Scowler

by Daniel Kraus

  “But, hey, look,” Linda said. “You can say crackers! all day long if you want. That’s what’s so good about pretending. Anything you want to be okay is okay. You know what I mean?”

  “I guess.”

  “And there’s another really good thing about pretending too. A really important thing. When you pretend—”

  “Wait!” Ry cried.

  Linda stopped. For an instant she looked annoyed but her smile ingested the annoyance like a wisp of smoke. “What’s up?”

  “What have I told you about Scowler?”

  Linda sighed and folded her hands on her skirt. “I admit that Scowler is a harder nut to crack. He’s our man of mystery, isn’t he?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Linda gathered her hair behind her head. Her knuckles fought the plastic balls of a ponytail holder for a while. Even when that was done, she spent some time taking the measure of the boy in front of her.

  “Let me ask you something,” she said. “This is just an idea. If you don’t like it, that’s cool. But do you think that the people in your family influence your personality? Because I wonder if these pretend voices that are part of you, like we were just saying, are also reflections of your family, kind of. Take, for example, our friend Mr. Furrington. Mr. Furrington sort of reminds me of your sister, Sarah. You know how much she loves you, always following you around. Not to mention that she’s small! You might have noticed Mr. Furrington’s rather small himself. And Jesus Christ, well, he’s so smart and takes such good care of you that I wonder if he’s not a little bit like your mom. Your mom’s the one who helps you with schoolwork, right? And feeds you and takes you to the doctor and brings you here to see me. Now, Scowler … well, maybe Scowler—and like I said, this is just an idea, so it’s okay with me if you don’t agree with it—but Scowler is, maybe, kind of a little bit like your dad.”

  Ry held his breath and waited for the screams to start.

  “Ry?” Linda leaned in. “You okay, buddy?”

  Scowler emitted no screams, no whines, no ghastly choking noises, just a silence of colossal and damning grandeur. Ry scrapped for a distraction.

  “You said,” he began, replaying the conversation. “You said there was another good thing about pretending.”

  Linda tilted her chin and then snapped it back once the thought was recaptured. “Right,” she said. “The other good thing about pretending—and this is kind of important, Ry. I want you to think about this after we’re done.” She raised her eyebrows importantly. “The second good thing about pretending? It’s that you can stop pretending.”

  From that day forward, a heavy chain began to slide from where it had bound tight his shoulders. Increasingly he ventured forth without the Three’s protection—taking breakfast alone, going to the bathroom unaccompanied, minor chores here and there. By some miracle, tragedy was kept at bay, and he experienced the naked, windblown thrill of survival. His family, too, looked better than they had in ages, more adventuresome and alive, and he began to wonder if Linda had been right, if being under the watch of Ry (and Furrington and Jesus Christ and Scowler) was not all that different from being under the watch of Marvin.

  And then she betrayed him. Ry would never know what happened, if Linda had thought his independence had progressed more quickly than it had, if there had been a lapse in payment from Jo Beth, or if sabotage had been part of the plan all along. But one morning he set about his chores without the Three and when he returned an hour later, his mother was sitting idle at the kitchen table. This was not normal. Ry went straight to his bedroom where the Three had been stationed at the foot of his door and found them missing. Swaying dangerously, he used walls and furniture to drag himself back to the kitchen, expecting to have missed the key detail when he had passed by moments earlier: Scowler stuck deep into his mother’s jugular, blood slurping out in hushed currents. The only flow, though, was the wash of her tears.

  “I burned them.” Her voice skipped around as much as her gaze. “She told me to do it and I just did what she said.” She swallowed and grimaced as if she were drunk. “Now they’re all burned up.”

  Waves of blackness pushed from the scar in Ry’s forehead. He flapped a blind hand for support and felt his knuckles fumble past the handle of the refrigerator, the coiled cord of the phone. His lungs and throat filled with the cold loam of Black Glade and he drowned in it. Next the grave overtook his mother in her kitchen chair and his sister from where she waded in from the dining room. This was their death, all of theirs; without the Unnamed Three there was no protection. Ry collapsed upon the scuffed linoleum. He heard himself bleat out seizured demands for information. How long they had burned. The location of their corpses. Surely they could salvage something—Furrington’s marble eyes, a glob of melted Christ, the singed steel skeleton of Scowler—and mold them into a new being. It was their only chance.

  The next thing he became aware of was the blankets of his bed tucked so tightly around him that his arms were pinned. Linda Colson—he would never forgive her. He pictured a red Iowa dusk and the fleeing outline of the woman’s stocky body—no, she was fat, the lady was obese, just another one of the cowardly, secretive, sly monsters Scowler had warned him about—and how her blubber became a horrific hindrance as she was chased into the narrow corridors of Black Glade. Jo Beth, too—oh, how she had fooled him. Neither woman would last long in the wilderness.

  Anger shook down to grief and he felt the mopping handkerchief of his mother and heard her sorrowful shushing. In alternation came the fretful sounds of Sarah entering and exiting, her socked feet passing over the hallowed spot where the Three had made their last stand. Ry tried to remember the final moments he had spent with them. Furrington had been positioned to the left of the door; he had been tra-la-la-ing a jaunty tune. Scowler, as usual, took the center spot. Jesus Christ took the right side, and had taken the longest to balance upright. His feet were too small, that was the damn problem. Ry had cursed and then felt ungrateful. Jesus Christ, who never held a grudge, had consoled him in a voice pristine and true. They were the Three’s last words.

  We’re little now, he had said. But we shall grow up. Just like thou.

  Ry made a full recovery. He could tell it disappointed everyone. As the school year ended, his grades acclimated to lower altitudes. Classmates went back to ignoring him, or shoving him out of the way when they got sick of him blocking the hallway with his crutches. Violence no longer heavied Ry Burke’s fists—it was obvious to everyone. On the farm the motivation behind a dozen ingenious innovations dissipated, leaving behind a ten-year-old whose long legs and dangling arms looked less like the tools of a budding genius and more the manacles of a gangly dullard. On the first day of summer vacation, he abandoned his usual seat in the milking parlor and found himself shivering in the predawn darkness of the Costner Eighty. Tendrils of alfalfa hay tapped his bad ankle as if to remind him of a time when life was fearful, yes, but fearful with meaning.

  Ry squinted at Black Glade, wondering if that was where she had thrown down the tiny bodies and burned them. He thought he smelled cinder; he searched closer now, the alfalfa at his feet. Had it happened in this field right here? It was pointless speculating; he knew it was time to forgive his mother, but distrust lingered. The woman’s allegiances shifted too easily.

  So he was alone. He accepted it as best he could. There had been comfort in knowing that he was going to one day die at the hands of his father; now he felt only uncertainty. He realized with dismay that these were the conditions under which human beings lived their lives. A mist of rain pearled Ry’s face and made his clothes feel like a layer of packed clay. He looked at the darkening dirt. Death had been his anchor, but there were other posts to which he could fasten himself: the Osage-orange trees, the silos, his sister. Release one; move fast; latch onto another. It was how he would spend his next nine years. He turned his face to the sky. It was really coming down.

  A Darker Shade of Violet

  MONDAY, AUGUST 24,
1981

  0 HRS., 1 MIN. AFTER IMPACT

  The dog was missing.

  “Snig?” Marvin ejected phlegm from his throat and rose to wobbly knees. No more than a minute had elapsed since impact and he was the first to move. He looked one direction and winced, then repeated the routine the other way. Ry watched from where he was implanted in the lawn. His ears were ringing and his skin felt tender. Dimly he pictured the shotgun. Where was it? Could he get to it? But he kept getting distracted by the rain of ash, so pretty, so bizarre—the snowfall of the apocalypse. There was a loud exhale and Ry twisted his neck to see his mother slouched ten feet away. One of her hands was tentatively investigating a patch of scorched hair. After a moment she looked up at the sky and Ry followed her gaze. Tree limbs above them still reeled in slow motion, while individual leaves zagged to the ground aflame. The birds had flown.

  “Here, boy.” Marvin sounded dazed. He had one leg planted at a ninety-degree angle and, after a mighty inhale, pushed himself to a standing position. He was after the dog, not the gun, so Ry clenched his stomach muscles and sat up. Now he could see Sarah lying five feet away and wide awake, eyes rolling cautiously as if any further motion might awake her from this dream of survival. Ry checked on his father again. He was wobbling in the direction of the McCafferty Forty, where a mist of soil clung to the air like a bruise.

  Ry tore his eyes away and whispered to Sarah. “Hey. Hey. You okay?”

  Sarah propped herself up with an arm. Her hair floated in a crazed net, an effect that would have been comical under other circumstances.

  “I think I’m fine,” she said. “I think I fell.”

  “We all fell,” Ry said. “Listen to me: Find the gun.”

  Marvin was now as far as the garage. One hand dug into the termite-ridden wood for stability; the other shaded his eyes to get a better look at the northeastern field. “Do you know what this is?” he asked no one in particular. “I think I know what this is.”

  Ry fought his way to his feet. Both knees popped. He took a moment to sway, then extended a hand to help his sister. As she accepted the assistance, Ry turned to his mother.

  “Mom,” he whispered. “Mom?”

  “Yes. I’m here. I’m okay. It’s just … my ears.”

  “Find the gun,” Ry whispered. “Right now, find it.”

  Jo Beth and Sarah considered the grass around them—overgrown, overgrown, Ry’s fault—but they seemed foggy about the instructions. Ry cursed and took a step, and his vision rocked. Recovering, he swept his eyes across the area, hoping for a flash of wood or metal. Through the cloud of dirt the morning sun turned everything shades of yellow and purple. This strange color contrast complicated the effort, but everyone’s confusion was buying him time. All he needed were a few more seconds.

  Marvin turned around, his forehead lined with wonderment.

  “It is a meteor,” he said. “A meteor has fallen on my farm.”

  There was a pause, then all four of them looked to the southern sky, as if expecting to see four more fireballs bearing down. Recognizing their shared postures as belonging to the resident expert, Ry and Jo Beth turned to Sarah, who was busy tamping down her hair with the air of someone primping for an appointment. After a few moments she noticed their eyes, and then shifted her gaze uncomfortably between them and her father.

  “Meteorite,” she said. “That’s what they’re called when they land.”

  Ry looked to the back forty, then to his sister, who was clearly only beginning to process the madness of what had just occurred. What made him even more uneasy, though, was that she had yet to display the proper amount of fear of her father. It was entirely possible that Jo Beth had never shared with her daughter the extent of Marvin’s depravity. Curiosity, then, was only natural.

  Marvin nodded as if Sarah’s terminology rang a distant bell, and then he began to approach. Jo Beth looked too bewildered to react one way or another. Ry’s body seized with panic, and his eyes skittered across the lawn, frantic for discovery.

  “A meteorite, Jo.” Understanding was dawning on Marvin’s face. “There was a—I don’t know why I didn’t think of it right off. At Bluefeather, there was a kind of … an event. The whole place shook. And the walls, some of them just blew apart like nothing. This—this thing.” He pointed a thumb back at the field. “I’m telling you, this is the same exact thing. And the Professor said—I didn’t tell you he got crushed. He did. One second he was relieving himself into the toilet and the next … But maybe six months back he said something about this, about a what do you call it, a group …”

  “A belt,” Sarah said. A familiar gleam was beginning to light up her eyes. “The Jaekel Belt.”

  Marvin snapped his fingers. “That’s it, a belt. Poor guy. Had he only lived to see it. He said it was of real scientific interest, and if chunks from this belt found their way to the ground, the person who found them would be one lucky son of a bitch because—”

  He turned and looked once more at the distant field. Instantly Ry blundered across the lawn, neck straining, eyes spinning, fingers splayed and ready to snatch the gun from its hiding place. Insects leapt from his path and blades of grass recoiled from his swiping feet. Suddenly he saw it—a darker shade of violet, a few feet away to his right, and he tumbled for it, fingers outstretched.

  The shotgun lifted from the ground, but in the hands of Marvin Burke. The man rotated the staff of walnut and steel as if trying to recall its purpose. The more he held it, though, the more its weight transmitted a significance, and soon it jounced lightly within an ever more assured grip. Marvin looked up and saw his family staring at him. At first he looked surprised. Then the gap between his front teeth showed itself.

  “Money.” His voice took on the brisk snap of nine years past. “That’s what this means, Jo. And that’s why I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to take it with me. Stash it somewhere until the heat is off and then—you have no idea. You have no idea what a university will pay for something like this.”

  Jo Beth looked lost. “Pay?”

  “Museums, too. There could be a secret auction. Not much different from fielding offers when selling off land. Doesn’t matter who I am, how I’m dressed, not if I have the goods. The Professor said it’s done all the time—some yokel finds a rock in his outhouse and makes a killing. You wouldn’t believe the dollar amounts he bandied about. You want to take a guess?”

  “No. What? Marvin.”

  “We’ve got to excavate it. We’ve got to do it now, right now; there isn’t much time. My God, don’t you see it, Jo? This is a gift.”

  He looked at his pallid, petrified wife as if expecting reciprocation of his enthusiasm. Ry found the gleam in his eye too familiar. It was the same fervor displayed by the great farmer when discovering the first signs of life in his fields; when slapping the swollen udders of a nervous cow approaching her first milking; when stalking, pitchfork in hand, the dusty alleys of a towering new metropolis of bales. It was the greedy look of revelation: There was one crop of value yet to be harvested from his beloved soil.

  Marvin Burke hitched up the shotgun and turned his gaze on each of them.

  “All right, then,” he said. “Let’s go have us a look.”

  0 HRS., 16 MINS. AFTER IMPACT

  The smell was unexpected. It hit them when they were still a hundred yards off, their quickly and poorly chosen shoes munching through the lunar crust of the northeasternmost field. It was a fragrant methane reminiscent of the muck once generated by the farm’s cattle, only with a stifling undertone of hot copper. Ry tasted it at the back of his throat and tried swallowing. It burned all the way down. Five more minutes and the stench crept into the territory of the distressing. Jo Beth tented a hand over her nose and mouth and silently urged Sarah to do the same. Sarah, though, had her sights locked on their destination.

  The fugitive took point; it was a kind of bravery. If Ry had been less dazed, if the ground had not been so fatally pitted, he might’ve gained enough s
peed to pounce upon the man’s back. Then there was the shotgun to consider, flashing in the sun with the speed of a twirling baton. The firing mechanism might jam after so many years of disuse, but that was an outside chance given Marvin’s diligence about keeping the gun well oiled. Ry let his eyes ease back to the ground and saw four, eight—no, more than he could count—giant black triangles leading to a depression in the field near the tree line of Black Glade. Seconds later Ry’s shoes were crunching through the residue. They were scorch marks. The dirt itself had been toasted.

  Marvin toed the edge of the crater. Sarah joined him like it was nothing, her blond hair close enough to tickle the Winchester’s trigger. Jo Beth had no choice: She swept in beside her daughter, darting an arm around her shoulder and pulling her away from the weapon, but then leaving the gesture half fulfilled when she saw what lay at her feet. Ry came last, slow as old age. His hope was that his father would be wrong—a rare and delectable occurrence—and the contents of the crater would be something rather pedestrian: a weather satellite, a ball of hail, some other atmospheric burp. The truth, though, was in his family’s postures: the shrinking back of an insecure species.

  The hole bored through countless strata of soil. At the top, the crater spanned nearly thirty-five feet, a giant toothless mouth. The walls were smooth as charcoal from the heat that had seared them. Stray ends of root systems dangled like cauterized arteries. The crater’s overall effect was dizzying, even though it was only roughly fifteen feet deep; a steaming pool of muddy water hid the precise depth of its lowest point. Peeking through the liquid was a rock of indeterminate size, a couple feet in diameter, maybe more, black and glossy and fascinatingly notched, a miniature planet of coral-reef complexity. Though only a few inches were revealed, Ry could vouch that it was like no stone he’d ever seen.

  “Water,” Marvin muttered. He looked sidelong at his son, droplets of steam fattening on his glasses while his beard darkened and curled. Ry’s stomach cramped at the irrefutable evidence of his incompetence. This surprise vat of moisture showed that the farm’s lifeblood still flowed.