by Scott Snyder
We wound our way through the pines, surefooted, stepping easily over exposed roots and stones. The night sky was clear, the moon bright. I didn’t yet know what, exactly, I was going to do with Captain Marvel when I found Lex and McCrae, only that nobody could experience this horse under me charging straight at him and not be struck with terror. And I knew that, once terrified, McCrae would reveal his true, repulsive self.
When we reached Lake Deed, I steered Captain Marvel out of the woods and rode him along the pebbled shore. The moon cast an eerie light across the lake, and as we moved toward the camp I imagined myself a knight traveling through a barren landscape of ice and stone.
Just as we neared the beach directly beneath About Face, I spotted figures moving down by the water. I sneaked Captain Marvel uphill into the trees.
“Say that again, in my ear, though,” I heard someone say.
Then something too low for me to hear.
Next the first voice again. “Keep that up. Keep talking like that.”
I peered around the tree. My stomach seized. Lex and McCrae sat on a blanket, facing each other, her legs draped over his. I could see his hands underneath her sweater, mangling her breasts. She had her mouth to his neck. A strange red light coated them both. At first I thought the light was actually emanating from them, from their bodies, but then I noticed two small propane heaters sitting on either side of them, the grilles glowing hot.
McCrae laughed and pulled Lex toward him. “Come here, Lexy,” he said. Lexy!
I heard her giggle, the exact same laugh she made when I kidded her in the van, and then she began to rub his thighs. His legs were impossibly long, like tongs. Lex seemed enveloped by them. I wanted to rush in and pull her out of those pincers. I knew that all I had to do was give Captain Marvel the slightest kick, just a brush of the heels, and he’d burst from the woods with me on his back. I could see it happening already, see us charging toward them both, tearing down the beach, Captain Marvel’s hooves hammering the shore, causing the ice fixed between the pebbles to shatter and spray up behind us. We’d run at the two of them so fast, the wind would blow my hair straight back.
I pictured us barreling toward Lex and McCrae until they were right in front of us, until Captain Marvel’s crushing hooves were bearing down on them. Then, in my mind, we ground to a stop, Captain Marvel’s chest heaving, and when I pulled on his mane, up he went, rearing high into the air on his hind legs. As he rose, his hoof struck one of the heaters, and its grille exploded in a burst of sparks. Captain Marvel called out, his voice a sound that in years to come I would try to imitate on my trumpet again and again. And when I looked down from the summit of his back I saw—somewhere far, far beneath us—Lex and McCrae crouching in the sand. She was huddled against him, her face buried in his chest, the little knuckles of her spine flashing in and out of view as sparks shot from the busted heater. McCrae was looking up at me with a face split wide open by fear—his eyes wild, his mouth twisted up in a grimace. Then, before he could help it, he did exactly what I’d known he’d do: he pushed Lex away from him, toward Captain Marvel, and scrambled backward, out of the way.
I could see Lex’s terror as Captain Marvel’s hooves came plunging toward her, her shock, and then relief, as they crashed down on either side of her thin shoulders. When she finally looked over at McCrae, I could see the shame on his face, and the rage at being exposed.
“Lexy, he made me do it. He tricked me,” he’d say, reaching out for her.
But it would be too late already. Because Lex would be climbing up behind me, sliding her hands around my waist. I could practically feel the warm pressure of her cheek against my back, hear her saying, “Thank you, thank you,” into my jacket. I could see myself carrying her away from him.
I watched them a moment longer from the woods, savoring my own anticipation. I thought again of McCrae’s horrified face, the skin pulled tight, teeth bared. An owl hooted and the sound echoed across the lake. Captain Marvel’s ribs twitched. I tightened my grip on his mane.
But just as I was readying myself, McCrae jumped to his feet and held his hand out to Lex. She took it and he pulled her up and started leading her toward the edge of the lake. I felt a tingle of worry at the back of my neck. He was going to throw her in. He was going to drown her. I raised my heel. But then, instead of wading out into the water, McCrae stepped out onto its surface, pulling Lex after him. For a moment I was bewildered, but then I saw that the edge of the lake had frozen over. How far out the ice reached, though, I couldn’t tell. When I craned my neck, I saw ripples at the lake’s center.
Disappointment overwhelmed me as I realized I’d have to wait for the two of them to return to shore before I could make my charge. I watched as McCrae dragged Lex farther and farther out onto the ice. She wobbled clumsily as she slid behind him. At one point she lost her balance and screamed. The sound made me burn to race out there and scoop her up. I knew I’d been wrong to think McCrae would go so far as to toss her into the lake, but still, it was reckless of him to take her out there. The ice couldn’t have been more than a few inches thick. Thin as a windowpane. I could practically hear the cracks veining out beneath their feet. How could he be so careless with her? And why was she letting him drag her out there? Then, even more surprisingly, she began struggling to catch up to McCrae, taking quick little steps toward him. Soon she was sliding past him, and now she was the one towing him out toward the lake’s center. The sight of her hurrying away with him confused and angered me, and I wondered how McCrae had cast such a spell over her.
They wandered out farther, so far that I could barely make them out in the moonlight. Finally, McCrae began to slow and gesture for her to stop. Lex tugged on him, but he planted his feet wide and held her in place. She yanked on him, trying to pull him farther out, but McCrae reeled her back toward him. Next she made to kick his feet out from under him, but slipped and fell on her behind. Even from that distance I could hear their laughter blowing across the lake.
I watched as they lay down together on the ice. For a while, they lay with their faces cupped to its surface, peering into the glassy blackness. Later, they flipped onto their backs and gazed up at the night sky. Every few moments one of them would point to something that was invisible to me through the branches. I strained to listen to what they were saying, but all I heard was the wheezing of my face. Eventually, McCrae laid his head on Lex’s stomach, and for a long time they stayed like that, his ear resting right above those damaged kidneys of hers.
I grew painfully cold. I leaned close to Captain Marvel and tried to warm myself in the vaporous heat coming off his neck. A lone cloud wheeled slowly across the moon. I rubbed my hands together to keep the circulation going.
Finally, Lex and McCrae got up and began walking back toward the shore. I shook the fatigue out of my shoulders and steeled myself. But as they stepped back onto the beach I found that I was unable to charge. I could feel the muscles in Captain Marvel’s legs trembling beneath me, tensed and ready. I knew that now was the time. But an image appeared to me and made me hesitate, an image of myself on horseback, hiding in the woods, waiting like a fun-house clown for his chance to jump out and terrify someone. But that wasn’t the truth, I told myself. I was about to help my friend. I was going to save Lex. My teeth were chattering now. I felt like the cold was shaking me apart. I tried to conjure up the vision of McCrae ejecting Lex from his embrace, throwing her beneath Captain Marvel’s hooves, but it wouldn’t materialize. I tried to imagine Lex’s grateful smile as I pulled her up behind me.
McCrae came up behind her and wrapped his arms around her waist. I made myself remember those birds, the words tagged to their ankles. I said the words out loud to myself, listing them one after the other, chanting them into Captain Marvel’s ear. Each one was an attack on McCrae, an ugly truth about him. I started spouting off new ones.
“Trash,” I said as I watched him kiss Lex on the shoulder.
“Reject,” I said as she pulled his hands ti
ghter around her. “Piece of shit.”
I watched until I couldn’t think of anything else to call him, and then I turned Captain Marvel around and tried to find my way back to the main road.
My seven hundred and sixty hours at About Face ended soon after that. For the week and a half until I left, I asked that other drill sergeants drive Lex to the hospital. She came looking for me, but I avoided her as best I could. When we did talk, the feeling between us was different, awkward, and even though she kept pursuing me, looking for me in the lunchroom or out by the canteen, I could sense her growing more and more frustrated by our strained encounters.
In the end, I did little those last days at About Face but play reveille and taps. Sometimes I ran stock. Now and then I worked custodial. When I finally left, Brill let me buy the trumpet from him for a cheap price, and I still have it. It’s what I use today. I work at a small museum of natural history near Albany, collecting tickets at the desk. Groups of schoolchildren come by a few times a week and tour the museum with their teachers. Once in a while my new boss, an elderly woman named Reese, has me play my trumpet to let the children know when it’s time to return to their buses.
The museum isn’t much. The wood floors creak. Some stuffed birds dangle from the ceiling. There’s one dinosaur, but it’s the size of a chicken and has lovers’ graffiti scratched all over its bones. Still, the museum is a quiet, pleasant place to work. Now and then, dust in the air reveals secret scaffoldings of sunlight descending from the windows.
One day, about three months after being hired, I was printing up tickets in the office when Reese came in and told me I had a visitor.
“Tell Ronald I’ll be out in a second,” I said, separating a sheet of ticket stubs.
“It’s not your cousin,” she said. “They say they’re from a camp? Somewhere you used to work?”
I looked past Reese, at the doorway, but it was empty. I felt the blood rushing to my head. I hadn’t spoken to Lex since I’d left About Face. Maybe McCrae had finally done what I’d always known he’d do. Maybe he’d broken her heart and she’d come to say she was sorry. I’d been thinking about her a lot lately, sitting next to me in the camp van, her eyes closed as I painted the brush across her legs. Leaning back on her elbows on the doctor’s table, laughing, joking with me while all the blood in her body was being drawn out of her.
I left the tickets on the table and went out to the admissions counter. I scanned the room, but the only person around was a young man standing with his hands in his pockets. He wore an old army jacket and blue jeans and it took me a moment to recognize him.
“It’s okay, music man,” said Haden McCrae, smiling at me. “I’m not used to me in civvies yet either.” His hair had grown into a bright orange shock that he’d wetted and wore smoothed back from his face.
“What do you want?” I said. I felt a liquid heat rising in me.
He dug his hands deeper in his jacket pockets and shrugged. “I don’t know. I just came to say I’m out.”
“Congratulations. I’ve got to get back to work,” I said, and turned to leave.
“Wait. I want to tell you something,” he said.
I stopped and looked at him over my shoulder.
He kicked at the splintered end of a floorboard. “I want to tell you thank you,” he said.
“You’re welcome. For what?” I said, sensing a trick.
“Lex told me you said nice things about me when we first started up together. She said you told her I was a stand-up person.”
I didn’t know what he was talking about, and I was just about to tell him what I actually thought of him, right there at the museum entrance, when the memory returned. I had; I’d said he was a stand-up guy the afternoon I’d been trying to find out from Lex which nights they went down to the lake.
I said to McCrae that, yes, I guessed I’d told Lex that.
McCrae nodded. “Why’d you say that about me?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “You made her happy.”
He seemed to think about this for a moment. “I was never really going to let those birds go, you know. I was just tagging their feet to mess with you guys. I thought you all hated me.”
I sighed. “I don’t hate you, Haden,” I said. “Like I said. I think you’re a stand-up person.”
He smiled at me. “I think you are too, Sergeant Fergus,” he said.
I told him I had to get back.
McCrae saluted. I saluted back, and then he turned to leave. “I’ll tell her you said hello,” he said, and then he was gone.
The museum only has one impressive exhibit. It sits at the back of the third-floor hall, in a square, dusty glass case: the skull of an ancient human, a skull nearly two million years old. The skull doesn’t look human. The top of the face looks familiar enough, from the nose up, but the bottom half is monstrous: the jaw is a massive hinge of bone with crushing rows of giant teeth. Under the harsh lighting inside the case each tooth looks mountainous, rising in knobby peaks, pitted with deep valleys of shadow.
The schoolchildren that visit the museum always find the skull soon enough, and even after they’ve wandered off to see other exhibits, they eventually return to it and look some more. There’s a plaque on the wall beside it, which explains that the skull in the case belonged to a particularly unsuccessful species of man, a species that followed an embarrassing evolutionary path. It seems clear, states the plaque, that just before this species evolved, back when man was still a hunched, ape-like creature, a great climate change occurred in ancient Africa, where man was then living. Fruit puckered, leaves shriveled, and a deep frost came upon the land. All at once, man began to adapt, to change into a number of different versions of himself in order to find one that might survive the freeze. Where almost all these new species of man advanced or developed was in the area of the brain: they grew bigger, more complex minds so that they might figure out new ways of getting food. It was one of these species—a species that used its new intelligence to make tools and hunt animals—that would eventually go on to become early modern man, then man of today, you and me. But there was another, lone species, says the plaque, that didn’t put any energy at all into developing its mind. (Here you can see the children becoming more interested, straining to read over each other’s shoulders, squinting.) What did this species see as its source of promise? Its mouth. It grew a giant mouth so that it might chew up more of the garbage left behind to scavenge, so that it might actually eat up bones, droppings, everything. It’s this, a species of ancient man called Paranthropus, that the skull in the case belongs to.
There’s a drawing of Paranthropus next to the display, and in it he looks sadly bewildered, gazing down at a clutch of stringy gray grass in his hairy palm. He’s forlorn; he seems to understand that at some point, long ago, he took a wrong turn somewhere, and now he’s ended up looking like a fool. From his eyes, though, you can tell that, for the life of him, he can’t remember how this mistake happened; he has no idea where or when he made the error. Often, as the time approaches to call the children to the buses, I imagine that it’s him, Paranthropus, that I’m calling to. Sometimes when I play I close my eyes and I can see myself doing it, aiming the bell of my horn at his ugly face and leading him back this way.
i.
MY GIRLFRIEND AND I ARE NOT RICH PEOPLE. NOT BY A LONG shot. But together we own a mansion—one of the last real mansions in central Florida. It was built by a family of lemon farmers back in 1869, almost one hundred and fifty years ago. We put less than eleven hundred dollars down, hardly anything, but the house has over twenty rooms in all: five bedrooms, a library with a vaulted ceiling, a study, even a garden room that looks out on three full acres of wild backyard.
The morning the realtor first showed us the place, I was sure she’d made some kind of mistake. The other houses she’d taken us to see had been small: one-and two-bedroom apartments mostly. And then, out of nowhere, this.
For a long time, Laura and I stood on the front lawn,
just staring up at the house. It had a wraparound porch. There were four stone chimneys rising from the roof. Laura had a good job at the aquarium, and I managed a major wrecking yard, but even so, how could something like this be in our price range?
“I know what you’re thinking!” said the realtor. She had to speak loudly to be heard over the persistent buzzing from insects hidden in the foliage. “But the price is just what I said. I’m tempted to buy this one myself.”
I studied the house, trying to take in the whole giant sprawl. Granted, it would need work. The place looked like it had stood vacant a long time, abandoned for ten, maybe even fifteen years. Ferns had sprouted though the slats of the porch. The columns were covered in a scaly silver mold. There were mushrooms growing in one of the rain gutters, a whole row, white with red spots, like tiny bloodstained umbrellas.
The grounds were in bad shape too: everything wild and overgrown, choked by weeds and bramble. Long tatters of moss hung from the trees.
Still, there was no disguising what lay beneath all the disrepair. With time and effort, this could be a wonderland for us.
Laura must have sensed my excitement. “This house is incredible. But it’ll be way too much work. I mean, look.” She waved a hand over the tall, weedy grass, which came all the way up to our thighs. “The yard alone will take weeks to clear.”
“We wouldn’t tackle the whole thing all at once,” I said. “We could just do a little every day.”