the bat from Ry’s hands. “Security!” he hollered as he made his way back toward the house. Rounding the corner, he shook the bat at the stars: “Security!” Not only was the taking of the bat sudden but to Ry even the logic seemed strained. The baseball bat would somehow deter vindictive neighbors better than the Winchester? Ry didn’t believe it, but he was only ten. What did he know?

  Whether or not Marvin’s original intent was pure, the bat soon took on a more sinister purpose. What set him off the first time was the discovery of a small mending job that Jo Beth had taken on for Mrs. Horvath down the road. The idea that their imbecile neighbors might think Marvin Burke’s family needed a single goddamn cent more than what he brought in was abhorrent. Ry immediately noticed the change in the quality of nighttime noises. Impacts had a lower pitch; what formerly snapped now had the sound of a sad and gigantic heartbeat: Thump. An epic length of time later, the second beat: Thump. Ry fell asleep counting the seconds between the beats and wondering what kind of animal could live with such sluggish blood.