Scowler

by Daniel Kraus

  It was more exciting than one hundred little lights from space. Sarah wanted to pack right away, but Jo Beth assured her that there would be plenty of time for that in the morning and, besides, anything they wanted to come back for later would still be here. Jo Beth headed upstairs; they heard the telltale rattle of the attic door being pulled from the ceiling and then the thud of the ladder unfolding. Five minutes later their mother was back, not with White Special Dress but with a cargo so exciting Sarah dropped her precious notebook: two full shopping bags, one old and sprouting the telltale chutes of wrapping paper, and one brand-new and bulging with promise.

  “Can’t haul these all the way to Monroeville without you seeing them,” Jo Beth sighed. “Who’s up for presents?”

  Ry’s heartbeat accelerated with the realization that he was in the presence of genius. With a single audacious move a night of anxiety had been transformed into festivity. The living room door was closed to gloriously exacerbate the rustle of wrapping paper and the squeal of drawn tape. There was a string of colored lights and Sarah knew where it was stashed. Ry headed out to the machinery shed, where weeks ago he had uprooted a small evergreen after its roots had begun to interfere with the septic tank. Back inside, he kicked aside the kitchen stool and propped the tree in front of the phone. Sarah strung the colored lights across dead limbs that refused the weight, and it was with some deal of smugness that Ry made it work.

  “That tree’s going to burn us down,” Jo Beth moaned.

  “What do we care?” Ry said, laughing. “We’re out of here, right?”

  The gifts, purchased on one of Jo Beth’s rare trips to Monroeville, maybe the same one during which she procured their mysterious new housing, were piled in the center of the table. Sarah’s Walt Disney record player journeyed from her room to the kitchen counter; Mickey’s arm was placed to the groove and out came Bing Crosby attesting that it was a silent night. It was anything but. The previous dinner was sent into the trash with a clatter of cutlery, and a dozen cooking tasks were in progress before Jo Beth bothered to take a vote on what the hell they should eat. This mild dip into profanity, on Fake Christmas no less, had Ry and Sarah howling, waving their arms through their frantic gasps to make sure the word pancakes was heard. Chocolate chip pancakes, even. “Liver and onions? Okay, if that’s what you really want,” Jo Beth said. Their screams of terror were unparalleled.

  By the time Bing was wishing rest upon merry gentlemen, batter was bubbling and bacon was sizzling and Sarah, showing inspiration, removed three Coca-Colas from the fridge. Pancakes and bacon and pop—he was surrounded by masterminds. He danced along to Bing until the crooner began to skip—I’ll be home for, I’ll be home for, I’ll be home for—and when Ry redropped the needle Bing was already on about jingle bells. Better, much better.

  While Jo Beth and Sarah sang and opened presents and licked maple drippings from their forearms, Ry rotated his head to take mental photographs of the house so that he could remember it in case he never saw it again: the incognito cans of generic or partially damaged food, the spotless heartbreak of the ice cream maker and fondue set stacked hopefully in the corner, the crusted runners on the stove front that were somehow the very fingerprints of his mother. He wanted to remember it, all of it, the life contained until the moment that the night surgeon came and snipped it away.

  He felt delirious; he heard laughing and joined in out of hope that his contribution could sustain it. Their faces—yes, it was faces he wanted to memorize, openmouthed and crinkled with happiness, and here of all places. Sarah opened the back door and called for Sniggety. Pancakes were the dog’s favorite and it should not have surprised anyone that he hauled his old bones up the steps to gobble the leftovers. It was his nirvana. It was theirs, too—feeling each other’s warmth, looking over Sarah’s shoulders to watch the food disappear into the soft brown muzzle.

  0 HRS., 40 MINS. UNTIL IMPACT

  Velvet dreams scraped away to reveal a soft scuffling coming from the other side of Ry’s door. Probably Sarah, her routine out of whack from spending half the night buzzed on caffeine and staring at an uneventful sky. When Ry had gone to bed, her pen had still been hovering over a fresh page unmarked by a single hatch mark. But he was thankful that the noises had awakened him. Just because it was his last day on the farm didn’t mean there wasn’t work to be done. He had a whole laundry list, starting with Phinny Rochester. The repairman was a notorious early riser, and Ry figured he might as well call him right away to make sure those spark plugs were coming today. Not just today, but this morning. The faster they did this, the less it would hurt. He winced while dressing; the floor was cold. He opened the door.

  Sniggety lifted his nose from the tile and let his tongue flop from an idiot grin. Ry just stared. Never in Sniggety’s seventeen years had he set paw inside the house. Even when temperatures had plunged into the negatives, the best offer had been the doghouse, a pile of musty blankets, and a heat lamp. Yet here he was, a begrimed and slobbering alien plopped down within a clean and orderly world, and by all appearances elated at the opportunity.

  Music rumbled from the next room, no doubt another album placed upon the Walt Disney record player. This indicated that it was Jo Beth who was up, not Sarah, though Ry couldn’t imagine why his mother had allowed Sniggety indoors. Not that it mattered—Ry was surprisingly happy to see the old boy. He took a knee, gripped the pennant of fur that sprang from the dog’s cheek, and examined the tumor swaddling the left rear hip. Maybe this was the gift of their newly revised life: Old was new to the eye, the sick could be saved. Today Sniggety would be among the car’s passengers. Ry chastised himself for overlooking the dog before.

  His hand brushed over the dog’s collar. Years of rabies tags tambourined, and then Ry felt something unexpected. He brushed crud out of his eyes and leaned closer. It was twine, knotted around the collar and trailing off across the floor like a leash. A leash? Sniggety had outgrown those fifteen years ago. This thought, disturbing enough on its own, was followed by a realization even colder. That music—he recognized it and it wasn’t an album. It was a voice, and now it was directly in front of him.

  “Hmmmm hm hm hmmmm.”

  The strap of twine lifted from the floor. Ry craned his neck to follow its arc but got no farther than the toothless maw of their shotgun. A sob broke from Ry’s chest, but he yanked the sob back because it was a release he did not deserve. Instead he gave himself a single moment to enumerate his failures, and rapidly, for he had only seconds. One, not insisting that they follow Jeremiah into the safety of the night. Two, not remembering to search for the gun, not for even five lousy minutes. That was as far as he got; the heavy barrel pressed into his temple. Ry swallowed a lump of hard air, pulse racing, the delay of oblivion a torture, while the memory of old Bing made nonsensical laps in his head: I’ll be home for, I’ll be home for, I’ll be home for—

  Marvin Burke never changed his tune, either.

  “Hmmmm—”

  “Fast.” The word escaped Ry’s lips, dry and quick. “Do it fast.”

  Ry felt the warm gust of voided anger at the interruption. An apology gagged up Ry’s throat, son to father, weak to strong; how swiftly it all came back.

  A deep inhale, another try: “Hmmmm hm hm hmmmm.”

  “Can’t you just do it?” Possibly Ry referred to his own fate, possibly to the fate of his family. “Do it. Do it!”

  “Hmmmm hm hm hmmmm. Hmmmm hm hm hmmmm.”

  Sniggety wagged his tail and made sprightly figure eights, the most energy he’d displayed in a decade. Ry lost himself in the appalling demonstration until a click, soft as a mother’s whisper, signaled the disarming of the shotgun’s safety. Yes, good—now. Ry thought of all the farm animals, old or infirm, that the twelve-gauge had executed.

  “Hmmmm.” The barrel moved, so unexpectedly Ry gasped, and the cool metal tapped his ear, once, twice. “Hm hm.” Now it nudged his neck. “Hmmmm.” Finally it poked at the starburst of his forehead, making thi
ngs explicit, urging him up. Ry didn’t know why, but he put his hands to the cold floor and pushed himself to skittish knees. The warm walnut of the shotgun stock touched against his cheek, effortlessly angling him toward the staircase, which fed upward to the confident, lazing bodies of his mother and sister. The muzzle lodged comfortably around a vertebra and prodded.

  0 HRS., 14 MINS. UNTIL IMPACT

  Ry didn’t get a single look at his father as they climbed the stairs. Nor did he get a peek during the calamity of his mother’s awakening. After a minute, the humming infected her dreams, and then her eyes shot open, and then she was throwing the sheets around like they were someone she was strangling, and doing plenty of screaming, and all Ry could think about was the last time these spouses had shared this room and what had happened. To Ry’s knowledge, the mattress had never been changed, only flipped.

  Sarah appeared at some unnoticed moment, drawn by the furor, and stood by the door sleepy-eyed, trying to make sense of the mom who had gone crazy and the brother who was in the wrong bedroom, not to mention the stranger. Ry got no sense that she knew for sure who the man was, though her dawning expression of rapacious curiosity meant she had a pretty good idea. The humming continued as if oblivious to all of this, and the muzzle pushed Ry, and Ry’s body pushed Jo Beth, and Jo Beth clutched Sarah, and in this centipede fashion they moved down the hall and staircase.

  They spilled down the back steps into a pretty country morning, and a canny shove from the Winchester sent the three of them sprawling. Jo Beth sprang back up like a wrestler, her chest heaving and hands open. Sarah followed suit, noticed a grass smudge on her mother’s nightgown, and fingered it to gauge whether or not it would stain. Ry found this gesture touching and yearned to bring his sister into his arms. He brought himself to a knee, and Sniggety blasted him with a putrid snort before shouldering about the legs of his resurrected master, happily distracted at last from the aural agony of the birds. Ry stood.

  It was Marvin Burke, all right. A pale tongue emerged to slake blanched and riven lips, and this alone provided proof that he was not a corpse, or a ghost. He looked awful, though—chewed up and regurgitated. His prison garb, baggy, striped, wrinkled, and filthy, was identical to Jeremiah’s, except crudely flayed, and Ry could imagine him wriggling beneath several sets of barbed-wire fences. The patterns of color were mosaicked but not hard to identify: Brown was blood, gray was mud, black was soot. Though no critical wounds were visible, evidence of injury was everywhere, especially in a dark red crust covering his heart. Marvin Burke had torn, or fought, his way out of something terrible.

  The familiar facial features were disguised with wrinkles, which struck dozens of anguished new intersections. Most shocking, though, was the hair. No longer trapped beneath a dome of tight skin, the hair ran dangerously wild. No areas of thinning, no lines of retreat; in fact, the hairline was lower on Marvin’s forehead than on Ry’s, giving the father the swept-back pelt of a silverback. There was something insidious about how long Marvin had hidden this lushness; it recalled the unchecked growth of Black Glade. The trademark mustache was gone too, replaced by a wiry month-old beard that began high on the cheekbones, circled the mouth like a ski mask, and dove into his shirt collar. The glasses had also changed over the years but remained too big for his face, as if attempting to conceal what little skin his hair had not already eaten. Nothing, of course, had changed with the teeth—teeth revealed you. Big square blocks fed into that same ravenous gap.

  “Did I ever tell you about the time I bagged a bear?”

  The words grinded out like crushed ice. The gun was pointed at a place near their feet, while Marvin’s red eyes roved to see who would answer first. Would the winner, Ry wondered, get shot? He glanced at his mother to see if she was taking the bait; she, though, seemed to have been paralyzed by the question’s absurdity.

  “Well, let me tell you.” Marvin’s tongue came out again and made its languid rounds. “I bagged and bagged that bear to let me go.”

  Ry blinked as if subjected to a pulled punch. Jo Beth choked like she’d seen something revolting, and Sarah extended her epic silence. Not even the joke’s teller chuckled; he frowned and raised the weapon until it was pointed at Ry’s chest.

  “I worked on that for three years.” Marvin’s voice was tightly controlled. “The Professor heard it so many times he swore he’d slice my throat. But he was the one who convinced me I ought to say it to you if I ever got the chance. The Professor was brilliant, brilliant, but on this? On this I thought he was nuts. Until I got here and I looked around at what you did—what you’ve done. Only right then did I see the poetry. A little humor before the pain—it might focus you. It might focus me. It might make it all the more meaningful. Don’t you think?”

  Jo Beth moaned. “Let’s be calm. Let’s talk. Please? Can we?”

  “You’re a sight for sore eyes, Jo.” Marvin did not allow himself to look at her. “But right this second’s not the time for us. I’ve got serious business with our son. I’m sorry but that comes first.”

  “Ry, is it okay?” Sarah whispered. Of course she whispered. It was how the two of them communicated anything of real importance.

  “Yes.” This response was his duty.

  “No.” Marvin shook his head. “No, see, it is not. This is my farm—surely you haven’t forgotten that. So there wasn’t any debating about where I should go. My reasons were simple. The first was to get some money. The warden, the guards—they’re good at their jobs and when the dust settles they’ll come after me, and I’ll be on the run. I’m not worried about that, but a little money would ease the journey. And then I saw. Even in the dark, I could see—the colors and how they were all wrong. Everything supposed to be green was yellow. Everything supposed to be white was brown. The fields are—I still can’t believe it. And I’m going to take something? What on earth would I take? There’s not a single thing left. Then I go inside, and the kitchen? There’s garbage, scraps of paper everywhere. There’s syrup all over the counters and there’s ants in the syrup. There’s a—and I can’t believe this. But there’s a tree. A tree in the kitchen. This is how savages live, you understand? You took the farm that I built with my own hands, my own back, my own brain, methods I invented myself, and you did not nurse it. Now it’s too late. Now it’s overrun. You let that crazy forest out there get a foothold, son, and that, I can tell you, is all it ever wanted.”

  Ry had forgotten the craft behind these walls of words, laid one brick at a time with the patience of a master mason. It was how Marvin Burke had filibustered merchants, discouraged uppity field hands, silenced his family with checklists of everything he had done right that day, the things he would do righter the next. It was somewhat courageous, a speech of this kind given under such duress, and Ry realized that he’d been foolish to reduce the man to a voiceless monster. He wasn’t even sure how it had happened. Scowler’s doing, perhaps.

  “Evidently this place means nothing to you, but I’ll tell you something,” Marvin continued. “Thinking about these fields, these crops, kept me alive for thousands of days. You are the murderer. That’s why the second thing I came to do—to take care of you?” Marvin grimaced. “Can’t even feel bad about that anymore. Just one minute, that’s all I want. Not even one minute—thirty seconds. To see if you have anything to say for yourself, any explanation whatsoever.”

  “Marvin.” Jo Beth took a deep breath and swallowed. “All you’ve done is run away. They’ll be lenient. I know they will, and I can speak on your behalf. But they won’t be lenient if you harm a child.”

  Marvin removed an unsteady hand from the stock and scrubbed it over his weary face. Soot and blood coalesced to a muddy orange.

  “You know everything there is to know, son.” His eyes conveyed genuine sorrow. “I saw to it. So I’m sent away and you don’t care. That I understand. But to throw away an education like that? To just let this place rot? I see no logic in that, and I’ve looked. I’ve spent the whole morning looking.
Tell me now what I’ve missed. I want to hear it.”

  Ry knew that his muteness was suicide, each beat of silence making space for the forthcoming bullets, yet he could find no words. This would be acceptable if not for the question he didn’t want to ask himself: What would happen to Jo Beth and Sarah after he was dead?

  “I’m sorry,” Ry managed. “I’m sorry.”

  “You’re sorry. My God. You have no idea what you’ve done.”

  “He’s scared,” Jo Beth said. “You’re being extremely aggressive.”

  “Aggressive?” Marvin’s face was not easy to read beneath the beard and glasses and blood and grime, but the muscles appeared to rigidify into a pattern of disbelief. “Jo—there’s going to be shooting. It’s going to be very aggressive.”

  “Marvin, no.” She was through reasoning. “Marvin, stop.”

  Something about her pleading pushed him beyond patience. The butt of the gun squared with his shoulder. The weapon’s shadow, thrown across the lawn, was already at Ry’s head.

  “There’s nothing for me here.” The raspy remnant of his voice crackled in a struggle for control. “I’ve never seen people with more nothing. Not even in prison. All you got is Old Snig, and you know what? Old Snig is coming with me.”

  Hearing his forgotten nickname, the dog whined with pleasure, the twine leash snaking after him through the grass.

  “Marvin, no, please,” Jo Beth said. “Marvin, please, no.”

  “No way my dog would die without me, that’s what I told the Professor.” He reaimed the gun. His right eyelid twitched behind the sight, and he knuckled away a clot of soot. It left a mark, black and horizontal, as if he were a man who shot fire instead of dripped tears. “No one—no one—buries this dog but me. You understand that? No—”