The Monster Variations

by Daniel Kraus

  When he left the school a short while later, he had his flashlight stuffed in one pocket of his shorts and the rest of Mel Herman’s handiwork rolled up and jammed under his arm. Instead of walking home, Reggie made a detour and climbed into Willie’s tree house, and sat cross-legged inside it, alone. He turned on his flashlight and examined all of the paintings. He found objects that might have been Mel’s house, contorted shapes that could have been Mel’s father. James was better at this kind of stuff—the more Reggie studied, the less certain he became of anything.

  He returned again to the first painting they’d stolen and aimed his flashlight beam at the detail that had started everything: a tiny truck running over a tiny person. At the beginning of the summer, it had been as good as a confession of guilt, but now Reggie looked closer and found something altogether different. It wasn’t a truck, or a car, or anything. It was a bunch of lines. That person caught beneath the wheels—that wasn’t a person and those weren’t wheels. He wondered how the three of them had rushed to the same mistake.

  So Reggie had done something else that night, something James and Willie would have called absolute madness. He climbed from the tree house with all of Mel Herman’s paintings—aside from the original one, which he left tacked to the tree house wall—and walked all the way to Mel’s home. For a while he stood in the shadows. From inside he heard music playing from a radio and bathwater running. Then he heard arguing: the old man’s gravelly voice and Mel’s rare, tentative responses. Reggie carefully placed Mel’s paintings next to the front door, weighted them down with a rock, and then went home.

  Two days later there was a Mel Herman painting, a brand-new one, sitting on Reggie’s doorstep. Reggie looked at it for a while. It did not make sense. Or did it? Could that diamond be the junkball field? Could that straight line be the baseball bat that he had threatened Mel with outside his house? It really didn’t matter, for the painting was large and brilliant blue and wonderfully menacing; Reggie wanted to understand what it meant and somehow wanting to understand was good enough.

  Reggie taped it to his bedroom wall and it became even more obvious. The color was just color, the paint just paint. Mel Herman was simply a kid who placed paint wherever he pleased. The significance of this was breathtaking; suddenly Mel was no longer a foe. He pictured Mel slouching through the halls two weeks from now when school resumed, and imagined how they might speak to each other and what they might say. Finally he fantasized about all the new things Mel might show him, for there was only one thing Reggie was sure of when it came to Mel Herman. He was bigger.

  The air was heavy and itchy. He tossed the ball, swung the bat, chased after. Hit, run. Hit, run. Reggie’s knees pumped up and down and sweat dripped from his nose. He tried to catch his breath and could not, and found he did not care. He kept moving, faster, wondering with morbid fascination when exactly his body would collapse. Hit, run, hit, run.

  The world darkened. Caught within the curfew’s grip, the daylight hours all summer had felt curtailed and constricted. But who needed daytime? The night unrolled itself and expanded before Reggie’s sightless eyes into something he could explore forever, live inside. He drank air like dark water and grew accustomed to it, found oxygen, decided he liked it, no, loved it.

  The moon rose and the curfew descended. To hell with it. Let them come: teenagers, grown-ups, killers, police waving flashlights and nightsticks. If they came and took him away he’d be even stronger, because then he’d be one of them. Reggie closed his eyes, blind now for good, and felt the veins of the baseball press into his equally leathery palm, the heavy bat lift from his even heavier shoulder, and he pushed himself harder. Hit, run, hit, run, hit, run.

  Every Good Boy

  Deserves Forgiveness

  “How do you see so much?” demands Miss Bosch from her bed.

  Mel Herman shrugs. “I just keep my stupid eyes open.”

  Mel tells Miss Bosch about the violence he sees and hears about all over town. She responds that it is an odd thing that the summer ended up so bloody. Spring is the season of birth, she says, and that’s a naturally violent thing; autumn is the season of slaughter and death. Not this year, says Mel.

  Every day he tries to find something to tell her, either overheard from one of his odd-job employers or memorized from the police blotter, lately his favorite section of the local paper—which he reads now instead of throws. Mel Herman tells these things to Miss Bosch because he likes her wicked smiles and thirsty, mean-spirited cackles.

  These are the things Mel Herman tells her: In late July, four kids make a pipe bomb in a backyard and it blows up while still in some kid’s lap, and he loses four fingers and the hair from the top of his head. For weeks afterward, kids marvel at the resulting stain and wonder to one another why no one has bothered to clean it.

  A grown-up shoots a hole through his own hand with a hunting rifle. A teenager hooks his eyebrow with a fishing lure while out on Grayson Lake. A curious little girl sticks her tongue inside a metal soda can and the can must be cut away by surgeons. A woman falls down in the local movie theater and on the dark, sticky floor there is blood but no one can see where it comes from. A head wound? Busted lip? Or maybe from somewhere inside? And everything in between is worse this year, too—Mel can attest to it. Skinned knees are skinned wider, bloody noses gush harder, cuts are deeper, scrapes nastier, puncture wounds so severe that it takes almost a minute for the blood to well and push its way out from the hole.

  “They don’t trust anyone who doesn’t bleed suitably,” says Miss Bosch, barely audible beneath the clanging of that rusty old fan. Mel thinks she is referring to herself, dying slowly but with nothing at all to prove it: no wounds, no blood, no plastic tubes in her nose like his father. Each day Mel spends more and more time at Miss Bosch’s bedside, scrutinizing her rising and falling torso and wondering if each breath he witnesses is her last.

  “Paint for me,” she says one day.

  She knows about his painting. He doesn’t remember how, but somehow over the summer she has dragged the information from him. He says no. No, thank you. But the request sets fire to his insides. No one has made such a request from him since his brother asked him to paint all those album covers.

  Anyway, Mel knows Miss Bosch doesn’t really want him to paint for her, she’s just being polite. Once she saw his work, Mel is certain that she would ignore it like his brother, or misunderstand it like Mr. “Bud” Camper. No, thank you, ma’am.

  Mel doesn’t know what to do about Mr. Camper, who one blistering day around lunchtime catches Mel slouching down the street. Mr. Camper tells him he has been calling Mel’s home for days but no one answers, and when Mr. Camper drove to Mel’s house last Friday, no one came to the door. Mr. Camper, beneath his unkempt beard and long hair and ruffled clothing, is excited. There’s an arts academy in the city, he says. A scholarship you’re being offered, he says. He has pamphlets and information and he tries to show them to Mel right there in the middle of the road. Mel’s heart beats so hard that the veins in his throat squeeze off his air. He takes the pamphlets from Mr. Camper without looking at them and hurries away, feeling cold sweat trickle down the middle of his back. Mr. Camper hollers that Mel must call him, and soon, because the academy’s application deadline is just ten days away—there isn’t much time! Mel mumbles, thank you Mr. Camper, and Mr. Camper hollers back, please, Mel, call me Bud.

  Mel goes home and tosses the paperwork in the garbage.

  Later that week, when Mel returns home from his daily roaming with a handful of money collected from Miss Bosch, Mr. and Mrs. Huron, Ms. Daisy, Mr. Cole-man, and several others, his father is waiting for him in the living room, clutching paper in a skeleton fist. Mel is frozen. There in his father’s hand are the pamphlets and application forms from Mr. Camper, only wrinkled and dappled with tomato sauce, coffee grounds, and bacon grease. His father shakes the papers; some of them flutter to the floor. His father is upset. He’s always upset, but this time it is differ
ent. He screams so loudly saliva swings from his chin. Mel stands there like a boxer taking punches.

  His father yells for hours, and afterward Mel still is not sure why. His father does not say he wants Mel to put the papers back in the trash. His father also does not say he wants Mel to go to a special arts academy in the city. He only rattles his blue oxygen tank and roars about being left alone to die. Hacking and spluttering and coughing, tears of incredulity leaking from his red eyes, Mel’s father demands his bath. Mel disconnects the oxygen tank and helps his father move slowly to the tub, then removes his father’s clothes and lifts him into the lukewarm water.

  His father seems to weigh less than the weapon that presses against Mel’s chest.

  With his father splashing safely in the tub, Mel goes to his bedroom and shuts the door. He peels off his filthy black shirt. Then, as he does every night, he gingerly removes the object that he has carried next to his heart all summer: his brother’s knife, what the high schoolers call a switchblade, and he unfolds it and watches how the dull light from the ceiling’s bulb transforms into white shimmers when it strikes the clean, sharp blade.

  When his father calls to be removed from the tub, Mel clenches his weapon. The knife is a way out, he knows this, a better way out than any worthless arts academy, any meaningless scholarship.

  Now the phone rings almost every night. Mel answered it the first time, but it was Mr. Camper, and Mel hung up without saying a word.

  “You have no business taking a scholarship,” says Miss Bosch when she hears of it. Mel didn’t mean to tell her about Mr. Camper’s offer, but somehow it just came out. “Isn’t that right?” she asks. Mel shrugs. Miss Bosch looks thinner and weaker than ever. She is dying, as sure as Mel’s father is dying, but instead of flailing like a drowning man she is sinking straight down like a brick.

  Miss Bosch laughs, a raspy, crackling chuckle. “No academy would ever want someone like you,” she says. “Isn’t that right?”

  She then demands that he paint for her, as she does now every day. But Mel has made a decision: no more painting, not ever. If he just stops that foolishness, right here, right now, the distress it causes in everyone—his father, Miss Bosch, Mr. Camper, himself—will go away.

  One evening as he fixes his father’s bedtime poached eggs and toast, the newly coined cusswords of “scholarship” and “academy” still sputtering from his father’s lips, Mel hears a sound from the doorstep. Mel leaves the stove and peeks from behind the curtain, afraid that he will see Mr. Camper.

  Instead, he sees a kid from school named Reggie Fielder, and a pile of school paintings stacked beneath a heavy rock. Instantly he remembers Reggie standing outside his garage a couple weeks ago, with that kid James Wahl and that one-armed Willie Van Allen, and the way Reggie held that baseball bat like he was going to start swinging. Mel doesn’t even think about it: he grabs his brother’s switchblade and his heart leaves his body, he is capable of anything. He is at the door, the knife is brandished. He is breathless.

  But the weight of the weapon drags down his hand. Reggie Fielder leaves. When Mel goes out later to inspect Reggie’s delivery more closely, the rock looks like a grave marker. Beneath the marker, Mel’s paintings are dead.

  Later that night, a resurrection: Mel Herman decides to make one final painting.

  Reggie’s house is even smaller than Mel’s. The new painting, his final one, Mel leaves at Reggie’s doorstep, killed dead beneath another rock. Even Mel is not sure what the painting is supposed to say to Reggie. It could be a warning. It could also be an invitation. Mel has a strange urge not to terrorize Reggie with his knife, but to show him the blade, show him how the spring-release works.

  “Paint for me,” demands Miss Bosch a few hours later. Her voice is a thin piece of paper, perhaps an application to an arts academy, fluttering away too fast in the wind.

  Mel remembers Miss Bosch complaining that the townspeople “don’t trust anyone who doesn’t bleed suitably.” Maybe Miss Bosch had not been talking about herself after all. Maybe she had been speaking about Greg Johnson or Willie Van Allen. Clean crime scenes are suspicious—where is the blood, aside from reproduced somewhere in one of Mel’s paintings? Death, Mel thinks, is the most suspicious thing of all, for once the bodies are gone, how can you be sure they ever existed? Mel’s brother is gone but that does not necessarily mean he is dead; so a marble marker reading “Gregory Johnson” does not, in fact, prove anything.

  As he continues his odd jobs, Mel finds further evidence that he is right: he can sense the dawning disbelief in the hit-and-run killer in everything the grown-ups say and do. There is blood all around them, yes—that they can plainly see. But a murder? When? Says who? A murder without a victim or assailant is not a murder, it is daily life.

  “Chew your food,” Mr. and Mrs. Huron warn their children. Mel smoothes down the new dining room linoleum and watches the bored, too-safe Huron family grind their jaws until their food is a flavorless mash impossible to choke on. Mel has seen these children so bored at night that they touch stove burners and fondle broken glass, practically dying for danger. Mel watches the children drag their feet inside at eight o’clock. Television schedules are fought over. Board games are dusted off. Tiny plastic playing pieces go missing and paper money is doled out. A banker is elected. Free Parking rules are irritably debated. None of the Hurons is happy.

  “This curfew,” sighs Ms. Daisy into her phone as Mel mops up another kitchen flood. She sips her tea and chats to someone on the other end about the Van Allens, who continue to have a rough time, or at least that’s the current gossip. Mr. Van Allen has been out of work now for what seems like forever, and Mrs. Van Allen has been seen laughing too loudly in the cereal aisle and standing in front of playgrounds, crying into her hand. “This is the bed we’ve made ourselves,” Ms. Daisy whispers into the phone as Mel slips out the back door to dump the foul water.

  “Sleep tight,” says Mr. Coleman, checking on his tucked-in kids. Mel stands quietly, awaiting payment and listening to Mr. Coleman chew the ice from his second or third stiff drink. Mr. Coleman clears his throat and speaks about being a child himself, about his own childhood injuries and accidents, as well as some things that were not accidents at all. “Being a kid has never been a very safe thing,” Mr. Coleman tells Mel with a shrug.

  All of this means less to Mel Herman now that his painting has ceased. He still hears everything but no longer has any reason to remember it. “Doing nothing is death, too,” snaps Miss Bosch, straining her dry eyes through the arid current of the metal fan. Mel feels the weight of his switchblade and wonders if using it on Miss Bosch would be merciful or cruel. “Doing nothing, Mel Herman, is a more gradual death than that by truck,” Miss Bosch continues from where she lies, sunk deep down in her bed. “But every parent has warned their child against standing still in the middle of the road. You know why?”

  Miss Bosch smiles that wicked smile.

  “If you want to live, you’ve got to move.“

  A Common,

  Everyday Grave

  The curfew: lifted!

  All across town the news was delivered by parents glancing over the tops of newspapers. Some grown-ups relayed the news with skepticism; these were the parents who felt that no child had business scurrying around after nightfall anyway. Other grown-ups spoke from a sideways smile hidden behind the sports section; these were the parents who remembered the headlong thrill of charging, too fast, over a field turned purple with night. Some grown-ups reacted in ways that none other could predict, like Mrs. Van Allen, who clapped her hands ferociously, as if this marked the beginning of some new and better phase, while Mr. Van Allen sat shivering at the kitchen table, his hands in fists, perhaps cursing the killer, that son of a bitch, who was going to get away after all. Still other grown-ups, like Reggie’s mother, did not even hear the news; she awoke late, as usual, and messed her son’s hair on her way out the door. Reggie smoothed down his hair without thinking about it—the curfew
was lifted!

  The kids understood the math. It had been almost three months since the hit-and-run driver killed Greg Johnson. It had been even longer since Willie Van Allen lost his arm. Apparently the grown-ups had decided that these two incidents were unrelated—basically just rotten luck—and that if there was a real killer, he had long ago left town.

  So at the last moment, just one week from the start of classes, summer returned to them, less dangerous than before and therefore less desirable. Some boys stood in circles and kicked the dirt, like they did at the beginning-of-summer fair, and some wondered why they had become blood brothers at all, if not to defy curfews. When Friday night faded into Saturday morning, boys all across town opened their eyes to a world without danger, and it felt to them like a body drained of blood.

  They felt safe.

  * * *

  Long vampire claws lashed at their cheeks. No, they were tree branches, trying to hold them back. But they could not stop, would not stop—once more they were running too fast.

  Tonight Reggie ran first but only because there was no time at all for getting lost. He pushed through thorn bushes, hurdled fallen maples, barreled through nets of underbrush. Directly behind him was Willie, who kept his eyes trained on the moon glow of Reggie’s white T-shirt, suffering visions of dropped eggs and discarded milk, but determined to never again fall behind. Lagging several yards back was James, for some reason having more trouble with the trees and weeds and sticks and stones. Of course, part of this was Willie’s fault—he kept letting branches whip back into James’s face.

  A woman was screaming. No, it was the wind.