The Monster Variations (12 page)

Willie turned left. The bottom of the bag parted and the milk jug hit the sidewalk. The eggs and butter tried to slip through too, but Willie folded up his body and managed to pin the items against him. He set everything down on the ground and opened the eggs to evaluate the damage. Two broken that he could see. He stood up and watched the rain drum patiently upon the open eggs, the overturned milk jug, the package of butter. It was an odd sight and for a moment he was transfixed.

There was no way he could get everything home without the sack. He grabbed the wet butter, shoved it into his underwear, and picked up the heavy milk jug by the handle. There were no eggs, that’s what he would say. The store was out of eggs. What happened to the rest of the money, then? Willie scrunched his forehead and felt rain forge new routes down his temples.

He turned again because it felt like progress. He came upon the same lawn sprinkler he had dodged earlier and this time he walked right through it. He thought about going straight at the intersection. He wondered
how far the road extended. He thought about the long, windy path that led to Tom and the thing in the apple box. Perhaps there was a resting spot at the end of this road, too.

He set the milk jug within the wet branches of a shrub. Maybe later he could find it again, present it to his mother, make amends.

He did not notice the rain pick up until his sneakered foot swept through a puddle and the water fanned through the air. Now he staggered—he had hurt his toe. He crossed one intersection, another. He heard an engine somewhere nearby, and he sped through yet another intersection, his toe throbbing. He began to limp. The package of butter fell from his pants leg and he left it. He felt himself mumbling and tried to stop it but the words kept coming, strange sentences that he had invented for homework, stranger sentences that he had invented at home for no reason at all, nonsensical phrases that stood for coniferous-deciduous or Indian-Arctic-Atlantic-Pacific or molar-premolar-incisor-canine or Mercury-Venus-Earth-Mars Jupiter-Saturn-Uranus-Neptune-Pluto.

At the following intersection he saw a truck, maybe the same color as the one he’d seen earlier, which was maybe the same color as the one that struck him several months ago, he couldn’t remember, not now, not with these sentences rattling through his brain. He staggered onward and his limp reminded him of how his father walked these days, as if he were constantly butting invisible obstacles with his pajama-clad knees. Sometimes his
father even winced, as if the pain of these collisions were real.

His father even walked that way outside, sometimes clutching his beer with both hands as if that might steady him, and sometimes it did. Other times the alcohol made things worse and he would end up wandering the backyard gripping the fence. Other times he would tuck his beer into the waistband of his pants and push the lawn mower in meandering ovals until his limp worked itself out. The lawn was mostly dirt now, except for below the tree house where the grass was lush and soft—it had not been mowed in months.

Willie stomped through a puddle, then skipped, trying to keep off his sore toe.
Lust-gluttony-avarice-sloth-wrath-envy-pride
. He remembered what the boys said at the junkball field, that they heard Willie’s father roamed the town at night, sometimes in his robe, sometimes with dirty knees, sometimes bloodied. Now Willie wondered if it might be true. After all, here
he was
, wandering in the rain on some street he’d never seen before, inappropriately clothed and limping, like father, like son. He felt a rush of stubborn pride for his father. He pictured him—his robe, his beer, his maybe-dirty knees, his maybe-bloodied body—and Willie hastened to match his own limp to the one he’d memorized from his dad:
diamonds-clubs-hearts-spades
.

Now when Willie heard tires on a neighboring street splitting the rain in two, he felt fright, real fright.
Asia-Antarctica-Europe-Africa-North-America-South-America-Australia:
he limped faster. His father limped alongside him, or so Willie imagined, but instead of feeling safer he felt exposed and dissected like a science-class insect, pinned down with parts labeled—Missing Arm, Crooked Teeth, Elephant Ears, Long Nose. So he kept moving, because at the end of the road could be anything,
anything
, and if it was an apple box and a crate he was more than ready to be packed away in a warm attic corner, away from eyes, safe from the rain.

He ran faster and louder, and the truck, too: louder, faster. He urged himself on, out loud and with strange sentences indicating the treble clef notes, the bass clef, the first five books of the Bible, and the reedy sound of his own panicked voice revealed everything about him: he was a short, flimsy, worthless kid. Maybe the truck coming up behind him was a killer, maybe it wasn’t; maybe it was the stupid Johnsons, doing their stupid daily patrol. This possibility was the most harrowing. Because if concerned parents were inside the approaching vehicle, they would see him running and they would pull over to the side of the road and ask what was wrong, dear? And he would have to keep running, for if he turned around he’d see his reflection in the passenger window: a boy with one arm, carrying no food at all, soaked to the bone, shivering and small—not small, tiny!—and whether he liked it or not they were going to scoop him up in their arms, drag him kicking into the vehicle, and drive him straight home, touching him all over like Reggie and James had touched him when the tree
house pulley collapsed. He would not accept such contact, not now, not again, not ever.

When he saw the Harper family tire swing and therefore the way home, he coughed up more words: “I smell meat.” There it was, home, and he would have to explain the missing money and food. But he would not tell the truth. The truth was something he had dropped along with the milk and butter and eggs. The truth was something for helpless children, and from here on it would be a thing foreign to him, he would see to it, he made himself promise. This thing that just happened, this lost errand, this maybe-pursuit, it was his and he would keep it. He would not tell anyone.

“R
eggie.”

“What?”

“You think he’ll be mad?”

“Who, Willie?”

“Yeah.”

Reggie considered it. “I guess it doesn’t really matter. He’s never going to know we’re up here.”

“Yeah, but it’s his tree house.”

“It
was
his tree house. He can’t own it anymore, James, you know why? Because you can’t own something you can’t touch. Just like you can’t own the sun
and I can’t own the moon. Look, we tried. That pulley idea of yours was great. But face it. He’ll never see the inside of this thing again. He’s probably already forgot what it looks like.”

“Maybe we should try again. We could lift him, maybe. If we tried together, you think?”

“It’s impossible. Remember how hard it was getting him through the school window? I thought he was going to kill himself. No way we’d ever get him all the way up here. He’d fall and break his neck. And then we’d be in real trouble.”

There was silence for a while. It was late, well past curfew, something that still made James nervous when he thought of his folks noticing the toll of the grand father clock, which they would any minute now, any second, and the two boys lay on their backs on the wooden floor of Willie Van Allen’s tree house. Their heads almost touched so that they could both stare through the rectangle Mr. Van Allen had cut from the roof long ago. There were tree leaves above, blacker even than the night, and then, above those, the shimmering pinpoints of stars.

On the wall before them hung the oversize Mel Herman painting they had stolen from the school. It had been there for weeks and both boys had spent much time, together and alone, studying its infinite detail. Reggie said it looked like blueprints. James kept returning to the tiny vehicle running over a tiny person, and for that reason insisted the painting must be a map. If
they could just decipher it, he said, it could lead them somewhere important. “To Mel’s house,” said Reggie, his dark eyes flashing, although that was not what James meant.

From his spot on the floor James looked from the painting to the dark sky above and breathed deeply. Reggie had a point. The tree house
was
pretty high. At night even he and Reggie had to be cautious when they climbed.

“Well, we at least should’ve told him we’re borrowing it,” said James.

“What, you just want to make him feel bad?” said Reggie. “It’s better this way. It’s better if we just sneak in after his parents have locked the doors and tucked him into bed.”

“He’s not asleep yet, it’s not that late,” said James.

“Of course he’s not sleeping.” Reggie sighed. “He’s sitting around staring at his Lincoln Logs or telling Softie how crummy it is to have one arm.”

“Shh.”

“Stop worrying,” Reggie said. “He sure as hell can’t hear us. They have their fans on full-blast because the dummies keep all their windows locked. I guess they think …”

He trailed off.

“They think what?” asked James.

James felt Reggie shrug.

“You don’t think a truck could break through a house, do you?” Reggie asked.

James considered it for a moment. It was an unpleasant thought.

“No,” James said. “I doubt it.” He paused. “I hope not.”

“Yeah,” said Reggie. “No kidding.”

A vehicle rumbled past on the road. The floorboards vibrated. Mel Herman’s painting trembled, took on brief new meanings, then was still. James shivered.

“Anyway,” Reggie said, “let’s face it. It’s probably good that Willie’s locked in. He’s safer down there. Indoors, I mean. He doesn’t really belong out here with us anymore.”

James frowned into the night sky. “But it’s not the same without him.”

“Of course it’s not the same,” said Reggie. “But
he’s
not the same either. Neither are you. Me neither. Nothing’s ever the same, James. Kids get older. Kids change. Some kids get in accidents and lose their arms. What are you going to do, cry about it? You just have to go ahead and get older.”

James imagined Willie, somewhere below them, lying on his bed, holding Softie to his cheek with his one arm. James inhaled and held his breath, feeling his rib cage expand his chest and letting the night air fill his body until he felt heavy and powerful. He stretched against the floorboards and found that he could feel the end of the tree house with his toes—he was getting taller.

“We can still hang out with him,” Reggie said. “I have no problem with that. But some things we’ll have
to do without him. Sometimes we’ll have to leave him behind.”

James exhaled and felt the muscles in his chest tingle. He blinked his eyes and thought that the night looked like a black mirror, and those two stars right there were his own eyes reflecting back at him. He felt as big as the sky.

For some reason, the idea of leaving Willie behind was exciting. It reminded James of picking teams in gym class—you had to choose the best players if you wanted to win. Sure, excluding Willie made James feel merciless. It also made him feel like a grown-up, like someone forced to make tough choices and live with them. It did feel awkward having these thoughts while lying inside Willie’s own tree house, where the three of them had spent so many hours reading comic books, dropping tiny green paratroopers, and whispering into the dead of night while tucked into side-by-side sleeping bags.

“Like my plan for getting the Monster, for instance,” Reggie was saying. “Willie can’t come with us for that. For a million reasons. Can’t you just picture it?”

James hesitated. He had planned on convincing Reggie that stealing the Monster was a bad idea. But tonight James didn’t want to—an exhilarating new courage stirred within him. Steal the Monster? Why not? There was a part of him that enjoyed imagining his parents pacing the floor at home, fretting about his safety. Sometimes disobedience felt good and he wanted
to give himself over to it, become someone who ate danger and breathed risk like Reggie Fielder.

“What do you think they’ll do to him?” Reggie asked.

James blinked.

“Who?”

“The guy. You know, the guy with the silver truck. What’ll they do when they catch him?”

James paused. “What do
you
think?” he asked.

“Jail. Probably for a long time. If they can prove he did it, if they can prove he had a silver truck and that it was the same kind that hit Willie and Greg? Then maybe even the death penalty.”

James listened to their breathing for a while before replying. Mel’s painting was barely visible in the darkness, but James knew it well enough now to know that Mel’s world was not made of straight lines and bright colors—it was sharp-toothed, mystifying, and painful.

“I think it might be worse than the death penalty,” James said softly. “I’ve heard that sometimes when a bunch of grown-ups get real mad at once, they do illegal things and get away with it, because the cops can’t throw all the grown-ups in jail at the same time, it’s just impossible. So I think if they catch the guy, there’s a good chance that all the grown-ups in town will get together and go to wherever they’re keeping him—at the jail or wherever—and then they’ll drag him out of there. He’ll try to get away but there will be too many of them. Then they’ll take the guy somewhere where
there’s nobody around to watch, like maybe the woods or some farmer’s field. And then they’ll do something bad to him.”

“Like how bad?” asked Reggie. “You mean kill him?”

James could not keep away the terrible thoughts. He burned with a fire kindled by Mel Herman’s canvas and fanned by past-curfew air.

“Maybe worse,” he said. “Maybe worse than murder, because the guy hurt and killed kids. Grown-ups get real crazy about kids. And so maybe they’ll tear his arm off. You know, for justice. To make it fair. Because Willie lost his arm. Maybe they just tear this guy’s arm off.”

“Jesus,” said Reggie.

“And then maybe they keep going. Because I’ve heard that once grown-ups start something like this, they can’t get themselves to stop. They get like a pack of wolves, like they’re wolves tearing apart a, a …”