The Alex Crow (7 page)

“Care to make a bet on it, Larry?”

“What's the wager, Teacher's Pet?”

Cobie Petersen considered his terms for a moment, and then raised his hand and said, “If I prove there's a claw mark from Dumpling Man in my shoulder, then you and me are going to trade beds for the next six weeks, Larry. If I'm lying, I'll move over to the bed Bucky Littlejohn peed in last night.”

Those were daring terms by any standards.

The four boys of Jupiter stared at our counselor, waiting to see if he had the guts to take Cobie Petersen's bet.

Cobie Petersen got to his feet and began to pull his T-shirt up over his head.

“Hold on there,” Larry said. “I didn't agree to the bet.”

Cobie stood between the fire and Larry, his shirt halfway up over his enamel-white belly.

“You believe me, Larry? Do you believe in the Dumpling Man?”

Larry shook his head. “I just don't want to bet, is all. I'm not giving up my bed for nothing.”

“Okay. I guess that's as good as saying you believe my story,” Cobie Petersen said.

There was no possible way for Larry to win, and all the boys of Jupiter knew it.

Cobie pulled his shirt down, and Max protested, “Wait! I want to see it! Show us!”

So Cobie Petersen lifted his shirt up over his head and took it off. Then he leaned toward the firelight so we could all see the imperfect pink grooves—four clawed marks in front of his shoulder, and the deeper scar of a powerful thumb claw in the back.

And Max said, “That's probably the scariest story I've ever heard in my life.”

Tick tick tick
went the kitchen timers strapped to the melting man's ears.

Tick tick tick
.

“You should take those things off your head, Leonard. You look like a fool, and they don't work, besides.” Joseph Stalin said, “You can still hear me.”

The melting man had tried everything he could think of to stop Joseph Stalin from telling him what to do.

“You're unwrapping the bandages. You're unwrapping the bandages. Oh my! Your hair is falling out!” 3-60 narrated.

“Shut up!” Joseph Stalin said.

“Shut up!” the melting man said.

Leonard Fountain blew a gust through his Hohner harmonica. It didn't work.

“Listen to me. Your van is broken down,” Joseph Stalin told him.

“It is?” Leonard Fountain—the melting man—asked.

“No! You have to
pretend
you've broken down,” Joseph Stalin explained.

“How can I do that?” the melting man asked.

“Pull over to the side up there. Then get out and raise the hood. People will think you're broken down.”

“That's pretty smart.” The melting man said, “But why do I want people to think I've broken down?”

“So someone will stop and try to help. I need you to steal a cell phone,” Joseph Stalin explained.

“But I have a cell phone.”

“You're pulling over. Now you're slowing down,” 3-60 said.

“Can't you shut her up?” Joseph Stalin said.

“I can't make 3-60 stop talking,” the melting man said.

“You are applying the parking brake. You are turning the ignition to
off
,” 3-60 said.

“Why do I need another cell phone?”

Joseph Stalin said, “Because you're going to make a switch with it. For the
masterpiece
.”

“Oh! That makes sense,” the melting man said.

“You are opening the driver-side door,” 3-60 said.

There are a lot of cemeteries in Arkansas.

Leonard Fountain had pulled off the road beside a place called Holland Cemetery. It was spacious and green, with neatly manicured paths and perfectly spaced oaks that shaded the row upon row of gray headstones.

“Get the gun from the back of the van.”

The melting man wanted to do exactly what Joseph Stalin had told him to do. After all, he thought it made sense; it was a good idea. Besides, the melting man was insane, so he didn't have much in the way of choices.

He walked along the gravel shoulder of the road to the rear of the van. The melting man was tired and hungry. He couldn't remember the last time he'd eaten.

He opened the rear of the van. Inside was a mess of strewn clothing, plastic grocery sacks, and empty beer cans. There was a white plastic five-gallon bucket with a lid covering it. This was Leonard Fountain's toilet when he spent nights sleeping in the van. Leonard Fountain's plastic-bucket toilet was getting full.

The melting man's masterpiece, the very big bomb, was covered beneath two horse blankets Leonard Fountain stole from a ranch in Oklahoma. The melting man slept in a mass of ragged sheets and bed linens in the part of the cargo area that overhung the cab—the space the U-Haul company referred to as “Mom's Attic.”

“Get your gun,” Joseph Stalin repeated.

“You are climbing up to
Mom's Attic
,” 3-60 narrated.

The melting man coughed, and spit a bloody molar onto his bedding.

“You've lost another tooth!” 3-60 said.

The melting man only had a few teeth left in his mouth.

Inside his sleeping space, the melting man kept a small chrome pistol—a six-shot semiautomatic .380, the type of gun that was easy to carry in trouser pockets due to its size.

Leonard Fountain picked up the gun and slipped it into his back pocket.

“I wonder if I should take a nap,” the melting man said.

“No!” Joseph Stalin ordered, “You need to get that extra phone from someone who thinks they're being helpful.”

The melting man walked back to the front of the van.

“You are raising the hood of your U-Haul van. You are looking up into the sky,” 3-60 told him.

The melting man caught a glimpse of the drone that had been following him. As it always did, the moment the melting man looked at the small metal rectangle floating in the sky, the object immediately pivoted and vanished.

One thing that is true about Arkansas: The people who live there are very polite and also exceedingly helpful. Leonard Fountain only had to wait about four minutes before an old Chevrolet pickup passed him, stopped in the road one hundred yards down, and then backed up until it pulled even with the front of the U-Haul van's raised hood.

The teenage boy at the wheel had to lean across the seat and roll down the passenger window.

“The boy is rolling down the window,” 3-60 said.

That afternoon, Joseph Stalin kept telling the melting man he needed to kill Francis MacInnes, the driver of the old dull-orange pickup, but the melting man didn't want to kill him, probably because the redheaded boy was so nice and well mannered in a very simple, corn-scented Ozarkian way. Later, the chubby, freckle-faced eighteen-year-old kid who wore round wire-frame glasses would become momentarily famous when he appeared on every Arkansan news station to talk about the strange man who'd stolen his clothes and coerced him into handing over his keys and phone.

“Good afternoon,” Francis MacInnes said through the passenger window on his pickup. “I'd be pleased to offer you some help, if you're in need of it.”

“When the boy gets out of the truck, look to see if there are any cars on this road, and if there aren't, shoot him one time in the side of his head,” Joseph Stalin said.

“Huh?” Leonard Fountain was confused.

“Hang on, friend. Let me park my truck and then we'll see if we can't get you on the road again.” Francis MacInnes smiled warmly and then parked his Chevrolet on the shoulder in front of the melting man's U-Haul.

Francis MacInnes squinted in the bright afternoon sunlight. “Are you moving
to
or
from
Arkansas?”

“Huh?” the melting man said.

Francis MacInnes hitched his thumb at the dented old moving van. “Moving?”

“Murder him,” Joseph Stalin said.

“You are standing on the side of the road,” 3-60 told him.

“Oh. Yeah. I'm moving,” the melting man said.

“Where to?”

“Um. Maryland?”

“Shoot him now. He knows who you are,” Joseph Stalin said.

The melting man didn't know what to do. He wanted to obey Joseph Stalin, but before he could do anything, Francis MacInnes was sticking out his hand and introducing himself, telling the melting man that it was just his luck he'd gotten off work at the chicken farm early because he happened to be a “real ace” at getting trucks running the way they're supposed to.

And all the while, Francis MacInnes had this smiling-yet-disgusted Baptist-preacher-confronting-homosexuality kind of look on his face, due to all the blisters and sores on the melting man.

“You are shaking hands with the nice boy,” 3-60 told him.

Francis MacInnes wore an embroidered blue one-piece jumpsuit with an elaborate logo on the back, showing a hen sitting on a clutch of eggs. The jumpsuit said
TY
-
BEE
EGG
RANCH
, and on the front was a small oval name patch that said
FRANKIE
.

“Do something right for once in your life. Shoot him in the head,” Joseph Stalin said.

“Why don't you hop up in the cab and try to fire this thing up, and I'll take a look and see what's going on here,” Francis MacInnes said.

“Huh? Oh. Hey. Do you happen to have a cell phone?” the melting man asked.

“Boy oh man, I sure do have a cell phone, mister!” Francis MacInnes was almost sexually aroused by the joyous degree to which he was helping out a stranger with horrible skin boils who was moving to Maryland. “It's in my truck! Let me go get it for you!”

“Kill him,” Joseph Stalin said.

“Lenny, he's a nice boy. Do not kill him. You are following Francis MacInnes to his truck. You are taking the gun from your back pocket.” 3-60 said, “Oh my! You are pointing the gun at Francis MacInnes.”

“Do something right for once in your life, Leonard. Shoot him in the head,” Joseph Stalin said.

Francis MacInnes was tremendously disappointed in humanity that afternoon. In fact, he would have been less disappointed if the melting man had done what Joseph Stalin ordered him to do, which was to shoot the kid in the head. Francis MacInnes would have never known the tremendous letdown he'd had to endure, which was this: Leonard Fountain stole Francis MacInnes's cell phone and car keys. Then Leonard Fountain marched the redheaded chicken ranch hand out into the middle of the cemetery and forced Francis MacInnes at gunpoint to strip off all his clothing.

Francis MacInnes lost all faith in his fellow man that day. Leonard Fountain stole all the kid's clothes, his eyeglasses, cell phone, and car keys, and then the melting man locked Francis MacInnes's truck, got into his U-Haul van, and drove away.

“You are driving. You are driving,” 3-60 said.

“I am driving,” the melting man said.

“You never do anything right,” Joseph Stalin said.

Francis MacInnes sat down behind a headstone and cried.

Even people in Arkansas are not generally nice enough to stop and help out a weeping naked guy who's stranded in a cemetery.

“
Shhhh . . . Wake up,
little boy. It's all right now. Wake up, Ariel.”

“Huh? What?”

I had fallen asleep in the shade beneath the rear gate of the truck. Thaddeus leaned over me. He was shaking me by the shoulder.

“I didn't know what to do,” he said. “I felt so terrible. You were crying in your sleep. I decided to wake you up. I'm sorry. It was awful.”

In my grogginess, I remembered that I had been dreaming about my family. I had come into the kitchen, and everyone was seated around bowls of food. But when I came into the room, my uncle, aunt, and cousins all stood and left the kitchen without saying a word to me. And every time I followed them into a different room of the house, they would leave and go into another and another room. Room after room after room, without saying anything to me.

I sat up and rubbed my face. It was wet.

“It was a bad dream,” I said.

“You shouldn't be sad,” Thaddeus said.

“Why shouldn't I be?”

Thaddeus shook his head. “I don't know. I guess there's nothing we can do about those things.”

“I want to go back home,” I said.

You know how these things are, Max. It was terribly sad—so sad I could hardly think about what was happening to me. It seems so hard to remember at times.

Over the course of the three weeks I rode with them, I became a sort of mascot—a good luck charm dressed as a little white clown—to the soldiers of the Republican Guard. They believed I'd kept them safe.

“You can't go home. How would you go home?” Thaddeus said.

I pointed down the rocky road behind us. “Walk back that way.”

“But there isn't anyone left,” he argued. “Besides, what would we do without you? Look at how much good fortune you have brought to us! Three weeks with no losses and no skirmishes. You're our blessing. The men would not allow you to leave now.”

“So I'm a prisoner?”

Thaddeus thought for a moment. “No! Of course not.”

“But you said they won't let me go.”

“I didn't mean to make it sound as though you have no choice. It's just . . . the men have grown accustomed to sharing what we have with you. We saved you, didn't we? You owe us something, after all, and you've been very lucky for us.”

And as though to punctuate Thaddeus's conviction that I was some sort of good luck charm for the soldiers, at precisely that moment a rocket, streaming white-hot vapor, corkscrewed out of the sky and slammed into the lead vehicle of our convoy.

Then two more came in, roaring, screaming. The explosions were louder than anything I'd ever heard. I could feel them in the ground, vibrating through my body like electricity. In seconds, everything became chaos—shouting, hurrying for any cover, gunfire from every direction.

What could I do?

I was frozen there, sitting cross-legged beneath the open gate on the transport truck I'd been riding in since I came out of my refrigerator.

“Move!”

Thaddeus grabbed the back of my tunic and pulled me out from beneath the truck. We scrambled into an irrigation canal that ran along the roadway. The trucks were easy targets, sitting there pinned down on the road in the heat of the day. We were being fired upon from multiple directions. The rebels had divided and were attacking from the cover of the tangerine groves on both sides of the convoy.

I was up to my chest in water; could feel my feet slipping and sinking into the warm mud on the steep banks of the canal, and I put my face down into the grass of the bank with my hands pressed over my ears and the back of my head.

I did not look up.

If I could pray—and I'd stopped doing that nonsense long before the miracle of the refrigerator—I imagined praying, but I didn't know who to direct it to.

The gunfire and explosions seemed to expand through time. Although the fighting was over in a matter of minutes, it felt as though I'd been sinking in the mud of the canal for hours. It may have been—how can I tell? My ears rang until the following day. But when Thaddeus and I, soaked and muddy, came up out of the water, I could see the damage that had been done. More than half of the convoy ahead of us had been destroyed, and seven soldiers needed to be buried in the tangerine orchard before we could move on.

So much for good luck!

W
EDNESDAY
, F
EBRUARY
25, 1880—
A
LEX
C
ROW

Luck is with us, and it has turned on us as well.

One more crewman succumbed to the elements during the night. The dead man was the naturalist, Mr. Jason Foster, from Napa, in California.

Several hours after daybreak, Captain Hansen and Mr. Piedmont managed to find a safe beach on which to land our boat, but there is nothing visible in the way of shelter or settlements. And the fog is so thick and heavy! The day appears to have a promise of yet more snow. Three more of the men had to remain behind with the boat and provisions, because they are so sick, and unable to join an expedition to search for relief.

With the three sick men sheltered at the boat, the nine of us who can manage work are preparing to split into two groups in order to explore the island in opposite directions. I will go with Piedmont, Mr. Warren, and Murdoch—Captain Hansen will lead the second party eastward.

We are armed with rifles in the hopes we may find a bear or seal. Our food supply is nearly exhausted.

W
EDNESDAY
, F
EBRUARY
25, 1880—
L
ENA
R
IVER
D
ELTA

It is remarkable to note how the human spirit can swing so rapidly from despair to ecstasy. One hour into our expedition out of the landing on the beach, Mr. Piedmont spotted a cluster of native huts and fish houses.

The tiny village was evidently occupied, for we could see black smoke rising from the stovepipes on each of the huts, which appeared to be pyramids of ice. We could smell the odor of food on the fire.

Upon realizing our discovery, Mr. Murdoch fell to his knees and wept.

“We will be warm! We will be warm!” Murdoch cried.

Mr. Piedmont and I had to restrain the man from running wildly into the small settlement, for who could guess what manner of society would exist in such a place as this?

After some discussion on the matter, we came to a consensus that the four of us should make ourselves known to the inhabitants of the dwellings before turning back to reunite with Captain Hansen's party and reclaim our sick crewmen.

The village here consists of six native huts and two communal fish houses, in which the residents store meat—primarily fish, but also some whale and seal. It was our great fortune to meet a Mr. Katkov, an exile from western Russia, who could speak several languages, notably the native dialect as well as French, in which Mr. Warren and Mr. Piedmont were both capably versed.

Mr. Katkov and two of the native men from the village have consented to return to the beach where we landed, and help us bring the remains of our expedition into their shelters.

This is truly a gift from God.

W
EDNESDAY
, F
EBRUARY
25, 1880—
L
ENA
R
IVER
D
ELTA

On the way back to the beach we encountered a brutal snowstorm that would have swallowed us all if not for the skilled guidance of Katkov and the native villagers.

There was little we could do, though. Our progress was so hindered by the weather, and by the time we arrived at our boat the three men we had left behind had all succumbed to the conditions and had frozen to death.

Captain Hansen's party was nowhere to be found.

Fate presented no choice for us but to return to the safety of the village's shelters and pray for the others. As for now, I fear there are only four souls who have survived the terrible fate of the
Alex Crow
.

Murdoch has resumed his incessant repetitions: “Why bother?”