by Daniel Kraus
Scowler chirped, urging him to look again.
The piece of finger had been replaced by a small nugget of wood, the drop of blood by a scattering of sawdust. Relaxation crashed over Ry like water. Scowler had gifted him with his special brand of blindness. He could see what he wanted to see and it was better, so much better. Chopping wood—that was something he knew how to do. He sighed and turned away from the table, eager to get started.
Marvin Burke had been replaced by a wooden Indian so tall the peaks of his headdress poked through the top of the ceiling. Ry nodded at Scalper Jim, a salutation between warriors. His appearance at this moment felt natural, though in truth Ry had not anticipated the Indian’s size. Marvin’s proxy was a goliath whose strength was derived from the simplicity of his formation; it would be difficult to break a hand that had no fingers, challenging to damage a chest that was but one solid block.
But he would try.
Ry attacked, only now it was Scowler, not Ry, and sawed-off steel, not a cleaver. The whetted edge struck Scalper Jim’s defending elbow and cracked like an axe ricocheting from a tree trunk. Scowler’s little body was shaken and as he recovered he heard the splintering sound of Scalper Jim’s mighty limbs shifting into combat position. Jim did not go for the shotgun and this too Scowler admired. If there was anything that Marvin had made clear about his admiration for Jim, it was the Indian’s disinterest in the white man’s toys.
The tomahawk was at chest level and rising. Scowler spluttered excitedly and scurried to the right, coming in fast with another stab. This time the blade gouged across the slab of Scalper Jim’s left arm, carving out a curled ribbon. Sawdust hit Scowler’s empty eyes and coated his flashing teeth. He clucked in glee.
It was this injured arm that Scalper Jim extended with authority. His fist, the size of a breadbox, cracked the underside of Scowler’s chin. Scowler reeled, feeling the collapse of his head’s understructure, the snap of strings within his cloth neck, the loosening of nails all over. His metal skeleton began trembling, then shaking, then jackhammering with the punishing pulse of an Indian chant coming from inside the wooden colossus.
If one did not know better, the chant could be mistaken for a tuneless hum.
“Hmmmm hm hm hmmmm.
“Hmmmm hm hm hmmmm.
“Hmmmm hm hm hmmmm.
“Hmmmm hm hm hmmmm.”
The story told by these tribal noises was a violent one with themes of loss, wrath, and revenge. It was almost too much to take. Scowler’s head lolled on its busted neck and bled onto the floor a dozen seashell teeth. Certain emotions he knew well—rage and fury—but this thing called fear was new. There was no denying the truth that towered before him: Scalper Jim was bigger and stronger and had fought more bravely in larger numbers of fiercer battles. The cries of alarm coming from the human females made perfect sense because Scalper Jim was unbeatable.
That line of thinking did not last.
He was Scowler.
Scowler.
TK!
Scalper Jim’s tomahawk dove and Scowler sidestepped it. He scampered face-first into the Indian’s shins, clamped down with shark jaws, and began to climb the leg with his teeth, taking big bites of everything along the way, relishing the smooth coffee of maple wood, the bitter cinnamon of sandpaper. He munched thigh, groin, and stomach, while Scalper Jim flung his tomahawk at the height of his usual enemies. Scowler was no cowboy. For that matter, he was no neighbor farmer, no seed salesman, no jailer, no wife, no escaped convict encountered and scalped in the corn. He was Scowler, an uncategorizable thing of which there was no double or even words to accurately describe. He was brutality, he was pain, and this slothful redskin never even had a chance.
Scowler’s teeth punched through Scalper Jim’s throat and hung tight even as the Indian began to flail. The screaming from the humans in the next room increased, while Scowler’s mouth flooded with wood chips and spilled over with sawdust. Finally the weight of this scrap wood became too much and he dropped to the floor. Scalper Jim had no knees but they buckled anyway—with two earsplitting pops both legs snapped in half. He fell, taking out the kitchen table in the process, landing so hard that his left hand and right arm broke off and a fissure rent his torso from neck to loincloth.
Scowler leapt, circled, and did what he did best: He ate.
The next few minutes were lost to him. His face was buried in (guts) wood, ripping past (skin) bark, and chewing up (organs) knots, though there were times when instead of the coarseness of lumber he swore his tongue tasted slick patties of warm meat and the spurt of tangy liquid. But he fought through it—he ate through it—and when he finally arose, smacking his damp cloth lips, he thought he had never felt so full and powerful, so quaking with the adrenaline of disaster.
But there was a funny feeling in his belly.
He recognized it and flashed his tiny teeth.
He was still hungry.
23 HRS., 19 MINS. AFTER IMPACT
Jo Beth took Sarah’s wrist and darted through the dining room, into the hall, and up against the front door. The locks were in place but she might have had time to throw them if not for Scowler, the four-inch doll, jammed through the chain and beaming at them. It was a fright too many. She took Sarah’s hand and they scrambled up the stairs.
Ry watched them flee. His eyes fell upon Scowler, beckoning to him from the front door, which meant he had vacated Ry’s head, at least for now. Ry licked his briny chin and nodded. Yes, yes, he was coming. But as he made his way across the kitchen, he noticed a wadded matchbook with the logo of a tavern and a rumpled pack of Luckies. What was spread across the rest of the linoleum did not interest him, and he narrowed his focus to these discreet few inches. With his toe he pushed aside the matches and cigarettes, then nudged at the breast pocket of a prison shirt until it gave up its hidden cargo.
It was a small wooden carving of Scalper Jim. Marvin Burke, a man known for truth, had lied. He had not, in fact, put away childish things. Prison, Ry saw, had crushed the man until he had admitted to loneliness, the most shameful of things, and had found a way to craft a replica of his old friend from some esoteric scrap of wood. Using the bluntest of tools—Ry imagined the rounded edges of spoons, the harmless plastic of a toothbrush handle—the whittling must have taken an eternity. But it had been worth it. His father had clutched the toy warrior as Ry had once snuggled a turquoise teddy bear, and it had gotten the man through hell, out of prison, and then back into hell once more.
The figurine had broken in the skirmish. One hand and one arm had snapped off, and the torso was practically cracked in two. Ry felt his spirits taken by melancholy. Finding this speck of humanity was the last thing he wanted. His focal point widened enough to see that the floor, the walls, and even the ceiling were slopped not with the shavings of carpentry but the viscera of a hog house, and the carcass at his feet was a man who had been eviscerated, his chest cavity cracked open like a nut, dark currents still bubbling from the countless primitive gorings. There were sour chunks in Ry’s cheeks and stringy fibers caught in his teeth. They were the flesh of organs, he knew that, just not which ones.
Ry turned away, vomit stewing in his throat.
Footsteps rattled across the second story. Ry’s nose jerked upward, attuned to a predator’s frequency: Tk-tk-tk! He scanned the ceiling, wondering where on earth they thought they were going: Tk-tk-sh’sh! Scowler cackled appreciatively. That was more like the boy he knew, the soldier he’d travel alongside into any glade of any level of blackness. Ry felt his nausea resolve into something warm, something close to lust but even more primal. Scowler was offering to climb into his head once more, but this time Ry wanted to do it himself, to show his brother what he was made of. He still, after all, had the cleaver.
Ry covered the ground floor in an instant and snatched up Scowler without slowing. Each staircase step was to be relished. The family photos opposite the banister were enjoyably insane, weird portraits of smiling buffoons with their arms around one a
nother as if they had all the time in the world to escape doom. He tipped each one with a single finger until it slipped from its nail and exploded upon the stairs behind him.
The upstairs hallway was just as fascinating. He could see into Sarah’s room, a pastel junkyard of jilted toys and kids’ books; he could even see her beloved spiral notebook, right alongside a dog-eared volume titled My Stars!: Asteroids, Comets, and Meteors. Craning his neck, he could see through the ceiling door into the attic, where a piece of actual meteorite—not to mention some battered old dolls—lay forgotten in a nest of attractive though frivolous fabric. Scowler betrayed a single peep of nostalgia. He had spent a lot of time up there.
The one closed door belonged to his mother’s bedroom. Ry sidled up to it and listened. Behind it he heard the rodent frettings of animals still clinging to life. Ry’s mind was a hectic place now, but he seemed to recall standing in this spot many years ago while the one called Jo Beth lay on the other side making very similar, very desperate noises. It was funny, he mused, the difference a little perspective made. In a few moments the woman might remember those bindings and wish she had never been cut free.
23 HRS., 23 MINS. AFTER IMPACT
Scalper Jim had failed him.
It was enough to make even a man like Marvin Burke cry. Instead, translucent goo seeped from a ruptured eye. He did not remember that particular injury, but looking over himself with the eye that still worked, he found that he did not remember fielding the lion’s share of these damages. Bones popped their white daggers through clothes and tender morsels of flesh were scattered as if by a storm. He looked bad, but he could not help but find the sight of his massacre comforting. It reminded him of the way soil used to look in the wake of the combine’s tiller.
He flicked the remains of Scalper Jim from his chest. Nearby rested the stamped pack of Luckies and the matchbook. He took them up in a fist. It would be nice, he thought, for his final inhale to taste of nicotine, and even better, he speculated, to watch the smoke escape through the new holes of his chest like his spirit lifting from his body. It was grand in a way—a lot better than wasting away in a cell.
His eye fell upon the pine tree.
The clenching of spiteful muscles squeezed blood from a dozen mortal wounds. Here he was, perfecting his death, and that tree lay there mocking him. It had been the first thing he had spotted when sneaking into the house, a sight so offensive it had all but erased the image of Jeremiah’s scalping. With its dirty roots and brown needles and moronic sash of holiday lights, the tree represented all that had gone wrong with the model family that he’d tried to fashion. He’d made mistakes, sure, but none so unforgiveable as those made by his wife and son. The crops were dead, the counters were dirty, but still the imbeciles took time to dress up this piece-of-shit shrub.
The tree was on its side near his feet. He began to prop himself on an elbow so that he could reach it, but halfway up he felt a shift inside his torso cavity as his organs prepared to spill onto the floor. He lay back down. His skull felt lightweight and his vision was pinkish. At last, though, his headache was gone. It felt good to think so clearly, so good that he laughed. That meteorite to his left, sunk into melted linoleum, he didn’t even want to look at it. Clarity snaked through his busted chest as if it had been trapped inside for days. Coming to the farm had been a bad idea. It was so obvious now. Once here he’d had an entire day to run, yet had not. Stupid, stupid. His mind, whetted for so long, had been dulled by the rock, or by Jim, and the most precious hours of his life had been squandered. For a man who prided himself on efficiency, it was the bitterest pill.
His body convulsed so violently that his fingers went rigid and brushed what felt like glass. Marvin gathered energy into his neck and took a look. It was a bulb at the end of the string of Christmas lights, which had unfurled when the tree had fallen. He extended his fingers—one of the tips was missing, he noted—and scratched them across the cord until it was close enough for him to take hold of the bulb. It was blue.
He instructed himself to flex his arm, while keeping his eye on the ceiling so that he could avoid the cutaway view of his bicep. Caught by the string of lights, the tree pulled closer. He employed his other hand too, the one threatening to shed its glove of skin, and was able to slide the tree alongside him like a wife in a marital bed. The topmost needles poked into the raw meat of his face and flaked away the charred crust of his mustache. Marvin sighed as deeply as he dared; it was pleasant to feel his mustache one more time.
Operating matches with the tip of a middle finger missing was surprisingly tricky. Finally he positioned a match sufficiently and flicked it across the graphite the same way he’d done it all of his life, and presto—a flame. He grinned. The heat warmed the enamel of his teeth. Not the same as taking a drag, but close. He brought the match toward the dry needles. It hovered too close; it drifted too far. Marvin chuckled up blood and felt sympathy for poor old Phinny Rochester—gauging distance with one eye was no mean feat.
Marvin was concentrating so hard that he missed the precise moment that his lungs failed to inflate. They settled like a wedding veil dropped to the floor. While registering this, he also missed the final contraction of his heart. He only noticed, seconds later, how the babbling brook of his blood had stopped.
Time to. Move. He touched the. Fire to the tree. It. Caught immediately. This would show. Him. The boy. Who’d fought him. Somehow won. Though there had been. Another one. Hadn’t there? Hadn’t he. Seen? A little? Beast? Chewing at? His Achilles tendon? As he had. Once. Cut a man’s. In prison? He wasn’t sure. Nothing was. Certain. Just. Smoke. And look—so. Much. Fire, so. Quickly. This. Would show. Them. What. Kind of. Man. He.
23 HRS., 25 MINS. AFTER IMPACT
The secret key ring of Marvin Burke had never been found. Not during the trial, not after he had been sent to Pennington. So Ry did not make a big thing of it: He turned the bedroom doorknob and it opened easily. The one called Jo Beth and the one called Sarah both shrunk their shoulders and whipped their heads in unison.
They were trying to leave out the window. A sensible idea, given that the porch was right below; if they weren’t too clumsy about it, they could escape without anything worse than a stubbed toe or a jammed finger. The problem was that Ry had nailed shut the troublesome window on Sunday afternoon. The room was a coffin.
Ry entered feeling like an owner. This bed, these walls, that window, this house, the whole farm—it was all at his mercy, just like Scowler said. He strode forward with the cleaver extended in one hand, Scowler in the other, and caught a glimpse of himself in the dresser mirror. He was coated with so much gore that it looked as if he had been skinned. He turned away from this promising vision and placed Scowler upon the bed, even taking a moment to situate him on a pillow so he could watch. Scowler whimpered and began burrowing. As surely as Sniggety could sniff out roadkill, Scowler could smell the old blood on the flip side of the mattress.
The one called Sarah backed herself into the corner nearest the window. The one called Jo Beth tore her eyes from the creature on the bed and moved an arm’s length from the pane so that her body stood between her two children. She held up a hand as if believing that the cleaver wouldn’t cut through it like butter. Tk-hraw! Tk-tk! Ry advanced and thought how wonderful it was that their final confrontation would take place here, in this room, the secret dark heart of the farm. The females would be split open and who knew if sawdust or something else would fall out.
“Stop,” Jo Beth said. “You stop right there.”
Ry did stop. Her voice had changed since he’d last heard it. It puzzled him. The tone was not the delicate china arrangement he recalled from the crater. Nor was it the screeching falcon from when she had slapped him. He searched his memory, an act now as effortless as paging through a phone book, and traced the tone of voice back to nine years ago in this very spot.
Things that emerged stronger from suffering were to be mistrusted.
“Now you’re com
ing after me.” Her voice was as flat and simple as a plate. “I understand that. I hate what I did to you. You should know that. I hurt you—you think I don’t know that? When the teachers stopped believing in you and the therapists stopped believing in you, I stopped believing in you too. That’s all there is to it. All right? Now put that thing down.”
On the bed, Scowler ceased his hunt for blood.
Jo Beth’s lips curled up against her teeth. She looked ready to bite. This right here, her normal face, Ry realized with fright, was the woman’s monster form. It had been brazenly displayed right in front of his eyes all these years.
“I kept you here when you should have been out there, moving on, doing I’m not even sure what. College?” She shook her head once, and the sweaty mat of her hair flung and returned like houseflies caught on flypaper. “That’s my fault and I know it. But it’s your fault, too. You understand? If enough time passes, the world ruins everybody.”
Scowler broke his silence with a lowing. His cornmeal guts began to rattle.
Sarah appeared to hear it. Her nose crinkled and she flapped her hands as if they were covered with wasps. Ry took a step back, the cleaver growing heavy in his fist. No one but him, the special boy, the one true fighter, was supposed to be able to hear Scowler. But that wasn’t what Sarah was detecting.
“Smoke.” She was sniffing the air. “Mom, smoke.”
Jo Beth’s hand veered toward the girl, but her eye line did not shift.
