The Monster Variations (7 page)

It was a tiny drawing of tiny vehicle running over a tiny person. It was a detail so small probably no one had ever noticed it before. Yet there it was.

The boys pointed flashlights into each other’s faces. Their skin burned pallid and their eyes became reflecting
pennies, their mouths gaping black holes. Willie closed his eyes to block the light and for a second looked like Greg Johnson in his casket, tranquil and colorless.

James tapped Willie’s good shoulder with his flashlight until Willie cracked open an eye.

“Do you think … ?” James whispered.

“Get that flashlight outta my eyes,” Willie said.

“But why would he do it?” said James.

“Why are you trying to blind me?” said Willie.

“Wait a minute, no,” James said, shaking his head. “Mel Herman can’t drive.”

“Why not?” shouted Reggie. His face was grave but his eyes glinted. “He’s big enough to drive a truck. Smart enough, too, I bet.”

“Maybe his dad drives it,” suggested Willie.

The bottom of James’s stomach fell away. This was too plausible.

“I thought he didn’t have a dad,” James said hopefully.

“That’s the thing, nobody knows,” said Reggie. James could tell he was thrilled to unearth a new reason to hate Mel Herman, and instantly James felt Reggie pushing this reason on him and Willie, pressuring them to accept it. “Nobody knows squat about him. He wears the same clothes every day. He walks to school from who knows where. Hell, he walks
everywhere
and watches
everyone
and knows exactly what everyone is up to. And he shows up for junkball out of
nowhere?
”

The implication was haunting. If Mel Herman followed
kids to the junkyard, might he follow kids away from the junkyard as well? Might he do it in a truck?

Reggie leapt and in a single motion ripped the large painting from the wall. When he folded it into quarters and stuffed it inside his backpack, he moved with the curt motions of one handling something dead.

They did not stay the night. Around midnight, the boys wiggled out a classroom window, and when they walked away from the school they did it swiftly and did not look back.

T
hey couldn’t return home at one in the morning, especially since they were all supposed to be staying at one another’s houses. So Reggie, James, and Willie crept through the town toward the park, where they could sleep beneath branches, out of view of any police cruising the streets on the lookout for suspicious curfew breakers or trucks. As they walked, James thought he had never seen the town so static.

They woke up at dawn and stretched, laughing at the strange tattoos the grass left on their faces and forearms. They tried to remember what had happened inside the
school, but the memory was as murky as a dream. Only the crackle of Mel Herman’s painting inside Reggie’s backpack hinted otherwise.

They moved fast, trying to beat the sun across the sky. They passed a woman walking the opposite way down the sidewalk. Two little girls, twins, held on to the woman’s hands. When they passed, the girls saw Willie’s missing arm and at the exact same time started bawling.

The boys ran.

The Van Allen house was the first stop. The tree house looked small and flimsy in the morning light. Without a word, James and Reggie nodded farewell to Willie and watched as he started up the driveway, his shoes making light patters on the pavement. So delicate, these sounds—but suddenly the front door flew open and Mrs. Van Allen was there, and she shrieked, and then she and Mr. Van Allen came sprinting, she in a fancy nightgown that rippled back to reveal stripes of underwear, he in pajamas that snapped at the air.

They descended upon Willie like they wanted to eat him. Willie took a knee to protect himself from being tackled. Arms wrapped around his back and lips pressed up against his head. “Oh, baby, my little baby!” squealed his mother, while his father gritted his teeth and encircled both of them in his arms, his hands flitting like spiders across their backs. Willie squeezed shut his eyes like it hurt, and James and Reggie believed it—after a moment, they couldn’t even see Willie anymore, he had
gone missing somewhere inside the clutching arms of his parents. When another minute passed and no reprimands were doled out, not to anyone, the two boys stole away. The Van Allens never acknowledged them.

Willie was whisked inside, stripped, and nudged into the bath by his mother. His parents obviously knew he had not been at James’s house last night, but for some reason they did not discuss it. Willie heard his father dial the phone and sigh, “Call off the dogs, the little son of a gun is back.” Then he appeared at the bathroom door, but seemed unnerved by his son’s nudity and turned his attention to the newspaper and red pen that were clutched in his shaking hands. “All is well,” he said, maybe to them, maybe to himself. “Back to work, then, back to work.” Mrs. Van Allen smiled but did not respond, and continued washing the grass from her son’s hair—bathing in private was something Willie had been forced to relinquish after losing his arm. As she scrubbed, she jabbered mindlessly about things that were of no interest to Willie: heat, humidity, groceries, the upturn of the job market. Willie was tired and had to keep reminding himself to sit up tall so his arm bandages wouldn’t get soapy, but upon hearing this last topic he forced himself to contribute. “Did Dad find a job, then?” he asked, feeling very grown-up despite being naked in a tub. His mother laughed through clenched teeth, scrubbing at his neck, soap bubbles swaying from loose strands of her hair like bulbs on a string of Christmas
lights. “No, no, no, he hasn’t,” she whispered. “But jobs aren’t everything, are they?”

As Willie’s mother re-dressed his stump, Willie tried to block out her voice so he could hear his father moving elsewhere in the house. The only thing he heard was the electric fan. As was often the case these days, Willie started to worry, and that telltale cleft scored the soft skin between his eyebrows. Willie did not know why his dad had lost his job, but suspected it had something to do with the hit-and-run. It seemed like the same day Willie had been struck on the road, his father had been infected with a terminal disease that he was slowly dying of, right here inside this house.

Willie barely remembered getting hit—just that silver truck and how it had floated away. The doctor who sewed up his stump said it was a blessing he didn’t remember more. Mostly, Willie remembered looking up from a hospital gurney, seeing the white ceiling rush by, and then his father’s worried, upside-down face. It was then that Willie uttered his first words since the truck hit him: “Dad, how come you forgot me?”

He didn’t mean to make his father feel bad. But after he said it, the life had drained from his father’s face and it had yet to return. Before his father lost his job, he had sold things—insurance, mostly—and he would sometimes invite Willie into the TV room where he was downing a beer and spinning an old autographed football between two hands, and he would point at the athletes on the
screen and make Willie guess how big an insurance policy he would sell that man if he met him.

“A hundred dollars?” Willie would venture.

“A hundred dollars! This is a sportsman we’re talking about here! He makes a living getting his butt knocked around the field!”

“A thousand dollars?” At this point, Willie would start to smile. His father’s exaggerated distress was comic.

“A thou—? Kid, tell me you’re joking. Oh, you’re no son of mine, not with a brain that thinks that small, there’s just no way. I always thought you looked like somebody else’s kid anyway. You are, aren’t you? Just level with me.”

“I’m not! I’m yours!”

“Prove it. Because I don’t believe it. A thousand dollars, unbelievable! Prove to me you’re a son of mine, because this, I’m sorry, I cannot swallow.”

“I don’t know how!” And now Willie would be laughing, louder and louder to match the increasing volume of his father’s protestations, and soon his mother would appear at the door, unable to resist the joyful noise.

“I’ll prove it,” she once said, and winked, and his father had made a growling cat noise, and though Willie didn’t get it, they all laughed together, and his father tackled him against the floor and tickled him, asking how much would he pay to insure against
this?
How about
this?

There had not been such noise in the house for a long time. One day after kissing his dad’s cheek before going
outdoors, he felt a cold hand grasp his wrist and wrench him back to the kitchen table. Without another arm to brace himself, Willie nearly fell, but his dad kept him aloft by lifting upward on the arm, too hard. His father’s loose red eyes aligned themselves with Willie’s.

“Listen,” he whispered. The beer stink entered Willie’s gaping mouth, stole away his breath. His father gripped his wrist even harder, gave it a brisk shake. “This isn’t the life for a kid, I know that. You’re not all there. Look at you. That isn’t right. But what can I do?”

Willie just stared at him, his wrist smarting.

“There’s not one thing I can do. If there was information I could give, facts that would actually really truthfully help, don’t you think I would volunteer them?”

“Barry.” It was his mother, her voice frightened.

“What information—”

“Barry.”

The grip on his wrist tightened, unbearable.

“What facts
could put you back together? Facts don’t mean anything. This is something I’ve learned. One day, Willie, they are going to ask you for the facts.” His father nodded slowly, the pale skin of his razor-burned face looking even deader because of the steady, measured movement. “You tell them. The facts, they do not tell the story.”

Then his mother was there, releasing his wrist as easily as if she possessed a key, and he was off, away, outside. After the surgery, his mother had changed, too, wide-eyed and open-mouthed and always looking as if
she were bracing for impact. Sometimes there would be little moments when Willie’s parents seemed normal. Last Saturday Willie and his mother had laughed together at the cartoons and she had grabbed at his socked feet like she used to while he dodged, and just for a second she had looked like the Momma he remembered. And last week Willie’s dad had helped him catch a salamander that went zigzagging beneath the back porch. There, under the stairs, with mud on his cheek and chin, Willie’s dad had looked just like he used to—funny, laughing, always up for anything. But of late he just slumped through the house in rumpled pajamas, spreading that beery odor—that flat, rotten, bready stink—from his breath, clothes, hair, and skin.

Sometimes Willie forgot that he didn’t have a left arm. Before he’d come home from the hospital, the doctor had told Willie that, in time, he would “mourn” his missing arm. Later, Willie had heard that the town mourned Greg Johnson at his funeral. He began to wonder if his left arm was buried somewhere in the same cemetery, and if one day he might stand over his arm’s grave, cry a little, read a little bit from the Bible, and then feel a whole lot better because he had finally properly mourned.

Mournful was not how he felt about his missing limb, not now. His father tended to shy away from the daily dressings, glancing at the naked stump like it was a new, unwanted baby that would not stop wailing. But Willie loved the ritual; it was the only thing he still shared with his mother: the daily unwrappings, her tender fingers,
the application of cream, her gentle breath on his sensitive skin, the rewrapping—snug but not too. What else was there? The chores she formerly assigned were too difficult to execute with one arm, and though he gamely tried washing dishes, folding clothes, and clipping coupons, what should have taken minutes lasted hours. She had little use for him indoors, that was clear, but she also did not want him running around outside. Locks on doors were used with frequency, and those doors that did not have locks were given them. Willie assumed his parents feared that the hit-and-run driver would return to finish him off, even though they never dared speak such fears aloud. Even after Greg Johnson had been killed and both Van Allen parents had returned home from the town meeting, they turned away in distaste when Willie had asked too many questions.

So he did not spend much time missing his arm. He spent much more time trying to keep his room clean (which took longer without a left arm), make his bed (that took longer, too), smile a whole lot, and in general be a very good boy, which he hoped might please his parents and rouse them from their sleepwalking. He carried Softie around whenever he could. He wasn’t much interested in the teddy bear anymore, but his mom seemed to delight in seeing him with it, so he kept it, despite the mean things Reggie said. He tried to avoid Mel Herman, not because he hated him like everyone else, but because he feared his mother’s strange, heartbroken reaction whenever he came home with gum in his hair. It was
exhausting, all the things he did each day to keep his parents as happy as possible. Was it normal for a kid to worry that his mother and father would burst into tears at any moment? Wasn’t it supposed to be the other way around? Willie wasn’t sure. So he kept smiling and laughing and being good, while privately wondering why his parents were the ones who acted like they had lost something.

* * *

“Willie’s mom called here at the crack of dawn to check up on him,” James’s mother said as she set down his milk and cereal. James had arrived just as his mother was finishing up her own breakfast of grapefruit, toast, marmalade, and tea. Not having had time to reapply makeup after eating, the scar on her upper lip was more visible than usual. James forced himself not to look at it. It upset his mother greatly, this scar; she masked it with more vigor and effort than Willie ever put into trying to hide his stump: cosmetics, lipstick, a raised glass of wine, a knuckle placed to make it look like she was thinking. How a tiny sliver of flesh could be so shameful was unfathomable to James, but it was a flaw, and that was something his mother was not skilled at handling.

Mr. Wahl stood at the other end of the table, having been dragged in there by his wife to be present for this interrogation. But he had brought with him his work, those thousands of tiny numbers, and he stood above his
papers with both hands planted flat. There was paper and pens and a calculator, none of which were good signs.