Scowler

by Daniel Kraus

  “Meet us outside,” Jo Beth warned. The front door creaked. “We’re leaving.”

  Ry sunk his hands into the pile and felt the loving bite of fake weaponry and robot circuitry, the prickly scruff of stuffed animal. He shoved a handful into his coat pocket. Another handful into the opposite pocket. One, two, three more crammed down his left pants pocket and four jammed down the right. The ridges of plastic faces, of posable arms, of hands with notches for accessories—they excited his fingers, were the very textures of joy. He could not stop now. Several more characters went into his underwear.

  He heard what sounded like a car door. No, not yet! A sob tore through his shoulders and he swiped up the baseball bat and turned away. Action figures ground against his groin as he dashed through the dining room. He banked through the kitchen, kicked through the back door, and rushed across the porch, feeling like a toy himself—stiff and operating with the simplest of jointed limbs.

  Leaping down the stairs, he expected to find the car idling in the driveway, Sarah waving at him from the backseat. It was not there and Ry wondered if he had been left behind. Then he saw the creep of exhaust from the garage and realized they had yet to make it out. Ry ducked under the clothesline and came upon the car. It chugged dutifully. There was no one in it.

  He turned at the sound of voices and saw, thirty feet to his left and near the junk shed, his mother scuttling backward across the snow with Sarah clutched in her arms. A purring truck blocked the narrowest stretch of driveway and Marvin Burke stood in front of it, boots planted, overalls poking from his wool coat, green stocking cap sitting comically low upon his head, gloved fists placed on hips like a schoolmaster. Jo Beth was screaming something. Ry couldn’t make it out and stepped closer.

  “Don’t touch her!” That was her refrain. “Don’t touch her! Don’t touch her!”

  Whatever conversation Ry had missed had been enough for Marvin. For once he was not in the mood to talk.

  “Get out of my way!” A strand of saliva hung from Jo Beth’s lip. “We’ll run you over!”

  Ry realized he was still moving. Toys poked at his legs as if nudging him along.

  Marvin held out a palm to his wife, as if expecting to be given her hand, or even the baby.

  “Burn in hell!” Jo Beth roared.

  Ry was fifteen feet away now. He passed his mother and sister. Marvin did not look at his son; instead he made clenching motions with his outstretched hand.

  “No!” Jo Beth screamed. “No! No!”

  Ten feet, nine, eight—Ry choked up on the bat, his fingers and wrists recalling the lessons of all those swings taken over all those nights. He raised the bat to his shoulder. Seven feet, six, five—he drew it back. Here it was at last, the violence he had always expected and secretly wanted, a violence that if pulled off correctly might just free his sister and mother. His heart lost its tempo, improvised.

  Marvin looked at him.

  “Son,” he said.

  Ry smiled—an apology—and swung.

  Until the final instant, Marvin did not believe it. That was the sweetest part, the mustache twitch indicating how the master calculator had miscalculated. The moment, however, was brief. The sickly strike passed a few inches in front of Marvin’s nose. Ry was left drastically twisted. He blinked and coughed and wondered if, apart from everything else, his father was disappointed that he had raised this magnitude of pussy. A shadow fell over Ry; Marvin took the bat. There was nothing else to it. Ry appraised his empty hands. Red welts glistened upon each palm.

  He looked up. The gaping black hole of the man’s face was warped by the unfamiliar contours of betrayal. The bat, however, looked natural in Marvin’s grip, particularly when he lifted it to his shoulder.

  “The rubber tubing.” Marvin sounded choked. “You flushed it?”

  Ry acknowledged that it was a perfectly sound question. After the curtain was drawn on this scene, Marvin Burke had a farm to administer. Unfortunately, the morning’s chores were impossible for Ry to recall. Marvin’s defeated sigh was aimed at all parties, including himself.

  “This is not how to run a farm,” he insisted.

  The bat left a red mark upon the air. Ry was struck between the eyebrows. He was aware of a black flare like that of the camera flash during school photo day; then, at a great distance, his mother’s howl. He saw trees, clouds, the roof, the ajar second-floor window, clouds again, trees again, snow. The puny plumes of his own breath. Sniggety, upside down, skulking from the upsetting scene. He felt for his body and found nothing. After a time, blood began to run into his eyes. It made sense to close them and he did.

  Sixty seconds at most passed in darkness, though it felt like sixty years.

  Ry resurfaced. Through lashes glued together with blood he made out his mother crouched against the side of the garage. She held Sarah’s face to her chest as if to shield her from the outlandish Wild West vision of Marvin Burke hopping from one foot to the other. He was hollering all the while, though to Ry’s busted head it was but wet and fuzzy nonsense. Ry shook himself, watched his vision go wild, and felt hot blood sluice down his collar. For some reason this made him aware of the shears lodged in his back pocket. He took a handful of dirt and dragged himself closer for a better look. Now Marvin was making jabs with the bat close to his wife’s face. Jo Beth was not crying, though, and not shrinking. Ry was proud. His mouth opened in a smile and he felt blood coat his bottom lip.

  Snow fell. A truck rumbled past on the road and gave a neighborly toot; Marvin waved his bat like an overexcited kid. He did not look around, though, and Ry was glad. He pulled his junked body another foot, then another. Marvin started clobbering the ground at Jo Beth’s feet as he tried to explain a complicated point. Ry felt mud spatter from the backswing—his crawling had drawn him even nearer than he had realized.

  He brought himself to a seated position and reached for the shears in his back pocket. The metal burned his hand and tears exploded from his eyes instantly. He could no more drive the shears into his father’s back than he could his mother’s neck or sister’s heart. The sink, the squish, the jut—his muscles refused to be a part of it. He was not a killer; he was a little boy—he was ten and he was useless. The shears, in fact, had already slipped from his fingers and were lost in the snow.

  If he ran away at least he would not have to watch what happened next. Ry’s first steps were foul; his knees bobbed as if they were toys floating in water. Marvin noticed him standing and was so surprised that he dropped the bat. Ry felt the pinch of a grin. Running: It was not cowardice; it was inspiration! His father would be forced to chase him! Ry gulped a sob of pride. His foot kicked through the flimsy wire fence bordering an erstwhile flowerbed, and his legs, midsection, and torso worked together in acceptable fashion. He shuffled across the lawn dizzily. The exact location of his mother was unclear—he could no longer see her due to a black spot in his vision—but he pointed at what he hoped was the garage and whispered a prayer: Drive away, Mom, drive away.

  Ry heard the shunk of a Louisville Slugger being snatched from sidewalk cement and he gasped in delight—his father was taking the bait. Ry picked up his speed and careened between the thirty-five-foot silo and the corn crib, everyday landmarks along a path he could traverse half-blind, which he was. His father gave chase—Ry could hear the footfalls. Far away, he thought he heard the opening of a car door.

  “Yes!” Pink froth sputtered from his lips. “Yes!”

  Both seventy-foot silos, the old grain shed, and the dueling manure pits blurred by in neon scribbles, and then the architecture of the farm gave way to the endless brown of one hundred and sixty acres, the white corkscrews of snow. Ry elongated his stride and laughed at his speed. What spirit and endurance! With each pump of his leg, toys worked free from his pockets and scattered. Bravery! These kamikaze soldiers! He would earn their sacrifice.

  It was a distance that never took more than seven minutes to cross, but that was walking. At a dash, Ry covered the winter ruins
in what felt like seconds. Beyond the low-hanging limbs of Marvin’s beloved Osage-orange trees, so thick they made fences unnecessary, awaited the caliginous magnificence of Black Glade. Green ash walnuts stood like old gods, flexing their bone wings against shag bark and bitternut hickories. Ry dove beneath these skeletons and daylight was obfuscated. The pelt of snow became haphazard scatterings.

  For half an hour he dodged among the trunks and branches. No sooner did Ry find himself slowed by a deeper thicket than he heard the distant firecracker blasts of Marvin taking out intrusive limbs with the bat, and the ice crackle of similarly obliterated thornbushes. They were the sounds of furious defeat: Because of the son’s unexpected burst of speed, the wife and daughter had escaped and soon police would be sent in pursuit. Marvin had lost control and there was nothing else of equivalent value to lose.

  “Hmmmm hm hm hmmmm.”

  This song was the only way to keep focus in the face of such failure.

  Marvin was twenty or thirty yards away, in some perilously indeterminate direction, and Ry bucked himself away from the flaky bark of a red pine and kicked through the beetle-ravaged hull of a fallen hickory. Two action figures fell from his pockets; he felt the decrease in weight. Moments later a leap over a small creek released the last of the toys he had shoved into his underwear and they splashed down like turds. His toys, the future merriment he was owed, all of it would dissolve like shit in water. He gasped for breath with his hands on his thighs, and wondered if this was what it had felt like for his mother to be hounded day after day and year after year.

  Living was a burdensome impulse. He kept moving for one incredible hour, then a fantastic second. Then three, then four, or more, he lost track—his body was a miserable machine and time passed like a slowly breaking bone. To throw off his father, he made every unpredictable turn that he could, but Marvin always came roaring back. Sunlight dove away and still neither father nor son slowed his pace. Beneath the braided and purpled canopy, sharp things ripped at Ry’s ears, obstructions cracked his kneecaps, and barriers sent him clawing for alternate avenues. After stuffing a gritty handful of snow into his mouth in place of water, he used his cold fingers to probe, just for a moment, the site of his wound. His forehead was spongy and swollen. A concussion, was that what he had? Or was it something worse? His thoughts were unclear; they were just clear enough to know this.

  More than anything he was freezing. Both shoulders, his back, and his legs ached from shivering and his exposed skin was inelastic and numb. He wasn’t stupid. He knew he couldn’t keep up this evasive effort. Full darkness had fallen, and there was no way he’d survive an entire night so inadequately clothed against subzero temperatures. He knelt alongside a hill and watched each joint of his body quiver with the promise of surrender and the welcome onset of hypothermia. He lowered his butt to the bank and enjoyed the comforting hitch of relieved sobs—it felt so good to give up. The birds of nightfall wailed a lullaby. He couldn’t remember them ever sounding like that before.

  Patting at his empty coat pockets led to a crushing realization. It was his toys that had given him away—dozens of them, their chilly little corpses creating a trail far better than breadcrumbs. Ry laid his head down in the cold twilight, set his arms at his sides, and gazed up at the branches that made cracks in the smoked glass of the sky. If he removed all suggestion of rebellion, perhaps his father would kill him quickly.

  There was something in his left pants pocket. Forcing in his knuckles and fingers was like stuffing in rocks and twigs, but after some fumbling he withdrew not one object but two. No—even farther down, a tiny third object as well. This was curious. He debated tossing the traitorous toys into the snow. On the other hand, he felt an idle interest in the identity of these survivors. After all, it still might be a couple of minutes before he was overtaken.

  He laughed at the motley sight. A gathering of odder bedfellows would have been difficult to produce. The first one was Mr. Furrington, a portly turquoise teddy bear with a sewed-on bow tie and bowler hat. He had been a baby gift, and Ry had warm memories of taking him along to the bath and potty and dropping him into both when Furrington asked to approve the contents. This cheap wad of cloth and stuffing had guided him through scary bedtimes, ominous mealtimes, and episodes of sickness and worry. Marvin had implemented a zero-tolerance policy on stuffed animals a few years back, and Ry had placed each offender in a garbage sack with eyes clear and dry, though his mother, for some reason, had cried. That night, Furrington reappeared in Ry’s sock drawer, and though Ry knew it was his mother who had salvaged the toy, he preferred to imagine Furrington himself scaling the trash can and brushing off the filth in regal distaste before readjusting his hat and strolling back into the house. To keep him hidden, Ry put him in the cardboard toy box, where men with guns and mutant villains soon overwhelmed him.

  Jesus Christ was the second toy. Ry recalled that the figure had come as an unexpected bonus from the stupefying chants and papercraft drills of Sunday school. Jesus Christ was an eight-inch bendy figure in the Gumby mold, entirely pink save a white swaddle of cloth around his midsection, a brown beard of nodular texture, and the painted dashes and dots of his face and stigmata. When Ry had seen the Jesuses being handed out, he felt a rush of fantasy: He would break out the blue and black markers from the arts-and-crafts bin and turn Jesus Christ into Marvel Comics’ Reed Richards, a.k.a. Mr. Fantastic. It was a disappointment when he got his hands on Jesus Christ and found that he did not stretch at all. He only bent. Ry had stuck Jesus Christ’s legs behind his head and knotted the arms, and when he released the plastic messiah from his tortures the limbs snapped back into place. There was a disarming intensity to Jesus Christ’s pupil-less white eyes, and yet there was also something peaceful in the blankness. Ry felt a quiet. In truth the contemplation of Jesus Christ’s features was the closest thing to a religious experience Ry had ever had at church. This did not mean that Jesus Christ was fun to play with; Ry gave up after just a few attempts. Throwing him out, though, seemed like sacrilege, and over time, when he saw the pink skin peeking through layers of more popular toys, Ry could not shake the hunch that there remained in Jesus Christ a Mr. Fantastic potential.

  The third and last toy was Scowler. Ry stared at it, fearful of making any sudden move. Mr. Furrington and Jesus Christ he may have remembered if asked to mentally catalog the contents of the cardboard box. Scowler, though, he had willfully forgotten. It was a toy only in the broad technical sense. There was nothing fun about it. Ry had found it in a dusty apple box that his mother had brought home from an estate sale. He had been lifting aside yellowed issues of Life and swirling a hand through a metal soup of pulleys and hinges and buckles, when suddenly he saw a mouth gaping up at him. Ry withdrew the figure carefully. Its insides crunched like cornmeal. It was naked and humanoid, a collection of rancid lumps, and no more than four inches long, with half of that length owing to its cone-shaped head. The waxy texture of its skin suggested oilcloth, and though its intended color was yellow, it had bleached to a hue almost fleshlike. There was a crisp outer film that had once adhered to the skin with waterproof tightness, but now blistered away like sausage casing. Dominating the head was a huge downturned mouth, a dry open hole defended by dozens of daggered teeth made of seashells. Shallow depressions, imprinted by the artisan’s thumb, served as its empty eye sockets. Its abbreviated limbs were gnarled like roots, and tiny nails erupted from repair zones like patches of iron acne. Sharp sawed-off pipe edges poked from the ankles and wrists, evidence of the thing’s metal skeleton. It felt to Ry like a dreadful talisman—for what purpose, he did not care to know.

  He had begun to lower it for instant reburial when his mother craned her neck over his shoulder.

  “Look at that,” she said. “That’s folk art.”

  “It’s dirty,” Ry said. Attacking the object’s cleanliness was a savvy tactic.

  “Someone worked hard on that,” Jo Beth said. “Look at the workmanship. Look at that slipstitchi
ng. There’s not a single gap between those teeth. Somebody loved this little guy.”

  “I don’t like it.”

  “Well, you’re spoiled. The person who made this probably didn’t have money for real toys. They had to make do with their imagination and whatever they had handy. You keep it. I’ll bet it outlives every other toy you have.”

  Ry rolled it over in his palm. Its weight seemed deceptive.

  “What does it do?”

  “What does it do? Does it have to do something?” She leaned over and squinted. “He scowls.”

  “He scowls?”

  “In fact, he kind of looks like you.”

  He turned to her in alarm. “What do you mean?”

  Smiling, she pointed at her son’s expression. “Right there, see? You and Scowler are like two peas in a pod.”

  Ry looked back down at the thing. The eyeholes offered nothing.

  “Okay,” he said. He set Scowler on the floor and later placed him facedown at the bottom of his cardboard toy box. He assumed it would go missing along with the turquoise teddy bear and bendy religious icon. Through brisk shuffling of the box’s contents, it would even dismember and disintegrate. Death—that’s what boxes were for. Only it didn’t die. Scowler showed up repeatedly throughout the years, its hollow eyes and voracious mouth poking their ways into the topmost space of the toy box, the knives of its exposed skeleton spearing gun belts and jet packs. Ry would extricate these entanglements and assure himself that they were accidental.

  The fat one, the tall one, and the small one: Ry fanned out the trio beneath the moonlight. How odd that he would spend his final moments with these companions. He gathered them to his chest and struggled for the icy breath that would be one of his last.

  You can do it.

  Ry smiled. This encouragement was pleasant, even if it came too late.

  I believe in you, old boy.

  It was a jolly falsetto with a punctilious British accent. Ry was warmed by it, even tickled.