Scowler

by Daniel Kraus

  Marvin broke off. His eyes had wandered to Ry’s right, but the person who had arrested his attention was not Jo Beth. It was Sarah. The girl stood perfectly straight with her chin tilted and neck craned, brazenly ignoring the threats, the gun, her father’s very presence, instead devoting herself to gawping at the morning sky. Marvin looked baffled, even offended, and Ry opened his mouth to tell his sister to snap to attention, and quick, but then he noticed what his sister had noticed first.

  The birds, at long last, were silent.

  Into the void came a sustained and piercing shriek. Without even thinking, all four of them clamped their ears and twisted their necks. Fire was splitting the sky. They braced against it. A sword of yellow eviscerated the clouds and struck the telephone pole that ran alongside the road. The pole detonated. Ry heard the sizzle of sparking cables and saw curls of black circuitry head for the trees. Somewhere in the house, two windows shattered simultaneously as the projectile came in like a landing plane. It slanted over the house and the two trees directly above, the limbs blooming with red smoke, and then the people below were whipped by a storm of heat and ash. Sinuses were baked and throats seared; they lurched and felt one another’s confused hands. Toes stubbed steel—the shotgun was loose. Jo Beth tumbled, swatting at a tongue of flame in her hair. Ry whirled, breathless, and found himself staring at the McCafferty Forty, the location of Sarah’s lost tooth, at the very instant the fiery object buried itself into the field, spraying a half-mile curtain of earth into the blue canvass of a perfect morning. A slam of air hit their torsos and the four of them dropped like rocks. For a while, dirt continued to rain. After that, nothing moved.

  Interlude

  JANUARY 1972–MAY 1972

  The doctors spoke to Jo Beth as if Ry were not there. Ry noticed this. He also noticed how his mother, when greeting visitors, repeated the doctors’ stories with the giddy volume of one who has narrowly avoided tragedy. She used the doctors’ words and relished them: Her son’s story was a miracle of survival; his was an astonishing display of courage. The guests—mostly neighbors, folks from church, community well-wishers—would at this point invariably look to the hospital bed, seeking evidence of this paragon of human resilience. Instead they found a sullen, incommunicative, regular old boy. Ry didn’t care. He tucked himself farther beneath tight white sheets and brought Mr. Furrington and Jesus Christ closer. He wasn’t deaf and he wasn’t stupid. He just wasn’t much interested in adult conversation. Tentatively he took hold of Scowler’s clammy belly and brought him closer, too.

  “See his lips move? See?”

  Tiny specks of scab marked the incision points between Jo Beth’s fingers, and similar scabs ran along the ridge of her left ear. But she smiled with wanton happiness. She thought her son’s hushed powwows with his three companions were cute. They were not cute. Ry would die for these friends, each of whom had saved his life.

  A nurse tasked with changing the dressing on Ry’s forehead was the first to find out how not cute they were. She scoffed at Furrington’s missing leg, tsked at Jesus Christ’s grimy skin, and went silent upon uncovering Scowler and his blind contemplation. She tried to remove them, ostensibly to make room for the unrolling of bandages, but Ry snapped into action. He clacked his teeth and pounded his feet against the railings; his left foot, encased in plaster, was louder. Later, when the nurse detailed the episode to Jo Beth, Ry was disappointed to hear his behavior described as a “crying fit.” He had intended it as something more forceful.

  No matter. He inhaled the familiar funk of his companions and felt pleasantly dizzy. Never in his life had he felt so secure, and everyone noticed. The very things that frightened children about hospitals Ry Burke took like warm milk: the unnerving cleanliness of the white walls and beige tile, the malodor of the elderly, the clockwork shock of nurses and their invasions. His friends made it all okay. They told him how to breathe when he awoke from nightmares; they gave him advice on which medicines to take and which to feed to the pillowcase. Trays of food went ignored until his friends deemed certain items edible (milk, potatoes) and others trickery (fruit, greens). They told him how to be tough, and when he cried anyway they sang along until his sobs turned to laughter.

  The toys were present for the first police interrogation. It did not go well. The uniformed men became frustrated at Ry’s inattention and snapped shut their notebooks. Ry glanced over the top of Furrington and Jesus Christ, who were cavorting upon his lap, and saw his mother wince at the men and touch her upper lip to reference their mustaches. The next time they came they were clean-shaven, and Ry talked. The men glanced at each other throughout the session, and when it was over one of them looked around as if what he was about to do were a lapse in protocol. He gripped Ry’s shoulder, leaned in, and said, “Don’t worry—the bastard’s going away for a long time.”

  Ry nodded because he was supposed to, but he could not keep his eyes from the tiny columns of hair that were trying to push through the skin above the man’s upper lip. See? Right there? The world was not to be trusted.

  The subsequent days were used to wean him back to solid food; to inflict two more procedures on his frostbitten extremities; to check on the cast on his left ankle; to fit him for crutches; and to stitch, poke, frown at, salve, and rebandage the hole in his head. Numerous sets of X-rays were taken of his brain, and when the doctor traced with a pen the areas of concern, Ry wondered if he was already dead—in the X-rays, he looked like a ghost.

  The results, said the doctor, were both good and bad. What was good was that his reparative abilities were top-notch. What was bad was that, as tall and strong as he was, he was still a kid, and a trauma like this one could be compared to dropping a baby on its head. Jo Beth, he said, using her name, needed to be vigilant until her son was full grown, and they needed to beware further trauma to the head, including the rattle of things like city buses or roller coasters, as well as strong magnetic forces, which could initiate relapse. This last warning worried Jo Beth because she did not know how to guard against it, but the doctor raised his hands in apology. He shouldn’t have even mentioned it; in all likelihood, they would never encounter a magnetic field that powerful.

  Nine days later Ry was back at home. He dug up one of his mother’s old leather purses, modified it into a hip sack, stuffed in his three companions, and hobbled off to do his chores. In his mother’s face he saw concern about what he supposed was his serious and dutiful manner, but she did not realize how little time there was for playing or laughing when one was fielding so many important whispers.

  Jo Beth watched him line the toys alongside his supper plate, facing outward as if watching for attack. She watched him readjust their sentry positions upon the sink or tub before hand washing or bathing. Each night when she tiptoed inside his room to whisper good night, three other tiny heads poked out above the bedsheet, and soon she began to include them in the nightly ritual: “Night-night, Jesus. Sweet dreams, Mr. Furrington. Sleep well, Scowler.” It was the best part of every day for Ry, a moment of directionless joy. He had the best mother in the world and no one to thank for it.

  School presented a bigger problem. Was he just going to pose these figures on the edge of his desk? Jo Beth’s bold, unspoken decision was why not? Upon crossing the school’s concrete threshold and entering the familiar calamity, Ry felt the fear dry from his skin like perspiration. These chilly halls were no colder than Black Glade, their distances no crueler. Ry concentrated on the stab and swing of his crutches, the sheet-metal reverberation of his locker, the fifth-grade classroom’s incense of ground pencil. He kept his head down during Miss Plaisted’s welcome back and said nothing when Carla Green scooted her desk over to help him catch up with assignments. It was afternoon—math—when he finally succumbed to the trifecta of whispers and unzipped his hip sack. They crawled out and claimed three of the desk’s four corners. He was aware of the looks; he turned his eyes to Miss Plaisted and saw that she was a bit slack-jawed herself. A moment later, though,
she remembered the chalk in her hand. Ry felt his shoulders relax and began following her lecture for the first time that day.

  The dolls made everyone nervous and uncomfortable. The dilemma, from an adult point of view, was that Ry had begun to excel. For years he had been the personification of the C-minus student. Now he was distinguishing their from they’re and who from whom like it was second nature, and his victory at the ballyhooed fifth-grade spelling bee had juvenile oddsmakers clutching their heads in disbelief. Math, long his worst subject, had rocketed his name through the ranks until it sat among the crème de la crème of Miss Plaisted’s grade chart. To Ry, though, succeeding in the class was no more notable than carrying out chores—though his amazing innovations of wood and wire all across the farm were making those tasks easier, too.

  Ry knew that he wasn’t really any smarter. What he was feeling must be comparable to when a kid with lousy vision looks through prescription glasses for the first time. Furrington was naturally fussy about words; his fur tickled Ry’s ear when he giggled their proper placement. Jesus Christ, meanwhile, had an extensive knowledge of history; writing down which president did what and when was a piece of cake. And math had become the easiest subject of all, though also the most unpleasant. Each calculation was rent with the slashes and puncture wounds of division signs and fraction bars, evidence of Scowler’s impatient attack upon the helpless numerals. Ry finished each page of equations sweaty and gasping, the pencil ruptured, the paper ripped. Miss Plaisted picked up the homework, blew away the lead dust, smoothed out the ripples, and edged away. At home Ry observed the same look of uneasy pensiveness in his mother. Both adults waited for the next development.

  An excuse for action came in a matter of weeks. Jo Beth was called to the school to pick up Ry, who sat placidly in Principal Teague’s office with his unzipped hip sack and pristine white cast—she hadn’t noticed until now that not a single student had signed it. The other boy, Teague assured her, had been in no shape to wait around for Jo Beth’s appraisal. He was bleeding far too profusely and, in Teague’s experience, the sooner stitches went in, the better.

  Ry was aware that this was his prompt to express remorse. Yet it was hard to feel bad about trouncing a sniveling, smart-lipped little monster, which was exactly what the boy had looked like through Scowler’s eyes. Ry looked at his mother’s hands, clasped but shaking in her lap, and started to feel bad anyway. He swallowed and zipped his hip sack shut.

  Scowler began hissing immediately, so Ry barely heard when Miss Plaisted knock-knocked, entered, and began unleashing her pent-up observations. Ry Burke was secretive. He hid his drawings in art class so no one could see them and smashed flat his clay sculptures before the teacher could grade them. Ry Burke was crafty. After taking a hit in gym-class dodgeball, he had gotten a bathroom pass, scoured the thawing playground for dog feces, and during recess smeared the feces to the underside of his attacker’s desktop. Ry Burke was highly intelligent. This, too, was true, at least according to the books, although let’s be honest—weren’t the books a little suspicious, given everything else? And now Ry Burke was violent. This wasn’t the first incident, Miss Plaisted insisted. The ensuing pause conjured up nightmares of unspecified blacktop beatings.

  Finally the school could recommend what they had wanted since day one, and Jo Beth could accept that recommendation with an air of reluctance. Psychological evaluation—that was the ticket. There were handshakes. Pats on backs. Positive progress had been made today, they were sure of it. His mother’s clasped hands, Ry realized as they got up to leave, had not been shaking from fear. They had been shaking from excitement.

  The first therapist, Dr. Kent Thurmond, wasted no time blaming it all on Ry. The child had survived a trauma, he said during the very first interview, and that engendered a good deal of cognitive dissonance. The long day and night in the woods had also inspired strong feelings of invincibility. To handle the runoff, the boy had instilled his toys with some of these unrealistic attributes. These invented personalities simply needed to be uninvented; from this moment on, they were to be known only as the Unnamed Three. Ry grinned because he liked the new moniker. Jo Beth, however, forced an apologetic smile and asked if it was normal for a psychiatrist to offer such conclusions with the young patient sitting right there.

  He was fired. Other therapists followed, but none were up to handling the Unnamed Three. There was Paul Pulchalski, who wanted to peel back the layers of quote unquote normal ego functions. Jo Beth said that sounded painful. There was Janelle Smith-Warner, a violent-trauma survivor herself who chewed anxiously on her long blond hair while fretting about her own career and romantic orbits. There was the stoop-shouldered Monroeville doctor who declared Ry a “tasty” challenge because of how he was firmly in the latency stage, so much more interesting than those in the phallic or genital. The sole standout was an Iowa City shrink who intrigued Ry with his talk of a “death instinct.” Ry bristled, though, at the man’s misquoting of his companions’ names as “Furryman,” “Mr. Jesus,” and “Frown Guy.”

  Just when all hope was lost, there came the butcher. Handing Jo Beth a white-papered parcel of pork loin at Sookie’s Foods, the aproned man took one look at the toys poking from Ry’s hip sack and decided not to let go of the parcel when Jo Beth tried to take it. The two strangers bridged the counter, connected by meat. The overhead music cut out in favor of a price check.

  “My sister can help him,” the butcher said.

  The accuracy of this snap judgment seemed to crush her. Ry did not fully appreciate his mother’s new responsibilities—he knew she spent increasing amounts of time yelling at farmhands, on the phone with bankers, and driving to the Bloughton courthouse to deliver statements—but one thing he understood was despair. He could not bear seeing a woman of this caliber defeated. Her sleeve was right there, so he tugged it.

  “It’s okay,” he whispered. “I don’t mind.”

  Jo Beth took her son’s chin between her thumb and index finger and gave him the kind of dazed examination usually reserved for new fiancées testing the clarity and cut of their diamonds. After a while she let go, squared her shoulders, and nodded at the butcher. The man wiped his hands and used his wax pencil to write a name and number.

  “Her name’s Linda.” He winked. “You tell her I said to give you the pork-loin special.”

  Linda Colson worked from a home that doubled as a floral arrangement business, which she ran with her sister. The air was syrupy and the carpet seeded with spines of baby’s breath, and a clacking curtain of beads was all that separated the rest of the world from the living room where Linda met her clients. The space was brown and orange and dappled with motes of dust soaking in the ample sun. Ten or twelve crystals spun from a western pane and their associated pellets of rainbow twirled across the walls. Linda, a tall, hefty, owlish woman with braided hair all the way down her back, folded herself onto the frowsy carpet across from Ry, billowing her long skirt about her so that her lower half was concealed in a jellyfish drape.

  “He thinks his dolls are real.” Jo Beth seemed way up high on the sofa.

  Linda Colson looked incredulous. “Who says they’re not?”

  Ry came to think of her as his greatest ally. The other specialists had poked at him as if they had been the butchers, each of them after the choicest cut of meat. Linda, though, displayed no similar appetite. Mostly they talked about cartoons. Ry had lost track of them but she brought him up to date: Archie’s TV Funnies, Deputy Dawg, Woody Woodpecker, The Jackson 5ive. They also talked about toys, another topic she was well versed in: Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots, Erector Sets, walkie-talkies, electric football. She asked him what other toys he had, and he told her that most of them had gotten lost in the forest, but that it was okay since he had the most important three. What the hell—he introduced them. After a couple weeks, Linda asked Ry to translate their whispers and, feeling emboldened, he did. Furrington and Jesus Christ’s bits of advice sounded fortune cookie-ish when spoken
aloud, but Linda looked rapt. She even laughed at the right places.

  When she asked to clean Jesus Christ with some rubbing alcohol and cotton balls, Ry consented. The swarthy tan of his skin buffed to a bubblegum pink, and rich stigmata resurfaced on the diminutive palms. Ry was impressed. On future visits she sewed shut Furrington’s leg stump and used her own finger to tuck in the frayed ends of Scowler’s skin. Ry felt Scowler’s displeasure; that was no surprise. The surprise was Ry’s response: He found that he liked ignoring Scowler. The trick was how to get away with it.

  A month before the school year ended, Linda broke it down.

  “They’re parts of you,” Linda said. “I’m not telling you that. You told me that.”

  “I did?”

  “Why do you think Jesus Christ only quotes from the Lord’s Prayer?”

  Ry had never realized that before.

  “Because I know it?” he ventured.

  “That’s right. It’s the only verse you know. And the rest of what he says?” Linda flapped a dismissive hand. “It’s just a big bunch of thees and thys and thous.”

  “Oh.” Ry looked at Jesus Christ. The figure was lukewarm and lightweight.

  “You’ve told me quite a bit about Mr. Furrington, too.”

  “I have?”

  “You’ve told me he’s smart. He’s funny. He cares about people. He has a good imagination and tells good stories. You know who else is smart and funny and creative?”

  Ry felt his ears burn.

  “Me,” he mumbled.

  “Also, I’d like to know of any real British person who says crackers! You find me one, I’ll give you fifty bucks.”

  Ry laughed. He clapped a hand over his mouth.