Scowler

by Daniel Kraus

  “It’s hot,” she said. “It’s hot! It’s hot!”

  “Sarah!” Jo Beth shouted. “Help her!”

  Ry’s heart hopped into his mouth, fat and bleeding and choking off air. Sarah’s legs pedaled and her body jerked, and an instant later her fingers ripped free and skimmed through the mud, and were tucked into her gut before Ry could see their condition. Sarah, her pale lips quivering, shouldered up the bank as if she were armless. Ry’s paralysis broke and he fell over his sister like a cage, wanting to embrace her but afraid to touch because of the whimpering and weeping and now, quite suddenly, the coughing.

  “She’s hurt! I’m bringing her up!”

  Hearing genuine alarm in his voice was gasoline to the fire of Sarah’s panic, and on cue her whine amplified into a scream. Ry slid one of his arms under her knees and told himself that the rise in volume was not—was not—to be taken as an accurate gauge of her injury. He put his other arm beneath her shoulders, stood, and began the process of lifting and planting feet, recalling school film strips of astronauts, their boots crashing to the pale moon with arduous slowness.

  Jo Beth’s arms tangled with his, sharp nails scraping at his wrists and biceps. Ry resisted—what right did she have to help now? Sarah, though, rolled toward her mother. Ry let it happen, unexpectedly furious, and dropped to his knees as Jo Beth stumbled from the crater with her new, thrashing burden. Ry planted his elbows over the lip of the crater; he sucked for air, in, out, and watched the corresponding flit of a weed that had survived the interplanetary clash.

  “Sarah, let me see.” How many times had Ry himself given in to that smooth, motherly firmness? “Let me see. It’s all right, let me see.”

  “It hurts! It huuuuurts!”

  “I know, sweetie, just let me see so I can make it better.”

  Ry’s neck creaked when he moved it. Marvin was still there, the gun held inches from Ry’s temple but with only half of its former authority. A bead of sweat puckered from his father’s eyebrow, crept down the rim of his nose, and clung to the bulbous tip.

  “We’re going back to the house,” Jo Beth said.

  “Hold on,” Marvin said.

  “That hole’s not going anywhere. Please.”

  Marvin took a step away from the crater, folding the shotgun back against his shoulder. Jo Beth hoisted the girl’s fetal, twisting body. She could not hold her daughter indefinitely, and this more than anything tilted the entire afternoon onto its edge. Marvin spat his cigarette and held a fist to his injured heart.

  “Fine, we all go. But we come right back and that’s not up for—”

  Jo Beth staggered forth. Black, brown, then white dust enfolded her legs. Marvin watched for a long moment, then looked at Ry, the sweltering silence both accentuating the father’s failure in getting his prize and challenging the son to go ahead and do something about it. Ry sagged into his elbows; he was rid of energy, out of breath, and literally at his father’s feet, though he could not help but feel a small victory had been won.

  Marvin’s voice crackled like flame. “You think there aren’t worse things than sewing someone to a mattress?”

  Ry screwed his fingers into the dirt and brought himself to shaky knees. Before long he found himself eye to eye with his father. They were the same height, look at that. Ry let a heedless smile exit through his mouth like a whisper. In the distance, Jo Beth was making fine time, already to the shed where they used to store commercial feed.

  Marvin stepped aside and motioned with the gun. Blurred by Ry’s squint, the barrel took on a red hue and became the bat—it would always be the bat—and Ry wondered and feared, as he always did, if he would ever be brave enough to use it. He took a step toward the house and passed through a perimeter of the meteorite’s voltage; an elastic tension snapped away from his skin like latex. There was a matching throb at the center of his head, where the darkest of things had always filed their claws.

  (so much light)

  (how pretty)

  (are you gone away?)

  (hello?)

  1 HR., 32 MINS. AFTER IMPACT

  The universal dinginess that made everything the same color, the foot-worn stripes that marked a lifetime of shortcuts, the silos standing like once-fearsome kings with shoulders rounded by defeat—it was easy to believe the farm was unchanged. The only clues otherwise were the few charred leaves still drifting across the back lawn. Ry managed to find one and stamp it before climbing the back steps on his way inside. The shotgun nicked his shoulder blade and the reedy wheezes coming from behind him made it evident that Marvin’s injuries were flaring. The house reacted to their weight; it tsked as if disapproving.

  Jo Beth was at the sink filling a glass with water. Ry went no farther than the pantry door. Marvin stopped, too, as if they had intruded upon some private feminine ritual. She lifted her eyes only to make the quickest of identifications and then went about topping off the glass, setting it on the counter, and opening a cabinet.

  “Well?” Marvin asked.

  “Well, she’s burnt.” She withdrew a bottle of aspirin and shook it once before clapping it to the counter. “I don’t know. I think she’ll be all right. It’s hard to say. You know burns. There’s not much you can do for them. It’s pink—who knows what that means.”

  “Rub freshly chopped onion on it,” Marvin said.

  Jo Beth shook two aspirin into her palm. “Nothing’s fresh here.”

  “Vinegar, then,” Marvin said. “It’ll take the edge off.”

  “No home remedies,” Jo Beth said. “She’s got ice in a rag.”

  The lid was half screwed on before the threads slipped and made a plastic grinding noise. Jo Beth threw the lid into the sink. She turned around and looked at her husband. Her eyes were expectant. Marvin inhaled noisily but said nothing.

  “You should take a few of these yourself,” she said.

  “I might,” he said. “But we’ve got to get back out there.”

  Her lips went pale with pressure. Slowly she shifted her gaze to Ry.

  “Would you take these to your sister?”

  He glanced at his father, who was busy inspecting his wife for signs of treason. Cautiously Ry moved around the table, lifted the glass of water, and held out his hand. Jo Beth opened her hand over his and for a second he was convinced of a secret maneuver, that what would drop into his palm would be a small paring knife—just like that, reuniting them on the same team. Instead two white pills bounced across his palm. He closed his fingers and felt the aspirin soften and stick.

  Ry moved away from the sink and toward the dining room. Below his feet a surreal glimpse of a past life: a scrap of holiday wrapping paper stuck to a splotch of maple syrup. Next he looked upon the limp needles of the makeshift Christmas tree, and that’s where the reverie ended, because above that was the phone, their savior. He paused just long enough to recall the utter destruction of the telephone pole across the road. There would be no more calls made from this house, maybe ever.

  Sarah was curled up on the sofa. Piled on the floor, sent there by her cycling legs, was a piece of in-progress sewing. Ry flung it behind the chair before kneeling; Marvin hardly needed more evidence of the ways in which his wife had moved on without him. Ry set his elbow on the cushion next to Sarah, and her moan crescendoed.

  “Shhh.” Ry opened his palm and looked at the aspirin. It was the first still moment of the day, and it provided unexpected space for Ry to acknowledge the morning’s enormities. Water sloshed from the glass. His shoulders were shaking.

  With Ry mute and Sarah’s sobs reduced to a drone, their parents’ voices carried.

  “We should get her to the hospital.”

  “There’s no use asking that.”

  “We don’t know anything about that thing out there. It could be radioactive. Just being near it might have done something to her.”

  “We don’t know that.”

  “That’s exactly right—we don’t know. How are you feeling?”

  �
��I told you.”

  “Not that. I’ll dress that. I mean your head. You’re going to tell me you don’t have the worst headache of your life right now?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Seriously? You’re seriously going to tell me that?”

  “I am.”

  Such a coarsening of voice typically forewarned hitting. Ry closed his eyes and waited for the meaty smack. Instead there was a drowsy silence in which nothing happened, though when Jo Beth next spoke her tone was less strident.

  “Then you’re the only one, Marvin.”

  “I’ve never felt better in my life and that’s the God’s honest truth.”

  Sarah whimpered and Ry’s eyes shot open. He glanced at the door, thought about closing it, and judged it an unnecessary risk. They’d just have to keep their voices down.

  “Hey. Sarah. Hey.”

  Her feet did a little dance of pain.

  He tried another tack. “Hey, shitburger.”

  At this she turned, gasping as if woken from a nightmare. The salty residue of tears striped her face pink and white. Water dripped steadily from the cloth around her injured right hand, darkening the sofa cushion, the pillow, and her pajamas.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t run when you said.”

  “It’s okay. Everything will be okay.”

  “Ry, it hurts. I’m not lying.”

  “I know.” He held out the glass and the pills. “Take these.”

  Even suffering, she took the time to look skeptical. “What is it?”

  “Arsenic. Take it.”

  “Ry.”

  “Go on.”

  Teeth bared bravely, she propped herself up on one elbow, pinching an aspirin aloft in front of her face. She had been swallowing pills for only a few months now, and never in a situation this dire. But lodes of strength ran deep in this girl. A little line dimpled her forehead. She placed the pill on her tongue and with impulsive speed slopped water into her mouth and rocked her head backward in the same alarming style of pill-swallowing as their mother.

  “Good girl. One more.”

  She coughed, the aftereffect of having done something vaguely medical, but it caught in her lungs, wet and crackling and more resonant than any sound that had ever originated from that tender chest. It might have been the same cough she had been nurturing since yesterday. Ry grimaced—it might not. Thirty brutal seconds passed with her spine curled and wretched. Finally she leaned back, taking hold of her injured appendage just above the wrist and settling it in her lap.

  “I have a question,” she whispered.

  “One down the hatch,” he urged softly. “How about another?”

  “He’s going to take it? The meteorite? And sell it?”

  Ry shrugged. “I guess so.”

  Sarah frowned. “That’s a bad plan. It doesn’t make sense.”

  Ry thought for a moment. “I guess not.”

  “And it falling here in the first place—that’s crazy, right? That’s crazy that it happened.”

  Ry nodded. “It is.”

  “Okay, I have another question.”

  “All right.”

  “Is he going to shoot us?”

  “No.”

  “Ry, be truthful.”

  “I am. No.”

  “Is he going to shoot you?”

  It was a trap well set. He massaged his head. “I don’t know. I hope not.”

  “You have a headache?”

  “Yes.”

  She extended a tiny pale hand, touched the bottom of his cupped palm, and lifted it so that the remaining aspirin was elevated to the level of his lip. They did not make girls any finer. Holding back tears, Ry took the pill and placed it on his tongue. She handed over the sweating glass. He tipped it back, swearing to himself that he’d get his sister out of this mess no matter what kind of sacrifice it took.

  The pill was in his mouth when there came a knock at the front door.

  2 HRS., 11 MINS. AFTER IMPACT

  Ry swung into the dining room. Marvin and Jo Beth crowded there, faces broadcasting their fear that Ry might shout for help, because who had any idea what might happen after that. Five heavy raps upon the door—and then a silence in which none of them moved or breathed.

  Then of course came more knocks, harder this time, and six of them; Ry now had an idea of what being shot felt like. People did not make idle sojourns to the Burke farm—it was on the way to nowhere—so this visitor had some good reason to be there, and knowing how farms operated the visitor might amble around back to hunt for them in the barns or fields. They had to face this right now.

  “Anybody home?” boomed the voice. “You folks there?”

  Phinny—oh, Christ, it was Phinny. Ry’s heart skipped and he gaped at his mother, guilt and heroism swirling in his throat, and she transferred his paralyzed appeal to Marvin. He bit his lip with such force that beard hairs shot outward like quills. He made a motion at his wife with the shotgun.

  “Answer it,” he whispered. “Get him out of here.”

  Jo Beth looked at her husband as if he had asked her to host an impromptu dinner party. Her eyes pleaded but he kept white-knuckling the gun, and the way the old parts rattled, agitating the loaded shell, made everyone nervous. Seconds, swollen with fear, dripping with torture, ticked by. At last Jo Beth moved her head in loose circles; maybe it was a nod, though it looked more like her neck had snapped.

  She moved toward the door as if reeled by fish line. Marvin snatched a fistful of Ry’s shirt and pulled him against the dining room wall so that the two of them hid only a few feet from the front door, mere inches from Phinny’s view, the muzzle of the shotgun pushed into the back of Ry’s skull. There was a noise behind them, and both of them twisted their necks to see Sarah standing slack-jawed, the damp cloth draping from her forgotten injury. She might talk, she might scream—Marvin opened his mouth to deliver a warning but there was no time.

  Locks snickered open and the door mewled like a cat.

  “Why, Phinny.” Ry winced; the why was too much. He heard the rusted springs of the screen door push wide. “Good morning. Or is it later than that already?”

  “You know you got live wires out here?”

  Phinny was livid. As gregarious as the man was, he had no patience for incompetence, and the front yard writhing with downed wires had set him on edge. Ry pressed his eyes shut and told himself to stay quiet, stay quiet, stay quiet.

  “Yes,” Jo Beth said. “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “Lightning hit that thing? Sweet Jesus. Dangerous as hell. You’re keeping that girl of yours away?”

  “I am. And I’ll call the phone company and get them to take care of it.”

  “You’ll call them? With what?”

  “With the …” Jo Beth’s voice was louder because she had turned to point a finger at the kitchen, where the dead phone swung like a man hanged. “Oh. Of course. I can’t call, can I?” She giggled; it was over the line of normalcy and Ry held his breath.

  “How about I call for you when I get back?”

  “Oh, Phinny, that would be wonderful. I’m sorry I’m scatterbrained, I just—”

  “Now, look.” The shake of a box of spark plugs brought back to Ry the sweet, safe memories of motor oil and uncooperative engines. “I know these are late. Mary came back from a weekend at the lake with her fellow hoodlums and told me she’s dropping out of school, so I had to dish out all kinds of hell. That had my attention for a couple days, I admit. Then I backed over my mailbox. I know this isn’t a great excuse. But dammit if I wasn’t distracted by all this nonsense with Mary and I guess I wasn’t looking where I was going because I steamrolled that thing, and it gave my back axle a talking to. So there’s a day lost right there. Worst thing of it was my mailman refused to deliver a single piece of paper so long as that mailbox was down. Said it wasn’t regulation. So I had to fix that axle and get myself to town to pick up my mail. Long story short, here’s your plugs, and I hope to God
they work because they’re a different brand and I didn’t have time to double-check compatibility.”

  “Thank you. Thank you, Phinny. This is wonderful. I’ll let Ry know.”

  “Where is he? I better show him myself.”

  “I … ah …”

  Everyone in the house sweated.

  “Ry,” Phinny repeated. “He here?”

  Ry did not need to see his mother to picture the tics of her lie: the false, faltering smile, the eyes rounded and blinking as if somehow offended. They were red flags for anyone with half a brain and Phinny was as sharp as they came. Jo Beth’s silence became a thing too hot to touch, and then the gun was jabbing into Ry’s back, prodding him into the hallway.

  “Fix this.” Marvin’s threat was clammy against Ry’s ear.

  Ry snatched the briefest of looks at Sarah, planted in the center of the dining room and at her father’s mercy, before a shove sent him into the hall. Shoe rubber squeaked across tile and instantly four eyes were on him: Jo Beth’s childlike in naked distress, Phinny’s peering from the shade of the porch. Ry straightened and pushed himself down the hall. He arrived to find his mother holding open the screen door and looking ridiculous—nightgowned and aggrieved in the midday sun. Nothing felt right and Phinny would sense it.

  Ry tried anyway: “Howdy.”

  Phinny held up the box. Ry saw right off that the spark plugs were just what he needed and parted his lips to say it. But he paused. There was a chance here. If he was careful, if he was clever. He settled in next to his mother and gave Phinny a once-over: frayed cap with the seed manufacturer logo subsisting on two or three threads, waterfall beard pouring over the chest, thick neck and thicker torso giving the man the dimensions of a grizzly. It was the bleached overalls Ry was most interested in; often the pouches and loops held screwdrivers and hammers, any of which might be handy if Marvin decided to attack.

  “Hiya,” Phinny said. There was no doubt that he was giving Ry the eye. “Better late than never, I hope.”

  What Ry needed was to send a signal. There was a crazy man hiding six feet away. A gun. Something in the field. They were hostages. Sarah was hurt. Back off, Phinny, drive away, fetch help. But Ry could not risk mouthing any of these words, because if Marvin was peeking he would see everything, and there was Sarah to think about. Ry dug his fingernails into the soft wood of the doorframe and let his mind spin. Then: a delirious flash of inspiration.