Scowler

by Daniel Kraus

  “Marvin.” Jo Beth’s face was as blank as paper. “Is it safe?”

  “It’s safe, Mom,” Sarah said. “Can we go get the camera?”

  “No.”

  “Can I go down and touch it?”

  “Of course not.”

  “We’ve got to,” Marvin said. “Good Christ. Good Christ.”

  Marvin shifted the gun to his left hand, placed his right on his knee, and leaned over the hole. His forehead peaked at the heightened smell. Ry could not help but be intrigued. He followed suit, leaning over, and when he sniffed it hit him like a too-cold drink, not just the overpowering smell but sheets of magnetic waves so charged they puckered the pores of his skin. He inhaled, choked, tasted salt, and expected a nosebleed.

  (hello)

  Ry swallowed to clear his throat of blood before responding. But there was no blood and no one had spoken. He looked to Sarah, but she showed no signs of hearing a thing. She leaned into the magnetic field as if it were a thrill ride, her lashes fluttering as vaporous forces moved each long blond hair. Ry felt it too: His eyebrows twitched like insect feelers.

  “I’ll do it,” Sarah said. “Is anyone listening? I’ll go down there.”

  “That smell’s going to make us all sick,” Jo Beth said.

  “No worse than pumping diesel,” Marvin said. “I pulled that duty for a month. You get used to it.”

  “And it’s hot. Look at the steam. Let’s go back. The two of us can talk. I’m sweating. We’re sweating.”

  “If it was that hot there’d be fire,” Sarah insisted.

  Ry noticed the fresh space in his sister’s teeth and felt a crazy certainty that he would find the missing tooth in the crater, its fluoride polish impervious to the volcanic glass that caked everything else.

  “There’s no fire,” Marvin growled, “because all that’s left out here is dirt.”

  “The whole hole is so big,” Sarah said. She turned to her brother. “The whole hole. Ry—the whole hole.”

  With her attention on him he considered asking if she had heard that faint, ringing hello. But he was an older brother and with that came the responsibility of being amused by pointless wordplay. He mustered a sickly smile and a jittery wink—the best he could do.

  “It’s big, all right,” Marvin said. He reached into the front pocket of his shirt and with practiced agility withdrew the sorriest pack of cigarettes Ry had ever seen: flat, gray, and speckled with errant flakes of tobacco. Luckies—Jeremiah’s favorite. While trying to shake free a stick, Marvin raised an eyebrow and scanned the cemetery remains of the land he loved. “Makes the whole back eighty look … I don’t know. Little. That isn’t how I remember it. Not at all.” The crooked cigarette went between his lips and his nimble fingers dove once more and came back with a crumpled book of matches. “You remember the night the steers got free, like they were angry about the low-grade hay, like they knew the milk cows were getting the good stuff.” He tucked the shotgun under his arm and struck a match. The flame was butterscotch, weak. “And out of bed we jumped, all of us in our underwear, flying through the corn back here trying to round them up.” His lip hiked, betraying real affection. Ry’s mind, too, conjured snatches of the frenzied hunt, his muddy briefs, the moronic thrill of flailing unclothed through nature. “Jo, you remember. How long did it take us?”

  The hand holding the lit match was trembling.

  Ry concentrated on it, willed it into a symbol of hope.

  “All night,” Jo said. “Into morning.”

  “God, the mornings here. The mornings.”

  His voice softened in a way Ry wasn’t sure he’d ever heard before.

  “Things here,” he said, “weren’t perfect. But I did try to provide. It was all I knew how to—”

  The fire died. Marvin’s fingers shook even harder for a moment, a death spasm, and then snapped into a fist. There was no breeze to blame so he blamed inconvenience. Having to hold the gun under his arm while trying to ignite damp matches was too awkward, and with brusque motions he stuffed the cigarette, soft pack, and matchbook back into his shirt pocket—and there Marvin froze. Relief rinsed his face as the tips of his fingers fondled an unseen object bulging from the bottom of the pocket. Ry felt a warning in his gut that there were other secrets yet to be revealed.

  “Yes, indeedy. Half the day was spent wrangling. Because loaded with crop, this here stretch was—there’s no other word for it. It was big. Bigger than eighty acres, once you were inside it. A rock, even one like this, had it fallen from the sky back then?” He looked at them in turn: wife, daughter, son. “Why, I believe the corn would’ve gobbled it up. In fact …” He let his eyes tickle across Ry’s face. “Those one or two steers we didn’t find that night, I’ve always figured that’s what happened. Corn got hungry.” He jerked his eyebrows. “Chomp.”

  Ry jumped. He hated it, but he did.

  Marvin grinned. Filaments of tobacco floated in his beard like scabs.

  “Time’s a-wastin’.” He motioned the shotgun barrel at the crater.

  Ry took a deep breath and squinted. The clouds of steam were thinner now. Sun blasted off the water, which hissed as it lapped at the rock. The lustrous ore seemed to squirm in its stew of energy like a knot of wrought-iron snakes. Ry had no business down there, none of them did. But his mother’s haggard face—how easily a bullet could unsnap tendons from bone. The padding of girl-fat that swaddled Sarah’s organs—how crudely a shot would yank garish colors from the paleness.

  Marvin appeared to read his son’s mind. His red and weary eyes examined both possible targets. Ry wasted no more time. He stepped over the edge of the crater, dug his left heel into the soot, and eyed a path that should not prove too difficult for a young man of sure footing. It wouldn’t be fun, but as Marvin had said a million times, running a farm never was.

  0 HRS., 42 MINS. AFTER IMPACT

  Three feet down the smelly exhaust enveloped him like warm honey. He wiped it out of his eyes and flung it aside. Another step lower and he found himself emerging damp from the steam clouds. Magnetism at this level was palpable; his pulse struggled against confused gravity. With his heel he kicked a foothold into the smoldered grade, leaned back, and slid—seven feet down, eight feet, nine. He crouched and locked his arms around his knees. Less than a foot away, the pool, roughly four feet across, swayed like melted chocolate.

  The meteorite was an extravaganza. Ry leaned forward, extended his neck, and held the posture breathlessly. The exposed rock gleamed with mercurial liquescence and twinkled in neon tones of pink, purple, and blue. Ry angled his head and an entire world of sparkling lace revealed itself, floating within the rock like a field of golden mushrooms. Ry longed to grip one of the rock’s many outcroppings—how much like handles they looked!—and see what other dimensions there were to discover. He stretched out a hand.

  The field of energy straightened the hair on his knuckles. His arm hairs rose next like flowers awakening to sun. After that his neck stubble became a garden of thorns. Then the pressure upon his skull began to build, steady as a closing vice. Ry’s jaws scraped past each other with an abrupt squeak and he pushed himself back from the meteorite, clutching his ringing head between his palms. Bitter methane folded like construction paper down his throat. He gagged and his vision went black.

  (hold still)

  (i can’t find you)

  (yes, you)

  Ry opened his mouth to scream that he was HERE, RIGHT HERE!—and with that he crested from blackness to discover a slamming headache. Long black fingers had wrapped around his legs. He gasped and kicked but they were just shadows from the people staring from fifteen feet up.

  “Ry? You okay? You okay, Ry? You okay?”

  The subsequent cough told him that this concern came from Sarah, not Jo Beth, and even in this crippled state the slight from his mother hurt. He nodded in response, but that was a bad idea because it widened what already felt like a gaping hole in his head. He pushed himself farther from the meteor
ite.

  “Feels weird,” he managed to say. “Real weird. I’m coming up.”

  Sun glared from shotgun metal. The muzzle made the scribbly motions of aiming.

  “That’s not necessary, Marvin.” Jo Beth’s voice carried well in the absence of the birds. “He’ll do what you say.”

  “I’ll judge what’s necessary.”

  “But I can help. Just talk to me.”

  “Talk? Jo, I can barely think.”

  “Because you’re hurt?”

  “Because the situation is tense.” Marvin probed the gap between his front teeth with his tongue. “And because I’m hurt.”

  “That’s what I’m saying. Let’s slow down. Let’s think this through. You haven’t told me a thing. How you got here, anything.”

  Ry took a knee and tried to reestablish a normal pattern of breathing. It was possible that these requests from his mother were a brilliant ploy. If she could draw answers of any detail from her husband, Ry might have a chance to make a move that counted. He’d just need to hang on to his slippery powers of judgment.

  “There’s nothing to tell,” Marvin said. “I got out.”

  “Because one of these things fell?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And it knocked down some walls?”

  “Knocked down? It turned the east end of my cell to chalk.”

  “And you climbed out?”

  “What else? Only it was up, Jo. I climbed up.”

  “Up?”

  Ry stood and turned toward the crater wall. He winced as the heel of his shoe crunched through the glasslike surface. It was the kind of noise Sarah would jump at, if her attention wasn’t fixed upon her parents.

  “The ceiling’s what fell in,” Marvin explained. “That’s what buried the Professor. If I’d used the toilet first, it would’ve been me.”

  “Well, I’m grateful.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  “I am,” Jo Beth insisted. “That’s not what I would have wanted.”

  “Please don’t say that.”

  “I’m sorry. But weren’t there any guards to stop you?”

  “Guards? Christ, yes. They were everywhere.”

  “Then how …?”

  Marvin at last deigned to look at her. The gun dipped and its bead slid from Ry’s forehead like a drop of sweat. “How. How.” Marvin’s lips flattened strangely, and it took Ry a moment to identify the emotion as amusement. “Jo, the questions you ask.” He was pleased, though, and symmetrical patches of beard thickened with the twists of a wry grin. As a master of the kitchen-table soliloquy, the only thing Marvin Burke might crave more than revenge was a chance to bask in his own ingenuity.

  Ry crouched, prepared his muscles to move.

  “There was a game room,” Marvin said. “Directly above my cell.”

  “A game room?”

  “Pool, shuffleboard, darts. You know, rewards for good behavior.”

  “It was above your cell?”

  Ry moved on all fours up the side of the crater. His parents seemed to leap closer.

  Marvin’s whiskers twitched with his grin. “The noises would drive the Professor crazy. Me, I came to like it. Little men and their little games. When the ceiling opened up, all of it just sort of … slid.”

  “Even the pool table?”

  “Fell right into my cell. Christ if it wasn’t a sight. Balanced up there on the edge, big as a whale. Then it was lumber.”

  “And you used it to get out somehow?”

  The climbing noises of Ry’s hands and feet, even those of his labored breathing, were too loud. He froze, held his breath. Somewhere above his head he could hear his father swallow, how the subsequent inhale peeled his tongue from the roof of his mouth.

  “Men on the inside,” he said, “that’s all they talk about. What they’ll do if God reaches down and rips open a hole. You know me well enough. You know I’d have a plan. And a contingency plan. And a plan three, a plan four.”

  “I do know that. Or I should’ve known. I’m sorry if I forgot.”

  “Darts. Billiard balls. A pool cue. Maybe I picked up other things too, I don’t remember. But in the right hands, these objects are not toys.”

  “Did you hurt anyone? Tell me.”

  Ry was practically within arm’s reach of Marvin’s ankle, but Ry looked at his shaking wrists and locked elbows and found that he could not move another inch until he heard the man’s response. Because before grappling with his father it would be wise to know exactly what he’d become.

  “Did I hurt …” Marvin laughed once, a sandpaper sound. “I don’t know, Jo. To get out of that place I had to do some things, and some of those things were surely bad. But I’m telling you—it was like it wasn’t me. It was like someone else was doing them. I don’t remember the half of it; I wish I did. You don’t have to believe me, but it’s the truth.”

  “I believe you, Marvin. Honest, I do.”

  Perhaps it was the word honest—used too often inside penitentiaries by men who were anything but—that riled him. Marvin gave his head a shake and dug a thumb into his temple, drawing blood and smearing soot. Ry rubbed his own thrumming skull and shut his eyes. Words, when they next came, sizzled.

  “You think I like this spot I’m in, you’re crazy. But you put me here, Jo. You and the boy. I’m not putting this gun down if that’s what you’re hoping. I can’t. The Bluefeather folks might think I’m under rubble at the moment, but that moment will pass. And then they’ll come. They’ll come here, and then I’m done for. That’s the situation and nothing in the world can change it except this rock.”

  Ry slit open his eyes to find Jo Beth, her arm graceful upon emergence from the nightgown, reaching out to touch her husband’s chest with tentative fingers. The prison-issue shirt above Marvin’s heart was crusted into a brown, immovable snarl.

  “You have to let me look at that.”

  “No time, Jo.”

  “You’ll drip. They’ll find you.”

  The unjust dead ends of life momentarily appeared to overcome the man. His eyes wandered across the perishing plain, the infected air, his own damaged body. “It does hurt. No doubt you could work wonders. If things could be different, I’d say something else. You’d say something else. You’d be proud of me, even. God, who knows.”

  He winced from more than one kind of pain and, as if for cover, he reached again for his pack of Luckies. Only this time Jo Beth’s fingers slipped in and plucked the pack and matches from his pocket. She withdrew a cigarette, inserted it into her mouth, struck the match, and then cupped her hands around the flame like someone who knew what she was doing. She took a hard puff, a gray veil lifted in front of her face, and then she held the cigarette out to her husband. He touched his shirt pocket, making sure the secret object still lay untroubled, and then took the cigarette, putting his lips where hers had been.

  Ry could blame it on the heat or the meteorite’s haze, but what he saw in Jo Beth’s expression was no illusion. Ry knew that look. He had seen it for years in department store checkout lanes as Jo Beth eyed the stacked cart of a woman with a thicker pocketbook, or during sewing deliveries as she stole glances at some woman’s new car or backyard pool. Though Jo Beth hadn’t had access to the Burke savings account in those days, it had been far from empty.

  Marvin’s sins were serious but rarely had he erred in business matters.

  “Your hair,” Jo Beth said, venturing to touch the thick black tufts. “Your beard.”

  Marvin looked at his feet. “You shave by their rules in prison.”

  “I like it,” she said. “I do.”

  Ry could not bear another word. The time for crawling was over, and he shot to his feet on the uneven grade and hurled himself up the final few feet, at the same time altering his angle so that his body was in line with the meteorite. If Marvin shot, at least some of the buckshot would fragment the miraculously unfragmented rock. Ry wondered who would cry the loudest at this damage, husband or wife
.

  There was no chance to grab his father’s ankle. All things dreamy drained from Marvin’s face and the gun sprang.

  “What are you doing?” Marvin demanded.

  Ry raised his arms in surrender.

  “Sarah, run.” He had to believe in the power of chaos.

  “What?” Jo Beth was aghast. “Ry, no.”

  “I don’t want to run,” Sarah said. “I want to see it.”

  “Don’t cause trouble,” Marvin warned. “Either of you.”

  “Sarah, do it.” Ry believed his own voice had never sounded so tired. “Run.”

  He closed his eyes. He hoped to hear the gunshot. Even more, he hoped to hear the diminishing claps of his sister’s escaping feet.

  Instead, he heard the voice.

  (oh, no)

  (do not lose faith)

  (dear boy)

  These words distracted him and by the time he heard his sister’s footfalls, closer instead of farther away, it was too late. The first thing he saw was the stunned faces of Marvin and Jo Beth. Turning around, blinking and twisting, finally he found Sarah, who was skidding down the embankment in pajamas. When he reached for her all he got was a quick, cool slide of blond hair across his palm. He spun, hit the incline, and lost his wind. Jo Beth’s shouting—Sarah!—brought him right back. His sister was trying to make good on her begging and go touch the damn thing, and he saw her slip down the fired slickness of the crater, her little thighs flexing in a brave attempt to stop her momentum. Her arms helicoptered and then flew forward to pad her fall, and though one of her arms caught beneath her chest, the other landed right where she had wanted, directly upon the meteorite. Her fingers wrapped around one of the black nodes like five tiny pink whips.

  Sarah for a moment oriented herself in silence, taking note of her body and appendages. Her face, smudged and stupefied, at last discovered her right hand curled around the beautiful, glistening rock, and she shouted out long before taking any physical action.