The Alex Crow (9 page)

None of the boys of Jupiter had taken a shower since we'd arrived at Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys, which was actually kind of gross.

So I kept my eyes fixed over my head, waiting for something predatory to drop down, while the five of us stood beneath trickles of freezing water, naked and shivering in the hell of the spider cave. And Larry kept ordering Robin and Cobie to be sure and get all the blood off their skin and out of their hair, because he didn't want to lose his job on account of a fight between two shitheads like us.

Cobie Petersen stood under the corroded spigot next to me, and rubbed water into his face.

“Hey. Noisy dude. Did I get all the blood off?” he said.

I nodded.

Cobie Petersen laughed. “That little kid looked pretty much like a walking scab, I guess.”

I glanced back up at the ceiling.

“What are you looking at?”

“Spiders.”

“Oh. Well, I always heard spiders don't like water.”

“And you never heard about how you shouldn't wake up sleepwalkers?”

“Shit. This fucking water is too cold for spiders.”

“Maybe they'll go after Larry, then,” I said.

“Hey. You can talk,” Cobie Petersen said.

I couldn't help but look at the gashing scar on Cobie Petersen's shoulder. It looked like three streaks of melted pink wax.

Three boys from Mars came in to piss and brush their teeth. They laughed at us and made fun of us and called us fags because we were all naked in the showers, but Larry told them to shut up or he'd throw their asses in there with us. Nobody wanted that. It was bad enough showering with the kids from Jupiter. The Mars boys were monsters.

Cobie Petersen turned and faced the boys from Mars squarely and flipped middle fingers with both hands. He stared them down until they looked away.

Outside, someone clanged and clanged on the coffee-can breakfast bell.

And after breakfast, when we all went back to Jupiter to prepare for the day's interplanetary contests, we watched with mild disgust as the new kid with the extremely hairy legs put a set of sheets on the bed that Bucky Littlejohn peed in. It was probably dumb, I thought, because I was certain that every single plastic-coated bed in Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys had inevitably been peed in—or worse.

By the middle of our second
week at Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys, Larry had softened his opinion regarding the five boys of Jupiter, most likely because none of us had tried killing himself and no blood had been spilled since the morning we caught Robin Sexton sleepwalking. The kid still kept paper plugs stuffed in his ears constantly, and usually pretended not to hear anything we said to him. He'd even managed to sculpt his fake earbuds from toilet paper he chewed on—like a wasp—and then he craftily attached kite string to them so it really looked like he had an iPod or something inside his T-shirt. He got the string from the Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys kite-making competition, which Jupiter won because I made a kite with Jesus on it.

Two of the boys from Mars beat up Robin Sexton one day because they thought he really had an iPod, and they wanted to steal it. Then they beat him up more when they realized his iPod was made from masticated toilet paper and pilfered kite twine.

And Robin Sexton continued to sleepwalk just about every night or so.

Trent Mendibles talked incessantly about his prowess at
Battle Quest: Take No Prisoners
, an online game that was like a massive networked cult to the majority of the boys at Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys.

Cobie, Max, and I had never seen the game before, although we knew plenty of kids at William E. Shuck High School who were similarly addicted to it.

Trent Mendibles's parents committed him to the camp after finding him unconscious and dehydrated in front of his computer monitor. He was having some type of seizure, he bragged proudly. He said there was even foam coming out of his mouth and nose. Trent Mendibles told us that he had been playing the game nonstop for eighty-three hours, according to his log-in records. He had to be taken to a hospital and hooked up to an IV, and he told us a very scary story: At the hospital, an orderly had to insert a catheter tube inside Trent Mendibles's penis, which, he said, hurt more than anything he'd ever felt in his life. His story made us all cringe, even Robin Sexton, who was clearly paying attention to Trent Mendibles's story about the tube that got shoved inside his penis.

But Trent swore his plan to play BQTNP for more than eighty-three straight hours as soon as he got back home to Ohio, catheter or not.

Trent Mendibles missed
Battle Quest: Take No Prisoners
so desperately he sobbed for three consecutive nights after coming to Jupiter, until Cobie Petersen told him this: “I will choke you to death with my bare hands if you don't shut the hell up.”

Three days was enough to cry over any video game, Trent Mendibles must have decided after that. And Max had said, “You should choke him, anyway.”

Nobody in the entire solar system of Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys was daring enough to mess with Cobie Petersen.

Who would ever be dumb enough to screw with a kid who'd survived being pooed on
and
clawed by the Dumpling Man?

Larry had installed a bell on Jupiter's door, which really wasn't a bell—it was a Mountain Dew can with a pebble inside it, tied to the top of the door by a string—and each night at bedtime one of us would be assigned the task of following Robin Sexton if he sleepwalked again, just to make sure he didn't get eaten by wild animals or wind up drowned in the canoe lake. Except for Cobie Petersen, we were all afraid of waking him up. When it was Cobie's turn to babysit the kid, he just took Robin Sexton firmly by the wrist before he got five feet away from Jupiter and pulled him gently back to his crumpling bed.

He said, “I'll be damned if I wouldn't rather get in another fistfight with that son-of-a-bitch jerkoff than lose a couple hours of sleep following his scrawny ass out into the woods.”

And Cobie Petersen begged Larry to let us tie the kid down to his bed every night, but Larry, for whatever reasons, thought that was too weird and could probably get him in trouble if someone came into Jupiter and found one of us boys tied up to his bed.

“What if we forgot him like that for a few days?” Larry had said.

And Cobie Petersen said, “Do you really think anyone would care, Larry?”

Robin Sexton pretended not to notice that Jupiter was having a conversation about tying him to his bed.

Another reason Larry found himself with a kinder attitude toward us was that Jupiter had pulled into the lead after a week and a half of interplanetary contests at Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys. I think that the biggest factor in securing our lead over the other planets was that three of the five boys of Jupiter were relatively sane. The other cabins, filled with boys like our own Robin Sexton and Trent Mendibles, just couldn't seem to function in the real world much beyond giving us dirty looks, calling us names, and mouthing predictable threats about us being queers, or about our asses, and how they wanted to kick them.

The interplanetary competition that Thursday afternoon was arbitrarily judged and as nonlethal as any contest could be: The planets of Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys all had to make puppets and then use them to put on shows for the other cabins. We had to make the puppets out of pairs of our own socks.

I didn't like the idea of sacrificing my ink-marker-initialed socks for a contest, much less for the entertainment of the other planets. We had a very limited wardrobe as it was, and it was getting near to laundry day for the five boys of Jupiter. We were all down to our last relatively clean changes of clothing.

Still, I had no choice in the matter of using my socks. What could I do?

So I made a sock puppet Jesus, and Jupiter put on an absurdist, metaphorical one-act play about gluttony and masturbation called
Teen Jesus Goes to Camp Merrie-Seymour for Fat Boys.

It was a tremendous hit.

In our play, Max and Cobie Petersen performed all the voices while the five of us crouched uncomfortably close to one another in the sweaty plywood box of the puppet theater stage. Max insisted on playing the role of Jesus, which was okay with me, because I would never have been able to talk in front of all those people, even if I was hiding inside a wooden box.

Max also said he was going to jump over the railing and into the audience if we had to make a quick escape. Planning escape routes and stealing things were Max's specialties.

I had cut holes in the sides of my sock puppet Jesus, so I could use my thumb and little finger as Jesus's arms. Nobody at Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys had ever done something so inventive—the thirty-odd other sock puppets performing that day all pretty much looked the same, which was to say they all resembled saggy white snakes with two black eyeballs and pinching thumb-to-fingers mouths. My sock puppet Jesus had a halo that I'd made from paper clips, and a Spanish moss beard. At first, Cobie Petersen objected to the beard, saying that if Jesus was a teenager at Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys he wouldn't have been able to grow a beard yet, but Max quickly corrected him by pointing out Kyle Breckenridge, one of the kids who'd called us “fags” in the showers, a fourteen-year-old thug from Mars with a fire-red man-beard.

“Oh yeah.” Cobie Petersen nodded in agreement. “Okay, then. You can keep Jesus's beard, but I think we should stab pins or something into his arms so you bleed.”

I shook my head. Cobie Petersen was out of his mind.

Cobie Petersen made a sock puppet of Mrs. Nussbaum, who he gave enormous breasts and hair made from dried grass. His sock puppet looked remarkably like Mrs. Nussbaum. Max, Trent Mendibles, and Robin Sexton all made sock puppet campers they named after themselves: Sock-Max, Sock-Trent, and Sock-Robin. We even glued small name tags to their sock chests.

“Make sure you put shit in the ears on yours, kid,” Cobie Petersen instructed Robin, who made small spit-wads from dining hall napkins and stuck them to the sides of Sock-Robin's head.

In our play, Sock Puppet Jesus lamented about how boring it was being a teenager and also having to be so perfect and pure all the time. Max, as I fully expected, delivered a passionate soliloquy at the beginning of our play in which Sock-Jesus complained about how desperately he'd like to sneak away into the woods so he could anoint himself and finally have a chance to
sprinkle around his holy water
or
cast out some Israelites
like other normal teenage boys do from time to time.

And Sock-Jesus's Jupiter cabin kept getting in trouble with Sock–Mrs. Nussbaum because Sock-Jesus could turn water into chocolate milk shakes.

“Nothing beats grabbing a nice shake with your best friend!” Sock-Jesus said.

And Sock-Jesus made endless chocolate milk shakes for Sock-Max, Sock-Trent, and Sock-Robin, who kept getting fatter and fatter, and eventually exploded by the end of our play.

And at the end, Cobie and Max sang the Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys song, but they had written out their own lyrics as a theme for
Teen Jesus Goes to Camp Merrie-Seymour for Fat Boys.

Their song went like this:

Jupiter-Jesus Boys!

We're Jupiter-Jesus Boys!

We're having endless milk shakes,

We could fill the whole canoe lake!

When people see us they cheer and scream,

There's a quarter-billion tadpoles on our swim team!

When we get bored we hitchhike to town,

Don't bother us now, we're punching the clown!

So cheer and make a happy noise—

For US, the Jupiter-Jesus Boys!

For US, the Jupiter-Jesus Boys!

It was all great fun.

I'll admit, it wasn't high drama, but our sock puppet play was immensely better than any of the other planets' plays, most of which were reenactments starring plain white saggy snakes depicting various levels of
Battle Quest: Take No Prisoners
, which Trent Mendibles and Robin Sexton found mesmerizing.

Trent told us, “I wished they would have put me in one of the
normal kids'
cabins.”

But that's how we five boys of Jupiter pulled way out into the lead against the other five
normal
planets at Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys.

And Larry slept well at night, which presented an opportunity for Max to come up with some clever diversion for us.

“
Be careful with the
soldering iron.” 3-60 cautioned, “You don't want to burn yourself.”

Leonard Fountain—the melting man—had rigged a Honda generator in the back of his moving van to provide electricity for his tools and the two-burner hot plate he used to boil things when he was hungry enough to cook. He held the soldering iron in his blistering hand, connecting thin wires onto the board inside Francis MacInnes's stolen cell phone.

The melting man's stomach ached.

Something dripped like warm tree sap from the end of the melting man's little finger. It was a soggy fingernail that had detached from the pudding-like flesh of his hand and fallen onto the overturned watermelon crate Leonard Fountain used as a workbench.

“Oh, Lenny, your little pinkie nail fell off!” 3-60 said.

“Look at you! You're disgusting!” Joseph Stalin said, “You're falling apart.”

The melting man tried to ignore Joseph Stalin. He tried to ignore the bloody fingernail that splattered down beside Francis MacInnes's phone. But he couldn't ignore what the tissue-based biochip the Merrie-Seymour Research Group implanted in his brain a decade earlier had been doing to his brain. It was why, in reality, they had been following and watching Leonard Fountain for so long, even if the melting man's brain, which came up with Joseph Stalin and 3-60, also concluded someone called the Beaver King was out to get him.

“Finish wiring the switch,” Joseph Stalin scolded him.

“I want to make you happy,” Leonard Fountain said.

“If you wanted to make me happy, you would have shot the kid in the cemetery. You can't do anything right, Leonard! How can I count on you to put an end to the Beaver King?”

The melting man groaned and put his fists to his ears. He'd forgotten he was holding the soldering iron, though, and he burned a diagonal gash in his forehead, just above his right eyebrow, which no longer had any hair. His left eyebrow did, however.

“Ow!” Leonard Fountain said.

“You burned your head,” 3-60 told him.

“Make me happy,” Joseph Stalin told him.

Leonard Fountain was getting crazier and crazier.

“What do I need to do to make you happy?” He said, “What can I do to make you leave me alone and be happy?”

“Put the red mercury into the masterpiece.”

Leonard Fountain had a Folgers coffee can filled with mercury. He did not know exactly what
red
mercury was. Joseph Stalin had been asking for red mercury ever since the melting man left Mexico City. In one of his more coherent thoughts, Leonard Fountain considered that if he didn't know what red mercury was, but Joseph Stalin did, then maybe it proved that Joseph Stalin was real; that all of this was actually happening and it wasn't just a dream going on inside the melting man's short-circuited head.

Still, Joseph Stalin never objected when Leonard Fountain stopped at a Safeway supermarket in Texas and purchased some ketchup and a bottle of red food coloring, both of which he emptied into his Folgers can of mercury. As much as he mixed and mixed, nothing happened. He tried stirring the concoction with his bare hands. The melting man enjoyed the feel of mercury on his skin.

Nothing—not even ketchup—mixes with mercury.

“And stop playing with my mercury! Take the mercury out of your pockets,” Joseph Stalin said.

The melting man also liked the way mercury felt in the front pockets of his jeans.

“You are taking the mercury out of your pocket,” 3-60 said.

Leonard Fountain dropped the mercury.

The back compartment of his moving van was a mess. There was mercury and trash, a festering open toilet, and rotting food everywhere. And Leonard Fountain had to make poo. He scrambled back up into Mom's Attic and uncovered his can of red mercury.

Well, it wasn't actually red mercury.

This was going to be beautiful, the melting man thought.

F
RIDAY
, F
EBRUARY
27, 1880—
L
ENA
R
IVER
D
ELTA

Staying in the company of Mr. Katkov, along with Mr. Warren, whose condition and spirits improve steadily now for the past two days. Mr. Piedmont and Murdoch are both housed with one of the native hunters.

It is remarkable how quickly the human soul can be restored with food and shelter! And having acquired those minimal comforts, there is always a drive to venture outward and seize more. The human condition is perplexing, at best.

Katkov's dwelling is efficient but terribly small. From the outside, the home appears to be little more than a hillock of snow with a doorway and a stovepipe. Inside, one can discern the structure had been made entirely from smooth logs, which are peaked in a triangular frame supported by thick pillars. It is very dark, as there are no windows, and the only illumination is provided by a fat-burning lamp. Katkov has a desk for writing and reading, and a stove that provides heat and is used in cooking our meals, and there are but two beds (one of which I share with Mr. Warren, a necessity we both find convenient to our passions). Thankfully, Katkov snores like a demon.

Mr. Katkov's story—told to me through Mr. Warren, who is quite well versed in French—is particularly compelling. Katkov has been here on the Lena River Delta for some two years, having been exiled for his affiliation with anti-Tsarist radicals. He was forced to leave his wife and children behind in western Russia, and here he stubbornly clings to survival, alongside the enigmatic natives in this most desolate post.

“Would you leave this place if given the opportunity to do so?” I asked him.

I had assumed Katkov, being so Western in his manners and sensibilities, would not hesitate to leave the Lena River Delta with our diminished crew of survivors should our rescue eventually materialize.

Katkov, something of a puzzle himself, answered thusly: “Are you a religious man, Dr. Merrie?”

“I attend church as often as possible,” I said to him. “What does religious inclination have to do with your staying here or going elsewhere?”

“There is something here,” Katkov told me. “It keeps me here for some reason. I am bound to its preservation. It is a miracle.”

“I think the man's been isolated too long,” Mr. Warren confided, in English.

“What manner of miracle?” I asked.

“You will see, Dr. Merrie. I will show you and Mr. Warren this thing tomorrow, in the daylight. You will see. Both Mr. Warren and you strike me as reasonable men, and you, Doctor, a man with a scientific mind. You will find this particularly enthralling.”

“What is it?” Mr. Warren's curiosity was piqued.

“It's a beast,” Katkov explained. “A beast, frozen in ice.”

S
ATURDAY
, F
EBRUARY
28, 1880—
L
ENA
R
IVER
D
ELTA

This morning we ate a breakfast of smoked fish, which Mr. Katkov smothered in seal oil before serving. The native inhabitants of this land are accustomed to such meals, but I find the food to be endlessly unappealing. Still, one must do whatever is necessary to survive. If I have learned nothing else from my experience on the
Alex Crow
expedition, it has been this. This is the reason we bother, Mr. Murdoch!

Armed with rifles—for this is a dangerous and daunting land—Mr. Warren, Mr. Katkov, my constant companion aboard ship, Mr. Murdoch, and I set off in the gray cast of daylight, following the course of the frozen Lena River inland for some two or three miles in search of what Katkov had promised would be our glimpse at a miracle.

S
ATURDAY
, F
EBRUARY
28, 1880—
L
ENA
R
IVER
D
EL
TA

I find myself nearly incapable of expressing what Katkov brought us to see.

After hiking inland for several miles, we came to a place where the river had quite obviously changed its course at some point in the distant past.

Here, the former bank along the western edge was made of a continuous and sheer rock face, into which cut dozens of deep fissures. Katkov led me, Mr. Murdoch, and Mr. Warren up to one of these rifts in the rock wall, and told us the thing he wanted to show us was inside the crevasse.

The opening of the rift had been adorned with all manner of strange artifacts: tusks and bones laced into crosses, dyed strings and ribbons, and small painted pebbles. The place looked like an antique and primitive shrine of some sort. Katkov told me it was he who had labored to make the place into a shrine, gathering together what scarce components were offered by nature to construct his crosses and ornaments.

Climbing up the bank to the opening was a matter of some difficulty, for the hill was piled with shards of broken shale, much steeper and higher than it had appeared from a distance.

“You have never seen such a thing as what you are about to see, gentlemen,” Katkov promised. “You will question everything you've assumed to be true.”

Along the journey, Warren had whispered to me on several occasions his concern as to the sanity of our two companions. By the time we had arrived at the strangely decorated mouth of this cavern, Mr. Warren's worries had claimed some discernible effect on my own outlook. We were both reasonably afraid of following Katkov into the fissure. Murdoch, as was his usual excited manner, acted eager and intrigued.

“This is nonsense,” I said to Warren. “We are reasonable men. Let's see what we've come so far to see, shall we?”

Mr. Warren didn't answer me. He looked pale.

Katkov went in first, followed by Murdoch, then me, and finally the newspaperman. Within moments we found ourselves in complete darkness, led forward as though pulled along by the guideline of Katkov's voice (and Warren's translation) of our path.

“Be careful to step over this rock!” he would tell us at times, or, “Lower your heads here!”

We moved in a single line—in two places the opening became so narrow I was certain Murdoch might have become trapped. But finally, after some time, the walls widened away from us and we stood in what I could only assume was some sort of room-sized chamber.

It was terribly cold here—so much so that I could sense Mr. Warren shivering beside me.

After a moment, Katkov managed to coax light from a lamp that had been left on a ledge in the wall. I looked at the man, puzzled. There was nothing remarkable at all here that I could see.

Mr. Warren released a relieved sigh and exclaimed, “There isn't anything here!”

And Murdoch shouted, “Good God! Good God!”

Katkov positioned his lamp at the height of his waist and pointed at something I hadn't initially noticed. Here there was another opening in the wall, quite small—so that standing erect as I was, it was not something I would immediately have looked for. Inside this groove was the thing that Katkov had promised to show to Mr. Warren and me.

It was a frozen man.

I will call it a man only because that is the most familiar thing I can use to describe Katkov's beast in the ice.

Mr. Warren crouched forward, simultaneously horrified and drawn to the thing, as a newspaperman would be. He exclaimed, “What in the name of hell is that?”

“Satan himself!” Murdoch said. Then he laughed viciously and shouted, “Great Jupiter Jove! It's Lucifer, and he's trapped in ice!”

“Well?” Katkov asked, “What do you think, gentlemen?”

The creature, bent slightly back as though seated, would stand no more than three feet in height if erect. But I was quite certain the specimen was an adult, due to the features and wrinkles on his face. He was quite obviously a male, too, and with the exception of his hands, feet, and face, was covered everywhere in a sparse growth of white hair, through which could be seen his pink manlike skin and nipples, indicating the species was some form of mammal. The eyes of the beast were closed—indeed, he seemed to have the most placid and relaxed attitude. But the most fascinating characteristic of all were the two ivory horns, each perhaps five inches in length, that curved back from the creature's forehead.

If a devil—or anything that might be mistaken for one and thereby misidentified—ever roamed this earth, we stood looking at one here inside Mr. Katkov's frozen shrine.

And at that moment, I was gripped by something I would not be able to resist—the insurmountable and selfish need to remove this thing from the ice and bring him back to America with any survivors of the
Alex Crow
. All the hellish suffering of this expedition had led me here to this revelation, a discovery of my purpose for being here, for having endured the ordeal in the ice. I could save this thing; I was compelled to do it. Katkov may be satisfied in his role as guardian of the creature, but that is not enough. Our place in this world demands the creature be brought back.

I know I have to do this.

- - -

Let me tell you,
my brother: There are few things more unnecessary than a good luck charm that has lost its power.

After the battle in the orchard, the soldiers stopped talking to me. Thaddeus chose to ride in a different vehicle, away from me, so I sat alone in a corner of the open truck bed, hugging my knees and pretending to sleep. I was hungry and thirsty, but nobody offered anything to me.

Two days after the attack in the tangerine grove, what remained of our unit rolled into a destroyed border town in the mountains.

Earlier in the morning jets flew past us overhead, so low in the sky the roar they made seemed to trail behind them like starving dogs chasing after a garbage truck. And then came the terrifying din of rockets and bombs as they slammed into the distant city.

Most of the town we came to lay in rubble that piled into the roadway leading away into the mountains. The convoy stopped in the center of the road, adjacent to a square that would have been a marketplace on any normal day that didn't involve aerial bombardment. All the soldiers climbed out of the vehicles, rifles pointed and ready to fire at anyone who might be there, but nobody moved on the street at all.