The Monster Variations (17 page)

Why not? The summer was dying like a cigarette. Reggie could almost feel the months wear away like an arm or leg waking from a deep sleep, and the resulting tingling sensation drew his attention to his own body: baked brown, strong and quick. He would play here all night if he felt like it. Who could stop him? He felt invincible and instantly knew it to be the truth. He was.

He found the ball, picked it up, tossed it into the air, hit it. It rang against the batter’s-box chain-link. Before the ball even came to rest Reggie was charging at it, faster this time, grabbing for it, tossing it up again, feeling muscles clench across his back, a textbook swing. He went after it. He felt himself wear down to a series of meaningless repetitions, and it felt exciting and adult because he could perfect these repetitions if he wanted.

There was nothing better to do. His grandest scheme
had been ruined when James had lost the Monster. Even though Reggie had felt a peculiar sort of relief when he had found out, he still manufactured some resentment toward James, who had made the classic child’s mistake of falling asleep too quickly.

And then there was Willie, who a few days ago found his way to the junkball field and made a scene in front of James and the other players. He yelled at Reggie for not inviting him along to steal the Monster. He made other weepy accusations about flashlight beams in his tree house, about being left behind for junkball, about being left behind, period. Reggie did not feel anger toward Willie as he led him aside and nodded for the other boys to go ahead, keep playing, this wasn’t going to take very long. Willie was wild-eyed, one-armed, his cheeks red, his balance precarious. Reggie said very little and tried to scoot Willie along his way. He actually pushed him in the direction of home, firmly but gently, feeling the twiggy fragility of Willie’s backbone beneath his shirt.

Then James came to Willie’s aid and things complicated. Reggie had been expecting something like this from James for days. Following their failure with the Monster, James had shunned anything even remotely connected with fun, always went home before curfew, and talked about the upcoming school term like it was something he anticipated. Even getting James to the junkyard had been a struggle.

Suspicions were now confirmed: James was on Willie’s side. There was silence from the boys as Reggie
examined his feelings. It did not take long, as he found very few feelings at all. He told James to mind his own business and then there was shouting—Reggie could no longer remember specifics—about how you don’t abandon friends, treat them like garbage, stuff like that. It gave him a headache.

So Reggie chose a remark that would shut James up: “When I saw your dad at my house, he didn’t mention anything about the Monster—if that’s what’s got you so uptight.” Reggie felt some regret speaking aloud these facts, though he was not sure why. He knew facts could not hurt you, not if you chose to ignore them. James, though, looked angry and confused all at once, and as a result could not act upon either emotion. James instantly faded back; Reggie felt serene; and then Willie came to James’s defense, roaring, spoiling everything.

Nearly foaming, Willie leapt forward and hit Reggie, a girlish knock of knuckles against Reggie’s chest—nothing, really—but before Reggie could retaliate, Willie’s fist was back, this time against his chin, then nose, then throat, and though none of the blows was key, together they worked: Reggie was backpedaling, his arms were rising to shield his face. He felt Willie’s forehead thump into his ribs, felt hot spit tack across his cheek, felt fingernails rake down his side, and none of it made sense, this was not how boys fought. There was no method at all to Willie’s attack, if that was what it was, and Reggie gasped at the heat now rushing up his neck—why, he was
scared
. This feeling quickly turned into anger, for it reminded
Reggie of a year ago, when he still cried over minor injuries, still felt sorry for himself that no one kissed his boo-boos. He was not that boy anymore—he knew it, he just had to remember it.

He banked to the side, lifting his shoulder to protect himself, and felt Willie’s entire weight smash into his back; there was a wheeze from Willie and a surprised bleat from James. Willie’s arm wrapped around Reggie’s knees and he felt Willie’s arm-nub wedge inadvertently into his groin. More in disgust than anything else, Reggie made an instinctive hop to the right, and moments later both boys rolled their bodies through the dirt. Reggie, having two arms, was the first back on his feet.

Willie hurled his arm at Reggie but the blow seemed to take forever; Reggie even had time to see the blood-brother scar that marked the center of Willie’s palm. Reggie made use of the moment. All right, there it was, easy—he saw just how to prevail. Reggie stepped to the right and struck Willie once in the chest. Willie coughed and to his credit immediately swung at Reggie again, but again Reggie shifted right and struck Willie’s chest, knocking him back. James made jerky movements in the background, like he was dying to get in there and feel the collision of bone yet for some reason could not do it. Willie snorted and hacked but kept coming, his knotted face now as disfigured as his body, but Reggie kept moving away from Willie’s remaining arm: to the right, right, right.

After too many circulations spent swatting at the air,
Willie at last landed choking and crying in the dirt. In front of all the other junkball players, it was utter humiliation: snot, tears, slobber, all cascading down his face and neck. Much too late, James found a small amount of courage and moved to Willie’s side. He lifted him, slinging an arm around his heaving body and pressing his cheek into the burning wetness of Willie’s own. Bound together, they limped away. Hours later, when Reggie himself left the junkball field, he knew something none of the other boys knew. He was never coming back.

Reggie’s shirt was now a second skin, slopped to his torso with a bucket of sweat. He peeled it off with a snap and tossed it in the dirt. He hit the ball, ran after it. Hit the ball, ran after it. This was no longer junkball he was playing, this was baseball. No—it wasn’t baseball either, but something more, some military ordeal he could not bring himself to quit. He was not sure why. He felt his head spin. His lungs ached with each guzzle of air. His muscles trembled and threatened to collapse. It was torture, but inevitable and necessary, like rings through ears, ink into skin, the swallowing and heaving up of alcohol.

His eyes stopped seeing. There remained a blur of dim light, but he operated now on his other senses, the smell of sweat, the troubled hiss of dead grass, the rotten texture of the tape wrapped around the bat. The narrower Reggie’s focus, the more confident he became in his strength and cunning. Brains did not mean memorizing lists of figures like James, or stupid strings of words
like Willie. Brains were figuring out how to swipe the answer key from the teacher’s desk. Brains were figuring out how to ingratiate yourself with bigger and more powerful people, until
you
were the one big and powerful. That was what he was doing on this field, this field upon which no other kid his age dared tread.

The rush of superiority was strange and wonderful. For so long he had felt that his abilities lagged behind those of James and Willie. He had met James in third grade, and the first thing he’d appreciated about him was his ability to take a punch. That’s right—he remembered it now. At recess, just beyond the monkey bars, where a group of older kids had held James in a headlock while his face grew purple. When James had finally dislodged himself there had been a flurry of blows and James had come away bloody. It was an expected series of events with expected results—the nurse’s office, an ice pack, the works—but instead James turned away, snorting the blood into his throat and spitting it out in forceful globs. Reggie tracked him at a distance, admiring each red splotch as they grew smaller and diminished into the blacktop. Reggie made contact with James that afternoon, and by nightfall they were friends.

Reggie had known Willie even longer, since kindergarten. Back then they had been the same size, and remained that way for years. He remembered being on his knees in a playground sandbox, and how Willie had shown him how to construct fantastic underground labyrinths. He had loved Willie for that, and had continued to love him for
the inventions he created in first grade (melted-chocolate tar pits for their plastic dinosaurs), second grade (faked UFO photographs using cardboard cutouts and clean windows), and so on.

But as years passed, Reggie spent too many recesses indoors redoing botched homework, and would locate James and Willie through the classroom window and feel twinges of resentment.
What am I doing wrong?
he used to think. Now he knew he had done nothing wrong. Because here he was, stronger, smarter, and fiercer than his two former playmates, and any remaining jealousy now turned into something closer to pity.

Willie’s body had stagnated while Reggie’s had grown thicker and taller. Willie’s teeth had spread like petals on water, while Reggie’s baby teeth twisted out with force and blood, and replaced themselves with teeth stronger and larger. It now seemed to Reggie that Willie had lost an arm because it ceased to have any worth—it could not help Willie, so it withered away and died. Even Willie’s mind had lost its way, trapping itself within a loop of senseless wordplay. Reggie thought it would be sad when Willie finally realized all of the living that he had missed.

James’s transformations had been less dramatic, but Reggie’s sharp eye noticed them all: his anxiety, his timidity, his obsession with a future already plotted out by his parents. Though physically James was not unlike Reggie, he could not make a move without tripping over one thought and blundering into another. Reggie felt
again the finely burning point of his own focus and was thrilled.

There were so many things he could no longer tell James and Willie: the blunt words of high school boys, the laughter and occasional touches of teenage girls, the satisfaction of a thick roll of paper money in his back pocket rather than the delicate jingle of pennies and nickels and dimes.

Most of all Reggie could not tell James and Willie what he knew about Mel Herman. Weeks ago, Reggie had snuck back inside the school. He’d told no one, because he was no longer interested in their admiration. This time he had waited until just after sundown, then experimented with first-floor windows until one of them slid open. Once he was inside, the familiar isolating chill had gripped him, but he plunged through the darkness, telling himself it was like dunking your head underwater for the first time. Surely he’d resurface alive.

When he left the school a short while later, he had his flashlight stuffed in one pocket of his shorts and the rest of Mel Herman’s handiwork rolled up and jammed under his arm. Instead of walking home, Reggie made a detour and climbed into Willie’s tree house, and sat cross-legged inside it, alone. He turned on his flashlight and examined all of the paintings. He found objects that might have been Mel’s house, contorted shapes that could have been Mel’s father. James was better at this kind of stuff—the more Reggie studied, the less certain he became of anything.

He returned again to the first painting they’d stolen and aimed his flashlight beam at the detail that had started everything: a tiny truck running over a tiny person. At the beginning of the summer, it had been as good as a confession of guilt, but now Reggie looked closer and found something altogether different. It wasn’t a truck, or a car, or anything. It was a bunch of lines. That person caught beneath the wheels—that wasn’t a person and those weren’t wheels. He wondered how the three of them had rushed to the same mistake.

So Reggie had done something else that night, something James and Willie would have called absolute madness. He climbed from the tree house with all of Mel Herman’s paintings—aside from the original one, which he left tacked to the tree house wall—and walked all the way to Mel’s home. For a while he stood in the shadows. From inside he heard music playing from a radio and bathwater running. Then he heard arguing: the old man’s gravelly voice and Mel’s rare, tentative responses. Reggie carefully placed Mel’s paintings next to the front door, weighted them down with a rock, and then went home.

Two days later there was a Mel Herman painting, a brand-new one, sitting on Reggie’s doorstep. Reggie looked at it for a while. It did not make sense. Or did it? Could that diamond be the junkball field? Could that straight line be the baseball bat that he had threatened Mel with outside his house? It really didn’t matter, for the painting was large and brilliant blue and wonderfully
menacing; Reggie
wanted
to understand what it meant and somehow wanting to understand was good enough.

Reggie taped it to his bedroom wall and it became even more obvious. The color was just color, the paint just paint. Mel Herman was simply a kid who placed paint wherever he pleased. The significance of this was breathtaking; suddenly Mel was no longer a foe. He pictured Mel slouching through the halls two weeks from now when school resumed, and imagined how they might speak to each other and what they might say. Finally he fantasized about all the new things Mel might show him, for there was only one thing Reggie was sure of when it came to Mel Herman. He was
bigger
.

The air was heavy and itchy. He tossed the ball, swung the bat, chased after. Hit, run. Hit, run. Reggie’s knees pumped up and down and sweat dripped from his nose. He tried to catch his breath and could not, and found he did not care. He kept moving, faster, wondering with morbid fascination when exactly his body would collapse. Hit, run, hit, run.

The world darkened. Caught within the curfew’s grip, the daylight hours all summer had felt curtailed and constricted. But who needed daytime? The night unrolled itself and expanded before Reggie’s sightless eyes into something he could explore forever, live inside. He drank air like dark water and grew accustomed to it, found oxygen, decided he liked it, no, loved it.

The moon rose and the curfew descended. To hell with it. Let them come: teenagers, grown-ups, killers,
police waving flashlights and nightsticks. If they came and took him away he’d be even stronger, because then he’d be one of them. Reggie closed his eyes, blind now for good, and felt the veins of the baseball press into his equally leathery palm, the heavy bat lift from his even heavier shoulder, and he pushed himself harder. Hit, run, hit, run, hit, run.