The Monster Variations

by Daniel Kraus

  He trailed off.

  “They think what?” asked James.

  James felt Reggie shrug.

  “You don’t think a truck could break through a house, do you?” Reggie asked.

  James considered it for a moment. It was an unpleasant thought.

  “No,” James said. “I doubt it.” He paused. “I hope not.”

  “Yeah,” said Reggie. “No kidding.”

  A vehicle rumbled past on the road. The floorboards vibrated. Mel Herman’s painting trembled, took on brief new meanings, then was still. James shivered.

  “Anyway,” Reggie said, “let’s face it. It’s probably good that Willie’s locked in. He’s safer down there. Indoors, I mean. He doesn’t really belong out here with us anymore.”

  James frowned into the night sky. “But it’s not the same without him.”

  “Of course it’s not the same,” said Reggie. “But he’s not the same either. Neither are you. Me neither. Nothing’s ever the same, James. Kids get older. Kids change. Some kids get in accidents and lose their arms. What are you going to do, cry about it? You just have to go ahead and get older.”

  James imagined Willie, somewhere below them, lying on his bed, holding Softie to his cheek with his one arm. James inhaled and held his breath, feeling his rib cage expand his chest and letting the night air fill his body until he felt heavy and powerful. He stretched against the floorboards and found that he could feel the end of the tree house with his toes—he was getting taller.

  “We can still hang out with him,” Reggie said. “I have no problem with that. But some things we’ll have to do without him. Sometimes we’ll have to leave him behind.”

  James exhaled and felt the muscles in his chest tingle. He blinked his eyes and thought that the night looked like a black mirror, and those two stars right there were his own eyes reflecting back at him. He felt as big as the sky.

  For some reason, the idea of leaving Willie behind was exciting. It reminded James of picking teams in gym class—you had to choose the best players if you wanted to win. Sure, excluding Willie made James feel merciless. It also made him feel like a grown-up, like someone forced to make tough choices and live with them. It did feel awkward having these thoughts while lying inside Willie’s own tree house, where the three of them had spent so many hours reading comic books, dropping tiny green paratroopers, and whispering into the dead of night while tucked into side-by-side sleeping bags.

  “Like my plan for getting the Monster, for instance,” Reggie was saying. “Willie can’t come with us for that. For a million reasons. Can’t you just picture it?”

  James hesitated. He had planned on convincing Reggie that stealing the Monster was a bad idea. But tonight James didn’t want to—an exhilarating new courage stirred within him. Steal the Monster? Why not? There was a part of him that enjoyed imagining his parents pacing the floor at home, fretting about his safety. Sometimes disobedience felt good and he wanted to give himself over to it, become someone who ate danger and breathed risk like Reggie Fielder.

  “What do you think they’ll do to him?” Reggie asked.

  James blinked.

  “Who?”

  “The guy. You know, the guy with the silver truck. What’ll they do when they catch him?”

  James paused. “What do you think?” he asked.

  “Jail. Probably for a long time. If they can prove he did it, if they can prove he had a silver truck and that it was the same kind that hit Willie and Greg? Then maybe even the death penalty.”

  James listened to their breathing for a while before replying. Mel’s painting was barely visible in the darkness, but James knew it well enough now to know that Mel’s world was not made of straight lines and bright colors—it was sharp-toothed, mystifying, and painful.

  “I think it might be worse than the death penalty,” James said softly. “I’ve heard that sometimes when a bunch of grown-ups get real mad at once, they do illegal things and get away with it, because the cops can’t throw all the grown-ups in jail at the same time, it’s just impossible. So I think if they catch the guy, there’s a good chance that all the grown-ups in town will get together and go to wherever they’re keeping him—at the jail or wherever—and then they’ll drag him out of there. He’ll try to get away but there will be too many of them. Then they’ll take the guy somewhere where there’s nobody around to watch, like maybe the woods or some farmer’s field. And then they’ll do something bad to him.”

  “Like how bad?” asked Reggie. “You mean kill him?”

  James could not keep away the terrible thoughts. He burned with a fire kindled by Mel Herman’s canvas and fanned by past-curfew air.

  “Maybe worse,” he said. “Maybe worse than murder, because the guy hurt and killed kids. Grown-ups get real crazy about kids. And so maybe they’ll tear his arm off. You know, for justice. To make it fair. Because Willie lost his arm. Maybe they just tear this guy’s arm off.”

  “Jesus,” said Reggie.

  “And then maybe they keep going. Because I’ve heard that once grown-ups start something like this, they can’t get themselves to stop. They get like a pack of wolves, like they’re wolves tearing apart a, a …”

  “Caribou?”

  “Right,” said James. “And once they’ve tasted the meat they just can’t stop. Grown-ups don’t even like police and judges and stuff. Because grown-ups don’t like being told what to do. I mean, you know—they’re grownups. And so maybe they keep going.”

  Reggie swallowed. “Keep going how?”

  James shrugged.

  “After they pull off his arm,” said James, “then maybe they pull off his other arm. Then maybe they take an ax and chop off his legs. Then they look at him on the ground with no arms and no legs and they laugh at him when he tries to roll away. But maybe they don’t even stop there.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Maybe they don’t want this guy even looking at kids anymore. So they poke out his eyes. And then they don’t want him tasting good things anymore, either, so they cut off his tongue. And then someone says they better go ahead and cut off his nose, too, because there’s all sorts of good smells in the world, like hot chocolate and mowed grass.”

  “Jesus.”

  “And then they probably just leave him there, without legs or arms or eyes or a face, just sort of rocking back and forth in the grass like a little baby. But they don’t kill him because they want him to think about what he’s done, about how he killed that one kid and tore off that other kid’s arm—those poor little kids. And the guy lies there with bugs all over him and rats chewing off his skin. He can’t cry because he’s got no eyes and can’t yell for help because he’s got no tongue. You know how long it takes to die from starvation?”

  “ Nuh-uh.”

  “A really long time.”

  The stars above were no longer friendly, they were the points of a million knives poised to stab. Beneath this terror, they stared at Mel Herman’s distorted map—the tiny vehicle, the tiny dead person, the hundreds of other scenes of possible violence—and they thought about the killer, perhaps also located somewhere on Mel’s map, disemboweled, alone, and dying. Finally Reggie spoke, startling James. “Serves him right,” he growled.

  Many Vanish Entirely,

  Many Just Soak Up

  New Pains

  Willie could not come out. Ever since losing the milk, butter, and eggs, and then returning two hours late from seeing the Monster, he was allowed only to speak through the latched screen door, mumbling stuff about his parents and how they were trying to spend more time with him. To James this seemed like a lie; he could see Mrs. Van Allen troubling the appliances and chairs and curtains as she always did, and Mr. Van Allen in the same wrinkled pajamas contemplating what could be the same gutted newspaper. James understood the real reason: the Van Allens no longer trusted the boys, any of them—not James, not Reggie, not even Willie.

  But Willie was twelve—he couldn’t stay in there forever, and eve
ryone knew it. Outings were therefore planned, as much as a week in advance and only after a relentless series of parent-to-parent phone calls. James felt a new, uncomfortable pressure as he walked up the Van Allen steps and knocked on the door.

  From inside sang Mrs. Van Allen’s voice: “Come in, James, and lock the door behind you.”

  This was unusual. The door was never unlocked. James pulled it open carefully and stepped inside. He had a sudden sensation that Mr. Van Allen was looming behind him, and James spun around expecting bloodshot eyes, putty skin, and foamy lips, but there was nothing there but a rack on the wall with a fedora and a set of keys.

  “You didn’t lock the door.”

  Yes, it was Mr. Van Allen’s voice, but coming from a safe distance away, over at the kitchen table, right where he ought to be. James noted that the absence of sound that forewarned an unlocked door was something Mr. Van Allen knew by heart. James hurried back and with nervous, fumbling fingers learned how to draw the lock.

  “Over here!” called Willie.

  Grateful to escape the presence of Mr. Van Allen, James hastened to the living room. He was around the corner in seconds, but stopped at the sight of exposed flesh.

  Willie’s shirt was off and his stump was naked. It was a shocking white, whiter even than the rest of Willie’s chest and upper arms, and the tip of it was a flushed pink. The skin around the nub was snarled into a grimace as if the surgeon had twisted shut the wound like a bag of bread.

  Mrs. Van Allen had one arm around Willie’s back and the other was playfully poking at the twitching stump with a cloth. For a moment, James was caught up: the laughter, the comfortable touches between mother and son, the kind of contact James had not shared with his own parents for a number of years. But the longing went away. There was nothing funny about a malformed lump of flesh where an arm used to be, so why were they laughing? Willie would one day grow up and become Mr. William Van Allen and he still wouldn’t have a left arm. Watching Willie’s mother pin up his sleeve was like watching a mommy fastening her baby’s diaper. It offended James; maybe Reggie had been right about Willie. They couldn’t spend the rest of the summer babysitting, if that’s what it really was.

  Reggie had pointed out scars all his life—on the faces of carnival workers, on the hands of fishermen—and seemed to long after them as a sign of manhood. James, however, knew of the mark on his mother’s lip, and therefore knew that sometimes scars were evidence only of a body’s refusal to heal. James remembered a strange moment, many years ago, when Call-Me-Kay had lifted the hem of her blouse and pushed down the waist of her skirt to show the boys a thin white scar somehow related to Reggie’s birth. Reggie had demanded she put it away, and looked as if he wanted to thrust his hands into that old wound and reopen it, rip her in half. It would not have made much difference, as it was but one of Ms. Fielder’s many scars: cigarette burns, neglected ear piercings, a white semicircle on her temple where an unskilled doctor had stitched a cut. With so many old wounds to her credit, Reggie’s mother was tougher than all three boys put together. This embarrassed James, and the next time she offered to show them her belly scar, he joined Reggie in saying no.

  Watching Mrs. Van Allen finish up Willie’s sleeve, and hearing the whir of the fan that spun inches from Mr. Van Allen’s face, James realized that the Van Allens were nothing but scar, and lived in a wound so big you could no longer see it. This thought scared him. If life was an accumulation of scars that told your story better than any stupid scrapbook, Willie needed to slow down. His scarring was too great for someone his age, and his book was running out of pages.

  James was uncomfortable; he wanted to leave. He turned aside and examined the first thing he saw, an empty aquarium.

  “I’ve been practicing,” said Willie. “Wanna hear?”

  James wrinkled his nose at the sour smell of the scum lining the aquarium glass. “Sure,” he said, wishing that Mr. Van Allen had kept him locked outside. “Go ahead.”

  Willie screwed up his face into a knot that looked like the tip of his stump, and shouted in a high-pitched voice, “Steeeeeee-riiiiike threeeeee! Youuuuuuuu’re outta there!”

  James had to hand it to Willie. Instead of getting down about it, like James figured he would if his arm got squashed under a truck, Willie enthusiastically dove into his new role of umpire-for-life. All the way to the junkball field, Willie yelled crazy ump garbage like, “Baaaaaaaaaall four!” and “Plaaaaaaaaaaay baaaaaaaaaaaall!” Reggie, who had joined them without a word, glanced at James over Willie’s head. He said nothing, but James got the message: Reggie was putting up with Willie, but just barely.

  When they got to the field, five other boys were already there. They divided into teams and went at it. Before one inning was through, the boys’ shirts were shaded with sweat. They licked their salty chins and pounded their chapped fists into the cracked leather of secondhand gloves. Between pitches, the fielders shouted to throw the batter off-rhythm. But when the batter swung the only noise was the trill of crickets slinging themselves through outfield grass.

  Everyone agreed it was good to have an umpire. Unfortunately, Willie was neither skilled nor fair. No matter how good the pitch was to James or Reggie, Willie refused to call a strike. To compensate James and Reggie started swinging at every terrible pitch that came their way.

  Mel Herman showed up at the top of the second. Despite the heat, he still wore his large black shirt, but had made one concession to the blazing heat: his pants were cut off at the knee. All chatter from the boys on the field died, and for a moment they sweated in silence.

  “I’m here, nutballs,” Mel said.

  “We already got a game,” said Reggie, glancing at James and Willie.

  Mel Herman counted the players, the sun blasting off his thick, taped-up glasses.

  “You jackasses are uneven!” he said. “Sweet blessed lord, good thing I’m here.”

  Reggie had nothing to say to that—it was true. So Mel joined the other team and proceeded to smack the hell out of the ball. It was annoying for everyone, as it meant continual halts in play as they tried to locate the ball among the junked cars in right field or under the chain-link fence in left-center. After he strolled across home plate, Mel just stood there watching the hapless outfielders, not happy, not angry, not offering help, nothing.

  In the fifth inning, a kid threw pitches in the dirt so Mel couldn’t hit them. After four straight mud balls, a red color poured up from Mel’s collar and his jaw muscles pulsed beneath the skin. He took first base, but from then on the pitcher couldn’t concentrate—he had to keep making sure that Mel was not charging him, claws outstretched, bent on murder. That was the first and last time anyone tried to walk Mel Herman.

  When Reggie came to bat, he whispered to Willie.

  “We gotta follow him.”

  Willie frowned. “Who? Where?”

  “Mel. To where he lives.”

  “How come?”

  Reggie wiped the sweat off of his forehead with his sleeve. “To see what kind of truck his family has, stupid.”

  “Oh,” said Willie, squatting in the umpire stance. He squinted at Mel, who was picking his nose near second base. His glasses were full with sun and his eyes were great bright blotches. Willie chewed on his lip. Maybe Mel wasn’t just some crazy painter who occasionally threw gum in your hair. Could it be he was something much worse?

  The game broke up in the early afternoon. A couple of boys were late for swimming lessons, and it was getting way too hot. Besides, the score was 16-2, and Mel was the only one doing any scoring.

  “Why do you cockenheimers want to quit?” Mel asked the three friends as they gathered their stuff. He posed the question as if he honestly didn’t know.

  “We have to go home,” said Reggie, picking up his glove and bat. James and Willie stayed close and busied themselves with slapping the dust from their clothes.

  “I vote we keep playing,” said Mel.

  “Yeah, well, we can’t,” said Re
ggie.

  “I was having a fine time with you paraplegics.”

  “I could tell,” said Reggie.

  Mel’s face was as empty as a clean chalkboard. He regarded the boys for a moment.

  “What else you paraplegics like to do?”

  “We don’t like to do anything,” said Reggie. “Come on, guys, let’s go.”

  They started away, leaving Mel booting around the hubcap that served as third base. James could feel Mel’s presence behind them, and winced each time the hubcap rang. They were a good distance away when Mel called out.

  “You’re lucky I don’t beat in your paraplegic heads,” he said.

  Reggie’s eyes gleamed. There it was. That old Mel Herman temper. See how it flared up? See? This creep was capable of anything. James and Willie looked at each other and walked faster.

  After they turned the corner, Reggie pulled the three of them into a gutted, upside-down car. They got on their hands and knees and huddled inside, their foreheads wedged against the leather seats, dangling seatbelts knocking against their noses.

  “We’ll hide here,” Reggie whispered. “Be quiet. After he goes by, we follow him.”

  Reggie gripped the baseball bat hard.

  * * *

  They trailed Mel Herman for almost an hour. They dodged behind newspaper kiosks and parked cars, and ended up in vaudevillian tangles when one of them stopped too abruptly. It was so bright their eyes ached from squinting.

  “Can’t we stop for orange sodas?” asked Willie. “Sodas. Orange sodas. Wanna stop?”

  Reggie paused, keeping one eye on Mel Herman, who lumbered along like a bear maybe a block farther up the road. Willie pointed with his single arm to a handwritten sign that shouted: COLD DRINKS.

  Reggie kept focus upon the steadily shrinking Mel.

  “No,” Reggie said. “We only got one shot at this. We can’t let him out of our sight.”

  He charged on. After an unhappy moment, James and Willie followed.

  They were in a part of town they’d never seen before—beyond the abandoned public swimming pool, out of sight of the MacArthur Building, across the railroad tracks, through the Leisure Estates mobile home park, and down an alley crowded with overflowing trash bins, rusted stoves, and haphazard tangles of metal. James sensed a resemblance between these landmarks and the Mel Herman map hanging in the tree house. They were in Mel’s world now and it scared him.