The Monster Variations

by Daniel Kraus

  “A thou—? Kid, tell me you’re joking. Oh, you’re no son of mine, not with a brain that thinks that small, there’s just no way. I always thought you looked like somebody else’s kid anyway. You are, aren’t you? Just level with me.”

  “I’m not! I’m yours!”

  “Prove it. Because I don’t believe it. A thousand dollars, unbelievable! Prove to me you’re a son of mine, because this, I’m sorry, I cannot swallow.”

  “I don’t know how!” And now Willie would be laughing, louder and louder to match the increasing volume of his father’s protestations, and soon his mother would appear at the door, unable to resist the joyful noise.

  “I’ll prove it,” she once said, and winked, and his father had made a growling cat noise, and though Willie didn’t get it, they all laughed together, and his father tackled him against the floor and tickled him, asking how much would he pay to insure against this? How about this?

  There had not been such noise in the house for a long time. One day after kissing his dad’s cheek before going outdoors, he felt a cold hand grasp his wrist and wrench him back to the kitchen table. Without another arm to brace himself, Willie nearly fell, but his dad kept him aloft by lifting upward on the arm, too hard. His father’s loose red eyes aligned themselves with Willie’s.

  “Listen,” he whispered. The beer stink entered Willie’s gaping mouth, stole away his breath. His father gripped his wrist even harder, gave it a brisk shake. “This isn’t the life for a kid, I know that. You’re not all there. Look at you. That isn’t right. But what can I do?”

  Willie just stared at him, his wrist smarting.

  “There’s not one thing I can do. If there was information I could give, facts that would actually really truthfully help, don’t you think I would volunteer them?”

  “Barry.” It was his mother, her voice frightened.

  “What information—”

  “Barry.”

  The grip on his wrist tightened, unbearable.

  “What facts could put you back together? Facts don’t mean anything. This is something I’ve learned. One day, Willie, they are going to ask you for the facts.” His father nodded slowly, the pale skin of his razor-burned face looking even deader because of the steady, measured movement. “You tell them. The facts, they do not tell the story.”

  Then his mother was there, releasing his wrist as easily as if she possessed a key, and he was off, away, outside. After the surgery, his mother had changed, too, wide-eyed and open-mouthed and always looking as if she were bracing for impact. Sometimes there would be little moments when Willie’s parents seemed normal. Last Saturday Willie and his mother had laughed together at the cartoons and she had grabbed at his socked feet like she used to while he dodged, and just for a second she had looked like the Momma he remembered. And last week Willie’s dad had helped him catch a salamander that went zigzagging beneath the back porch. There, under the stairs, with mud on his cheek and chin, Willie’s dad had looked just like he used to—funny, laughing, always up for anything. But of late he just slumped through the house in rumpled pajamas, spreading that beery odor—that flat, rotten, bready stink—from his breath, clothes, hair, and skin.

  Sometimes Willie forgot that he didn’t have a left arm. Before he’d come home from the hospital, the doctor had told Willie that, in time, he would “mourn” his missing arm. Later, Willie had heard that the town mourned Greg Johnson at his funeral. He began to wonder if his left arm was buried somewhere in the same cemetery, and if one day he might stand over his arm’s grave, cry a little, read a little bit from the Bible, and then feel a whole lot better because he had finally properly mourned.

  Mournful was not how he felt about his missing limb, not now. His father tended to shy away from the daily dressings, glancing at the naked stump like it was a new, unwanted baby that would not stop wailing. But Willie loved the ritual; it was the only thing he still shared with his mother: the daily unwrappings, her tender fingers, the application of cream, her gentle breath on his sensitive skin, the rewrapping—snug but not too. What else was there? The chores she formerly assigned were too difficult to execute with one arm, and though he gamely tried washing dishes, folding clothes, and clipping coupons, what should have taken minutes lasted hours. She had little use for him indoors, that was clear, but she also did not want him running around outside. Locks on doors were used with frequency, and those doors that did not have locks were given them. Willie assumed his parents feared that the hit-and-run driver would return to finish him off, even though they never dared speak such fears aloud. Even after Greg Johnson had been killed and both Van Allen parents had returned home from the town meeting, they turned away in distaste when Willie had asked too many questions.

  So he did not spend much time missing his arm. He spent much more time trying to keep his room clean (which took longer without a left arm), make his bed (that took longer, too), smile a whole lot, and in general be a very good boy, which he hoped might please his parents and rouse them from their sleepwalking. He carried Softie around whenever he could. He wasn’t much interested in the teddy bear anymore, but his mom seemed to delight in seeing him with it, so he kept it, despite the mean things Reggie said. He tried to avoid Mel Herman, not because he hated him like everyone else, but because he feared his mother’s strange, heartbroken reaction whenever he came home with gum in his hair. It was exhausting, all the things he did each day to keep his parents as happy as possible. Was it normal for a kid to worry that his mother and father would burst into tears at any moment? Wasn’t it supposed to be the other way around? Willie wasn’t sure. So he kept smiling and laughing and being good, while privately wondering why his parents were the ones who acted like they had lost something.

  * * *

  “Willie’s mom called here at the crack of dawn to check up on him,” James’s mother said as she set down his milk and cereal. James had arrived just as his mother was finishing up her own breakfast of grapefruit, toast, marmalade, and tea. Not having had time to reapply makeup after eating, the scar on her upper lip was more visible than usual. James forced himself not to look at it. It upset his mother greatly, this scar; she masked it with more vigor and effort than Willie ever put into trying to hide his stump: cosmetics, lipstick, a raised glass of wine, a knuckle placed to make it look like she was thinking. How a tiny sliver of flesh could be so shameful was unfathomable to James, but it was a flaw, and that was something his mother was not skilled at handling.

  Mr. Wahl stood at the other end of the table, having been dragged in there by his wife to be present for this interrogation. But he had brought with him his work, those thousands of tiny numbers, and he stood above his papers with both hands planted flat. There was paper and pens and a calculator, none of which were good signs.

  James opened the cereal but could not imagine eating. He had disobeyed his parents and they had caught him. His stomach churned and shook, and he needed to use the toilet. But he was not ready to give in, not quite yet.

  “I was rather surprised to receive the call,” continued his mother, “because of course I thought you two were over at Willie’s.”

  “Keep your eye on the donut,” his father said flatly, his eyes never leaving the numbers. He fished a pen from his ink-stained shirt pocket. “You screw up now, it’ll set you on the wrong path for high school, and that’s the launch pad for college. That’s all it is, kid, nothing more.”

  James sighed, taking care to make it sound authentic. “I know.”

  His mother arched an eyebrow as he busied himself with arranging the correct proportion of milk to cereal—without Louise around, it was easy to pour too much of both. His father continued computing his lists of numbers; James could see the mental mathematics tug at his eyes. This was nearly every weekend in the Wahl house: his father consumed with his work and his mother struggling to fill the domestic void left by Louise, who was off on weekends. James remembered when he was very little watching his mother try to hang laundry on a win
dy day. It was a chore she had not been required to do as a youth, and as a young wife it was something at which she had no facility. James remembered the brisk wind and how the snapping sheets fought his mother’s grasping hands, spinning and thickening until she stood defeated before the twisted, anguished cords. Shortly thereafter they hired Louise, a trained nurse who just happened to be an excellent cook and housekeeper.

  Weekends also meant no talking about the hit-and-run driver, Louise’s favorite topic. The ex-nurse was chatty by nature and happily oblivious to other people’s discomfort, and so during the week they often discussed over dinner the ongoing hunt for the killer. With Louise gone, it was verboten. James had the notion that his parents found the subject too vulgar for their table. Unless, of course, they were complaining about how much everyone else in town talked about it—that was fair game. James tried to understand. He knew that neither of his folks had living parents of their own; he had also formed the impression that before he was born there had been other babies who had died while still inside his mother. He was all they had, James knew it. There was no one else left to make them proud.

  “So you feel like telling me where you were?” his mother asked.

  James sighed again. He and Reggie had come up with an excuse on the way home and now was the time to try it. “Willie and me—”

  “Willie and I,” his mother corrected.

  “Willie and I ended up staying at Reggie’s,” he said, doing his best to appear sincere. His mother raised her eyebrow higher. “Don’t worry,” he added, “we were inside before curfew.”

  James glanced at his father and was surprised to see that his father’s eyes had stopped moving. In fact, his entire face and body had gone rigid. This was alarming—although his dad was deadly serious about focusing on the donut, he also took pleasure in James’s occasional misbehavior, often comparing it with his own wild escapades, most of them set in college, before hastily changing his tone and adding an obligatory “mind your mother.” Normally his father would have shrugged off an offense like last night’s curfew-breaking, but this time something was different. Something about the mention of Reggie’s house had his father on edge.

  James’s mother scrutinized her son’s face. He stared down at his cereal and lodged some more in his mouth, his stomach squirming.

  “You can call Reggie’s mom and ask her,” he said between crunches. This was his secret weapon: he knew his mother hated calling Reggie’s mom. Not only did James’s mother think Reggie Fielder was a bad influence, but she also seemed to have a low opinion of his mother. Once James had overheard her saying that “every guy in town” knew Kay Fielder. James knew the reason was something more than the fact that she worked at a restaurant. He had seen plenty of boyfriends come and go from Ms. Fielder’s life, including two significant enough to compel her to move both herself and Reggie into the men’s houses before moving back out a few months later.

  James was not sure his gamble would pay off. His mother looked suspicious. Maybe it was because it was the weekend—his mother grew bolder in the absence of Louise—but all at once James could quite clearly envision his mom calling up Ms. Fielder, not caring for one second that she was probably waking her up. He felt a familiar panic that the road map of his life, so carefully drafted by his parents, was in jeopardy. He thought mournfully of his mother’s scrapbook. While his early years were thick with baby announcements, baptism notifications, school chorus programs, and tennis camp certificates, around age ten he appeared to have stagnated. Over the past couple of years only a handful of items had made the pages, leaving far too many blank for high school and college, more than he could ever fill. James felt that this was his fault—he was blowing it, he was losing traction, everything was falling down the damn hole.

  He had to stop his mother from calling, and so he did something mean. He looked his mother in the eye, waited until he had her full attention, and then flicked his gaze at her scar. Immediately she covered her mouth with a hand and turned away, making a flat noise kind of like laughter, but not quite. It was the same noise she made when his father made a cruel comment about her looks, or an innocent comment that she took the wrong way. James didn’t know how he felt being allied with his father in this fashion. All boys wanted to be grown up, he thought, but did it mean having to feel like this?

  “No, I won’t call her,” his mother said. Her face looked caught, flustered, and she added as if to excuse herself, “She works late.”

  She took a pinch of James’s shoulder.

  “But you know how I feel about you staying there,” she said.

  “Yes, Mom,” James said.

  “It’s just not a good environment for children.”

  “Yes, Mom,” James said.

  “I know you don’t understand now, but there’s certain things you don’t need to be exposed to—”

  “Goddammit.” It was his father’s voice, loud and unexpected. “You mind your mother or I swear to you there will be grief.”

  James’s mother’s hand slid from his shoulder.

  “And why are you covering up your face?” he demanded of his wife. “Why do you always do that? Am I that terrible?”

  There was a sound like rubber, his mother’s foot pivoting on the waxed floor. Then she was gone, moving swiftly through the house. Faraway stairs thumped, banisters creaked. James crunched his cereal for a moment, staring into the milky glow of his spoon. No one was calling anyone, he was safe, but he felt less secure than ever. He chanced a peek at his father.

  His father was staring right at him. His hands were still positioned on either side of the numbers. His body had not moved an inch.

  “You were at Reggie’s house last night,” he said. His voice was soft but direct.

  James moved his jaw around the cereal. “Yes.”

  “Reggie Fielder’s house,” his father said.

  The cereal crackled inside James’s mouth.

  “Last night,” his father said.

  His father knew he was lying. James sat there with half-chewed cereal bloating on top of his tongue, trying to figure out where his plan had gone wrong and waiting for the trouble to start.

  But his father said nothing. Instead, he lowered his head back at his numbers. After a moment he snatched up his pen and put it to paper. Ink moving too fast: it was the sound of a rattlesnake’s approach.

  When James dared chew again, the noise was deafening.

  * * *

  When Reggie got home, his mother was on her back on the sofa, her small white feet hanging over the end. A pillow rested on top of her face. She still wore her waitress uniform; Reggie saw the multicolored splatters of other people’s food. A cigarette was dying on a dinner plate on the floor.

  “Reg?” Her voice was muffled. This was how she liked to sleep. Sometimes Reggie went for days without seeing her face.

  “What.”

  She yawned and weaseled her body deeper into the cushions.

  “There’s chicken-fried steak in the fridge.”

  Reggie looked longingly at the TV and the stereo. He wouldn’t be allowed to turn on either until his mom went back to work at eleven, a whole lifetime away. He tossed his backpack onto the grubby carpet—he barely even noticed the rustle of Mel Herman’s painting inside—and sat in the cushionless rocking chair. With his toe he shoved aside the clay ashtray he had made his mother in art class several years ago, and put his feet up on the busted heater that currently served as their coffee table. He stared at his mother’s body.

  “I was at James’s house last night, in case you were wondering.”

  She didn’t respond. Smoke hung in the air above her head like an empty comic book balloon.

  “Actually, I was at Willie’s,” he said. He waited to see if this change in story would get a reaction.

  Her toes curled, then straightened.

  “Poor kid,” she mumbled through the pillow. Reggie didn’t know if she was referring to him or Willie. Over the past few years, as she had
taken more shifts and responsibility at work, her interest in Reggie’s life had seemed to drift away. She resumed a momentary interest following Willie’s accident, and for a few weeks had talked about the hit-and-run driver incessantly, badgering Reggie with questions that he was only too happy to try to answer. Reggie even brought Willie by at the beginning of the summer so his mom could gasp and shriek and ask him an almost unending series of inappropriate questions. “What was it like waking up without an arm?” “Do you feel sometimes like it’s still there?” “How much does an arm weigh? I mean, how much weight did you lose after it came off?”

  It was embarrassing for Reggie, but Willie didn’t seem to mind. Then she was off to work, and had barely mentioned the hit-and-run driver since, though this could be because she heard it nonstop from diners at the restaurant. She might just be sick of it.

  Reggie stood up and moved to her side. He watched his mother’s chest rise and fall, rise and fall. She was smaller than almost any mother Reggie had ever seen, and younger, too. Reggie was born when his mother was only seventeen, which meant she wasn’t yet thirty. Reggie supposed she was pretty as moms go, which explained the attraction for James and Willie, but he wished she would eat more. She got skinnier and skinnier, which made no sense—she worked at a restaurant! Reggie figured if he worked there he’d be eating burgers and fries and chocolate malts all day long.

  Beneath the pillow, he could see the blond waves of her hair. She spent a lot of time in the mirror messing with it. She’d put junk in it and tie it up above her head. Then she’d let it back down and toss it around her shoulders. Her hair was always flickering about, probably because she had a bouncy step and wore shoes with remarkable heels. When Reggie was younger and she couldn’t find a babysitter, she’d bring him to the restaurant and plunk him down in a corner booth with a stack of coloring books. Reggie, though, would spend most of the evening watching her as she bounced around the restaurant with her blond locks swinging. Reggie couldn’t believe how happy she looked, how widely she smiled at complete strangers, how loudly she laughed when they made jokes. After a while, Reggie started laughing, too. But in the car after work, there was no laughter. She sat in the driver’s seat, counting change.