Scowler (22 page)

J
esus Christ was eight feet tall. Ry did not recall this fact from years of bone-dry sermons or the Sunday school storybooks with their depictions of interchangeable men in slovenly robes. But Jesus Christ filled the bathtub in which he stood, the bumps of his rubber hair smearing the ceiling mold. The hair was painted brown, though much of it had flaked off, revealing an underlayer the dull-gray color of exposed brains. Similar patches of gray poked through elsewhere: two spots like nipples upon his pink chest; a palm dot like an extra stigmata; and, worst of all, along his kneeless legs, chipped paint like leprous welts. Ry knew that it was his
carelessness that had done this to Jesus Christ. He remembered knotting the long limbs to his belt as he fled through Black Glade. He parted his numb lips to apologize.

“Sorrow not, child.” Resonant yet gentle, the voice came from everywhere at once. “I am resurrected.”

An ache fit over Ry’s head like a helmet, and he judged it not as the flare of injury but as the sensation of the saved. He took a moment to get his bearings. The bathroom air was foggy and dimly lit. He was crumpled at the front end of the empty but humid tub, one leg tossed over the edge, his head resting just beneath the faucet. Realizing this, he braced, expecting water, the continuation of his drowning.

“Thou remember the last words I spoketh?” The oval head titled but there was no emotion in the line-dash mouth or white-dot eyes. Steam gave rise to perspiration upon the rudimentary features and the moisture fell like taciturn tears. “I toldest thou that we would grow up. Have we not?”

“Yes,” Ry said. “Oh, yes.”

“Gentle Furrington is here too. He missed thou greatly.”

“I missed … both of you, I—”

“And we thou.”

“But what about …” Ry’s mouth hung open. “Am I going to see—”

“Hush,” Jesus Christ said. “We shall not call upon that one. His is the world of Revelations.”

Like a series of still photos, events began to fill in the blanks of Ry’s memory: his father, the gun, the crater, his sister’s escape. Rather than being left to smother in the mud, he had been deposited in this tub, but he was quick to remind himself that such a lucky break did not mean that he was out of danger.

He gave Jesus Christ an important look. “We have to be careful. We need to—”

“Son.” His father’s voice was as brilliant as orchestral music compared with the soft sighs of the shower conversation. “Time to get up.”

Ry craned his neck and found Marvin no more than an arm’s length away, cloaked in steam, hunched over a sink whistling with hot water. Resting behind the knobs of hot and cold was the Winchester, bejeweled with moisture. The mirror, cloudy and drizzled, concealed Marvin’s face, and he was shirtless—his torso an unsightly knot of prison muscles—and he held in one hand a razor. Ry recognized it as his own and lifted a hand from the slimy floor of the tub to touch his face. The pimple alongside his nose was the only variation from the smoothness.

The razor rattled against porcelain. Marvin used no cream but put the blade directly to cheek. Ry looked away and saw, next to the shotgun, the foot-long shard that had broken free of the meteorite, its dazzling topography magnified by tense little beads of water. Marvin’s hand strayed and caressed its countless edges. He lifted the fingertips to his nose, where he sniffed; to his lips, where he daubed whatever slick magic he had wiped from the shard’s surface; to his tongue, which licked at the fingers like a child goes after runners of ice cream.

“We can’t see, we can’t work.” The razor repositioned itself, the blade cutting across cheekbone. “We can’t work, why, then, we’ll just wait for dawn. I’m not happy about what you did, son, but I can’t do anything about it. That’s a lesson in itself: You make the best of what you’ve got. I’ve been wanting a go at a shave anyway. Maybe some supper. We’ll
have another chance, you and I, you bet your life. And soon. Dawn comes early this time a year.”

“Let me take him.” Jo Beth’s voice came from the bathroom doorway. “I don’t want to hear him choking again.”

“Father-son time, Jo. You have to respect it.”

“He swallowed too much.… Can’t you just let me have him?”

Marvin rotated the blade in the stream of water. “Women will worry, son, but don’t hold that against them. Their fate is not their own. Worry is understandable. When it becomes too much, well, you nip it in the bud.”

Jo Beth inhaled. But she held her words.

Ry was riveted by familiar notes from his childhood: the wet rip of hair removal, the
ting
of cheap metal to porcelain sink, the gurgle of water thickened with hair, his father’s luxuriant sigh.

“Most fellows consider shaving as a chore. That’s the wrong way to look at it. Think of it instead as one of life’s sustaining rituals. There’s so many on a farm. There’s the alarm clock; there’s chickens; there’s things to be done before sunrise, before the rain, before winter. Same thing here. It’s a task to be done before things go too far. It also answers everyone’s first question: Can you operate on the schedule of manhood? Yes. We can. It is a ritual we
love
.”

The razor rattled. Ry thought he could hear individual hairs hit the sink.

“Jesus Christ, it feels good.”

Ry looked to Jesus Christ at the mention of his name. The towering rubber figure did not move. Beads of water worked their way down his luminous body.

“They’re not real enthusiastic about handing out razors in
prison. Shaving’s not a ritual they appreciate and, believe me, they have plenty of rituals of their own. Except theirs don’t make a man, no sir. Theirs pull the manhood out of you like deboning a fish. Until all that’s left is the worst of impulses. Things you want to possess, people you want to hurt, women you want to have forceful intercourse with. No good. None of these feelings serve you any damn good at all. But I won’t sugarcoat it. Bad impulses can be useful if you can hang on to yourself, your true self. They can act as cheap fuel for an engine that wants to quit. You think we’re miles apart, son, but it isn’t so. We’re closer than you think.”

The razor glided right past extended jugulars, a jutting Adam’s apple, the final patch of matted neck fur. Steam rolled in torpid clouds like a manifestation of Marvin’s wisdom allowed to fatten in a way not permitted in nearly a decade.

Marvin placed the blade to his forehead, right at the hairline.

“Oh, no,” Jo Beth said. “No, don’t.”

“It feels,” Marvin breathed, “like spring.”

The razor went back. A long strip of fur peeled off and plopped to the sink like a dead rodent. The bulb above the mirror shone off the segment of newly exposed scalp. Ry thought it must be nearly impossible to shave a head with a safety razor; though, on the other hand, no one wielded a blade like Marvin Burke. Back and forth it went
—shick, shick, shick
—and great volumes of hair were sliced away, much of it floating like bugs in the heavy fog. Ry blinked his father’s hair from his lashes and spat it from his lips. Only the dagger of meteorite went unaffected—black strands jitterbugged inches away like shavings of magnetized metal.

Marvin’s interlocked back muscles fattened as he twisted
around. The pink, puckered scar on his neck where Scowler had drilled for blood was now hideously revealed. Before Ry could look away light splashed off his father’s skull, so expertly shorn that it gleamed like a balloon. His chest hair was thick and matted with blood over his heart, and upon his flushed face was a surprise that should have been predictable: a mustache, thick and soaking. He held up the dripping razor.

“Your turn,” he said. “Up and at ’em.”

Ry turned to the figure hiding in the shadow of the shower curtain.

“What do I do?” Ry whispered.

Jesus Christ said nothing but twisted to the side, becoming a helix. The action made sense to Ry: Turn the other cheek. He nodded enthusiastically and gripped the edge of the tub. He could and would turn his cheek, both of them quite literally, if that’s what Marvin wanted.

“Thank you, Jesus,” he said.

Marvin’s mustache crawled upward. “You speaking to someone?”

“It’s his friends,” Jo Beth said.

Ry, halfway to his feet, threw a harassed look at his mother, who still hovered at the bathroom door, her skin like parchment. She gave him a glance that suggested she knew what she was doing. Ry doubted that viscerally—the Unnamed Three were to remain unnamed, especially by their murderess.

Marvin’s eyes traveled from wife to son. “Friends? How’s that?”

Jo Beth nodded so vigorously the hot clouds in the bathroom eddied. “Imaginary friends. Toys. Things he had as a boy.” She lifted a palm attached to a weary, dead-weight
arm. “It’s what I was saying earlier. He’s not okay. He’s been damaged—as a
child
. And now today, everything’s that’s happened today? At least let him go lie down.”

Horror crawled across his skin. How long had his mother felt this way? Who else shared her opinion? Did Sarah follow him around only because her mother insisted upon it? Maybe Jo Beth even paid Sarah for her pretend devotion? God knows Sarah would do anything for money. Or Esther Crowley—what about her? Had their sexual encounter been intended as no more than what kids called a mercy fuck?

Marvin’s mustache worked in circles before he responded.

“Here’s an idea, Jo. How about supper.”

“Food?”

“Father-son time. What did I say?”

Jo Beth was shaking her head. “You’re not listening—”

“Jo.”
This was firmer. “Late as it is, we’d all be grateful to sit down to some supper.”

Her shoulders held their height for a few more seconds before relenting. Ry looked away from her because he did not want to witness further evidence of her forfeit. Instead, he heard it: the creak of the floorboards that confirmed her following orders. Marvin’s eyes trailed her for a moment. The kitchen was in line with the bathroom and they both knew that she could not escape his watch. The light was brighter once she had departed and Ry squinted, almost missing his father’s beckoning gesture:
To your feet, soldier
.

Ry did not check with Jesus Christ this time. Soon he was on shaky legs before the mirror, grasping the warm porcelain with one hand and taking up the razor with the other. His knuckles grazed the shard of meteorite and his brain burned as if it had been scratched. He tried to focus on the metal
blade; it vibrated, became two or three. Marvin took hold of his son’s flagging wrist and worked the razor from Ry’s fingers. Without a word, Marvin pounded it against the sink to void the clotted hair and with a breathtakingly specialized grip placed the blade to his son’s cheek. It felt blunt and cold and Ry experienced a twinge of doubt.

A thumb and forefinger angled Ry’s head just so.

“You cling to your mother,” Marvin said. Noises from the kitchen, as if in response: a pot banging, water blasting; Ry knew all too well the sound of the colander striking the countertop. “That’s partly my fault and I know it. Growing up’s the hardest thing there is, and you’ve had to do it without a father.”

The blade began to pluck hairs, one by one, from Ry’s side-burn. It did not take long. Soon the irate edge of the blade was nicking along his jawline. There was a pop of pain as the razor claimed a ribbon of chin, but Ry was glad when the hot bullet of blood ran free. Injuries of men were not injuries at all—hadn’t Marvin been the one to say that? They were but the building of braver skin. A thumb set upon Ry’s cheek to push for a more advantageous angle and Ry found himself wishing a strange thing, that Sarah would take her time in bringing help so that this scene, so long in the coming, could continue.

“I’m going to share something with you. It’s not for your mother, not for your sister. It’s just for you.” Marvin kept his voice low and his eyes on his work. “When I was your age, I had toys, too. Yes, me. Not the fancy stuff you grew up with, with all those moving parts. Wooden toys, mostly, army men with guns painted on. They were gifts, from my grandmother almost without exception, because my father—well,
my father was like me. It pained him, I believe, to see an able-bodied boy messing with dolls when there was a whole mountain of work to be done. It’s fine for girl children. Girl children will have their own children one day and will need to know how to use toys to distract them. Little boys are different. You have to take those toys away. It’s the taking, in fact, that is so important.”

The blade nudged the fair hairs of Ry’s upper lip and hovered there.

But it did not claim those hairs; the razor left the fledgling mustache untouched. Instead, Marvin’s fingers spidered across the top of his son’s head and pushed until Ry bowed. There was a soupy moment where nothing happened. Ry listened to the spoon-to-pot clattering from the kitchen, the bathroom sink’s throaty choke, the liquid dripping from Jesus Christ’s extremities. Then the sensation of sharpness returned like fire against the nape of his neck. The razor began to glide up the back of his head.

“I even had a favorite toy,” Marvin said. “See, I had me a cowboy and Indian set. Little cowboys with their guns, little redskins with their tomahawks and bows. I knew who you were supposed to root for. I grew up listening to
Lone Ranger
shows just like everybody else. But I had a secret, and I’m telling it to you now, man to man.”

The razor alighted and cracked against the sink. Goose bumps raced across Ry’s scalp where there was no more hair. He felt two runners of hot blood streak down the side of his face, splitting paths around the ear and converging into a single stream along his jaw. It stung, but the bruising push of the meteorite fragment dulled everything.

“I was for the Indians.” The razor was back at the nape,
cresting, peeling off more hair. “They seemed better to me. Stronger, more efficient, more spirited. No matter the cowboys’ numbers, the superiority of their weapons, the Indians just kept on coming.” Marvin shrugged. “I suppose I also liked how the Indians cut their hair.”

The razor went too far, past Ry’s hairline, and sunk like fangs into his forehead. Marvin had to wiggle the blade to dislodge it, and blood crept like tar past Ry’s starburst scar, down the bridge of his nose.