The Monster Variations

by Daniel Kraus

  Willie was shouting something that sounded like He only wants me!, and even in the crash and fury of that moment, there was something in Willie’s voice that staggered Reggie and James. Willie did not sound scared, he sounded mad, mad at them. Willie kicked his legs—at them, at Reggie and James—maybe because Willie wanted them to let him go, let him fall, so that he could finally prove to them his worth.

  The tree house convulsed. A huge hole gulped away the center of the floor and Reggie felt one of his legs flop through. He loosened his grip on Willie’s pants leg and immediately got an eyeful of Willie’s shoe. Reggie reeled away, letting go of Willie to save himself. Willie’s body slid out the doorway and James wrapped his arms around Willie’s thigh, then his calf, now his foot, desperately clawing and clinging, shouting something, maybe, Don’t go, please Willie don’t go! For an instant the world narrowed down: gone were the tree house, the tree, the truck, the noise, the night. The world reduced to two things: James’s hands and Willie’s left foot.

  And then the tree shook and the truck backed up and Willie wriggled and the truck spun its tires and James screamed and the truck lurched ahead and then Willie dropped like a stone, heavy and silent, and James held only a single, tiny tennis shoe that was once worn by a boy named Willie Van Allen.

  Good Endings Leave

  Nothing Definite

  People forget things. Even grown-ups, who spend so much energy insisting that they are right, and that they are the only ones who know the correct course to take, even they eventually forget why they are insisting. They get distracted by their jobs, by the monthly bills, by that damn car that keeps breaking down, by that rainstorm, by that snowstorm, by that visit from Grandma, by how fast the kids are growing, like weeds, taller and taller every day. In the dull light of such events, even the hit-and-run killer soon faded into shadow.

  It was a tragedy, no doubt. It was on front pages for weeks. Mr. Van Allen, boiling over with alcohol and consumed with grief and rage over the lifting of the curfew, had finally decided to disassemble the tree house that he himself had assembled, even if it meant smashing the thing to bits with his truck. He never heard over the engine the cries of the children above him, nor did he see his son when he dropped into the truck’s path.

  What no one noticed was that Mr. Van Allen’s blue truck looked silver in the glow of the moon. All summer Mr. Van Allen had tried to bury a nightmare. He dreamt that one day in early April he had forgotten to pick up his son from that stupid junkyard, and so hurried to his truck and drove fast to make up time, but the alcohol fumes rising from his mouth blinded him and scrambled around all of his senses, and he barely noticed when he bounced something small and nearly weightless from the side of the road, then kept on driving.

  When he sobered and returned to a changed wife and a son with one less arm, he knew all apologies were inadequate. The truth, in fact, would surely destroy all three of them. Instead he would keep the secret in the hope that it would consume him alone. But his self-destruction was worse than he expected, more prolonged and painful, and he pleaded each day for someone to end the torture and discover what he had done. When he read about the cancellation of the curfew, he knew it meant that his agony was forever—and then he heard about what someone had done to Greg Johnson’s grave, the last thing that poor little boy had been given. It could wait no longer, the tree house had to come down; it was an affront to the Johnsons, to anyone who had to look upon the belongings of boys who had stopped existing.

  When the grown-ups of the town saw Mr. Van Allen over the next few months—as he was placed into the back of a police car, led to the courthouse, and transferred to the county jail—they tried to tell one another about the tentative, exhausted, penitent smile that loosened his knotted face. The grown-ups tried to communicate this, but they failed because it scared them.

  Greg Johnson’s killer was never identified, nor was the driver who desecrated Greg’s grave. There were rumors, unreliable sightings, supposed newspaper reports of similar patterns of slaughter. As months wore into years, the alleged locations changed, as did the methods of murder. But it was always the same killer, it had to be, for the threat felt identical to the grown-ups, who stirred their drinks with their fingers and used the blare of television to drown out the undying uncertainty. There were also occasional rumors of a quick and bloody justice, of groups of parents tracking the killer and bringing about a reckoning. The grown-ups knew this was only wishful thinking, and besides—there was something about these rumors that made them feel even worse.

  This killer would live forever. In fact, he had already lived that long.

  Before the police arrived at the scene of the accident, James escaped home and came upon a brightly lit living room. His father was gone—again, he was always gone—and his mother was surrounded by wads of tissue as pink and as puffy as her eyes. Her makeup was mostly wiped away and her scar glowed bright like bone. James wondered how she had heard about the tree house so quickly. Then he realized that his mother had her own heartbreak: his missing father. James stood there panting in the corner, unseen and painted with the red hieroglyphics of wood scratches, and in that long moment he vowed to fix the family that lay scattered before him. If his mother and father were indeed too damaged to do anything but harm each other, he would become their emissary and take them proudly where they wanted to go: high school, college, and beyond. All this would be theirs, starting now.

  Reggie was escorted home by a police officer. Like Mr. Wahl, Ms. Fielder was gone. Reggie waited in the living room. He turned on the stereo and the television, and turned up both so loud it hurt his ears and vibrated the fillings inside his teeth. Then he got a tub of ice cream and kept eating it, more and more, until it ran down his chin and neck and his entire face was so cold he couldn’t cry even if he wanted. Later his mother rushed in the door, her blond ponytail whipping about her shoulders, and when she saw him she stopped suddenly and her face trembled like she was afraid. She opened her arms. I’m not hugging you, Reggie thought to himself, the ice cream spoon buried deep inside his mouth. But a few seconds later there he was, across the room, his cold face buried inside the hot, hard folds of his mother’s uniform. She pet his head with hands that felt like they belonged to Mom, not to Kay, and said, “Shhh, shhh, shhh,” over and over, even though he wasn’t making any noise. Reggie wrapped his arms around her skinny hips and told himself he would let go soon. He did not.

  * * *

  Summer ended.

  Months ago, children would’ve bet money against it. But it happened—it ended just as suddenly as it had arrived. Now it was fall, and the new, cool air cut right through boys’ too-thin jackets and chilled their shoulders, shoulders that were a little broader and stronger than before. James and Reggie put on new sneakers and coats and hats and felt strange about how often they forgot Willie, but Reggie’s words had ultimately been proven true: there were places they would go that Willie could not follow. After a while, they thought of Willie only when they observed the pack of wild dogs roaming the woods near the old Van Allen place, scrapping for food and overturning trash cans.

  On the late autumn day that James’s father boxed up his clothes and moved out of the house, James found himself at the vacant junkball diamond. It was not a divorce, not yet, but his parents could no longer live together, even though the relationship between Mr. Wahl and Ms. Fielder had ended. Thinking back on that sweltering day when the three boys had followed Mel Herman home, it was funny how that shabby motel loomed increasingly large in James’s memory while Mel grew increasingly small. James kicked at the damp infield and could taste the dirt, just barely, inside his throat.

  For some reason he felt nothing about his parents’ separation; he felt as if all his nerve endings had been severed just below the skin. When he returned home from the junkball field he was dreaming about the approaching snow, not his parents, and he had his head thrust deep inside the refrigerator before it hit him. His father was gone. James remained bent
over the cold cuts and milk jugs for a long time, the heavy drift of frigid air turning his skin cold and white.

  As if to fill the home that suddenly loomed too large, James’s mother loved him harder than ever before. She was always there for him, on time, even early. If she had a single unkind thought it did not pass her lips or alter her features. James should have been pleased, but there was something he did not count on. She annoyed him. He didn’t know if it was her constant, overeager smile and the fawning way she spooned him second helpings of absolutely everything, or the cautious way that she handled him, both physically and verbally, ever since Willie died. It was as if James was an animal that might bare its teeth or flee if his mother made a single threatening move. He thought about both: biting, running. He also thought something else. Maybe tiring of your mother was just what happened when you grew up.

  His father lived in a nice apartment across town and James saw him regularly. Never once did his father mention the theft of the Monster, nor to James’s knowledge did the news ever reach his mother. James was thankful, at least at first. Later, he felt angry that he was obligated to feel thankful. Then he began to wish his father would go ahead and tell on him, to his mother, his teachers, everyone, because until the secret was told James owed his father a loyalty. But his father did nothing, and James did nothing, too, and this uncomfortable, unspoken pact between father and son stretched out, further and further, until it became their lives.

  The divorce did come eventually. Alone with his mother, money was not as plentiful as before. Louise, after over a decade with the family, had already been let go. James’s mother once again found herself facing the backyard clothesline on windy days, wrestling with laundry, those twisted, anguished cords. Only this time instead of turning to her husband for permission to quit, she turned to her son. James did not feel it was his permission to give and so withheld it.

  High school began. James never forgot the chief lesson he had learned the night the tree house came down: he was not breakable. After the death of his friend and the divorce of his parents, he felt deep within him the need to test this theory, to do things liable to injure and scar him. But he honored the vow he had made to his parents and instead kept his mind on the donut, escaping his mother’s relentless cheer by immersing himself in tennis, basketball, the drama club, the student newspaper. He volunteered at a nursing home and worked fundraisers for local associations. He met girls and stayed out late, but not too late, even learning how to kiss them. The scrapbook his mother kept, stagnant for so many years, began to thicken.

  Reggie was part of none of this. The junkyard fight remained interrupted. When tenth grade began and Reggie was not there, James did not investigate the reason, though he thought about it for months, wondering if Reggie had dropped out, if he still lived with his mother just a few blocks away. In a way, James was glad he was gone. Forgetting the summer of his twelfth year was already a goal nearly achieved, and seeing Reggie’s face in the crowd had only made that goal more elusive.

  Yet even as he was nominated to the homecoming court, made the all-state track team, graduated at the head of his class, and started to pack for college, James still longed for the danger of his childhood summers, those days of rushing through scrap heaps and thorns, those nights of broken curfews and cheated deaths. With peril now kept at such a distance, each day that passed was a mere drop of blood from a wound that, though mortal, would take a lifetime to drain.

  Sometimes James’s eyes would open in the middle of the night and he would lie there, caught in a dream vision of Willie. It was always the same. There he was, helping Willie limp away from the junkyard, Willie weighing little more than a laundry bag filled with old bones. As the memory took him, dozens of Willie’s nonsense sentences whispered in his ears, and he wished that someone would write them down in memory of Willie, because soon they would be forgotten. In the violet shushing of night, none of this disturbed him. He believed that he had been a good friend to Willie. Maybe a best friend. He was glad.

  * * *

  The day after Willie’s funeral, Reggie’s mother threw some stuff in the back of the car and they took a vacation, the two of them, their first one ever. Without makeup, her hair flying free, Reggie’s mother drove with her right leg pushing the gas pedal and her left propped acrobatically against the dash. With no destination in mind they drove for nearly two hours without a word, perhaps because the wind blasting through the open windows made conversation impossible, or perhaps because his mother’s mouth was too busy beckoning the ashes of one cigarette after another.

  Around noon they pulled off at a roadside diner. His mother walked inside and Reggie followed. They sat in a booth. Music jangled loudly from a jukebox. Even louder, the hiss of a grill. Reggie stared at his menu and felt as if, once more, he was being held inside for recess until he could complete a difficult assignment—the menu was all letters and numbers and none of it added up. He stole a look at his mother and she was glaring at him.

  “You want the burger,” she said. “Mustard, mayo, pickle on the side.”

  A waitress appeared. His mother recited their choices with brusque authority. Reggie tried not to watch but was spellbound. He soon realized why. He was at a restaurant with his mother and she was not the waitress. She was the one sitting down. She was the one giving her order. Later, as he gnashed his pink hamburger and sucked down the limp yellow pickle, he watched his mother complain about cold onion rings and receive steaming hot replacements, he watched her demand not two coffee refills but three, he watched her slap down money for the bill and send a tip skittering across the flyspecked tabletop.

  She drained her cup and sized up Reggie over the rim. The stillness of her unpainted eyes, her chipped and bitten nails, the disarray of her blond hair: she was so tough, and he so small. Reggie felt a stubborn thickening of his chest. He flattened his bottom lip and squared his jaw. Two could play at this game. He was tough, just as tough; she was nothing he couldn’t become. And so they sat there and frowned, enduring corny jukebox harmonies and the high-pitched exasperation of the grill.

  “Finish your fries,” she grunted at last.

  “I’m finished,” he grunted back. She considered this for a moment, then sat taller. He sat taller, too, propping a leg beneath himself for the boost. A puff of air flared her nostrils. She palmed her smokes and got up. Outside, on the way back to the car, she smacked the back of Reggie’s head; without hesitating Reggie twisted a leg and booted his mother in the rear. They did not look at one another when they sat down in the car, but both had the feeling that the other was concealing a grin. They were worthy rivals, the two of them. They knew it and relished the challenge.

  Their trip together lasted half a lifetime, even more. Or so it seemed when Reggie thought about it three years later, when his mother moved both of them into the home of her newest boyfriend, Darren. Reggie wondered how it had happened—he had promised himself he would not go through this again. Yet when the moving day came, he did not run away. He helped his mother pack and they moved, this time thirty minutes away and into a different school system.

  He had to make new friends, which wasn’t much fun, and he had to accustom himself to another new house as well as another fake dad with his own unpredictable smells and habits and rules. Reggie had to admit that Darren treated Kay decently, or at least better than his predecessors had treated her. It was not long before she took a job tending bar down the street from the gas station where Darren worked; they often met for lunch. Sometimes Reggie joined them, because he too was working at the garage. The first morning Reggie had woken up in Darren’s house, Darren had marched him down to the garage and told the boss, Gerald, to hire him. Reggie was handed a pair of overalls. He began to foment a new plan of escape.

  Then something unexpected happened. One day while hammering metal, changing tires, and persuading bolts into sockets, Reggie found something he was not looking for: pride. He was good at fixing cars. No, he was better than good. He was t
he best mechanic in the whole garage, and he was only a kid. His fantasies of flight-hitching a ride down South, joining the military, going wherever the nearest railcar would take him—soon fell from his mind. He was exactly where he should be.

  The age difference between him and his mother flattened and disappeared. They became more like roommates than mother and son; she was more Kay to him now than Mom. By the time he was a senior, it felt as if he had overtaken her in age and that he was the parent, she the child. He had to remind her of her shifts at the bar. He had to tell her when she let Darren get away with too much bullshit. Sometimes the phone would ring in the early morning and it would be Gerald saying that someone was calling in sick and they needed Reggie down there pronto. And Reggie would get up, pull on his overalls, and bang on his mother’s door to make sure she woke up on time. As he walked to the garage he didn’t think to himself how grown-up he was acting. Instead he thought that he owed this much to Kay, because if he turned out all right she might believe she had been an all right mother. Stepping into the familiar coolness of the garage, Reggie remembered the junkball plays Mel Herman had tried to teach, and recalled that the hit-and-run rarely worked but the sacrifice fly was possible if you just concentrated.

  Reggie graduated from high school with a C average, but found something better than high marks: Addie, a girl he met one day at the garage. She was perfect, much better than he deserved, and once he had her he did not let her leave his side. That was easy, because she didn’t want to.

  He told Addie about Willie Van Allen. She was the first and only person he’d ever told. Had he been able to predict Willie’s death, he told her, he would’ve guessed that it would toughen him up, make him more like the older kids he had idolized and finally become. Instead, remembering Willie dragged Reggie back to those days when he was smaller and weaker. For a long time, he had hated Willie for that.