The Monster Variations

by Daniel Kraus

  Mel also hears things from the other grown-ups who employ him. Mel is at their house ripping up the dining room linoleum when Mr. and Mrs. Huron return from a town meeting about the curfew, angrier than when they left. Mrs. Huron stomps upstairs, Mr. Huron heads out back, and the children are left alone with the only thing they care about anyway, their mountain of clattering plastic.

  Mel is there soaking up water in her flooded kitchen when Ms. Daisy prepares to take her turn on neighborhood patrol, screwing on a large, flowered hat, unrolling long smooth gloves, and patting herself down before picking up her purse and car keys. When she catches herself in the mirror, Mel sees what Ms. Daisy sees: the ridiculous and elaborate costume of someone totally unequipped to catch a killer.

  Mel is there on a ladder, brushing cobwebs from the gutters, when through the open window he hears Mr. Coleman shake his neighborhood patrol schedule and shout into the phone, “Well, is it your turn, Dave? Or is it mine?” Weeks later, after one grown-up reportedly falls asleep on patrol and topples a mailbox, Mel sees Mr. Coleman rip his schedule from the bulletin board and crinkle it into the phone receiver. “I’m not going to have some idiot running over my kid!”

  They are all part of Mel’s town and are duly incorporated into large paintings made on that scratchy brown paper Mr. “Bud” Camper, for some reason, keeps giving to Mel for free. Some of these paintings hang in school hallways. Most of them are rolled up and stuffed inside Mel’s closet. But all of them are evidence. Look closely. Mr. and Mrs. Huron are rust-colored piping shooting off in opposite directions near the center of the town. Ms. Daisy is a bronze star made from shimmering sparkles, then snuffed with charcoal. Mr. Coleman is an angry red spiral that spins inward until he swallows his own burning tail. Of course Miss Bosch is there, too, a yellow skeletal shape with limbs so long they connect to and become every road, street, and alley, granting her miraculous escape despite the fact that she does not leave the bed.

  Everything else can be found on these maps, too. Kids he knows. Places he’s been. Things he’s seen. Fights. Parties. His father. Blood spots on the pavement. As he has almost told “Bud”—and would tell him if he didn’t so strongly distrust the bearded, long-haired, sleeve-rolled art teacher—the facts are all there for the seeing, if only someone bothered to look.

  Last Chances Don’t Matter

  James and Willie were not much interested in high schoolers, except one. His name was Tom, and for months it had been said that Tom had in his possession a monster. Details were sketchy and sources unreliable, but it was generally agreed that the monster was dead. What remained unclear was what kind of monster it was, and where Tom had found it. Several kids who had older siblings claimed to have seen pictures (grainy, out-of-focus, dark), and one kid claimed to have a sister who touched it and woke up the next day with a rash.

  Reggie too was interested in Tom, though in a different way than James and Willie. Reggie was fascinated with all teenagers and spoke to them whenever he could, sometimes abandoning his friends when he saw a group of older kids across the street. More than one junkball game had been disrupted when a group of teens came by with burning cigarettes and bottled beverages, causing Reggie to lodge his glove in his armpit and go dashing off to greet them.

  Reggie used the Monster only as an excuse to muse aloud about the teenagers, what they were doing, the kinds of things they said, banal descriptions of their hair and skin and clothes. Meanwhile, the other kids, including James and Willie, would try to steer the conversation back to where it belonged. “I heard that it’s a baby monster,” said James. Willie added, “What phylum or species does it belong to, do you think?”

  As spring yielded to summer, and the frenzied classrooms gave way to the quiet immensity of the town, the Monster was forgotten. But then came the hit-and-runs. The curfew-shortened days now had to be plotted carefully and spent judiciously, and the Monster was something concrete one could plan to see, go to see, then see.

  It was James who first proclaimed, “Let’s go see the Monster!” It was after they had stayed overnight at the school and finished off several other escapades, and Reggie was starting to look bored and impatient. This was a dangerous state of mind for Reggie to be in, and it made James nervous. He could see it in the angry line of Reggie’s lips, his sudden, short outbursts, the way he hurled rocks at things he shouldn’t. There was abuse coming, James could feel it, and so he suggested seeing the Monster merely as something to occupy Reggie’s mind. Once spoken, Reggie pounced on the idea and suggested tomorrow as being as good of a day as any, then turned to Willie for confirmation. James knew this trick. Willie would be flattered that he was consulted first and would agree to anything Reggie said. On cue Willie grinned and nodded and went on braiding dandelion stems. “See the Monster, see the Monster,” he sang to himself, as if it were nothing more than words.

  It was increasingly difficult for Willie to get permission to leave the house these days—once or twice a week there were rumors of a truck gunning its engine outside the schoolyard or across from the park—but the boys managed by promising to bring Willie back before lunch. The next day the three boys set off in the morning, taking turns lugging the backpack full of sandwiches they had assembled, poorly, in James’s kitchen without any help from Louise. Reggie ate his sandwich before they were even two blocks from home and ended up sputtering out much of it when Willie flung an acorn at a squirrel, lost his balance, and fell. Willie got up, patted himself off with his one hand, grinned self-consciously, and asked for his sandwich, too. James kneeled down to fish it from the backpack and glanced up to catch Willie touching his stump and wincing.

  At Buchanan Street they stopped to buy orange sodas and when they stepped back outside they threw their hands over their eyes. The summer, unbelievably, was hotter.

  Tom lived at the end of a long dirt pathway that winded for so long the boys lost sight of it among the weeds. By the time the old farmhouse leapt into view their one wish was to hurry and rinse themselves in its cool shadow. Only when they were leaning beneath a kitchen window, sweat cooling on their legs and broken spiderwebs tickling their necks, did they see everyone standing alongside the old barn. There were teenagers, several loose groups of them, sitting on car hoods, checking their reflections in chrome, drumming their feet in time with the radio, kneeling to touch the matted fur on the back of a farm cat, slinging rocks up at the silo and dodging them as they returned. Beyond these groupings was still another one: three smokers, standing in a half-circle, shoulder to shoulder, staring down at something.

  James pushed himself through a web of gnats and heard the other two boys follow.

  Their arrival was greeted with indifference. They were ignored, given less respect than the cats. James kept walking, his eyes sweeping across the trail of cigarette butts. A high school-aged boy stepped away from the group and met them shortly before they reached the thing on the ground. He was short and stocky with black hair that grew like moss, almost joining his eyebrows and spilling over onto his cheekbones. There was a pink patch of pimples on his chin. His eyes, while soft, were slightly crossed and slid from the sky to the boys to the dirt and back up again. This was Tom.

  “A dollar,” he said, but instead of holding out a hand he stuffed both fists into his pockets.

  James looked at him for a moment, then turned to Reggie, then Willie. A what? A dollar? What could he possibly mean?

  “Aw, come on,” said Tom, glancing back at the three smoking teenagers who still stood swaying. Tom sighed and raced his mismatched eyes over the boys before retreating them back to the dirt. “I been giving freebies all day. I ain’t doing this for my health.”

  James fought to make sense of it. How could something as unique as the Monster exist in the same universe as dollars and cents? “We bought orange sodas” was all he could think of to say.

  This appeared to make sense to Tom. He grimaced and ran a hand over his neck, then nodded as if he had expected this, as if he had heard it a milli
on times before.

  “Well get over there and see it,” Tom said. “But I ain’t doing this for my health. A guy’s gotta make some cash, right? How about next time you pay double? I’m not asking for a lot, but it’s summer.” Understanding dawned in James. Maybe it cost money to be a part of this world, to drive a car, wear these kinds of clothes, associate with girls. Maybe there were fees connected to growing up that he had yet to consider. He had a sudden urge to discuss it with Reggie, for it seemed possible that Reggie knew of these fees and had begun payment.

  But then they were looking down at the Monster, the three of them, and for a while they were silent. The teenagers beside them drifted away after a time but the boys did not notice. They looked, blinked, looked again, and tried to understand what they were seeing.

  Willie was the first to speak. “Where did it come from?”

  Tom dragged himself closer, glancing at the Monster almost disdainfully. He snorted and spit and stared off into a patchy field where several skinny horses stood motionless. When Tom spoke, it was quick, like something memorized.

  “My grandpoppa died last winter and he used to own this land, all of it, far as you can see. Raised horses mainly. When he died we got to go through his things and he had stuff in his attic, crazy stuff, stuff you would probably pay ten dollars to see.” Tom glanced at them and added ominously, “He was in the war.“

  Tom continued. “This was up there in a big trunk. I can’t say for sure what it is or where he got it, but my grandpoppa, he went all over the world, saw all kinds of stuff, so there’s really no telling. My guess is that this is from Africa. Or Asia. I guess it don’t really matter.”

  There was a weird buzzing from the teenagers and James turned to look at them—he had forgotten they were there. The young men exchanged looks and stifled what sounded like laughter, while the girls frowned at them in reproach. Tom heard these noises and saw these looks and he dropped his slanted gaze to the ground, then back to the horizon’s horses.

  James turned back to the Monster.

  One thing was clear. It was dead. Tossed onto a bed of straw and crammed into the fractured remains of lid-less apple box, James almost felt bad for it. This was nothing like the coffin that Greg Johnson’s body had merited, nor was it as acceptable as the dirt and grass of the pet graves that James had seen in his lifetime. There was something rushed and makeshift about it, and James tried to convince himself that the Monster deserved it.

  “It’s got wings,” said Willie.

  “Look at its teeth,” said Reggie.

  Tom sighed again, and gazed out at the horses with what looked like a muddle of longing and hatred. James could imagine Tom leaping onto one of the animals and riding away. He could also imagine Tom taking a knife to the horses, or a club, or a gun. It seemed as if Tom himself could not decide what to do and so stood there, sweating, fists in pockets, somehow set apart from the unimpressed teenagers who gathered only a few feet away.

  “Guy named Mel Herman ever come here?” asked Reggie. Tom shrugged and nodded, and the boys were not surprised. Mel’s roving feet surely would have brought him to Tom’s months ago.

  James squatted down, brought his face closer to the Monster, sniffed it.

  “What are you going to do with it?” he asked.

  “Gonna mount it,” Tom said instantly. “You know, like a deer head? Tack it to some stained wood, something real classy, maybe hang it up in the barn? Then make up a sign, put it out on the road. Maybe put some advertisements in the paper in Monroeville. Course, I’ll have to clean up the barn. That ought to take a while. It’s so hot in there, there’s no ventilation. You guys ever want to make a couple bucks, you let me know. I got some pitchforks, you can clear out all that hay for me, huh?”

  Tom’s voice was prouder now, and though he spoke at the boys, his voice was aimed at the teenagers. After a moment, he kicked at a clump of weeds. “I got to get something from this,” he murmured. “It’s unusual. It’s great. Nobody out there’s seen anything like it, I bet.”

  Fifteen minutes were spent staring at the thing and pointing out its various attributes. Tom drifted toward the barn, where six or seven mangy cats nuzzled his ankles. Willie moved away and sat alone in the shadow of the silo. Reggie gravitated to the teenagers and began speaking to them in an artificially lowered voice. James alone remained hunched over the Monster, knees shaking, forehead pinched, back smarting. He tried to imagine this thing alive, its brittle bones lashed with muscle and covered with fur or scales or feathers, or some combination of all three, but as hard as he tried he could not do it. The Monster seemed like something that had always been dead, something stillborn into an apple box, packed unceremoniously into a crate, and suffocated in an attic for a hundred years. There was no life here.

  When it came time to go, James had to call Reggie five or six times before Reggie rolled his eyes at the teenagers and nodded goodbye. He bumped shoulders with James as they joined in step at the mouth of the path.

  James felt like someone should say something. “I don’t know what kind of thing has teeth like that,” he offered.

  “Or wings like that,” Willie added.

  “You guys aren’t going to believe this,” said Reggie, his voice popping with the electricity that teenagers always provided him. “You know what they’re planning to do? The big kids? You’ll never guess what they’re planning to do.”

  James did not look at him and did not answer. He prayed for Willie to stay quiet too.

  “What?” asked Willie.

  Reggie licked his lips and left them glistening with saliva.

  “They’re going to steal it.”

  James prayed for silence.

  “Really?” asked Willie.

  “Yeah,” said Reggie. “But guess who’s going to steal it first.”

  Cut Down

  The next day, the boys decided to build a pulley system to get Willie up into the tree house, but were distracted by a dog that kept pacing around the trees behind the house. It watched them with black eyes and pawed the dirt, feigning approach before returning to shadow.

  Willie disappeared inside and came back with binoculars and reported to the boys that the dog was fat. Reggie wrenched away the lens and planted it to his own eyes. “You can’t use these with one hand,” he muttered as he searched for the dog, found it, then adjusted some rings on the eyepieces.

  “It’s going to have puppies,” he said.

  They returned to work. Their tools included a hammer, a nest of nails, a length of rope, and a red metal pulley that Reggie had miraculously plucked from a trash can just down the street. Reggie did not usually poke through people’s trash—like most boys, he preferred the epic solitude of the junkyard—but for reasons unknown he was compelled to lift that lid, and when he held up the rusty metal gear, James knew just what to do with it.

  “There’s a branch just above the roof,” said James. “You can’t see it, but I know it’s there.”

  So he and Reggie scrambled up the steps, then up the side of the tree house itself, impressing themselves with their climbing abilities, then challenging each other with every daring leap and grip. Reggie reached the top of the tree house first, and when James joined him moments later they grinned at each other, chests heaving, as they brushed the crumbled bark from their elbows and knees. Reggie complimented James on a notable piece of footwork, and James insisted that he had no idea how Reggie had hurdled so quickly over the rooftop.

  “I don’t know either,” said Reggie, and they both laughed.

  They spent a few minutes scanning the distance, pointing out any truck that looked capable of murder. Then they remembered why they were up there and they both went flat on their tummies and snaked their bodies along the roof until their chins poked over the edge. Willie was far below, spinning in the grass. Reggie lowered a series of spit globs, at first taking care not to hit Willie, then hedging closer and closer. After two direct hits went unnoticed, Reggie shouted. “Hey, moron!”


  Willie stopped spinning, then swayed in place, dizzy. His lone hand grasped at the air. He looked up at his friends and smiled. Then he reached down into the grass and held up the pulley. “You guys forgot the pulley,” he said.

  The trip down was easier—they dropped through the rectangular opening in the tree house roof, then took the steps by twos before leaping off with five or six feet still to go. Soon they were loading their pockets with nails and experimenting with ways to attach themselves with hammer, pulley, and rope.

  “Dog’s back,” Willie said.

  The animal was closer now, just across the yard, marching in place and sniffing the grass but never taking her eyes off them. She was black and white and shaggy with a hairy tail that brushed the ground. Dried mud caked her feet and her belly was distended. Six teats hung low, shiny and red.

  “Pooch is probably thirsty,” said Willie. “C’mere, pooch.”

  “Leave it alone,” said Reggie.

  “Poochie, poochie,” said Willie, holding out his hand and making kissing sounds.

  “Leave the stupid thing alone!” shouted Reggie. Willie and James looked at him in surprise. Reggie cast his eyes downward, found some nails, and slid them into his pocket. “That dog’s going to have babies and you don’t want it to have them here, believe me.”

  Willie grinned. “Puppies are cute.”

  Reggie picked up the hammer, tested its weight.

  “My mom grew up on a farm and says that sometimes baby cows get stuck trying to get born and there are only two things you can do,” said Reggie. “You can rip apart that baby cow while it’s still in there, and take it out piece by piece, or you can cut the momma cow in half and save the baby. It’s one or the other.”

  Reggie reared back and his arm whistled through air, and a nail struck a tree near the dog. The dog flinched, and sniffed, but did not run away. Reggie tossed another. It bounced off the animal’s back. The dog’s back legs skittered and it wheeled around, looking sharply about and flattening its ears.