The Monster Variations (10 page)

The grown-ups are unhappy with the police, who have no leads in finding the killer. They talk of the Van Allens, only briefly, and only in the lowest of tones. The Van Allens, they say, are not doing well, not at all. But their voices brighten when they speak about the Johnsons, who despite their woeful loss are setting a wonderful example with their nightly patrols up and down neighborhood streets. The grown-ups claim they will invite the Johnsons over sometime. Not now, it’s too soon. But sometime, the grown-ups are sure of it.

Mel tells all this to Miss Bosch. He describes how easy it is to spot one of these grown-ups on patrol, because of how absurdly slow they always drive, their bug-eyed, oscillating faces, and the languid, glacial crunch of their tires inching across gravel. Miss Bosch looks a little mean when she laughs and Mel Herman likes that.

Mel also hears things from the other grown-ups who employ him. Mel is at their house ripping up the dining room linoleum when Mr. and Mrs. Huron return from a
town meeting about the curfew, angrier than when they left. Mrs. Huron stomps upstairs, Mr. Huron heads out back, and the children are left alone with the only thing they care about anyway, their mountain of clattering plastic.

Mel is there soaking up water in her flooded kitchen when Ms. Daisy prepares to take her turn on neighborhood patrol, screwing on a large, flowered hat, unrolling long smooth gloves, and patting herself down before picking up her purse and car keys. When she catches herself in the mirror, Mel sees what Ms. Daisy sees: the ridiculous and elaborate costume of someone totally unequipped to catch a killer.

Mel is there on a ladder, brushing cobwebs from the gutters, when through the open window he hears Mr. Coleman shake his neighborhood patrol schedule and shout into the phone, “Well, is it your turn, Dave? Or is it mine?” Weeks later, after one grown-up reportedly falls asleep on patrol and topples a mailbox, Mel sees Mr. Coleman rip his schedule from the bulletin board and crinkle it into the phone receiver. “I’m not going to have some idiot running over my kid!”

They are all part of Mel’s town and are duly incorporated into large paintings made on that scratchy brown paper Mr. “Bud” Camper, for some reason, keeps giving to Mel for free. Some of these paintings hang in school hallways. Most of them are rolled up and stuffed inside Mel’s closet. But all of them are evidence. Look closely. Mr. and Mrs. Huron are rust-colored piping shooting off
in opposite directions near the center of the town. Ms. Daisy is a bronze star made from shimmering sparkles, then snuffed with charcoal. Mr. Coleman is an angry red spiral that spins inward until he swallows his own burning tail. Of course Miss Bosch is there, too, a yellow skeletal shape with limbs so long they connect to and become every road, street, and alley, granting her miraculous escape despite the fact that she does not leave the bed.

Everything else can be found on these maps, too. Kids he knows. Places he’s been. Things he’s seen. Fights. Parties. His father. Blood spots on the pavement. As he has almost told “Bud”—and
would
tell him if he didn’t so strongly distrust the bearded, long-haired, sleeve-rolled art teacher—the facts are all there for the seeing, if only someone bothered to look.

J
ames and Willie were not much interested in high schoolers, except one. His name was Tom, and for months it had been said that Tom had in his possession a monster. Details were sketchy and sources unreliable, but it was generally agreed that the monster was dead. What remained unclear was what kind of monster it was, and where Tom had found it. Several kids who had older siblings claimed to have seen pictures (grainy, out-of-focus, dark), and one kid claimed to have a sister who touched it and woke up the next day with a rash.

Reggie too was interested in Tom, though in a different
way than James and Willie. Reggie was fascinated with all teenagers and spoke to them whenever he could, sometimes abandoning his friends when he saw a group of older kids across the street. More than one junkball game had been disrupted when a group of teens came by with burning cigarettes and bottled beverages, causing Reggie to lodge his glove in his armpit and go dashing off to greet them.

Reggie used the Monster only as an excuse to muse aloud about the teenagers, what they were doing, the kinds of things they said, banal descriptions of their hair and skin and clothes. Meanwhile, the other kids, including James and Willie, would try to steer the conversation back to where it belonged. “I heard that it’s a baby monster,” said James. Willie added, “What phylum or species does it belong to, do you think?”

As spring yielded to summer, and the frenzied classrooms gave way to the quiet immensity of the town, the Monster was forgotten. But then came the hit-and-runs. The curfew-shortened days now had to be plotted carefully and spent judiciously, and the Monster was something concrete one could plan to see, go to see, then see.

It was James who first proclaimed, “Let’s go see the Monster!” It was after they had stayed overnight at the school and finished off several other escapades, and Reggie was starting to look bored and impatient. This was a dangerous state of mind for Reggie to be in, and it made James nervous. He could see it in the angry line of Reggie’s lips, his sudden, short outbursts, the way he hurled
rocks at things he shouldn’t. There was abuse coming, James could feel it, and so he suggested seeing the Monster merely as something to occupy Reggie’s mind. Once spoken, Reggie pounced on the idea and suggested tomorrow as being as good of a day as any, then turned to Willie for confirmation. James knew this trick. Willie would be flattered that he was consulted first and would agree to anything Reggie said. On cue Willie grinned and nodded and went on braiding dandelion stems. “See the Monster, see the Monster,” he sang to himself, as if it were nothing more than words.

It was increasingly difficult for Willie to get permission to leave the house these days—once or twice a week there were rumors of a truck gunning its engine outside the schoolyard or across from the park—but the boys managed by promising to bring Willie back before lunch. The next day the three boys set off in the morning, taking turns lugging the backpack full of sandwiches they had assembled, poorly, in James’s kitchen without any help from Louise. Reggie ate his sandwich before they were even two blocks from home and ended up sputtering out much of it when Willie flung an acorn at a squirrel, lost his balance, and fell. Willie got up, patted himself off with his one hand, grinned self-consciously, and asked for his sandwich, too. James kneeled down to fish it from the backpack and glanced up to catch Willie touching his stump and wincing.

At Buchanan Street they stopped to buy orange sodas and when they stepped back outside they threw their
hands over their eyes. The summer, unbelievably, was hotter.

Tom lived at the end of a long dirt pathway that winded for so long the boys lost sight of it among the weeds. By the time the old farmhouse leapt into view their one wish was to hurry and rinse themselves in its cool shadow. Only when they were leaning beneath a kitchen window, sweat cooling on their legs and broken spiderwebs tickling their necks, did they see everyone standing alongside the old barn. There were teenagers, several loose groups of them, sitting on car hoods, checking their reflections in chrome, drumming their feet in time with the radio, kneeling to touch the matted fur on the back of a farm cat, slinging rocks up at the silo and dodging them as they returned. Beyond these groupings was still another one: three smokers, standing in a half-circle, shoulder to shoulder, staring down at something.

James pushed himself through a web of gnats and heard the other two boys follow.

Their arrival was greeted with indifference. They were ignored, given less respect than the cats. James kept walking, his eyes sweeping across the trail of cigarette butts. A high school-aged boy stepped away from the group and met them shortly before they reached the thing on the ground. He was short and stocky with black hair that grew like moss, almost joining his eyebrows and spilling over onto his cheekbones. There was a pink patch of pimples on his chin. His eyes, while soft, were
slightly crossed and slid from the sky to the boys to the dirt and back up again. This was Tom.

“A dollar,” he said, but instead of holding out a hand he stuffed both fists into his pockets.

James looked at him for a moment, then turned to Reggie, then Willie. A what? A dollar? What could he possibly mean?

“Aw, come on,” said Tom, glancing back at the three smoking teenagers who still stood swaying. Tom sighed and raced his mismatched eyes over the boys before retreating them back to the dirt. “I been giving freebies all day. I ain’t doing this for my health.”

James fought to make sense of it. How could something as unique as the Monster exist in the same universe as dollars and cents? “We bought orange sodas” was all he could think of to say.

This appeared to make sense to Tom. He grimaced and ran a hand over his neck, then nodded as if he had expected this, as if he had heard it a million times before.

“Well get over there and see it,” Tom said. “But I ain’t doing this for my health. A guy’s gotta make some cash, right? How about next time you pay double? I’m not asking for a lot, but it’s summer.” Understanding dawned in James. Maybe it cost money to be a part of this world, to drive a car, wear these kinds of clothes, associate with girls. Maybe there were fees connected to growing up that he had yet to consider. He had a sudden urge to discuss it with Reggie, for it seemed possible that Reggie knew of these fees and had begun payment.

But then they were looking down at the Monster, the three of them, and for a while they were silent. The teenagers beside them drifted away after a time but the boys did not notice. They looked, blinked, looked again, and tried to understand what they were seeing.

Willie was the first to speak. “Where did it come from?”

Tom dragged himself closer, glancing at the Monster almost disdainfully. He snorted and spit and stared off into a patchy field where several skinny horses stood motionless. When Tom spoke, it was quick, like something memorized.

“My grandpoppa died last winter and he used to own this land, all of it, far as you can see. Raised horses mainly. When he died we got to go through his things and he had stuff in his attic, crazy stuff, stuff you would probably pay
ten
dollars to see.” Tom glanced at them and added ominously, “He was in the
war
.“

Tom continued. “This was up there in a big trunk. I can’t say for sure what it is or where he got it, but my grandpoppa, he went all over the world, saw all kinds of stuff, so there’s really no telling. My guess is that this is from Africa. Or Asia. I guess it don’t really matter.”

There was a weird buzzing from the teenagers and James turned to look at them—he had forgotten they were there. The young men exchanged looks and stifled what sounded like laughter, while the girls frowned at them in reproach. Tom heard these noises and saw these looks
and he dropped his slanted gaze to the ground, then back to the horizon’s horses.

James turned back to the Monster.

One thing was clear. It was dead. Tossed onto a bed of straw and crammed into the fractured remains of lid-less apple box, James almost felt bad for it. This was nothing like the coffin that Greg Johnson’s body had merited, nor was it as acceptable as the dirt and grass of the pet graves that James had seen in his lifetime. There was something rushed and makeshift about it, and James tried to convince himself that the Monster deserved it.

“It’s got wings,” said Willie.

“Look at its teeth,” said Reggie.

Tom sighed again, and gazed out at the horses with what looked like a muddle of longing and hatred. James could imagine Tom leaping onto one of the animals and riding away. He could also imagine Tom taking a knife to the horses, or a club, or a gun. It seemed as if Tom himself could not decide what to do and so stood there, sweating, fists in pockets, somehow set apart from the unimpressed teenagers who gathered only a few feet away.

“Guy named Mel Herman ever come here?” asked Reggie. Tom shrugged and nodded, and the boys were not surprised. Mel’s roving feet surely would have brought him to Tom’s months ago.

James squatted down, brought his face closer to the Monster, sniffed it.

“What are you going to do with it?” he asked.

“Gonna mount it,” Tom said instantly. “You know, like a deer head? Tack it to some stained wood, something real classy, maybe hang it up in the barn? Then make up a sign, put it out on the road. Maybe put some advertisements in the paper in Monroeville. Course, I’ll have to clean up the barn. That ought to take a while. It’s so hot in there, there’s no ventilation. You guys ever want to make a couple bucks, you let me know. I got some pitchforks, you can clear out all that hay for me, huh?”

Tom’s voice was prouder now, and though he spoke at the boys, his voice was aimed at the teenagers. After a moment, he kicked at a clump of weeds. “I got to get something from this,” he murmured. “It’s unusual. It’s great. Nobody out there’s seen anything like it, I bet.”

Fifteen minutes were spent staring at the thing and pointing out its various attributes. Tom drifted toward the barn, where six or seven mangy cats nuzzled his ankles. Willie moved away and sat alone in the shadow of the silo. Reggie gravitated to the teenagers and began speaking to them in an artificially lowered voice. James alone remained hunched over the Monster, knees shaking, forehead pinched, back smarting. He tried to imagine this thing alive, its brittle bones lashed with muscle and covered with fur or scales or feathers, or some combination of all three, but as hard as he tried he could not do it. The Monster seemed like something that had always been dead, something stillborn into an apple box,
packed unceremoniously into a crate, and suffocated in an attic for a hundred years. There was no life here.

When it came time to go, James had to call Reggie five or six times before Reggie rolled his eyes at the teenagers and nodded goodbye. He bumped shoulders with James as they joined in step at the mouth of the path.