The Monster Variations (15 page)

Mel then looked at Willie and his forehead twitched. He said nothing, and again faced Reggie.

Mel held up his hands, not in fists, but as if displaying a fine set of knives. Reggie lifted his bat with both hands and seemed at once both bigger and smaller. James and Willie took unconscious steps away.

“I know what you did,” growled Reggie.

“Yeah? What did I do?” asked Mel. “Hit too many home runs? Boy, that must’ve really pissed you off.”

“We all know what you did,” Reggie said.

James felt his head spinning; he felt warm, dizzy, hysterical.

“Mel didn’t do anything,” James cried, even though he couldn’t remember if it was true. All he knew was that this fight was not about Willie Van Allen or Greg Johnson. Even worse, Mel’s fight had nothing to do with Reggie, and Reggie’s fight had nothing to do with Mel. They
were just convenient targets set in front of two hitters dying to hit.

Neither James nor Willie knew exactly when the old man appeared on the porch behind Mel. He was frail, bent, and so pale he was nearly translucent. James and Willie saw him and blinked, their faces knotted in the sweltering sun. Despite the heat, the man wore flannel pajamas and a blanket was thrown over his shoulders. His yellowed hand curled around the handle of a cane. He also carted a strange blue object behind him from which snaked tiny plastic tubes that ran into what looked like an oxygen mask.

Reggie saw him next and instinctively lowered the bat. Mel did not turn around, but his large hands fell to his sides.

The old man licked his lips and gawked at the boys across the lawn. His skin was white and papery and there was a growth of beard on his face, irregular and lumpy like a fungus. There were hollows sunk into his neck. His feet were bare and his naked toes shrugged and gripped at the porch. His thin chest rose and fell, rose and fell. His pajama bottoms looked big enough for a man twice his size, and were speckled with paint in the same vivid colors as the house. This was not a man who could drive a truck or plot a killing; this was not a man who could bathe himself or reach the toilet without assistance.

They stood in the sun for a long time, the four boys and the old man. To James it was even worse than a fist-fight. Somehow those old eyes upon him made him feel
like he deserved whatever was coming: Mel’s attack, his parents’ punishments, a speeding silver truck, anything. “My dad,” blurted Mel. Blunt, hard, and coated with something—sickness? arrogance? satisfaction?—the two words shoved into James’s ears and crashed around his skull, and continued to do so all the way home, past the motel, off Oleander Avenue, back through the trash-filled alley, across the Leisure Estates trailer park, over the train tracks, and then even further, for the entire rest of James’s life, pounding forever through his veins like cold blood and lodging stiff and painful inside his heart.

T
he lathery stink of horsehide was suffocating, and the darkness made it worse. The space was narrow and the two boys bumped into the walls, each time causing a horse to snicker, flap its lips, stomp in place, grunt. The dust floated down like snow and the boys had to wipe it from their faces and necks and try to contain their sneezes, or else risk rousing the animals to some higher plateau of resentment.

The barn was hotter than anywhere else they had been that summer, maybe anywhere they had been in their lives. It was small and cramped, though it had
looked enormous when they first approached it. There had to be a loft somewhere, but they saw no steps, no ladder, nothing. The building’s sole feature was this single hall that ran one end to the other, bordered on both sides by horse stalls. The door to each stall was closed, but they were only half-doors and inside the boys could see the large, dark heads of the beasts outlined in moonlight.

James pressed his eyes into the floating dirt, searching for a sign of the Monster. They had discussed the Monster’s location on the way over, and it had been Reggie who thought of the barn as the only sensible place.

“Tom wouldn’t keep it outside,” Reggie had said.

“Because people would steal it?” James asked.

“Because it’s bones,” Reggie replied. “And dogs and raccoons would come chew it up and drag it away.”

So it was indoors, they agreed, but not in the house. Tom lived with parents and no parents they could conceive of would ever allow such a thing inside, certainly not in the same house where they ate their meals and took their baths and relaxed—all impossibilities with something like the Monster staring with its empty, meaningless eyeholes.

Therefore, the barn. It had to be in the barn. James had only nodded and kept moving, his heart racing, his palms sweating against the drawstrings of the empty laundry sack he carried. They would go into the barn, look for it, and maybe they would find it, maybe not. They would not encounter any people if they were lucky, and James clung to this single encouraging thought.

Neither of them had counted on the horses. Neither of them had foreseen creeping nearly shoulder to shoulder with these creatures, and in almost absolute darkness. Before his eyes had adjusted, James walked with one hand trailing against the wall for support, and suddenly the wall had dropped off and his hand had landed on something coarse and damp, and James had felt a quick, hot expulsion of air before pulling away, a scream gurgling in the back of his throat, for it was the Monster,
the Monster
, the Monster was
alive
.

Of course it had only been the nose of a horse, which really wasn’t much better, and now James walked with his hands floating close at his sides, fearful of buckets left in the middle of the floor or pitchforks with unusually sharp points. He walked without raising his feet, instead shoveling them through the straw.

Reggie was somewhere up ahead, bothering the dust. He was in constant motion: on his knees, then on top of something, then poking his head into the abyss of a horse stall. These days James suspected more and more that Reggie found him useless and not much better than Willie.

James reached the end of the barn. Reggie’s hands were fumbling their way across the wall.

“There has to be a loft,” Reggie whispered. They both looked up, but the darkness withheld all details.

Reggie turned around and James did the same, and then they were looking back down the hall, where the
walls were blacker than the floors, and the windows into each chamber blacker than even the walls.

“It’s in with one of the horses,” said Reggie, and his conviction was confirmation: they were going in, would move among each animal until they found what they were looking for, there was no way around it, it had to be done. James staggered. Surely they would be maimed. They would be knocked aside, their skulls crushed by powerful hooves.

Reggie moved forward. In despair, James spun his eyes wildly about the barn—what was he looking for? A weapon with which to intimidate Reggie? If James wanted to stop him, a weapon was what it would take, and he imagined tightening his fingers around the stem of a pitchfork, and how that single action would spell his end. Reggie, who seemed so much older now than at the start of the summer, would turn around and evaluate the feeble threat, and there might be a glimmer of regret in his eyes before he went at James with everything.

Then James’s eyes found something he wasn’t expecting and it was the Monster. He sputtered and attempted to speak as dust billowed into his mouth and dirt caked across his tongue. Reggie was reaching for a stall handle and James could not stop him and so he rabbit-thumped his sneaker against the ground.

It worked. Reggie turned to him and looked not so much older, after all, and James wagged a frantic finger. Above the door through which they had originally entered
was a shelf, and on the shelf, propped among bags of feed, empty gas canisters, a coiled garden hose, and other assorted junk, was the Monster. Reggie saw it immediately and went for it.

By the time James got there, Reggie had already overturned a bucket, climbed on top, and taken hold of the apple box. It lifted quickly, as if Reggie had expected it to be heavier. Then he moved with confidence, hopping from the bucket and holding it out to James, grinning.

The gray of the bones glowed faintly. James did not want to move closer but he did until he could smell it, a weird mix of mud and manure and something else, something gamy. He felt all over again the confusion he felt the first time he saw the Monster. He knew he was supposed to experience awe—he had certainly felt it when hearing about it on the playground back in the spring-but now he fought for breath not out of admiration or fright but from an unexpected flood of revulsion. This thing in tatters and stuffed inside a box might be from a world of teenagers, grown-ups, and grandfathers, but it was foul and sickening and James wanted nothing of it.

Reggie took the laundry bag and kneeled down to shove the box inside. His rough movements made it clear: he did not care about the Monster, he never had, it was just a currency he could use to purchase entry into that life of cigarettes, cars, and girls. James realized that Reggie was just like Tom, for he too planned to exchange the Monster for something of greater value.

When they gently slid away from the barn, the laundry bag slung across Reggie’s back, James was staggered by the expansiveness of the night; the sky seemed to retract and soar away. He stumbled and his head craned. Reggie put a hand against his back and shoved.

Their four hurried feet sounded like a stampede of horses.

Later, their walking was slow and soundless. James did not like it and asked Reggie what he planned to do with the Monster.

Reggie grinned and spun tales. What kid wouldn’t hear about it, if not tomorrow, then the next day? And when school started up again, boy, the legend would spread like fire: there was a Monster and it was taken, and there was a boy who planned it and pulled it off-look, there he is.

But none of this answered James’s question. What did he plan to
do
with it?

Reggie glanced at James in irritation, his smile fading. “What do you mean?” he asked. “I’ll
have
it.”

“But,” James said, and then paused to consider his phrasing. It was as if Reggie could not see past this moment of flight. “But what do you want to
do
with it?”

“Well,” said Reggie, looking at the sidewalk in front of him and automatically dodging the cracks. “I guess I’ll put it away.”

“Where?”

“I haven’t decided yet. I guess in a box.”

“Just like Tom’s grandpa?”

Reggie did not look at him, but James felt the chill of his displeasure.

“I’ll bring it out for special occasions,” Reggie suggested. “I mean, that’s what Tom said, right? It’s special, it’s the only thing like it anywhere. If I leave it out all the time, it won’t be special at all, it won’t even hardly be a monster. It’ll just be something that, you know. That just sits there.”

James gauged his advantage and spoke.

“Plus someone might steal it from you,” he said. “I mean, if you leave it out.”

Reggie kept his eyes on the task of skipping over cement cracks, but the temperature of his speech became cold like the earth when you dug too deep.

“Who’s gonna steal it?”

“I don’t know,” said James. “I guess there’s always somebody, though.”

“Like who?”

James sighed like the whole thing was too confusing to think about, which was not true. He shrugged, and the shrug was exaggerated so Reggie would see it even in the dark, even as he studied the sidewalk.

“I don’t know exactly,” James said. “But how long did it stay up in that attic? A long time, right? And eventually someone stole it.”

“Tom didn’t steal it, it was his grandfather’s, he took it from his dead grandfather.”

“And then, after a while, we stole it from him,” James said. “I’m just saying, there’s always somebody. You can
keep this thing locked up if you want, but one day you’re going to have to take it out, or somebody’s going to find it, or maybe you’ll be dead and someone will just go through your attic. But eventually somebody’s going to take it back.”

Reggie was walking faster. He regripped the laundry bag.

“I’ll bury it.”

“All right,” said James.

“No, I’ll hide it in the junkyard. A special place in the junkyard, and we’ll make a map, and draw up a map key that only makes sense to you and me.”

“Someone could steal the key.”

“Yeah, but you need both halves of the key to understand it, that’s the thing.”

“One of us could die, or move away, and then the other one would never be able find it, and then it’s like we never even stole it, you know? Which is kind of even worse.”

Reggie opened his mouth but caught his breath. Brushing accidentally against his arm, James felt how warm Reggie’s skin was, even in the cool, late-night air.

They turned a corner and James’s house was just ahead. Reggie suddenly swung the bag from his shoulders, tightened the string, and held it out to James.

“Hey” was all James could think to say.

“Here.”

“What are you doing?”

“Take it.”

“I don’t want it.”

Reggie smirked at him over the top of the bag. Brashness sharpened his features. James almost expected to see a cigarette dangling from his lip.

“I’m not giving it to you, dummy. But you know I can’t take this inside my house.”

James tried to stamp out the alarm that flared in his chest, but could not act fast enough.

“Why not?” He heard the whine in his voice but was unable to seal it off. “Why didn’t you say something before? What do you expect me to do with it?”

Reggie made no sound, but it looked like he was laughing.

“Jesus, calm down. I’m not asking you to hang it in the living room. Just take it for tonight, stick it under your bed or something. Your house is huge, you got plenty of closets. If I show up with a bag like this my mom will see it right away, and then we’ll both be in trouble.”

It was a good threat. James still didn’t know what to do and Reggie still held out the bag, and now they were only a few yards from James’s driveway. Maybe if he sped up, if he scrambled up his lawn, maybe if he just did it fast enough, Reggie would have no choice but to deal with the bag himself.