Strays

by Matthew Krause

  “Sarah! Move!”

  She glanced up to the direction of the voice, the direction where the cat had landed. The cat was gone, but in its place, crouched on the forest floor, was her new friend Tom. He was completely naked, bent on his knees, pale buttocks jutted in the air, arms stretched and extended into the pine needles in front of him like the yoga stretch the ginger cat had done earlier. Tom’s exposed back was drenched with a splash of gleaming orange hair that extended from the top of his spine down to the anal cleft. His eyes were wide, shimmering, the color of onyx. Breath hissed between his clenched teeth, spraying drops of blood and bits of skin and hair on the ground before him.

  “Move,” he whispered. Sarah stumbled backward, back away from Rhino, and Tom leapt, his sweating body springing into the air. His right arm came up and back behind his head, fist clenching, a large biceps muscle twitching. As Tom came down, the pointed right elbow snapped forward, leading the way on the drop. It landed hard on the bridge of Rhino’s nose. There was a crunch like a cockroach under a boot, and more blood flowed, but in the end, Rhino lay still.

  Tom sucked in huge slugs of air. He jerked away from the unconscious Rhino, planting his elbows on the earth, arching his back high, the muscles continuing to twitch and tremble. Sarah watched as the back buckled, the vertebrae of the spine seeming to flow like a bony bullwhip, popping and rippling. The rash of copper fur that had graced his back only a moment before was now twitching too, thin fronds that slithered and sucked back into the flesh, revealing a back now hairless and pale with splatters of freckles across it that matched Tom’s tender face.

  After a moment, Tom shook his head. He groaned and arched his back concave, lifting his head into the air. His face was soft again, sweet and boyish, and his eyes were closed. He took in deep breaths through his nose. The corners of his mouth quivered on the edge of a smile, and he twisted his face to keep them in place, as if ashamed to show Sarah how much he had enjoyed the previous carnage.

  After a moment, he opened his eyes, and the onyx mist was gone, replaced by a soft hazel-green that went well with his ginger hair.

  “Now,” he said, allowing a small grin. “Now we have to get out of here.”

  Part II:

  Kyle/Molly

  1980: Hero

  “Warning: To avoid fainting, keep repeating … it is only a movie, only a movie, only a movie …”

  It was an unearthly caveat, uttered by the voice of what sounded like God Himself, and it had come to Kyle Winthrop sometime in the early 1973 when he was five years old. He had been in a car somewhere on an old Kansas highway called 254, riding shotgun (because in those days a kid could) en route to another father-son camp-out hosted by the Christian Church. Dad, who had been driving, quickly reached down and switched off the radio.

  “I think we’ve heard enough of that,” Dad said. “I don’t think we’re going to see that movie anytime soon, are we Kyle?”

  “No, Dad.”

  “But that’s a pretty good safety tip, wouldn’t you say?” He looked down at Kyle and grinned that sly way when he was about to tell a bad joke that would nevertheless make his youngest son laugh. “Next time we’re out camping and you feel like you’re going to faint, now you know what to say to yourself.”

  “What’s faint?”

  “It’s when you go to sleep all of a sudden. You’re awake and then suddenly you’re asleep. Something like that.”

  Five-year-old Kyle had thought about this and remembered something from TV. “You mean like when a coconut falls on Gilligan’s head?”

  “Kind of,” said Dad. “That’s something called a concussion.”

  Little Kyle silently moved the word around his lips.

  “Like being knocked out,” Dad said. “When something hits you in the head and you fall asleep, they say you got a concussion. The way Ali knocked out Bob Foster in that fight we watched awhile back.”

  Kyle nodded, remembering.

  “When you faint, it’s like …” Dad thought a moment, and then he got that grin again. “It’s like what happens to Mrs. Howell. You know how she gets upset sometimes and falls asleep on the spot, and Thurston Howell has to catch her and fan her face? That’s fainting.”

  “So you faint when you’re upset?”

  “Upset, scared, angry … sometimes when it’s just too hot.”

  Little Kyle considered this and remembered the radio spot again. “Why would someone faint watching a movie?”

  Dad shook his head. “I don’t know, Kyle. But as far as I’m concerned, if it’s that kind of movie, why would we want to watch it in the first place?”

  * * * *

  1980 was the summer everyone had seen the second Star Wars movie but Kyle. For a twelve-year-old who did not excel at sports, there was nothing else to do in a town like Landes, Kansas, but see movies on weekends and discuss them at the playground or swimming pool. The tragic thing was, none of the movies that came to downtown Landes Theater were recent releases. Most films did not arrive until months after their release, and so that summer when Kyle was twelve the only way for a kid to see the most popular movie in the world was if he got his parents to drive him to Wichita.

  Dad never got around to taking Kyle to Wichita. It was nothing personal, and Kyle had certainly not done anything wrong to deserve such punishment. It was just that Dad had no interest in seeing a movie about robots and spaceships and Jedi knights. He much preferred heading up to KC for a Royals game, accompanied by middle son Tony, or attending the jazz concerts at the old band shell, accompanied by oldest son Eddie. But when it came driving to the city just so youngest son Kyle could see the second Star Wars movie, well, it seemed Dad always had something else to do.

  He just didn’t get it.

  He didn’t even get it three years earlier when Eddie had taken Kyle to the first movie, and Kyle had spent the whole summer collecting comic books and magazines and trading cards that bore images of the likes of Chewbacca and Darth Vader. Now at twelve, he had his own paper route, delivering the Wichita Eagle every morning before the sun came up, which meant he had his own money for the ticket. All he needed was a ride to Wichita, which somehow never fit into Dad’s schedule. And when Kyle, perhaps the most demanding of the three boys, stamped his feet and pouted, Dad would just drape his arm across Kyle’s shoulders and ruffled his hair like he was a baby. “Remember that man on the radio a few years ago,” Dad would say through his trademark puckish grin. “It’s only a movie, Kyle. Only a movie, only a movie, only a movie …”

  In Kyle’s eyes, Dad was the worst kind of parent in the world.

  Throughout July, the kids all met at the swimming pool, and that particular summer, everyone else had somehow persuaded their parents to drive them to Wichita to the second Star Wars movie. At the pool the boys played Han Solo or Luke Skywalker and girls played Princess Leia, and there was splashing and dunking and the chance slick friction of moist skin wrestling in the water, hormones arriving and bodies changing. Kyle could have entered the pool. He could have gone on pretending that he was one of them and swum deep and grabbed a pair of peri-pubescent female legs and wrestled and made her scream.

  But he did not know how the game was played. He had not seen the movie.

  Summer ended in August, and Kyle entered the seventh grade and moved from Wilson Elementary to the Junior High building. There had been little time to adapt. The Junior High took in students from all five Landes grade schools, and suddenly Kyle’s social circle had been increased by 250%. It was a time to establish boundaries and cliques, to find your people, to determine where you stood on the social ladder. It was the seventh grade, and it would take the better part of a year to determine whether you were “cool” or a “loser.” By mid-autumn, the margins were starting to materialize.

  Kyle had been toward the bottom, of course. Perhaps, as he long suspected, it was because he was the last one to see the movie, and by the first week in November, he still hadn’t seen it.

  But the second
week in November was special.

  On November 1st, the banner had been hung off the colorful marquee of the Landes Theater: EMPIRE STRIKES BACK COMING NOV. 12. At last the second Star Wars movie would be there, right there in Landes, and since downtown was walking distance from Kyle’s house, it would be no problem for him to finally see this movie for himself. It still took a bit of howling and gnashing of teeth to get permission, of course, and Dad had even laughed a bit at Kyle’s fixation, chiding him with “it’s only a movie” again, but in the end, Dad finally gave in, allowing Kyle the two o’clock matinee that Sunday after church.

  Kyle had squirmed at church that day, squirmed at the table during the midday meal until at last his parents unlocked his cage. He ran all the way to the Landes Theater, past Mrs. Forman’s house (the one that looked like it was haunted), through Gortner Park, across the parking lot between Pinoak and Amurcork Avenues, crossing Main in the middle of the block to get to his destination. He had gone to the theater expecting an absolutely amazing experience, and he was not disappointed. Snow monsters and Imperial walkers and asteroid fields and lightsaber duels … it boggled the mind. Sure, the movie kind of left you hanging—at the end the Empire was still at large and Han Solo was now encased in carbonite to be delivered to Jabba the Hut—but at least by the time the third movie would roll around Kyle would be fifteen, and it would be harder for Dad to refuse him.

  That was what he hoped, anyway.

  As the final credits rolled, Kyle walked out onto the street that fine Sunday afternoon, unseasonably warm for November. He thought about space and far-off places. He thought about how he would probably never see them—he had no doubt he would grow old and die in this little town. In the end he thought about heroes. It would be nice to be a hero, he thought, and he wondered which kind of hero he liked more. Roguish Han Solo with cool blaster in hand and an even cooler Wookie for a sidekick, both of them were adept at mowing down armies of stormtroopers. Or headstrong Luke Skywalker, vacillating between fiery and enlightened, but nothing to be messed with once he flicked on that lightsaber. Kyle couldn’t decide which was better, shooting stormtroopers or having a lightsaber duel with Darth Vader. Sure, Vader turned out to be Luke’s father, but hell, how cool would that be, having a Dark Lord as your dad instead of the goofy, no-movie-going father Kyle was stuck with?

  He was walking down the street, thinking about these things when—

  “Jesus God, they’re gonna kill him!”

  The voice had come echoing across the small downtown shoppers’ parking lot, much louder on Sunday afternoon when most of the stores were closed. Kyle had crossed Main Street in the middle of the block en route back to his home and was moving across the parking lot toward Gortner Park. He was just to the alley between Main and Gortner Street behind the old muffler shop with the orthodontist’s office on the second floor, and when he glanced to the north he saw a rather nondescript man standing in the mouth of the alley just across Pinoak Avenue. It was perhaps the darkest and creepiest alley in all of Landes, a single-block track running from Central to Pinoak, flanked on either side by brick buildings that ran up two stories tall. Halfway down, a second tributary of alley ran to the west until it met up right across from the court house, and it was back there, back behind Oltmann’s Appliance where Kyle used to go digging for old refrigerator boxes, that Kyle’s life was about to change.

  “Boy!” the man shouted from across the street. “You gotta help, boy!”

  The man was standing there on Pinoak, right next to Ol’ Red’s Tavern (closed on Sundays), and he turned and ran north down the alley as fast as he could. He had long legs that jutted out in high-kicked strides, his entire body leaving the ground like a gazelle.

  “Come on!” his voice barked, fading as it rattled down the high brick walls. “Not much time!”

  There was urgency in his voice, but something more than that compelled Kyle to run after him. Someone was in trouble, someone back in the alley. Kyle didn’t know who and he didn't know how, but he did know that a person in trouble provided a unique opportunity for heroes. And a hero was what he wanted to be, especially after seeing the second Star Wars movie. He could see it all now, name and photo in the Landes Times, front page, with Kyle smiling, and all the kids in school talking about it. If anything would get him in with the cool people, it would be a dramatic rescue of some sort, maybe a child pinned under a trash dumpster, an old woman in one of the apartments back there fallen and unable to get up. Whatever the situation, he would be “Hero,” “Rescuer,” “Daring Young Lad” who “saved the day” with his “quick thinking and resourcefulness.”

  He crossed Pinoak Avenue and entered the mouth of the alley. Half a block ahead, the man was turning the corner into the east-west branch that led back behind Oltmann’s Appliance. Kyle picked up the sprint and covered the 220 feet to where the man disappeared. He turned the corner …

  … and the man was gone ...

  … but Kyle was not alone.

  Years later, Kyle would often muse that there are only two kinds of people in the world—bullies and geeks. At varying points in our lives, we all get a chance to decide where we ourselves stand. Bully is such an ugly word, but at least you get the power and the money and at some point the women. But geeks ... what benefit is there to hanging with that crowd?

  There behind Oltmann’s Appliance amid the piles of discarded refrigerator boxes were three bullies, one geek, and Kyle Winthrop, whose title was yet to be determined.

  The bullies of this movie were well-known to Kyle—Bran the Man, DC, and Marty, the most popular boys in school. It was not hard to see how popular they were in those days; you could always tell because of their haircuts. All three boys had that hip surfer wave that falls across the forehead in a thick clump of bangs, kind of the same haircut that Robert Redford made cool as the Sundance Kid. Later, of course, Mark Hamil as Luke Skywalker would make it even cooler. It was not long hair by today’s standard, but it was certainly long enough in 1980, and all the cool boys got to wear the “Sundance.” Go a bit too long, like one of those hippy rock stars, and you become too much a punk for the likes of Landes, Kansas. But the “Sundance” was okay, too short for a punk, too long for a geek, the golden mean of twelve-year-old coiffures.

  When Kyle arrived at the refrigerator boxes, Brandon “Bran the Man” Shoch was pacing about like a James Bond villain, rubbing his hands together. To an adult it probably looked cute and affected, but to another twelve-year-old it was scary. Bran the Man was not much bigger than Kyle, but it seemed so at the time. In fact, all three of the boys seemed like giants, and the fact that Bran the Man was mimicking one of the bad guys meant he was up to no good.

  Off to one side, lounging against a stack of boxes, stood Dustin “DC” Catella, and in his arms, clenched tight like a life preserver, was the most beautiful cat Kyle had ever seen. It was black with sleek, long hair, a lion’s mane of fur around its face, deep mauve eyes widened with terror as it wriggled to escape. DC held it firm, wrapped it in his right arm while his left twisted a handful of hair behind the cat’s head. The cat was yowling, and its eyes glared at Kyle, begging for help.

  “Who the hell’s that?” Bran the Man turned to look at Kyle.

  “It’s cool,” someone said. “It’s just Kay-Dub. I got him in gym class, he’s all right.”

  The speaker was Marty Segerstrom, the third member of the party, and he towered over the geek of this story. The geek was decidedly not a cat, although he was on his hands and knees like one. His name was Sebastian Lee, Seby to his tormentors, and he was the most miserable kid at school.

  Unlike the three bullies, whom Kyle had first come to know in Junior High, Seby Lee had been a wart on Kyle’s backside since kindergarten at Wilson Elementary. Even as far back as the first grade Seby was not liked. He was small. His voice a soft shriek like he had been inhaling helium. He wore the same threadbare Fonzie t-shirt over and over. What’s more, he had the worst haircut in school, high and tight on th
e sides, slicked down on top with at least a quart of Vitalis. His skin was pale, his arms were like wires, and if you gave him a smattering of interest he would talk your ears off about comic books and UFO sightings, yeah, one of those kids. Kyle wouldn’t say he hated Seby Lee, but he certainly didn’t care for him, and it did not break his heart to see big Marty Segerstrom holding the little freak in check.

  Seby Lee had been stripped almost naked, wearing nothing but graying tube socks and a pair of white underwear briefs with the waistband stretched from overuse. His clothes were in a pile a few feet away. He had been forced to his hands and knees, and Marty was using Seby’s belt as a makeshift dog leash, passing the strap of the belt all the way through the buckle and tightening it like a noose around Seby’s neck. Kyle could see ugly maroon scuffs and scrapes on Seby’s arms and legs where he had tried to run and perhaps been dragged back into the alley by his neck. Now, resigned and weeping, he crouched on the filthy pavement in defeat, his semi-naked body quivering with sobs.

  Bran the Man was still looking Kyle over, but on Marty’s reference that Kyle was “all right” Bran nodded with satisfaction. Kyle watched the three bullies carefully and held his breath. He was still dancing cautiously in the middle ground at junior high. He lacked the athletic skills to be one of the cool boys, and the bad haircuts his father gave him certainly didn’t do him any favors, but he had not yet fallen in with the geeks of the world, the Seby Lees and their ilk. As such, that afternoon in the alley was a threshold moment, a chance to get in good with the beautiful ones. The moment Marty referred to him as Kay-Dub he knew he was on the verge of great things.

  “So tell me, Kay-Dub,” said Bran the Man. Kyle’s heart raced at the use of the nickname again. “You think Seby Lee here’s a faggot?”

  Kyle almost became lightheaded with the thrill. He’s asking me! He honestly wants my opinion! And he used the nickname!