The Monster Variations (3 page)

Fear bubbled up in his belly, slid partway up his throat, and sat there. He moved his neck—just a little—to see over the top of his swollen shoulder. Beyond, he saw the scattered remnants of his arm, now little more than a purple stain on the road.

Willie panicked and started crying. Where in the world was his dad? He called out for help with such force that the acid in his throat splattered over his tongue and teeth. He jerked his head around, looking for somebody, or maybe a house, a telephone wire, anything, and the
movement woke up the rest of his body and told him things he had not known. His other arm, the right one, was dislocated from its socket. A pebble was lodged inside his right ear. A bottle cap was planted deep into his left calf. Both of his shoes, pliant and worthless from the hundreds of hours of rain, creek water, and junkball dust, had been flung right off his feet. His head, at least, was all right, but he had a road burn on his neck—a deep, oval groove of mangled flesh.

Then his shoulder split open with a sound like ripping fabric. Willie Van Allen passed out, thinking just one thought. Summer, for him, would never come.

* * *

But it did come. Proof was everywhere.

The wind could be seen; that’s how fast it was. The grass could be heard; that’s how green it was. He could smell laughter in the air, like melted waffle ice cream cones; that’s how happy they were, all of them, everyone in town, in seed company hats and farmer’s tans and dresses so new you could still see the dimples where they had hung all spring on store racks.

It was summer, finally summer, eight weeks later—he’d made it!—and the days, how perfectly terrible
hot
they were. Days like these made it practically a punishable crime to be a girl, and twelve-year-old boys everywhere were thrilled to be off the hook. The sun, everyone swore it, was closer that year and sagged lower, tickling tree leaves and roasting the skin of the three of
them, Willie and Reggie and James, as they ran, which they were always doing—through infield dirt, playground blacktop, or scratchy, overgrown ditch weeds—arms pin-wheeling and knee holes yawning ever wider; Willie in stripes, his arm stump still bandaged, James in something uncomfortable with buttons, and Reggie, as always, bringing up the rear.

Reggie was confident enough to let the other two go first, and often wore almost nothing at all, having already set his shirt on fire and thrown it into the pond, just for fun, and another time used one to catch a frog, and another one to wipe the caked soot from the windows of that creepy, abandoned shed, something he had been dying to do all winter—hell, for longer than any of the boys could remember. Willie had a theory: Reggie’s mother—Ms. Fielder, Call-Me-Kay—must have spoken of that shed while Reggie still slept in her belly. Or that wonderful tire yard. Or that giant sewer pipe so big you could stand up in it. Or that spot beneath the railroad tracks where each passing train showered you with cool flakes of dirt and rust. Reggie’s mother must have spoken of these places constantly, because Reggie somehow knew of them, or was drawn to them by a secret frequency inaudible to Willie and James. Reggie never got lost on the way to anywhere forbidden, not that Willie could tell, nor was he ever afraid.

“Martians will invade,” he promised some afternoons. “And our families will be killed dead in their shoes.”

The fair always came to town on the first week of summer, right after school let out, when the green lawn of the fairgrounds suddenly gave rise to tents, food trailers, and carnival rides. The men who worked the rides were beyond men. They were fatter than the boys’ fathers (except Reggie, who had no father) and wore fuller beards and longer hair. Their forearms were thick and blue with illustrations and their hands smelled sharply of kerosene. Though Willie sensed that the men were less offended by his missing limb than normal people, they were also without pity. They stood with arms crossed and looked at the boys with something between amusement and murder.

The boys kept running.

“We will all marry girls,” promised Reggie. “And we’ll be there when they die.”

They tried to pop two balloons with three darts and failed. They tried to toss one basketball through a hoop and failed. They tried to toss one plastic ring around one soda bottle—
any
bottle, come
on
. Willie’s face was sticky with cotton candy because he didn’t have a second arm to pull off the wispy remainders. James emptied his pockets to buy a one-dollar mirror etched with the contour of a sexy lady, but later gave it to Reggie, conceding that his own parents would never allow something so lewd and impractical inside a house already sparkling with three floors of clean, inoffensive mirrors. The Wahls’ housekeeper, Louise, was directed to clean all of the mirrors weekly, and the floors and windows and light switches,
too. James claimed that he found this routine needlessly thorough, but Willie and Reggie had both caught him staring intently into the mirrors as if searching for some kind of barely camouflaged flaw. Sometimes he would press his thumbnail into his upper lip for a full minute and then remove it, and show the temporary white slash to one of his friends. “Look,” he’d say, “I have a scar there, just like my mom.” It was unclear to Willie why James would want such a thing, or why he’d go through so much pain to keep it for only a few seconds.

At the top of the Ferris wheel they sat together and rocked as someone, miles below, got off. Reggie pointed to the lights at the edge of town and with a whoosh of breath tried to blow them out like candles. James announced that he wanted to be a baseball player when he grew up, but that it would never happen because he was too skinny. Willie asked James what kind of car his parents drove, because his mom wanted one just like it but said it was too expensive. One day, predicted Reggie, he would be a famous criminal or famous cop, either one was okay with him. James said he’d be the cop who caught Reggie the robber, or the robber who evaded his cop, and their gunfights would go down in history. Willie asked if either of them knew of any good jobs for his dad, because he’d just been fired—he was good at selling things, maybe he could sell toys or sports equipment? Reggie tapped a finger on the car’s railing and said
this
, this very moment, was perfect because they were so high
up that no one below could see them, and as far as anyone knew there could be anyone in this car: men, legends, ghosts, monsters.

When the sun dipped just below the trees, Reggie and James turned bright orange and their eyes flashed like those of African tigers. Willie wondered if he looked that way, too, and now wished he had the sexy-lady mirror so he could see. The boys smiled, but with closed lips. They measured each other’s reactions, then tested them by saying things that were mean and confusing. They spit and squatted in the dust like carnival men and acted as if they knew all about life and death—and maybe Willie knew about death, just a little.

It had been at a golden hour just like this one, three weeks ago, with Willie recently freed from the hospital and his mother’s side and reintroduced to the land of the living, that Reggie had made the three of them join as blood brothers, cutting their palms with an old buck knife and holding them together while they all looked at their feet, suddenly shy.

“I’d give anything to be old,” Reggie had said that day, his voice hoarse, watching the dark red liquid roll down the last middle finger Willie had.

Against all odds, night came. There was a man picking up trash with a poker. The rides lost their blinking lights. Reggie kicked the dirt, unhappy. James mumbled about his parents and how they’d warned him to be home hours ago, how they were probably already on the
phone trying to find him. Willie, meanwhile, sat and watched his two friends, taller and bolder and better-looking than he, and with two arms each. But instead of being jealous Willie was only glad. It was summer, he had made it after all, and any new pain he felt certain he could swallow whole.

A
kid was dead. It was a kid James and Reggie and Willie knew from school, a pudgy sixth grader with a florid complexion named Greg Johnson. Greg had been run over by a truck around eight-thirty a few nights ago, right after buying a soda at a corner store. None of the witnesses recalled the make, model, or color of the vehicle, but nevertheless swore that the truck never slowed down. It ran over Greg Johnson like he was made of paper. Grown-ups were calling the event a “ hit-and-run.” What worried everyone was that it had only been nine weeks since Willie Van Allen had lost his arm.

Last night there had been a big meeting. It was a small town and when two kids got hit by trucks, this apparently was what grown-ups did. Naturally the Van Allen parents had attended and so had James Wahl’s folks. Reggie Fielder’s mom, a waitress, was working that night, so Reggie relied on James and Willie to relay the details.

But there was only one detail that mattered, according to James. There was going to be a curfew. No kids on the street after eight p.m., effective immediately. “For how long?” Reggie asked James, who had begged the same question of his dad: “For how long?” James’s dad only shrugged, took a pen from where several sat leaking into his shirt pocket, and busied himself with the columns of numbers that made up his work. “As long as it takes,” he said.

The boys agreed it was terrible news. The summer wasn’t totally ruined, but close. After all, eight o’clock on a summer night wasn’t even
night
, it was the same as daytime only better—dimmer, cooler, and veiled. Now they’d have to withstand the stuffy interior of three separate houses several blocks apart from one another, and all because some guy was zooming around town looking for twelve-year-old boys to run over?

It’s not fair
, James thought as he pressed his forehead against the van window. The world beyond was stone gray and moved too fast to understand. Anything could mean anything. There was an old man scolding a dog-maybe he did sick things to children. There was a tall
man brushing himself off in front of a barber pole-maybe he was a drunk, maybe he beat his wife with a wooden spoon. There was a little troll-like woman hobbling her way down the sidewalk—who knew, maybe she liked to run over kids in her silver truck.

It was a bad day to go anywhere, and James was headed for a funeral. There had been a wake the night before—this, he had learned, was when everyone filed by the casket to get a peek at the dead person. He was not allowed to go and was too scared anyway. Willie’s parents did not allow him to go either; ever since the second hit-and-run, the Van Allens had become even more protective of their son. Reggie, of course, went to the wake, and because his mother worked nights he did it alone. James didn’t know how Reggie got so brave, but Reggie was determined to see a dead kid, and if the funeral home had sold tickets, he would’ve arrived early to get a good seat. Reggie owned no dress clothes, but borrowed one of his mother’s white button-down blouses and tucked so much fabric into his pants it looked like he was wearing diapers. He owned only white sweat socks, but soon enough found a black marker and went to work.

After the wake, Reggie had come knocking at James’s bedroom window. It was easy to do: if the family van was parked in the driveway alongside the house, Reggie had only to scale it, leap onto the lower roof of the three-story split-level home, dart across the shingles, then tap on James’s windowpane. Before the accident Willie also used to do it, but these days he had to use the door.

According to Reggie, Greg Johnson was definitely dead. Three people took the podium to speak. There were twenty huge bouquets of flowers, and more Styrofoam cups of coffee than Reggie had ever seen. Four people left during Mr. Johnson’s emotional plea to find the killer. Eleven people cried. Twelve people hugged Reggie, despite the fact that he didn’t recognize any of them, aside from Mrs. Van Allen. By the time it was all over, his socks were almost white again, and Reggie guessed it was all those damn teardrops that did it.

“What did he look like?” James asked.

“He looked pretty good” was the response, but looking was not enough, not for an opportunist like Reggie. He hung back to the very end of the viewing line—at least, that was what he told James—and then leaned his elbows on Greg’s casket, settling his chin against the cold, new metal.

“There was something weird with his eyes,” Reggie reported. “I’m not kidding. There was something all wrong with them.” When asked to explain, Reggie would only hint that the protuberance of Greg’s eyelids was somehow unnatural, either too big or too small, perhaps hiding objects that were not Greg Johnson’s eyeballs at all, but artificial glass that the mortician inserted after scooping out the originals—or, maybe, after the original eyeballs had been knocked out by the truck that struck Greg in the back. James imagined something terrible: one of Greg’s eyeballs mashed beneath a truck wheel, and the other eyeball carried away by an industrious
squirrel. James wished his brain didn’t think of things like this, but he couldn’t help it.

“I couldn’t reach it,” Reggie said, “but there was something in Greg’s hair, near the back, back here.” Reggie touched his head where fathers got bald spots. “I thought it was beads. You know, like religious beads, but why would there be beads in his hair? Then I thought bugs. I thought they were ticks, maybe feeding on him.” Reggie spoke calmly in order to shock James. It worked. Reggie shrugged. “But I think it was some kind of stitches. Big huge stitches. Or maybe staples. To keep his head shut.”

Then there had been motion in James’s house—heavy footsteps on the spiral staircase, drawers banging shut, the squeak of the medicine cabinet. James’s parents, both of them, were coming to his room, clutching stiff penny loafers and a tie for the funeral, so instantly Reggie vanished through the window, lowering himself onto the van roof before disappearing into the dandelions.

And now here was James, his hair dull, his face nervous and ashy, feeling in his bones each pebble that passed beneath the van’s tires. He was off to the funeral, his first, and he felt sick. He hoped Reggie wouldn’t be there because then James would have to hide his sick feeling. But he knew Reggie would show up, even without his mother, who inevitably would be working the lunch crowd—Reggie wouldn’t miss this for the world. “You’re chicken,” Reggie would say if James skipped the funeral, and he would be right.