Scowler (25 page)

T
hey went upward but it felt like a descent. The roomy dining room and high-ceilinged stairwell gave way to the cramped hallway and tomb-sized anteroom outside Sarah’s and Jo Beth’s bedrooms. Ry pulled the attic door down from the ceiling and unfolded the ladder, and the three of them took a minute to stare into the mausoleum darkness. No one wanted to be first. But Ry knew that his father was monitoring his progress, so up he went.

Moonlight glowed through the pulled shade of a window at the far end of the room. Otherwise it was pitch-black. Ry
swatted for the first light cord and his fingers brushed through Sarah’s hair. His heart stopped and then he realized it was only a cobweb. Jo Beth’s head poked through the opening near his feet and Ry offered her a paltry smile. She refused to look at him. She ascended at the urging of the shotgun; Ry leaned and saw Marvin bringing up the rear. Ry steadied himself, waved his arm around, found the flyspecked plastic at the end of the light string, and pulled it.

The mechanism clicked and the bulb winked awake. Ry shaded his eyes. He had not been up here since before Jo Beth had begun packing for their exodus, and he had imagined it as partly cleared. However, the room was exactly as he had remembered: a claustrophobic tunnel between two walls of boxes that rose like the steps of Mayan temples. Sarah could be anywhere. There were recesses dark enough to contain hideaways—certainly secrets—and crests topped with pieces of junk perched like gargoyles. Ry inched forward to give his mother room and the floor squealed in agony.

The butt of the gun thunked against the floor as Marvin completed his entrance. He held the Winchester in one hand, the dagger of meteorite in the other. His excitement was betrayed by how both items shook.

“Is there another hmmmm?”

It was Ry’s job as son to know this shorthand. He frowned.

Jo Beth offered a monotone interpretation. “Is there another light, he asked.”

“Hm hm see.”

“He can’t see,” Jo Beth said.

Ry pointed to the far window.

“Well, hmmmm,” Marvin said. “Hm hm hmmmm.”

“Go turn it on, he said.”

Ry addressed the passageway. The room was fifteen feet long at most. Sarah had to be within touching distance, taunting them with her silence. Well, he would flush her out. Reluctant to feel a rat throe beneath one of his landing feet, he moved by sliding his shoes. The floor hissed like it was salted.

The dimmest moonlight reigned at the far end. The knotted end of the second light’s pull cord batted Ry’s lips. It tasted sour. He caught it and hoped that, when he yanked it, he did not see Sarah right away propped among the boxes—it would be like seeing a corpse. Let it be gradual, he prayed. He counted out a deep breath.

“Sarah,” he croaked. “Come out, now.”

He pulled the cord.

Sarah was right next to him and she was headless.

Ry would never understand how he held in the scream. He stumbled back, landed his heel wrong, and tripped. And in that weightless instant he experienced the true horror of regret, because he should have listened to her about Jeremiah, about the top of his head being gone, because here she was, victim to the same decapitation. By accident he caught himself against the box their TV had come in a million years ago, and through the updraft of dust he made out Sarah’s lack of arms, the pole that stood in place of her legs, the zippered body bag that already encased her torso.

It was the dressmaker’s dummy, standing in its regular place next to the window. Ry could almost hear Marvin’s pitiless laugh. Ry flung his head left, right, to the rafters, to the floor, at cardboard, wood, wicker, plastic, glass, the whole illogical puzzle constructed from their lives’ castoffs.

“She’s,” Ry panted, “not here.”

Marvin shoved his chest into a wall of boxes like he wanted to fight it. It did not respond and he turned the threat upon his son. “She’s here. You
said
.”

Ry tasted panic. “I thought she was.”

Marvin kicked lightly at a lower crate. The stacks above wobbled.

“She hm hm.”

“She
is
here,” Jo Beth interpreted.

“She hm.”

“She
is
.”

“Hmmmm.”

“She—”

“Hmmmm-mmmm-mmmm.”

“She … she …” Jo Beth shook her head, lost. “Ry,
isn’t
she …?”

The room was torn apart; it happened in what seemed like seconds. Marvin brought down boxes on both sides of him with powerful drives of his arms, and before the packages split against the floor he was flailing at the next layer. The landslide ejected payloads of newspapers, tax forms, long-forgotten correspondence that took off on white wings. His feet hammered at a wooden crate until it buckled and bled the spangled shards of holiday decorations. Ry slipped on a busted garbage bag and fell into the dummy’s armless hug.

By now Marvin was chest-deep in the innermost layers. His neck swelled with the effort of extracting the staple-and-tape spines from obstinate containers. Pewter figures, old tableware, and outdated purses slopped to the floor like slaughterhouse entrails. No central thoroughfare remained; the room was postearthquake.

Marvin’s eyes, speedy and black as bees, found Ry and stung.

“That.” He pointed. “That.”

Ry looked at the mess in his lap. It was the contents of one of his mother’s sewing baskets scattered in a roadkill smear, complete with spool skull, pincushion heart, button blood, and scrap-cloth skin. Marvin kicked through the rubbish and pointed again, this time with the shotgun and at the dressmaker’s dummy. Ry ducked the invisible bullet and snatched the hem of the dustcover, eager to prove to his father that the dummy was not Sarah.

He stood, lifted off the cover, and dropped it to the floor. It took a while for him to notice his mother’s strangled whine. Marvin closed in on Ry, his feet grinding through the clutter with the same bored crunch of Sniggety chewing through a bone. The shotgun muzzle touched Ry’s shoulder and moved him aside.

There was no question about it: White Special Dress outshone the shard of meteorite, had just as many facets, was just as hypnotic. Marvin held his breath and reached out to touch it, but his fingers hesitated inches away as if weighing the possibility of electrocution. Finally they pounced, pinching the ivory taffeta. Ry could almost feel how the texture melted like lotion into his father’s coarse skin.

Marvin’s voice was muffled. “What is this?”

“It’s nothing,” Jo Beth said. “A hobby. Junk.”

“It’s not nothing.”

“That’s why it’s up here. It’s just an old—”

“It’s not nothing!”

Marvin snatched a handful of the dress, right at the neckline. Jo Beth shuddered at the crude molestation. He pulled,
trying to tear the delicate fabric from the model, but whatever laces or clasps Jo Beth had invented were impressive. He snorted in frustration, then moved toward Jo Beth, pulling the dummy by its clothes in the manner of a caveman. The headless thing came obediently, its circular metal base clucking across the garbage-strewn floor.

Jo Beth had both hands palm up as if eager to take back her baby.

“Look at it,” Marvin said. “What is it? What is it really? It’s a few goddamn buttons. Goddamn thread. Little goddamn bits of hm. It shouldn’t mean anything. Should it? But this crap is what ruined us, Jo. Ruined our hmmmm.”

“That’s true,” she pleaded. “That’s absolutely true.”

“And still you flaunt it.”

“I don’t.” To cover her bases she tried again. “I do.”

Marvin planted the dummy with enough emphasis to make a point, and Jo Beth’s knees jarred as if it had happened to her. The base snapped from the pole, wobbled a few feet, and came to rest against Ry’s shoe. With nothing to stand on the dummy dove but did not hit the floor—it was caught in the sling of the dress, which was still snared in Marvin’s fist. Ry heard individual threads give way:
Ping! Ping!

“They told me you were trouble,” Marvin said. “Everyone said hmmmm some other girl.”

“I am trouble,” Jo Beth said.

“She
sews
, is what they said. They said it like it mattered.”

“It shouldn’t have. It’s my fault that it did.”

He shook the dummy by the bodice, and through some fluke of angle and motion the dress, rippling as gorgeously as a tiered wedding cake, slipped free of the breasts and shoulders with a satin sigh. The naked wooden torso clunked to
the ground. Marvin teetered with the sudden loss of counterweight, then lifted the dress in a surprised fist. It puddled over his forearm like a dollop of frosting. They all felt it: Marvin had taken away the dress’s feminine shape, robbing it of much of its power. Emboldened, he kneeled and dug past the needle threader, tape measure, and tracing wheel, sifted through the scatterings of pins and needles, until he plucked from the mess a pair of pinking shears. He held the blunt little instrument in the same large paw as the dress and stood.

Marvin offered both items to his terrified wife.

“Please cut this up.”

Jo Beth’s eyelids fluttered as if pelted by a funnel of gnats. Her lips worked in silent syllables, struggling to come up with an alternate way to interpret this command. She ventured a little laugh, just soft enough, perhaps, to whisk the idea away.

He shook the dress and stared at the floor.

“Makes me uncomfortable to repeat it.”

“But I told you.… ”

“Don’t do that. Don’t cajole, don’t hm hm hmmmm.”

“And … and …” Her smile was busted and wild. “And why would I do this?”

“To change. For things to change. You want things to change, don’t you?”

Ry saw doubt touch his mother’s expression. Because she did want things to change. That was the whole point of leaving the farm.

“Then this is a symbol,” Marvin said.

Jo Beth’s lines of doubt deepened and Ry could not help but be awed. It
was
a symbol. How did his father know?

Marvin nodded. “You know what you have to hm.”

He extended the dress and shears. They hovered at a level
where all Jo Beth needed to do was lift her arms and the dress would be in her possession once more. She considered it, blinking drowsily. For so many years this object had soothed the rage and depression in her blood just through contact with her skin. Maybe it would do the same now, calm these stormy waters, make everything all right.

Ry realized he hadn’t breathed in forever. He sucked down a mouthful of dust.

At last Jo Beth spoke.

“No.”

Marvin angled his head. “No?”

“Shoot me if you want,” she said.

Marvin steadied himself. “You forget. I killed a man.”

“So? Think you can kill a woman?”

He readjusted his stance unhappily. “I can do other things, Jo.”

“What? Stick needles in me? Try it—you’ll have to kill me. Or you’re going to threaten to shoot one of my children? Do it. Do it and you’ll either end up dead or I will. Either way is fine. You’ve got that gun you keep waving around. It has to go off at some point, doesn’t it?”

Marvin’s shoulders began to tighten.

“You speak out of turn,” he said. “Hmmmm.”

“No, you do.
You
do. This is not your farm, Marvin. It’s mine. It’s been mine for nine years. And what I did to it was I killed it. You say you killed a man? Big deal.”

“I’ve got a plan, Jo Beth. I’m not going to let you ruin it.”

“Your plan is shit. Come here and kill us? That hasn’t worked. Take our money? Best of luck. Take that rock with you? You can’t even get it out of the hole. And then what? You’re going to waltz into some museum with it in a
wheelbarrow? Or what, a Polaroid picture? It’s laughable. It’s the most ridiculous plan I’ve ever heard. Prison ruined you, Marvin. I’m afraid you’ve lost your touch.”

Marvin slotted the wedge of meteorite into the Winchester’s grooves.

“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “I don’t have to sell it. I’ll
have
it. That’s worth something right there. By itself. Isn’t it? Just having it?”

Jo Beth’s face was wickedly drawn.

Marvin turned to Ry. The stew of rubbish around his feet rattled and clacked.

“Isn’t it? Son?”

Ry nodded. He had to.

Marvin’s silver grin dashed across his face like a knife. He lurched forward, the gap between his teeth like a great black curtain dropping over Ry’s world. Ry did not feel the fabric being bunched into his left hand; he did not see the stiff fingers of his right positioned around the child-friendly handles of the pinking shears. The black curtain lifted and there was Marvin, swooping backward to give his son space. Ry caressed the dress and fondled the shears. It was as if he held both of his parents in either hand.

“It’s what I was saying, son.” Marvin’s bare head was bouncing in approval. “Men do the real work. There’s nothing fair about it.”

“Don’t,” Jo Beth said. “You don’t have to.”

“He knows what he has to do,” Marvin said. “He’s my hm.”

Ry lifted the shears and practiced their operation. The soft noise sounded like a secret. He shook out the dress so that its full length touched the floor; its secret was even softer. He angled the tool toward the fabric, expecting the dress to
scream. It did not, not even when he fit the blades over the first thick fold of material.

The act of cutting detonated something at the back of his head; he felt his brain thud against the plates of his skull. Magnetized dust from his father’s hands might have rubbed off on the shears—would that mean Ry was absolved from responsibility? His thumb and forefinger pumped and the stubby jaws of the shears squeaked, and the two sabers of silver began munching through the lace trim. The pivot of the shears jammed and Ry felt stupidly happy—two inches of damage, that was all he’d done. But then the skirt went taut and the shears tore across it as if it were paper. A huge swath was flayed. From somewhere to his right came unbearable moans. Like a natural immune response, the blare in his head amplified to block them out. Both noises were distracting and he found himself having to double back, make a serious effort at chewing lamé to gristle, ribbon to confetti. Work: It was the one thing he knew he was good at.