The Monster Variations

by Daniel Kraus

  “I must be an awful waitress,” she muttered.

  “I think you’re really good,” Reggie ventured.

  “What do you know about waitressing?” she snapped, stuffing the money into her purse. It had been a great effort for her, getting a job at one of the nicer restaurants in town. Reggie knew she worked her ass off trying to get better shifts. She spent spare time studying library books about wine. She even tried to convince her boss to class up the joint by retiring those tacky uniforms. But it seemed to Reggie that every month there was a setback—some boss dangling the position of assistant manager only to give it to someone else, some shift supervisor patting her on the butt, that hostess position they would not give to her no matter how badly she begged.

  In the V-neck of the uniform, Reggie could see her chest bones. Resting on her sternum was a golden heart-shaped locket. It was green in spots. One of her hands rested alongside the locket and the fingernails were painted pink, but the polish was chipped. She wore three rings but none of them was a wedding band. She had left Reggie’s father before Reggie was old enough to remember. Now he knew only that his father was in prison and that he was never to speak of him to anyone, least of all her boyfriends, whom she went through at a relatively set pace—about one per year. She brought these men home with increasing infrequency, which Reggie appreciated even while it made him nervous: he no longer knew how serious she was getting with any of them. Now his fear was that at any moment she would announce that they were once again moving all their junk into some strange man’s house. Reggie promised himself that the next time she made such an unfair demand, he would refuse. It was that simple. He could live on his own if necessary. He could sleep in the tree house. James and Willie would bring him food. It could work.

  Both of his best friends still inquired about his mom, like you would ask after an old friend who moved away. His mother had been something of a celebrity to James and Willie ever since they were little because she had treated them like equals instead of brats. She asked them about their classmates and their teachers, and didn’t hesitate to call either group Miserable Bastards or Giant Bitches. She would let them look on as she arranged her hair, as she picked out her makeup; she’d ask them what color she should go with before squatting with them on the carpet and painting her toenails. She told James and Reggie to call her Kay, and every time they called her Ms. Fielder she crossed her eyes and pretended to gag.

  Reggie hated it. He hated watching his mother, still wet from the shower and wrapped in bath towels, as she adorned herself in the clothes and hair of a movie star. It simply was not what moms were supposed to do. The whole thing was humiliating for him, but it was the “Kay” that upset him the most. She was a mother, she was “Mom,” and she was all Reggie had, and by calling her Kay, James and Willie stole even that away from him. If she really was Kay, then Mom must be dead and gone. James and Willie did not get it—they even nicknamed her Call-Me-Kay, which Kay herself found adorable—and so Reggie had no other option but to keep his friends away from the house as much as possible. James’s place, Willie’s tree house, the junkyard: all of these were better options, because Call-Me-Kay would not be there.

  Now it did not matter, because she was hardly ever home. All at once Reggie didn’t like seeing that pillow over his mother’s face. It reminded him of a casket lid. Nervously, he reached down and slowly lifted it away.

  There she was, Mom, her painted eyes closed, her pink lips parted, a bead of drool hanging at the corner of her mouth. Her eyelashes fluttered, then her green eyes squinted open, and she looked at Reggie like she had never seen him before.

  After a moment she spoke in a hoarse voice. “What’s the matter?”

  Reggie shrugged.

  “I could only see your hair.”

  She frowned, closed her eyes again, and turned to nuzzle the back of the sofa.

  “Maybe I oughta cut it off,” she mumbled.

  Reggie pictured her standing in front of the bathroom mirror, sawing off all that pretty hair with a pair of rusty scissors, and suddenly his legs felt trembly and liquid. He wanted to lie down next to his mother, right now. He didn’t even care if he got other people’s food all over him.

  “Lemme sleep, Reg,” she said. Her hand reached out and clawed the air.

  After a moment, Reggie held out the pillow so her hand could snatch it. She pressed the pillow back down over her face. Moments later Kay was snoring.

  Desperate Boys Get

  Destroyed—Hated,

  Stubborn, Stupid

  Most rumors about Mel Herman are not true. He did not put a kindergarten kid into traction. He did not light a cow on fire so he could watch the thing thrash about the field before falling over in a smoldering pile. He did not slash the wheels of the gym teacher’s car. He did not eat a live mouse, bones and all. He did not refuse an offer to join the training camp of a professional baseball team.

  But one rumor is true. He did, once upon a time, have a paper route. It is three years ago: each morning, a white van deposits a thick slab of bound newsprint on Mel Herman’s front lawn, and he wakes up before dawn to roll and rubber-band the newspapers—roll, snap, roll, snap—before piling them with ink-stained fingers into a huge sack that he balances atop his shoulders before hitting the pavement.

  The paper route ends just over a year after it began, when Mel slings a rolled-up newspaper with such force that it punches a neat hole in someone’s front window. Intrigued by this achievement, and fascinated by the near-perfect roundness of the wound in the glass, he tries it again a couple houses down. This time an entire living room window explodes, leaving behind a mesmerizing pattern of shards clinging to the window frame—conjoined triangles like mountain ranges, swooping curves like ocean waves, pointy spindles like rows of sharks’ teeth. Like magic, the window becomes something he could stare at all day, though of course he can’t—here comes the patter of slippered feet and a woman’s screech, and so Mel beats hell out of there, knowing it is the last time he’ll toss newspapers, which is a real shame now that some good finally came of it.

  That night, after being summoned to the newspaper office and fired, Mel goes home, closes his bedroom door, removes his battered lunch box of paint and brushes, and paints his memory of the two destroyed windows. He finds that, once shattered, the window can be reconstructed in a million different ways, and that the points of broken window do exactly that, they point, to other destinations of glassy perfection and smashed ruin. This connecting-the-dots is art to Mel Herman, though he does not call it art. He just does it, quickly and for the record, as another kid might jot a diary entry.

  After that final day of the paper route, Mel Herman paints what he sees, and he sees when he walks, so it’s simple—he just never stops walking. These days he paints so forcefully that sometimes the brush splits to daggers in his hand. It used to be different. He used to draw what other kids drew: fantasy things, normal things, things you didn’t need to walk the town to appreciate. Long before leaving for the big city in the middle of the night a few years ago, Mel’s brother, five years older than Mel, used to emerge from his private, padlocked room of smoke and smells and music, and make fun of Mel’s paintings. You sissy, you queer, you girl. But Mel kept on, and soon his brother started shrugging from behind his cigarettes and tossing record albums on Mel’s bed. “Draw something like that,” his brother said. “I’m gonna need some album art pretty soon.” Mel complied, and when he heard his brother’s guitar making noises from behind that padlocked door, Mel turned that noise into paint.

  Then his brother dropped out of high school and skipped town. Mel kept painting; he’d come back, Mel was sure of it. And a few weeks later, his brother did return, his face ash, his arms skinny, his fingers twitching, his busted jack-o’-lantern grin looser and hungrier than ever. Through a mouthful of nicotine and beer suds Mel’s brother reported that his band was practicing all the time in the city, they were loud and incredible, and they’d need some album art real
soon, Mel, so keep it up, man, keep it up. His brother left again, and Mel kept it up.

  When his brother next returned it was nearly a year later, and he was all pelvis and vertebrae and jawbone, with skin as dry and scratchy as that brown paper they made Mel paint on at school. His brother smelled rancid and his teeth were gray, and the long hair that was his pride was patchy and clung together in slippery clumps. Several of his brother’s fingertips were burned so badly there were black holes in the skin. Mel mentioned it—he was worried it would impede guitar playing. “Matches” was all that his brother said, while hacking and spitting snot and rubbing warmth back into his shaking elbows. There was less talk about the band this time, more talk about how bad he needed money. Their father, as usual, would give him nothing—especially if Mel’s brother was going to use the cash to ruin himself with odious habits. After a late-night shouting encounter on this topic, Mel’s brother escaped again beneath the stars, and he left without taking any of the dozens of paintings Mel had made for his band.

  So he stopped painting album covers and started painting the world. Those two busted windows flash in his memory. Mel is impatient for another such opportunity to present itself, so he begins carrying a fist-sized rock in his shirt pocket, and with every step the rock swings and beats against his heart, bump, bump, bump, bump, until by the end of the day the skin there is tender and blue, and until, after a while, the bruise is replaced with a patch of skin thicker and harder. This weapon against his heart strengthens him with every step. His heart is stone.

  One day he throws the rock to scare off a frothing dog with crossed eyes that slinks out from the abandoned train depot. Mel is older now and a rock seems kind of stupid anyway, so he replaces it with something better: the padlock still hanging loose from his brother’s bedroom door. Mel finds that his hand curls nicely around the cold metal, and that it feels good how powerfully his middle finger grips the upper loop. Tucked into his clenched palm, it turns Mel’s fist to metal. Hidden back inside his shirt, Mel’s heart turns to metal, too; the new weapon beats ruthlessly against him as he takes each one of the thousands of steps that moves him around the town: thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk. To hide it he finds an old black shirt of his brother’s and wears it over the top of his clothes nearly every day.

  Then it is Christmas Eve and Mel is passing through the town square with his chin tucked low inside the black shirt, and he comes upon a familiar plaster scene: Mary, Joseph, angels, shepherds, a baby. He chooses one of the wise men. He reaches below his brother’s shirt and removes his heart. In his hand the padlock is so icy cold that it feels ten times heavier, and before this powerful sensation of heaviness leaves him, Mel punches and punches, losing the padlock in the madness, and there is new destruction, plenty of it, if only he can remember all of it for later: tiny white facial features, golden bits of costuming, two hands still locked in prayer formation. That night he paints, but the dismembered wise man looks too much like his brother. Mel feels stupid and lonely and, after a while, agitated. He finds he misses that familiar weight against his chest, so he rummages through his brother’s room until he finds a new object, this one even larger and more dangerous. He puts it beneath the black shirt next to his heart.

  Now it’s summer—the bloody summer of Greg Johnson and Willie Van Allen—and Mel Herman walks, and looks, and listens. He still leaves home each day at sunrise, and tiptoes out so as not to wake his father—he can hardly bear the thought of seeing the old man in the full light of day—and returns shortly before dark, when his father’s phlegmy voice shouts for him to come closer. Until then Mel will not think of it; he shuts it away in the back of his mind. Though he no longer lugs a sack of newspapers, Mel still keeps to his old route, every day. It is a hot summer and his nose is sweaty; he pushes his taped glasses upward and walks faster.

  He is glad it is summer. Teachers sicken him, especially the new art teacher, Mr. Camper, with his beard, long hair, and rolled-up flannel shirt sleeves, and his insistence that his students call him by his first name—“Bud”—not to mention the way he has of praising Mel’s work and then looking at him as if waiting on Mel’s response, a response that Mel goes out of his way to withhold. Teachers, including Mr. Camper—”Bud”—have always claimed to like Mel’s stuff, but they never really look at it for more than a few brief moments. It’s all in there, Mel wants to scream at them, as they blabber about his talent and hang his oversize paintings in the school hallway along with all the other worthless junk. If you would just look, you’ll see everything-you, me, this town, my missing brother, my furious father, and all the terrible things that happen that no one ever wants to see. These thoughts shoot through his brain. But when he opens his mouth, only foul words come out, and then even Mr. “Bud” Camper looks at him in exasperation and disappointment.

  Kids are even worse. Mel detests them. Often he overlooks his hatred and plays junkball with them and has fun, even convincing them to try big-league plays like the sacrifice fly and the hit-and-run, until he recognizes that animal fear in their eyes. In a way, Mel is glad the other kids are afraid. As long as they are afraid they will not come close enough to learn his secrets, like the new weapon hanging hard across his chest, or how his brother shriveled to a living corpse before vanishing into the city, or the greatest secret of all: the truth about his father.

  If Mel needs to frighten them, or punch them, all right, fine, good.

  So he spends most of his time with grown-ups. Each summer Mel works odd jobs for some of the same people who used to be on his paper route; this is partly why Mel always seems to be everywhere, roving, absorbing, recording everything for translation into paint. At first he refused to spend all of his time laboring, but his father does not work and starves for money like animals starve for food, and so Mel takes on the jobs, scraping scum from an above-ground pool, knocking dried mud from trucks, pushing a lawn mower around some guy’s colossal backyard. Initially Mel is concerned about what these people say—about him (“You’re far too big for sixth grade”), about his brother (“He seemed to me like a decent kid before he got mixed up in a bad scene”), sometimes even about his father.

  Mel relaxes when he realizes that few grown-ups seem to notice him. They talk around him like he’s not there. After a while, he observes a curious thing. In the mornings, grown-ups love their town and can hardly believe their dumb luck for having landed here. Then the morning bleeds into day and as the temperature rises their contentment splits and frazzles, and by the second cup of coffee it is not a nice town, not at all, it is a dangerous place where no one in their right mind would want to live. These grown-ups look right through Mel Herman and size up one another—the cement truck driver looks at the parking meter attendant, the parking meter attendant looks at the pharmacist’s assistant, and so on—and then they all smile and nod hello, but deep down feel suspicion and resentment. You cannot trust these people, their looks say to Mel. Not these days you can’t. Mel keeps his mouth shut, accepts his meager money, and shuffles away with a sneer curling his lips, because for once the grown-ups are right. He continues down the road, the lethal heaviness beneath his brother’s black shirt beating into his heart, bam, bam, bam, bam.

  What the grown-ups are afraid of is what happened to Greg Johnson. Mel Herman knows a thing or two about Greg Johnson. He knows that the kids of the town hardly think about Greg at all anymore; when Mel cuts through the playground he never hears Greg’s name, not ever. But the grown-ups can talk of little else, and so the name churns above the kids like irksome mosquitoes: Greg Johnson, Greg Johnson, Greg Johnson.

  Mel works for a woman named Miss Bosch. She is old and seems even older. She lies motionless beneath damp sheets all day in front of a chugging metal fan. Whorls of hair cling wet to her face. Mel goes once a day to check on her. That’s it—to check and see if she is okay. Mel guesses his real job is to make sure Miss Bosch hasn’t died. Occasionally she asks for something, a tiny wafer of food or another cup of water, and when the task is com
pleted she is as likely to frown at him as to smile. She talks sometimes, too, and if she’s feeling well enough, she asks questions. She asks if they’ve found the hit-and-run killer. Mel says no. She asks if it’s true that grown-ups have taken it upon themselves to patrol their neighborhoods night and day, and meet together weekly to discuss any suspect strangers. Mel says yes, he has seen it. She sighs resentfully and gives him a look, and asks if he thinks these patrols are a good use of time.

  Mel doesn’t know, so he sneaks up to one of these gatherings of grown-ups. He finds them at a house with a back porch and fenced-in yard, with plenty of space for lawn chairs and coolers and children. The grown-ups sit together mostly in silence, while the kids dodge around the lawn, whooping and grasping at fireflies and tumbling and skinning extremities. Mel is so close to the grown-ups he can smell the liquor and barbeque sauce on their words, but he is not afraid, because he has that weight on his chest and will use it if necessary.

  The grown-ups are unhappy with the police, who have no leads in finding the killer. They talk of the Van Allens, only briefly, and only in the lowest of tones. The Van Allens, they say, are not doing well, not at all. But their voices brighten when they speak about the Johnsons, who despite their woeful loss are setting a wonderful example with their nightly patrols up and down neighborhood streets. The grown-ups claim they will invite the Johnsons over sometime. Not now, it’s too soon. But sometime, the grown-ups are sure of it.

  Mel tells all this to Miss Bosch. He describes how easy it is to spot one of these grown-ups on patrol, because of how absurdly slow they always drive, their bug-eyed, oscillating faces, and the languid, glacial crunch of their tires inching across gravel. Miss Bosch looks a little mean when she laughs and Mel Herman likes that.