The Monster Variations

by Daniel Kraus

“Huh.” Reggie drummed his fingers against the roof. “Then why are you going?”

  The grin Reggie drew was large and disarming. Was it a friendly joke or the feint that preceded the first connecting blow? James opened his mouth to respond, but looking at Reggie made none of the available answers seem any good. He tried to return the grin and failed. Why was he going? Was it only to escape the scrapbook? Or was it all in hopes of bending those straight edges he had forged and refined throughout high school?

  He was lost in this thought when the two little boys ran up to the car and stopped suddenly, holding one another, throwing one another away. The bolder of the two stared at James, then Reggie, and appeared ready to speak. But then the father shouted, and both of them turned on their heels and hurried back to the safety of the pickup, angry and delighted. In their absence was noise: hammering, men shouting, an engine choking, music forcing itself through the small tin holes of a radio, murmured jokes as wadded dollar bills passed through truck windows. It was a cycle of events that had nothing to do with James. He looked down at his car.

  “Hey, none of my business.” Reggie coughed. “Fill ‘er up?”

  “No,” James said. “I can do it.”

  Reggie waved him off and moved with quick, forceful steps, and suddenly he was right there, stinking of oil and perspiration and reaching for the pump handle. James tried to grab it first and their fists rammed together-mental flashes of tree-house heroics, cemetery mud, knife blades, monstrous things. Finally, it felt good, and James wanted more, his muscles ached for it, the thrill of blood and dirt.

  “Back off,” Reggie grunted, and he leaned in, his shoulder knocking James aside. Those shoulders, that voice, those flashing eyes: James had to look down at his body to remind himself that he was not twelve, this was not that summer when too many people had died, and Reggie could not boss him around any longer. Instead, what James saw was his own clean shirt, his new slacks, those shoes that wouldn’t last one day working in an environment like this one. He chanced a glance at Reggie, who stuffed the nozzle into the tank and started the gas flow, thump thump thump. Reggie looked wild and unsteady, as if the shoulder contact had also brought home to him visions of their past contact: hands boosting feet over fences, brilliant bloody noses, wonderful bruises.

  They both felt the impact before it hit.

  “You seen Willie lately?” It was Reggie who struck first.

  These were the terrible words James had both yearned for and feared. He didn’t want to think about that summer—he had kept it from his mind for years and it had gotten him this far, all the way out of town—and the funny thing was, he felt certain Reggie didn’t want to resurrect it either. But James needed to finish the fight, and there was no other first punch to be thrown.

  “Not in a long time,” James lied, so close he could feel the heat from Reggie’s skin. “You?”

  Reggie snorted. “Man, I don’t have time for him anymore. He’s not exactly the most exciting guy I know.” He blinked, aimed another strike. “Remember those weird phrases he was always repeating?”

  “Of course.”

  “Remember the tree house? I still have the scars all over my legs.”

  “Me too.”

  “You remember the Monster?”

  James felt his fingers curl into fists. Reggie’s eyes flicked downward at the movement. The fuel pounded into the tank, thump thump thump. Behind Reggie, a car squealed from the garage, a truck rumbled over to the next set of pumps. Thump thump thump. Reggie saw dozens of trucks each day, James realized, and it was all too possible that one of them could be the truck that took that summer of their twelfth year and ruined it, and maybe ruined all three of them in the process-James, Reggie, and Willie. It was his heartbeat now: thump thump thump.

  Reggie, as always, knew just what James was thinking. He lowered his voice and closed his eyes and said the final thing: “You remember the truck?”

  THEN

  I Smell Meat

  Willie Van Allen’s arm was gone. The truck that hit him escaped, silver and purring, and it swept up a gust that was almost refreshing. In the hazy afterburn he lay, his face blank as sand, white as foam.

  Willie’s arm, or what was left of it, was tamped into the dirt, now part of the old tar road along with stones and bugs and beer cans and scrub-grass. There was blood, but it had mixed with dirt, become mud. There was bone, too, but the bone dove beneath the mud like a tree root.

  His left arm was gone, but his shoulder was still there, seared dark from hundreds of hours of baseball—they called it junkball—played upon a diamond with a right field wall of rusty, abandoned dinosaurs called Chevy and Ford, and left and center walls of buildings so dilapidated that people had long since given up trying to live there. The serious play was in the summer, just eight short weeks away, but the boys could not wait and hit the field while their breath still hung visible in the air and their tentative scurries were marked by morning frost. Willie was too short and too little to be much good, but that was fine: the vacant square eyes of these buildings were the only audience.

  But perhaps summer, and junkball, no longer mattered. His left arm was gone. His left shoulder was larger than before, as if the weight of the truck’s tire had squashed the muscle from Willie’s arm upward, like you might squeeze a tube of toothpaste. Willie himself did not move, but he could feel the compacted ball of flesh inside his shoulder squirm with each beat of his heart.

  Willie lay half on the road, half on the barren shoulder, trying to remember what had happened. He had been walking home from the diamond, in a hurry because there was school tomorrow—still eight more weeks until summer, an infinity—along with Reggie Fielder and James Wahl and that bully Mel Herman. Willie’s dad was supposed to have picked him up at the edge of the park, but he never showed up. Pretty soon the light began to fade. James stayed with him for a while, but eventually he left, too. Finally Willie began the long trek home. He barely remembered seeing the silver truck approach. He was busy thinking to himself, How come Dad forgot me? He remembered shuffling to the side of the road to let the truck pass.

  Now the warm firelight of an April dusk sealed him to the tar with the glue of his own blood, which slid to the asphalt and pooled beneath him. The fabric of his T-shirt hardened to a crust. There was no sound, but Willie imagined a soft sizzle.

  He began to fully wake. He blinked at a sky so red it looked bloody. The grass around him screamed with bugs. Slowly, he let his head loll to the side until his warm cheek felt the earth’s skin. He saw his left hand. It was way, way over there, far, too far away. He thought about moving his fingers and then his fingers moved. But it must’ve been the breeze, because that hand was no longer connected to his body.

  Then Willie began to feel again, and nails hammered one after another into his body, cold and fast, in places he could not predict: his forehead, his backbone, the webbing between his thumb and forefinger. His shoulder felt the worst. It was throbbing and itching like mad. There was also something wet pasting his hair to the back of his neck. Willie pretended it was gum. Mel Herman had thrown gum in his hair more than once and it took Willie’s mom over an hour to scrape it all out.

  The pressure in his shoulder was building. He looked at it, for the first time really scared. From the way his shoulder bulged, Willie almost expected to see a glittering mound of cockroaches tumble out of it, chattering and excited to be free. Instead, he saw only an arrowhead of bone. Willie made a face, his first one: he scrunched up his nose, and a delicate treble note briefly dimpled the soft skin between his eyebrows. It hurt. His shoulder really hurt.

  Willie decided to get up. It was the toughest decision he’d ever made. Would it hurt even more? Would all his guts come pouring out the hole where his arm used to be? He had to try, he had to make it to summer—injury, maybe even death, would be permissible then, but not now, not eight weeks away. He creased his forehead and tensed his neck, trying to yank his narrow wedge of a chest into action. His body didn’t m
ove. Willie felt like he was made of the same brittle twigs he saw on the ground all around him, and if he actually sat up, maybe his spine would snap.

  Fear bubbled up in his belly, slid partway up his throat, and sat there. He moved his neck—just a little—to see over the top of his swollen shoulder. Beyond, he saw the scattered remnants of his arm, now little more than a purple stain on the road.

  Willie panicked and started crying. Where in the world was his dad? He called out for help with such force that the acid in his throat splattered over his tongue and teeth. He jerked his head around, looking for somebody, or maybe a house, a telephone wire, anything, and the movement woke up the rest of his body and told him things he had not known. His other arm, the right one, was dislocated from its socket. A pebble was lodged inside his right ear. A bottle cap was planted deep into his left calf. Both of his shoes, pliant and worthless from the hundreds of hours of rain, creek water, and junkball dust, had been flung right off his feet. His head, at least, was all right, but he had a road burn on his neck—a deep, oval groove of mangled flesh.

  Then his shoulder split open with a sound like ripping fabric. Willie Van Allen passed out, thinking just one thought. Summer, for him, would never come.

  * * *

  But it did come. Proof was everywhere.

  The wind could be seen; that’s how fast it was. The grass could be heard; that’s how green it was. He could smell laughter in the air, like melted waffle ice cream cones; that’s how happy they were, all of them, everyone in town, in seed company hats and farmer’s tans and dresses so new you could still see the dimples where they had hung all spring on store racks.

  It was summer, finally summer, eight weeks later—he’d made it!—and the days, how perfectly terrible hot they were. Days like these made it practically a punishable crime to be a girl, and twelve-year-old boys everywhere were thrilled to be off the hook. The sun, everyone swore it, was closer that year and sagged lower, tickling tree leaves and roasting the skin of the three of them, Willie and Reggie and James, as they ran, which they were always doing—through infield dirt, playground blacktop, or scratchy, overgrown ditch weeds—arms pin-wheeling and knee holes yawning ever wider; Willie in stripes, his arm stump still bandaged, James in something uncomfortable with buttons, and Reggie, as always, bringing up the rear.

  Reggie was confident enough to let the other two go first, and often wore almost nothing at all, having already set his shirt on fire and thrown it into the pond, just for fun, and another time used one to catch a frog, and another one to wipe the caked soot from the windows of that creepy, abandoned shed, something he had been dying to do all winter—hell, for longer than any of the boys could remember. Willie had a theory: Reggie’s mother—Ms. Fielder, Call-Me-Kay—must have spoken of that shed while Reggie still slept in her belly. Or that wonderful tire yard. Or that giant sewer pipe so big you could stand up in it. Or that spot beneath the railroad tracks where each passing train showered you with cool flakes of dirt and rust. Reggie’s mother must have spoken of these places constantly, because Reggie somehow knew of them, or was drawn to them by a secret frequency inaudible to Willie and James. Reggie never got lost on the way to anywhere forbidden, not that Willie could tell, nor was he ever afraid.

  “Martians will invade,” he promised some afternoons. “And our families will be killed dead in their shoes.”

  The fair always came to town on the first week of summer, right after school let out, when the green lawn of the fairgrounds suddenly gave rise to tents, food trailers, and carnival rides. The men who worked the rides were beyond men. They were fatter than the boys’ fathers (except Reggie, who had no father) and wore fuller beards and longer hair. Their forearms were thick and blue with illustrations and their hands smelled sharply of kerosene. Though Willie sensed that the men were less offended by his missing limb than normal people, they were also without pity. They stood with arms crossed and looked at the boys with something between amusement and murder.

  The boys kept running.

  “We will all marry girls,” promised Reggie. “And we’ll be there when they die.”

  They tried to pop two balloons with three darts and failed. They tried to toss one basketball through a hoop and failed. They tried to toss one plastic ring around one soda bottle—any bottle, come on. Willie’s face was sticky with cotton candy because he didn’t have a second arm to pull off the wispy remainders. James emptied his pockets to buy a one-dollar mirror etched with the contour of a sexy lady, but later gave it to Reggie, conceding that his own parents would never allow something so lewd and impractical inside a house already sparkling with three floors of clean, inoffensive mirrors. The Wahls’ housekeeper, Louise, was directed to clean all of the mirrors weekly, and the floors and windows and light switches, too. James claimed that he found this routine needlessly thorough, but Willie and Reggie had both caught him staring intently into the mirrors as if searching for some kind of barely camouflaged flaw. Sometimes he would press his thumbnail into his upper lip for a full minute and then remove it, and show the temporary white slash to one of his friends. “Look,” he’d say, “I have a scar there, just like my mom.” It was unclear to Willie why James would want such a thing, or why he’d go through so much pain to keep it for only a few seconds.

  At the top of the Ferris wheel they sat together and rocked as someone, miles below, got off. Reggie pointed to the lights at the edge of town and with a whoosh of breath tried to blow them out like candles. James announced that he wanted to be a baseball player when he grew up, but that it would never happen because he was too skinny. Willie asked James what kind of car his parents drove, because his mom wanted one just like it but said it was too expensive. One day, predicted Reggie, he would be a famous criminal or famous cop, either one was okay with him. James said he’d be the cop who caught Reggie the robber, or the robber who evaded his cop, and their gunfights would go down in history. Willie asked if either of them knew of any good jobs for his dad, because he’d just been fired—he was good at selling things, maybe he could sell toys or sports equipment? Reggie tapped a finger on the car’s railing and said this, this very moment, was perfect because they were so high up that no one below could see them, and as far as anyone knew there could be anyone in this car: men, legends, ghosts, monsters.

  When the sun dipped just below the trees, Reggie and James turned bright orange and their eyes flashed like those of African tigers. Willie wondered if he looked that way, too, and now wished he had the sexy-lady mirror so he could see. The boys smiled, but with closed lips. They measured each other’s reactions, then tested them by saying things that were mean and confusing. They spit and squatted in the dust like carnival men and acted as if they knew all about life and death—and maybe Willie knew about death, just a little.

  It had been at a golden hour just like this one, three weeks ago, with Willie recently freed from the hospital and his mother’s side and reintroduced to the land of the living, that Reggie had made the three of them join as blood brothers, cutting their palms with an old buck knife and holding them together while they all looked at their feet, suddenly shy.

  “I’d give anything to be old,” Reggie had said that day, his voice hoarse, watching the dark red liquid roll down the last middle finger Willie had.

  Against all odds, night came. There was a man picking up trash with a poker. The rides lost their blinking lights. Reggie kicked the dirt, unhappy. James mumbled about his parents and how they’d warned him to be home hours ago, how they were probably already on the phone trying to find him. Willie, meanwhile, sat and watched his two friends, taller and bolder and better-looking than he, and with two arms each. But instead of being jealous Willie was only glad. It was summer, he had made it after all, and any new pain he felt certain he could swallow whole.

  Where All Jokers

  Must Make a Jump

  A kid was dead. It was a kid James and Reggie and Willie knew from school, a pudgy sixth grader with a florid complexion n
amed Greg Johnson. Greg had been run over by a truck around eight-thirty a few nights ago, right after buying a soda at a corner store. None of the witnesses recalled the make, model, or color of the vehicle, but nevertheless swore that the truck never slowed down. It ran over Greg Johnson like he was made of paper. Grown-ups were calling the event a “ hit-and-run.” What worried everyone was that it had only been nine weeks since Willie Van Allen had lost his arm.

  Last night there had been a big meeting. It was a small town and when two kids got hit by trucks, this apparently was what grown-ups did. Naturally the Van Allen parents had attended and so had James Wahl’s folks. Reggie Fielder’s mom, a waitress, was working that night, so Reggie relied on James and Willie to relay the details.

  But there was only one detail that mattered, according to James. There was going to be a curfew. No kids on the street after eight p.m., effective immediately. “For how long?” Reggie asked James, who had begged the same question of his dad: “For how long?” James’s dad only shrugged, took a pen from where several sat leaking into his shirt pocket, and busied himself with the columns of numbers that made up his work. “As long as it takes,” he said.

  The boys agreed it was terrible news. The summer wasn’t totally ruined, but close. After all, eight o’clock on a summer night wasn’t even night, it was the same as daytime only better—dimmer, cooler, and veiled. Now they’d have to withstand the stuffy interior of three separate houses several blocks apart from one another, and all because some guy was zooming around town looking for twelve-year-old boys to run over?

  It’s not fair, James thought as he pressed his forehead against the van window. The world beyond was stone gray and moved too fast to understand. Anything could mean anything. There was an old man scolding a dog-maybe he did sick things to children. There was a tall man brushing himself off in front of a barber pole-maybe he was a drunk, maybe he beat his wife with a wooden spoon. There was a little troll-like woman hobbling her way down the sidewalk—who knew, maybe she liked to run over kids in her silver truck.