Beautiful Children

by Charles Bock

Propped up against the base of the casino wall like an abandoned doll, the body was bulky in places, but still frail enough to look as if it might be carried along by a good wind. Electricity glossed over its mess of hair—kinked and matted strands of indistinct, artificial colors, clumped in all directions. Legs and shredded leggings were extended outward on a crushed cardboard box, perhaps a series of them.

  Through the spaces between the people ahead of him, Kenny could see that it was hugely pregnant, stretching out and sticking out of the bottom of her tank top, her belly this mass of flesh, rubbery in appearance, the color of uncooked bird. Approaching now, maneuvering through the pedestrians, heading toward her side of the sidewalk, Kenny could see where the left side of her neck was coated with some kind of greenish slime.

  Her arms reached and extended upward. Fingers danced, squalid with steel skulls and python rings. “Spare some change for some ketamine,” she said. “Won't you help for some low-grade horse tranquilizer?”

  And there was another ragged body. On the other side of her, he realized now. Folded up as if it were inside a small box, head in its hands, knees reaching toward its chest, heavy black clothing dripping from its spindly limbs, he—this one seemed to be a he—could have been an extra from some postapocalyptic movie, one of the decomposing undead types that come on camera to show how bad things are after the bomb. Resting against his shins was a piece of torn cardboard, its face scribbled with black marker:

  I am a good person in a bad situation

  Trying 2 get home 2 mom

  Please help me

  $30 4 a room 2nite

  Now the corpse became animated, coming alive in the manner of a haunted house mechanism that pops up as children approach. A high-pitched and scornful voice screamed: “Please, won't you help the children?”

  The pregnant girl looked at him, shook her head.

  “Why you always gotta be like that, Lestat?”

  Kenny could not take his eyes off them, slowing and stopping, watching the undead skeleton cackle at the pregnant girl and bare what looked to be fangs; the pregnant girl responding as if she had seen this show countless times, scratching at her distended belly. He, Kenny, was used to seeing people sleeping on park benches, homeless panhandlers, and the like. You hardly went a day in this town without seeing somebody by a freeway on-ramp, holding up a sign asking for a ride somewhere. But these two looked to be in his age range, and this was shocking, even as it sucked Kenny in further. For he saw that they were not alone.

  A few yards beyond the skeleton, a large delinquent was occupying himself with a book of matches, lighting and flicking one after another at pedestrians, who were going out of their way to give him a wide berth. In fact, punkers were strewn all over the sidewalk, six, eight—Kenny tried to take in the sight of all of them without looking like he was looking at them. Their presence had him alert, defensive, but more than this, too. He began searching around in his pocket, his finger poking cleanly through a hole in the soft white lining.

  “Need something there, slick?” she asked.

  “Oh.” Kenny started feeling around in his other pocket. “I just had it.”

  Preggers did not acknowledge the comment, but looked beyond him, out and down the length of the Strip. Her left hand stayed on the length of a mess of brown and gray and black fur that was curled into her side; Kenny hadn't noticed it before. This mangy, wolfish thing. Its head was nuzzled into the girl's exposed hipbone, at rest where the waist of her beaten shorts had been rolled up to form a makeshift belt. The girl stroked down the length of its back. Kenny checked his back pocket.

  “DUDE.”

  The familiar voice, the scuffling of a compact and quickly approaching weight. “What the fuck's wrong with—”

  A lack of breath ended Newell's sentence. Cradling the fun cup as if he were holding a baby to his chest, he sucked in a gust of wind, and spat onto the sidewalk. He bent over, the top of his head a bright red crayon that had been used to the point of dullness. A line of spittle hung from his hidden face, and he pulled at the end of his shorts, then reached to his stomach. When he came upright, his face was red and shimmering, and watching his struggle, Kenny immediately felt horrible about losing his temper, about having made his friend play catch-up. He had an impulse to wrap the boy in his arms.

  “Dude, what are you doing? You ditching me or what?”

  “I didn't— I wasn't . . .I told you to stop it.”

  “That's a funny way of not ditching someone.”

  “I got mad, Newell. When someone says—I mean—Why can't you just stop?”

  “OKAY, Dad. Can I have my allowance now?”

  Kenny didn't understand the last part, but figured it was some sort of slam or joke. He didn't have a response, and anyway, Newell was in the process of turning away from him, realizing they were not alone. “Whoa,” the boy said, and went quiet, inspecting the scene. “Total anarchy, man.” He took a step toward the filthy pair on the cardboard and removed a coin from his fun cup. “Want a nickel?” he asked, tossing the coin straight in the air. As it came down, his fist flashed, grabbing.

  “Newell.”

  “Just joking.” He released the nickel down into a small plastic cup, at rest on the edge of the pregnant woman's raft. “Geez.”

  “He didn't mean anything,” Kenny told them.

  “Like you know what I mean.” As if mocking Kenny, Newell followed up with more dropped nickels.

  “I hate taking baths, too,” he volunteered. “Baths suck.”

  Preggers remained nonplussed, and retrieved a plastic bottle from the opened maw of her backpack. The skeleton raised his head, ignoring Newell as well, instead watching his companion unscrew the cap. Lestat's eyes narrowed at the sight of Preggers swigging, the green liquid sloshing inside transparent plastic.

  “Once I didn't bathe for like a week,” Newell said. “I got sent home from school. It was pretty sweet.”

  The skeleton's eyes shifted toward Newell. Tired, deeply set inside carved sockets, they were lined with red, but still lively. Calculating. As if sizing up what was in front of him, he said, “What's your name, li'l man?”

  “Newell.”

  An oblique cough. A lick of chapped, blackened lips. “How do ya like that? Newell, is it?”

  “That's my name, don't wear it out.”

  “Maybe we should—” Kenny said.

  “Well, Newell, would you believe I got your name branded right here on my body.”

  “No way.”

  “I swear.”

  “Nuh-uh.”

  A sickly smile, dead and yellowing teeth. “Bet on it?”

  It was a dare as much as a proposition, with its own logic, some sort of hidden answer, Kenny could see that much. Exactly the kind of thing that made him nervous. He called out his friend's name. Newell stayed in place.

  “Friendly wager,” said the skeleton, his poker face now fully in place. “Everything in my hat against everything in your cup.”

  Newell willfully avoided another one of Kenny's looks, a trick that was starting to get on Kenny's nerves, to tell the truth. Kenny noticed that one end of a shoelace had been tied to the overturned baseball cap that the skeleton and the pregnant girl were using for their begging. He followed the shoelace's other end to the skeleton's far wrist, where it was tied and looped. The shoelace once had been white but now was a filthy gray, in some places black. Kenny was vaguely aware of tourists passing behind him, of the pregnant girl, bored out of her skull, staring out into the stalled parade of headlights and chrome and aerodynamic plastic. He watched the mongrel dog licking at a small open wound at the base of its tail. Watched a couple of punks on their knees, using condiments from a casino coffee shop to draw on the sidewalk.

  “BULLSHIT,” Newell cried.

  “Read it and weep.”

  “Fucking BULLSHIT.”

  Lestat's shirt cuff was rolled up to his elbow and his hand was in the air. Just his wrist, small thin lines appeared, imprinted on the so
ft, stained flesh of his inner forearm:

  YOUR NAME

  “You know that homeless people in front of the Pick'n Save make hundreds of dollars a day asking for change,” said Newell. “You know that, right? Dude. those two probably aren't even homeless. Look at them. I bet they just threw the dirt on themselves to make themselves look bad and shit. Fuck this. The whole thing's bogus.”

  Kenny asked if he believed what he was saying. He told Newell to look at those two, and reminded Newell that the money had been the casino's, and was just nickels anyway. “What's it matter?” Kenny asked, his voice soft but with an edge, a limit. He had a hand on each of Newell's shoulders and held the boy in place and looked deeply at Newell, locking in on Newell's eyes. It seemed to Newell that Kenny was pleading with him and at the same time telling him something warm, something intimate.

  Newell's face felt hot with anger. He started to speak but quieted, and stared back at Kenny and opened his mouth just a bit. Nothing came out and consternation remained on the boy's face. But slowly, visibly, the venom dripped away. For a moment Newell seemed to consider what he'd said, and more.

  “It's a pretty good trick,” he admitted. “If you stop and think about it.”

  A step now, taken in the manner of a high chair infant trying a new food for the first time. The skeleton waited, watching, amusement smeared across each angle of his dirty face. Now he extended his hand, as if waiting for a high five. “You all right, li'l man? No hard feelings, right?”

  When Newell did not meet his offering, Lestat nodded. “Tell you what, just to show my heart's in the right place, I got a good one for you. Double or nothing says you'll dig it.”

  “Maybe we should just—” Kenny began.

  A fangy smile from Lestat. “Okay. Freebies, then.”

  “Not another trick.”

  “Tell you what, li'l man, you like the way I roll, maybe you'll hook me up, help me out with a little something. I see you're cool like that.”

  The boy stared at him, dubious. Both of his hands remained wrapped around the fun cup, which stayed tight, held to his stomach.

  Lestat paid no attention, but coughed twice, clearing his throat. Now he wiped his nose, began rubbing at his eye with his palm. The rubbing became insistent. “Damn,” he said. A forceful blink, his eye now tearing.

  There had been a rumpled sweaty kid with heavy clothes and a pierced eyebrow. There had been a black girl with a prosthetic arm and large, scared eyes. Kenny used to see them, at the vocational high school.He used to see a palsied, thumb-sucking humpback—whenever they made eye contact, she'd go into a little convulsion, her smile spectacular for all its drool and spittle. Faces appeared in the hallways, showing up with enough regularity to become vaguely recognizable. Kenny always meant to approach them, but there had been complications. Never a right moment.

  The filthy one with the fangs, Kenny decided, was too hard for any of this, too much of a hustler. If he ever let his guard down, it had to be to work some kind of angle. Still, there was something almost familiar about the way these homeless kids embraced their awkwardness, the way they seemed to have created personas from their outsiderness, advertising the same social deficiencies that Kenny tried to hide.

  Lestat was cocking his head to one side now. His eye problems taken care of, he was settling into the cadences of ghost stories and campfires and friends confessing embarrassing things late at night, saying, “Okay, up in Hollywood? There's this place called Oki Dog—”

  Kenny stepped back. Almost instinctively he looked back down the length of the row, as if searching for one particular face.

  ——

  Because, without a doubt, he used to see the dude every once in a while. Too infrequently to put a timetable on, but amid the high school's listlessly matriculating bodies, every now and then, he'd catch a flash of colored bandana wrapped as a head scarf; that brittle body rattling around inside a T-shirt that had faded to the purple of a soft bruise. Kenny would notice that limp, so dramatic he had to stop himself from gawking, the way the right knee collapsed with each step, how the rest of the dude's body would go stilted, all of his weight transferring through his shoulder and down his arm and pouring down onto a makeshift crutch—this skateboard, a beat-up old long board, the kind you use for speed, only without wheels.

  The dude would limp unassumingly through the hallways like this, pretty much staying out of everyone's way. But, as it happened, Kenny'd also seen this same dude at Amazin’ Stories. Three times or so. Maybe a few more. It was a little weird, because each time Kenny'd seen him in the comic book store, this dude had been leaning against the New Arrivals bin, examining the same issues Kenny had been interested in reading. He'd be concentrating real hard, the dude—almost to the point where it looked like he was struggling with the pages, like he was trying to understand the reasoning behind the narrative, or maybe to figure where the story was going. Like this dude was unsure whether he should suspend disbelief and give in to the story and its flow, or just put the issue down, go and reap vengeance on the morons who'd perpetrated this fraud.

  Not a huge deal, these crossings. A couple of ten-second intervals. A few awkward blips. Kenny might have thought about going up and finding out what was pissing the dude off so much. He might have thought about remarking in a way that showed he too recognized the numerous and fairly obvious deficiencies with the Mutant Skinheads artwork, the fundamentally played-out concepts in Wendy Whitebread. But Kenny didn't do stuff like that. He simply wasn't the type to go and interrupt some perpetually pissed-off-looking crippled dude: Hey there! Don't you recognize me? We go to vocational high school together! Yes, not only am I unfit for standards of normalized education, I'm so dumb I'm gonna drag you straight into the moron spotlight with me. Let's talk comics!

  So Kenny stayed back and said nothing, and the dude took his issues and limped up to the register, and life went on, every bit as craptabulous as before, the whole thing a nonevent, a not-amazing nonstory. Certainly not the type of thing that stays in your mind enough to distract you from a rollicking yarn about pastrami hot dogs and sundry uses for napkins. Definitely not an incident of a heft or importance that would suck you away from the momentary particulars of the physical world. Yet in spite of a situation that had its own demands and dangers and responsibilities (Newell listening to that ongoing hot dog stand thing, a punk or two seeming to gather around as well, also being sucked in by the tale), Kenny had indeed returned, in his mind's eye, to the auditorium that passed for his second-period classroom; to the third-to-last row; an aisle seat and a swivel desk, rickety and loose, all but unhinged from its station.

  It must have been right after the quarter break, because the surface of the desk had been scrubbed, the efforts of untold taggers, graffiti artists, music aficionados, and lovestruck daydreamers scoured away. What remained was a relief map, pencil indentations like zit scars on the faded, tattered wood. And three new scribblings. Two were heavy and primitive. But the third: that one had been detailed, accomplished, in its way: the face of a giant skull like an orbiting planet; braces running down its continent of teeth, acting as railroad tracks for a speeding, out-of-control train.

  Kenny's aesthetic may have veered toward the intergalactic and superhuman, his sense of humor may have favored the subtle and whimsical, but it had been impossible for him not to appreciate the tiny skulls billowing from that smokestack, the bony arms flapping from the passenger cars’ windows. And by the end of the period, the side of his own hand had been smeared with lead: the skull planet's orbit now broached by a space cruiser, all eight of the pilot's eyes focused, with an appreciation that bordered on glowing, upon that runaway train.

  Two days later,Kenny had stared, with a dumbfounded awe, at the space cruiser's wing, and the pre-Renaissance corpse. Taking a knee, the corpse doffed its cranium.Ooze leaked from its open skull, forming the gelatinous word: WOW.

  Half-afraid the sight would disappear if he looked up, Kenny had tried to wrap his mind around t
he fact: he had been answered.

  So it began: a guarded castle stormed by zombie minions; a bikini babe wielding nunchakus to keep a shadowy dragoon cadre at bay. There were barriers, sure, there were interruptions and sabbaticals. The class didn't have a seating chart, for one thing. And the odds of Kenny getting to class in time to take that seat weren't great in the best of times. Also you had the mornings Kenny could not manage to escape from the seductive comforts of his fold-out couch. You had the times when he managed to get out and dressed, but couldn't spark the FBImobile's ignition fuse in time to make second period. And days when driving to school simply took too much energy. You had those couple of instances when Kenny had stopped at the Food King along the way to school, and had been distracted by the video poker machines. You had all those days, and you also had the fateful morning when Kenny had left his mom's place and discovered his old man, across the street, passed out, naked, in Mrs. Nguyen's year-round nativity scene, and Kenny had to get the poor sot out of there before Mom saw and lost her shit. All these distractions, and also the fact that whenever Kenny did successfully make it to second period, when he actually was fortunate enough to commandeer that seat, even then, a good half to two thirds of the time, the dumb bastard on the other side of this fun-house mirror, he'd come down with his own case of classroom attendance deficit syndrome, or himself had been unsuccessful in negotiating the politics of desk residency, which was to say, the desk would look exactly like it had the last time Kenny had left it, his most recent addition still untouched, a bride at the sacrificial altar.

  It was just aggravating enough to give Kenny another excuse to stay in bed, another reason to let himself get distracted, to not try so hard, although, eventually, whether it took three days, a week, or sometimes even longer, Kenny would make it back to that aisle seat. And, eventually, a new series of black lines would indeed greet him there, impressed upon the wood.

  Like this, slowly, gradually, with all the attention and intensity of missionaries in a new frontier, the glum confines of this physical realm had been transmogrified, turned into the expanding domain of the super-natural and otherworldly: a hobgoblin gleefully administering a superwedgie to a superhero, who flew warp speed through the rings of hell, rushing to get Satan his pizza before the clock struck twelve; a radiation-mangled, spider-armed giant with a hockey mask and a fried-chicken bucket on his head blasting guitar at such volume that an invading army of robots was carried away (some hanging from the bottoms of the notes, others trapped inside the independent universe that each chord happened to be). Kenny'd used ripped pages from blue book test primers as his tracing paper, devoting the bulk of the period to copying out the latest skeleton and mongoloid addition. He'd spent the rest of his school day coming up with rough sketches of possible responses. Stretched out on his stomach across the floor of his dad's trailer, stretched out in his mom's living room, stretched out in front of his aunt's television, he'd recognize a few things, little quirks—which comic books might have influenced the artistic sensibilities of the other guy: those billowing clouds, for example—straight out of that totally excellent graphic novel Ruthless Punishers, Dominant Visitors. Those posed skeletons—inspired by a particularly infamous episode of Mutant Skinheads in Love.