Scowler (23 page)

“The one I liked best was Scalper Jim. He was taller than any of them, taller than the cowboys, too, if you didn’t count their hats. Muscles out to here, a headdress to beat the band. A face braver than the bravest white man’s, lantern jaw, nose like a hawk, and no eyes you could see because of that avalanche of a forehead. Scalper Jim always won. Always. Even when he was the last surviving member of his tribe, he’d bide his time and pick off the cowboys one by one. Scalper Jim left no prisoners. He lived up to his name.”

Marvin’s voice was dreamier than Ry had ever heard it. It was no wonder that the shaving was getting sloppier, bloodier. Each new runner of blood grew cold against his skin as magnetic waves beset it.

“One day my father boxed up my toys and gave them away. But he didn’t get Scalper Jim because I kept Scalper Jim under my pillow. Scalper Jim never accepts defeat—with him it’s victory or death. Fathers, though, they know best, they really do. And when my dad found me playing with him, he sat me on the stump out back, put Scalper Jim in one of my hands and his whittling knife in the other. And I—”

Marvin coughed, cleared his throat. The breath was a cool tingle somewhere in the vicinity of Ry’s ear. Marvin reached
for the object hidden in his shirt pocket but the shirt was folded atop the toilet. Instead his fingernails closed to a fist over his wounded heart.

“I was the one who put the knife to Scalper Jim’s throat,” he said. “He didn’t flinch. Sharp as that knife was, it could barely chip the surface. Took me twenty minutes to whittle off the chin, another ten for the nose. A whole hour to take off his face. And I … I’ll tell you the truth. I cried like a baby. But Dad waited me out. He knew it was my last cry; I think I knew it, too. Took me all afternoon to turn Scalper Jim to sawdust but by the end I was out of tears. I grew up that day. Yes, I did.”

This time the tapping against the porcelain had a climactic finality. Ry felt two hands take his shoulders and redirect them to face the mirror. One of Marvin’s palms reached out and squeaked across the glass. Layers of gray gave way to a fleshy blob. Ry gripped the sink and pulled himself closer. The face he saw was Marvin Burke’s. But when Ry moved his head, the head in the mirror moved too. The shock of his new baldness was mesmerizing. Long stripes of blood dried to his face like watermelon markings. He swiveled his neck so much that vertebrae began to crunch. With a jolt of exhilaration, he felt that he understood his father: The man cut hair like he whittled wood, poorly but with total commitment.

Marvin’s face, another pink blob, joined his in the mirror. The mustache hairs fluttered, the voice beneath them softer and quicker than ever as if rushing to say something he had never planned to admit.

“Scalper Jim was with me in prison. He was. It’s true. Every day I pictured his moment of execution, the way he faced it. I tried to emulate it. It kept me alive. So I understand, I do,
toys and what they can mean. But you know what it says in the Good Book. There comes a time when we must put away childish things.”

The silverware clash they heard from the kitchen had an emphasis.

“Supper’s ready!” Jo Beth sounded desperate.

Ry stared at himself, his father, himself, his father.

“Just a few more hours. And then we work together. Right?”

Ry couldn’t tell which pink blob those words had come from.

He tried out the last word for himself: “Right?” He wasn’t sure about it and craved third-party confirmation. “Jesus Christ? Is it all right?”

There was no response. Ry endured a moment or two of anxiety, then suspicion, then exasperation. These supposed friends of his, what good were they? They recoiled from any gesture that counted. Marvin was right when it came to childish things.

“Supper’s getting cold!” Jo Beth cried. “Please.”

Marvin looked into the sink, extended his index finger, and ran it through the damp layer of hair that coated the basin. The finger came back up fully furred. Slowly he reached over and spread the tiny, prickling hairs across Ry’s upper lip. He withdrew his hand and both father and son checked the mirror. The makeshift mustache was patchy and asymmetrical but served its purpose. The similarity was now uncanny.

“Supper.” Jo Beth’s pleading was softer now.

“You hungry?” Marvin asked.

Ry shook his head no. Some of his mustache flaked away.

Marvin raised an eyebrow. Trust was being offered here
and Ry felt a desire to earn it. After all, his newly shorn head looked so clean, so efficient. Was becoming like his father the worst thing that could happen? It would at least give Ry the authority to bend the wills of the stubborn and salvage something from his squandered life. Marvin picked up the dagger of rock, wrapped his fingers around it, and weighed it in his hand. He nodded, his shiny head winking in the bulb’s hazy gleam.

“Well, you take a load off, then. Rest up. Dawn’s practically here.”

T
hey kept singing, which, first of all, wasn’t very polite. Ry was lying facedown on his bed, fully clothed, each thread of the quilt poking like wire into his sensitized skin, none more so than his bare scalp. He was in no mood for sing-alongs. But having their playmate back in their midst had spurred Furrington and Jesus Christ into heights of celebration. They looked past his comatose behavior. This was the most joyous of reunions and they gave it their truest voices.

Ry’s initial concern was the music’s volume, but after renditions of both “Angels We Have Heard on High” and “Holy, Holy, Holy,” Ry accepted that his friends’ voices were not pitched for adult ears. Not far from the half-closed bedroom door, in the kitchen Marvin and Jo Beth were sharing the least punctual supper of their lives—it had to be just a couple hours before morning. Occasionally Ry could hear Marvin’s remarks about the number of minutes till sunup and finding Sniggety before then, and he could hear a good deal of humming, too, but this discernment came only in the pause
between each bellowed round of singing. After six hymns Ry could bear no more and scrambled to a seated position.

Furrington was perched upon the foot of the bed, wagging his single leg in time with the music, while Jesus Christ towered above, undulating his elbowless arms like a conductor. Both figures were stunningly real: Motes of dust clung to Furrington’s glass eyes and shreds of cobweb swung between Jesus Christ’s head and the ceiling lamp. They were finishing up the fifth and final verse of “Shall We Gather at the River,” Furrington on a melody that was sharp but enthusiastic, Jesus Christ making harmony with his magniloquent bass.

“Yes, we’ll gather at the river, / the beautiful, beautiful river; / Gather with the saints at the river, / that flows by the throne of God!”

Furrington bounced. The bedsprings zinged.

“Smashing! Simply smashing!”

“Heavenly,” Jesus Christ concurred. “Blessings upon this house of worship.”

“Why …” The word slid from between Ry’s lips, tasting sour. He reminded himself to keep his voice down and tried again. “Why are you two so
happy
?”

The pair of shining marbles and the pair of white dots both oscillated his way.

It was hard not to squirm within their blank, merry stares.

“Our joy soundeth like thine,” Jesus Christ said. “Does it not?”

Ry rubbed his oozing forehead scar. “What joy?”

The pink face tilted in his direction. “We have traveled o’er a long road, bore the hammers of much misfortune. Yet bells shall ring, for we are home. Hark!”

“Hark!” Furrington parroted. “Hark, hark! Oh, that’s fun. Give it a try, old boy!”

“No,” Ry said. “I won’t.”

The stitches of Furrington’s mouth seemed to turn downward. “Just one hark?”

Ry drove the heels of his hands into his temples. Dried blood from his lacerated scalp crumbled into brown sand.

“The sun’s going to come up.” He spoke with utmost control. “I’m going to go help my dad get his meteorite. Then he’s going to go away. And then you’re going to go away, too. Both of you.”

The teddy bear and plastic savior were frighteningly still.

“You think he’ll leave, do you?” Furrington’s voice was innocence itself. “Once he’s got what he wants?”

“Yes,” Ry said. “I believe so. Yes.”

“True belief,” spoke Jesus Christ, “is man’s rarest quality.”

“No.” Ry’s throat tasted raw after so many words. “It’s loyalty. That’s what’s rare.”

“Bollocks,” Furrington scoffed. “I’ve been loyal as a knight! Look at me leg!”

“Then why’d you leave me? In the back field? Right when I needed you?” Ry turned savagely upon Jesus Christ. “And you didn’t have much to say in the shower, did you?” He pressed his hands over his throbbing eyes. “I’m too old now. I’m too old. No more fooling around. No more playing.”

“But,” Furrington said, “playing is what we
do
.”

“And we have waited so long,” Jesus Christ said, “to return to the promised land.”

Ry felt a twinge of guilt, then thought of his father and that twinge evaporated. The land was Marvin’s. The land was
Ry’s. These beings that emerged from its depths were trespassers.

“I know you waited,” he said. “And I’m glad you got out, I am. But—”

“ ’Twas a star shining on high,” Jesus Christ said, “that guided our way.”

“Oh, the brightest, shiniest, beautifulest star!” Furrington cried. “And when I saw it—crackers! I knew it was true! It meant we were—”

“And, yea, the star led us—”

They finished together: “home.”

It
was
a star, the meteorite, that had freed them, whether from the McCafferty Forty or from the recesses of Ry’s brain was the question. He pressed his face into greasy palms and felt the prickly smear of his bogus mustache.

“Ry,” whispered a voice from the window.

Past the fantastic shapes of Furrington and Jesus Christ, between the orange of bedroom and the black of night, whips of blond hair flickered in the space between the window and the sill. It was possible that nothing else in the world could have distracted Ry from making this choice between father and friends.

It was Sarah.

B
y the time he had raised the screen and was lifting his sister through the window, the room’s other occupants had melted themselves into opposite corners with a deftness either impressive or chickenhearted. Sarah had put her arms around Ry’s neck for the ride and kept them there once her feet were
planted, assailing him with a physical realness—noisy, quivering, smelling of night. He closed the window to shut out whatever had scared her and she folded into him like dough.

Ry laced his fingers behind her scrawny back and caught her. He sensed a thinning of noise from the kitchen, dialogue becoming one-sided, utensils with less to scrape, and muscled Sarah to an arm’s length. Her face was a spectral gray. Her feet were black with mud. Though the rag on her right hand was gone, the skin of that hand was sallow and rubbery.

“He’s … he’s—”

“Shhh. Real quiet.”

Sarah gulped down some air and then took on steadiness as one puts on a suit, one limb at a time. Ry adjusted his squat so he could look straight at her. She rubbed her bleary eyes and blinked. And blinked again. And again.

“Ry,” she gasped. “Your hair.”

He forced a little laugh. His lips felt to him like wax.

“You don’t like it?”

She shook her head with such force that the dam broke and the tears came full force. It was loud. Ry shook her shoulder with one hand, made a serious face, and with his other hand pressed a finger to his lips. With curt movements of distaste, she extracted herself from his clutch and pushed herself against the window. Ry grimaced, took two long steps to the bedroom door, swung it mostly shut, and came back across the room. The look she was leveling was unfamiliar: forehead pinched, eyes wary, lips withholding. When he recognized it, he was taken aback. It was the look of distrust.

He affected sternness. “You better have some excuse.”

“I’m scared,” she said stubbornly.

“That’s no excuse. I told you where to go.”

“But I saw him.”

“Who? Our dad?”

She shook her head.

“Mr. Strickland?”

She shook her head.

“Who else is there?”

Her lips went white as she deliberated the potential pitfalls of honesty.

“Jeremiah,” she blurted. “He’s dead.”

It was a sucker punch. Ry reached out for her in retaliation. She dodged and instead he found solid wood and so leaned into it, taking a moment to process the sadness—and then the outrage. Jeremiah had not served his full sentence, but anyone who had seen the old man’s ravaged physique or suffered his lumbering speech could tell that his debt to society had been paid and would, in fact, forever accrue interest. That he had died at the exact moment he might have tasted a bit of freedom was unjust.

Ry coughed out a platitude: “He was old.”

“No,” Sarah said. “There was blood. Lots of it.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know.”

“What happened?”

“I don’t know!”

He inhaled sharply through flared nostrils.
Little bitch
, he thought.

He’d never thought such a thing of his sister.

Part of him, a new part, rather liked it.

“Was it his own blood?” He enunciated the words with precision.

“Yes.”

“How do you know that?”

“His hair,” Sarah said. “His hair was gone.”

Ry touched his pate. “Like mine?”

“No,” she said. “It was gone. The whole top of his head.”

“You’re not making any sense,” Ry said, but it was a lie. He palmed his skull and felt how the veins pulsed with their freights of blood. The stuff would gush, he figured, if your weapon was more serious than a five-dollar razor.

“It was an accident,” he heard himself say. “He fell. Or jumped to hide from a truck. There’s concrete in those culverts.”

Sarah was shaking her head miserably.

“There was skin,” she sobbed, “in the corn.”

Ry punched the wall; Sarah’s flinch made him punch it again. Why did she find it appropriate to poison others with her personal nightmares? Ry realized that his father had been right about one thing: Sometimes the man of the house needed to curtail female misbehavior. He moved forward to do just that when a chair in the kitchen screeched back as someone stood.