Scowler

by Daniel Kraus

  ALSO BY DANIEL KRAUS

  The Monster Variations

  Rotters

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2013 by Daniel Kraus

  Jacket art copyright © 2013 by Vincent Chong

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Visit us on the Web! randomhouse.com/teens

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Kraus, Daniel.

  Scowler / Daniel Kraus. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: In the midst of a 1981 meteor shower in Iowa, a homicidal maniac escapes from prison and returns to the farm where his nineteen-year-old son, Ry, must summon three childhood toys, including one called Scowler, to protect himself, his eleven-year-old sister, Sarah, and their mother.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-98087-8 [1. Mentally ill—Fiction. 2. Violence—Fiction. 3. Meteorites—Fiction. 4. Family life—Iowa—Fiction. 5. Farm life—Iowa—Fiction. 6. Iowa—Fiction. 7. Horror stories.] I. Title PZ7.K8672Sco 2013 [Fic]—dc23 2012005363

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v3.1

  In memory of

  Susan Laura Kraus,

  1952–2005

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  The Blamings of the Birds

  Sunday, August 23, 1981

  Interlude

  July 1971–January 1972

  The Night Surgeon

  Sunday, August 23–Monday, August 24, 1981

  Interlude

  January 1972–May 1972

  A Darker Shade of Violet

  Monday, August 24, 1981

  The Hole Was Deeper

  Monday, August 24–Tuesday, August 25, 1981

  What Monsters Did

  Tuesday, August 25, 1981

  The Soft Ear

  Tuesday, August 25, 1981

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  From August 23 to 24, 1981, at least three large meteorites landed in southeastern Iowa. A prison, a farm, and a bridge were damaged in the impacts. Smaller fragments are still being discovered to this day.

  The Blamings of the Birds

  SUNDAY, AUGUST 23, 1981

  20 HRS., 10 MINS. UNTIL IMPACT

  A tooth was missing and that was never a pleasant thing. It was going on thirty minutes that Ry and Sarah had been after it. When the tiny white kernel had shaken loose from her mouth, Sarah had been staring up at the sky, something she did these days with escalating frequency. The brilliance of the cloudless blue seemed not to faze her, nor did the nip of the heavy and sluggish mosquitoes. She would go blind that way, and Ry knew that was bad; also bad, though, was the unhappy notion that this flat, dull stretch of moribund farmland contained a realm of fascination that in all his years he’d been either unwilling or unable to notice.

  What she was looking for were meteors. According to the radio, Sarah was a good eight or nine hours early, but none of the estimates had addressed whether or not you could see meteors during the day. Sarah was just covering her bases. Most kids her age had long forgotten their teachers’ reminders of this celestial event from back in June, because those reminders had carried the unpleasant whiff of homework. Not Sarah. She had stayed up late in April to see the luminous trains of dust cast from the Lyrids; she’d had a fit when a July thunderstorm had robbed her of watching the Delta Aquariids; and two weeks ago she had noted all thirty-four Perseids she’d seen by making hatch marks in a spiral-bound notebook. But the passing of the Jaekel Belt was the big one, a cosmic event so rare she’d not witness it again until she was an unimaginable forty-four years old. To be safe she’d started craning her neck days ago—she was well aware that trusting the estimates of small-town schoolteachers and radio personalities was risky.

  Interrupting this rigorous scientific observation was an event less rare but almost as exciting: the falling of a baby tooth. The cuspid had dropped while Ry had been busy uprooting the rusted Cardan shaft of a long-dead baler from the dirt, and who knows how long Sarah had gone before noticing the line of pink blood that crept down her neck. It was only when Ry barreled the soft beam of metal into the drainage ditch and whooped in victory did his sister come alive. She touched the blood and showed it to him.

  Ry wasn’t dumb enough to think that his sister believed in the tooth fairy; rather, she believed in money as she believed in nothing else. They all did. It was the thing that had been draining noisily from the farm for a decade now, for Sarah’s entire life, and Ry knew that she hungered after it like a pirate. The whole thing was ugly and he didn’t like to see it; his sister was eleven, pigeon-toed, proficient at dirtying clothes within seconds of donning them, and blessed with cerulean eyes and the downy blond crown of an angel—she was the kind of kid who stared up at the sky in hopes of seeing something from storybooks. It troubled Ry that Sarah’s dreamy guilelessness was boned with the sharp and cornered calculations of a handful of grimy coins.

  Stiff mufflers of August heat wrapped around their necks and bleak exhales of dust bloated about their ankles as they scuffed their toes through the dirt of the McCafferty Forty. This field and the five others bordering the farm had once commanded dizzying ranks of corn, soybean, hay, wheat, oat, and sorghum. Countless times in the past, Ry had put his hands to the dirt and felt for the hidden heartbeat, but it had been as futile as searching for meteor trails in broad daylight. Only his father had ever had the ability to speak to the land.

  Marvin Burke was a man whose shadow still chilled the entire county. Merchants and neighbors alike had brandished a distrust of the man of the wolverine manner, the obliterating handshake, the features that never stopped moving—pulsing veins, twitching mustache, a rubber grin that delivered the nonstop soliloquies. Marvin Burke talked too much; he was too tall, too thin; his muscles were too rangy; his head was shaved down to a gleam they found unnatural. They suspected the man was a horror and they were right.

  Ry had known that what his father did in the privacy of their home was unspeakable, but how could he or anyone else dare to stop him when Marvin Burke was the one who kept the sun rising and falling, kept winters from falling too harshly, kept late-spring frosts from shriveling the delicate yellow buds peeking through the soil? Ry had visceral memories of sitting beside his father in the combine cab, their stoic cattle dog, Sniggety, further crowding the quarters. His father would push back his thick square glasses and orate so enthusiastically that the wide gap between his two front teeth appeared to melt into the black mustache and form a huge open hole in the center of his face.

  From this hole would pour forth desperately important information about the functioning of the machine’s cutter bar and crop elevator, as well as broader lessons about acreage, not just of their farm but of the neighboring properties too, and how the Burkes had just the right amount of land while the surrounding fools had too much or too little to produce anything but ruin; about patterns of planting and harvesting and rotation; about how to treat your cattle—they’re not, after all, goddamn pets. Eventually his father’s stream of chatter gave way to the humming of a song, the same one day a
fter day and year after year, something tuneless and belligerent and exactly one bar long—hmmmm hm hm hmmmm—and that was Ry’s cue to edge away and turn his head to watch the monsters of dust swelling in the machine’s wake.

  When Marvin was locked up nine years ago, when Ry was ten, the farm should have gnawed itself to the bone in mere days. Marvin had never given his wife insight into his sorcery, so she only knew of the farm what could be printed in black and white, and she shouted these banal clumps of information from porch steps and barn doors and fence posts in indignant tones, as if their repetition and volume could somehow disguise her total lack of mastery. Not one of these shouts possessed the power of a single hummed bar of hmmmm hm hm hmmmm. After a time, the hired hands began showing up late and taking extended smoke breaks. Not two years after Ry’s father was put away, the lead hand quit. Days after that, the others approached one by one with their hats in hands.

  The dirt became just dirt. It quit clinging to roots, ceased soaking up manure, stopped drinking rain, and spat seeds. The Strickland Sixty vanished in a fell swoop, victim to a season of soy that slithered above ground like worms. Two years later, the Horvath Property was decimated when a lightning strike enveloped the lower portion in a blue fire that rushed across the dry wheat with hellacious speed. And that was how it happened, the excruciating piecemeal amputation of their land. Ry’s mother tried to sell portions, but the offers were insulting. She chose instead to let the grounds overgrow and smother.

  The cracks in the dirt now yawned to proportions slutty with thirst; in all likelihood, Sarah’s tooth had fallen into one of them. Ry wondered if he should feel some comfort in Sarah’s loss. Her tooth had been planted like a seed, and it had been years since this field had been fed as much. Now the entire farm was up for sale, and soon they would be transplanted to some desultory house in Monroeville or October or Bloughton. A house—that was if they got lucky with an offer. More likely was an apartment. Ry could barely conceive of such a thing. He glanced at his sister, maybe fifteen feet away, and tried to imagine her growing into a long-legged young lady within such cramped confines. He returned his face to the dirt. His heart hurt; he could actually feel it hurt. What was the use of resisting? He wiped sweat from his neck and transported it in a cooling wave to his shaggy brown hair. A fallen tooth in a carpeted apartment would at least be easy to find.

  19 HRS., 46 MINS. UNTIL IMPACT

  “Mom’s calling.” Sarah didn’t look up when she said it. “Hey. Mom’s calling.”

  It amazed Ry how after eleven years of being subject to her mother’s hollering, Sarah still managed to muster genuine alarm.

  “She’s yelled three times already,” she said.

  “I heard.”

  “Then why didn’t you yell back?”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “Because I’m the kid.”

  “What? That’s retarded.”

  “Ry,” she whined.

  “Fuck, it’s hot.”

  “Don’t blame me. It’s not my fault I have baby teeth. If you lost your teeth I’d help you find them.”

  “They’re called deciduous teeth. Deciduous.”

  “And you said fuck. That means I can say it.”

  “Go fucking ahead. Have a fucking ball, fucko.”

  “Anyway, I know they’re called deciduous.” She stood up straight and gathered her hair in a motion of startling femininity. Ry didn’t know where she came up with these displays of womanhood. Television seemed the most likely culprit. Kimberly from Diff’rent Strokes struck him as especially ladylike as she pranced around her cream-colored and pillared penthouse—now, there was an apartment. Of course, it was always possible that Sarah had learned such gestures from their mother, but at the moment Ry couldn’t recall a single time their mom had moved in any way that made her hair or hemlines dance. If such behavior had ever existed, her husband had beaten it out of her. And after that the farm had taken up the strap.

  All at once Ry was angry with Sarah, and for bad reasons, which only made him angrier.

  “It’s hot as hell and we’re not going to find your stupid tooth. Let’s just go so she’ll shut up already.”

  “If we go now we’ll lose our place,” she said.

  And there it came again, their mother’s voice, somehow cutting through the condemnations of the crickets and the blamings of the birds. Ry squinted up at the midday sun. You could set your watch to the twelve o’clock dinner; it was a reflex left over from a decade of feeding Marvin and his ungrateful posse. Her persistence in satisfying such ghosts infuriated Ry. Would she continue these pointless drills when the farthest her kids could stray was to the other end of the apartment?

  “She’s so mean to us,” Sarah said. “Isn’t she mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “And she’s cruel. Don’t you think she’s cruel?”

  “I do, in fact.”

  “And she’s bitchy. She’s a gigantic bitch.”

  A smooth dagger of pain, different from that in his heart, lanced the starburst scar between Ry’s eyebrows. It was the exact location of the wound that had changed everything in all of their lives. For the most part the memory was buried, but sometimes sun exposure released a beam of recall: his father giving chase through the icy forest, the arrival of the Unnamed Three, the blood draining from Ry’s forehead so that it painted a replica of his father’s face-hole. Now Sarah was the one with blood running down her face, and that was even worse—it was unacceptable that she could be anything like Marvin Burke.

  “No. Sarah, no.” Ry pushed his shoe at a sprig of weed that could, in theory, be nesting a stray tooth. The Unnamed Three—how long had it been since he had spoken their names? “Don’t say that. She’s under a lot of stress. You see how much sewing came in this month? Hardly anything. She’s mean sometimes but that’s totally different than being a bitch.”

  “You’re just excusing her.”

  “So what? You should listen to me anyway. You’re the kid, remember?”

  “You’re excusing her because you’re a cocksucker.”

  He shrugged. “Better than being a shit-eater. Think about it.”

  “Dirty cocksucker.”

  “Filthy shit-eater.”

  “Dirty poop-face cocksucker.”

  “Colossal maniac shit-eater.”

  The silence that resumed was more comfortable having been padded with these courtesies. Though it really was not silence at all; the birds were louder than Ry had ever remembered—they were screaming. Sarah looked up at them, then took the opportunity to make another quick scan of the sky.

  “You know how many meteors fall every day?” Sarah asked.

  “I don’t want to know.”

  “Three or four. An average of twenty pounds each.”

  “Holy shit. So amazing.”

  “Did you know that the heaviest meteorite weighs sixty tons?”

  “No. But thanks. Now I can die in peace.”

  “Dinosaurs were killed by a meteor, you know.”

  “Please don’t start in with dinosaurs now.”

  “Dinosaur means ‘terrible lizard,’ even though they weren’t lizards.”

  Ry stole a glance at her. She was scouring the ground, unaware. He shook his head in a mixture of irritation and amazement. Sarah might be able to move to town without so much as a backward glance, but this dirt was who he was. He could no more escape it than he could escape himself. When they departed the land would keep most if not all of his soul, after it had already taken so many of his dreams and so much of his blood. And this tooth that it had taken from his sister—

  There it was. A miracle, really, finding this speck of bone in a world of dust. There was a brown spot of blood on the tooth’s root, and to Ry it seemed the encapsulation of the bum deal of life: a once-perfect thing plucked and bloodied and tossed to the dirt.

  Briefly he considered wrenching out a tooth of his own and offering it up—surely it would be worth double the going rate. Instead he kicke
d at Sarah’s tooth until it slid into one of the earth’s cracks. It would be the part of his sister left behind to keep company with the segments of his own body that would never be able to leave. Worse fates were everywhere. Just look around.

  14 HRS., 23 MINS. UNTIL IMPACT

  The birds did not quiet. Not during the mournful march across the McCafferty Forty with a grieving Sarah. Not after a lugubrious lunch of meat and bread so dry it pebbled upon the tongue. Not after five more hours of knocking wasp nests from gutters, righting wronged fence posts, and wadding and disposing of chicken wire still tufted with evidence of chickens. The birds screamed into one another’s beaks and bristled their plumage, and with their own wings made cages they seemed frantic to escape. Ry sympathized.

  Dusk had begun its squeeze but at this time of year would take hours. Ry was at the top of a ladder outside the window of his mother’s second-floor bedroom. Her face appeared in the top-right pane. She gestured fruitlessly. Ry glared. She held up a finger—wait—and walked away. Ry heard her every step down the wooden staircase before losing her signal, but he knew her steps would soon resume upon the enclosed back porch.

  He wolfed his last free moment. Locking a heel onto a rung, he let his body pivot like a barn door opening along a draft until he leaned with his back to the ladder. The buildings of the farm were like parts of his body; he had to concentrate to really see them. To the left of the house was the multipurpose dairy barn, once the center of the farm’s sounds and smells. At its peak it had housed sixty-five Holsteins, shuffling and edgy behemoths that had been the only creatures on the planet bold enough to eye Marvin Burke with outright distrust. The dislike was mutual. Each cow was artificially inseminated in a process Marvin seemed to enjoy making as uncomfortable as possible. Births were no more pleasant. Ry himself had reached into at least a dozen hot wombs to grab purple and quivering babies, and he’d seen more than one get stuck in the birth canal, which often meant killing the mother or child—a task Marvin took up without hesitation. His trusty twelve-gauge Winchester 1200 was always at the ready.