The Monster Variations (20 page)

“What?” demanded James.

“Truck,” said Reggie, as if only mildly surprised.

Below, cloaked by the steam that poured from its front hood, was a truck, its front end wrapped around the base of the tree. Its wheels were spinning. It was stuck. Then suddenly it dislodged and jumped several yards back. The engine spit violently and then the truck roared and leapt once more.

The world shook. Reggie howled and ducked back into the tree house, covering his face with his hands. Willie and James shouted as the tree branches shook and the tree house itself spun, as if it were screwing loose from the tree. There was a snapping, splintering noise and the boys watched in terror as three floorboards buckled and crumbled into wreckage.

Willie’s mumbling continued, his lips moving faster and faster, his sentences flipping inside out until they could not possibly contain meaning, not even to Willie. James thought he heard the word “vacancy” in there, again and again, the piercing stab of the “V” sound cutting through the truck’s oceanic thrum, but James did not
know if Willie was describing that old motel, this tree house, or himself.

Outside, the screech of a pig being slaughtered—the truck—and then a sound like a thousand lightbulbs stamped beneath a thousand boots. The tree limbs flailed and the tree house twisted. Half of a wall fell away and the boys heard it pound against the ground several seconds later. No longer was the tree house as straight and sharp as an unspoiled grave; now it was as warped as Greg Johnson’s resting spot—the roof, the floor, the walls, everything bending and peeling off into a spray of wood chips. Mel Herman’s torn and flapping artwork shone through the chaos, the hard slashes of color finally transporting to the real world: here was the violence the paint predicted,
right here
. There was a deafening blast as the long-forgotten metal pulley crashed through the weakened ceiling, the flimsy floor, then vanished.

Through the rattling darkness, Reggie and James found the white flash of each other’s eyes. They were both lying flat on the disintegrating floor of the tree house, their mouths stretched wide. They might have been screaming, the both of them, it was impossible to tell. Yet they both realized the same thing at the same time.

Willie was no longer talking.

They twisted their heads to the corner where Willie should have been, his head between knees, his single arm folded across the top of his head. Willie was not there and the entire corner was gone.

Another screaming metal crunch filled their ears and the tree moaned in misery. The tree house soared outward as if it planned to launch itself like a baseball. At the last second the tree snatched it back, and that’s when the roof exploded into a shower of wooden daggers that rained upon the boys, scarred their legs, nicked the backs of their necks. Rusty nails landed in their hair; they felt other nails, cold and laden with tetanus beneath the palms of their hysterical hands. Before they shut their eyes they glimpsed the night sky totally exposed above them.

Wait—there was Willie! He had escaped from the collapsed corner and now hobbled like a three-legged dog through the hailstorm of wood. Reggie and James were frozen—without realizing it, they had accepted their fates—yet Willie was moving. His knees shoveled through inches of loose white wood and the colored confetti of Mel Herman’s painting as the floor bucked and writhed below him like the back of a giant beast. Willie’s face remained focused as he headed toward the widening mouth of the tree house door.

Alone, neither Reggie nor James had the courage to move. They were too scared, too shocked, too small, too powerless. But when they looked past Willie and at each other, there was something between them just strong enough.

James took to his knees and lunged. Reggie rolled his body over the sharp shreds of wood. They were faster than Willie, and in a flash they crossed the undulating
floor. They sank their hard fists into Willie’s clothes and when Willie felt it he exclaimed—loudly, angrily—and clambered for the doorway with an authority neither of the boys expected. Reggie and James cried and pounced. James swiped for Willie’s left arm, the one that wasn’t there, and James felt certain that for the rest of his life he would feel the tickle of that ghost arm fluttering through his empty fingers. Willie toppled half way out the door and dove down at the truck. But Reggie had found a grip and now James found one, too; but then they both felt Willie’s shirt ripping, yawning away. So they fell upon Willie’s legs and wrapped their arms around them. Willie’s torso dangled above the truck.

Willie was shouting something that sounded like
He only wants me!
, and even in the crash and fury of that moment, there was something in Willie’s voice that staggered Reggie and James. Willie did not sound scared, he sounded mad, mad at
them
. Willie kicked his legs—at them, at Reggie and James—maybe because Willie wanted them to let him go, let him fall, so that he could finally prove to them his worth.

The tree house convulsed. A huge hole gulped away the center of the floor and Reggie felt one of his legs flop through. He loosened his grip on Willie’s pants leg and immediately got an eyeful of Willie’s shoe. Reggie reeled away, letting go of Willie to save himself. Willie’s body slid out the doorway and James wrapped his arms around Willie’s thigh, then his calf, now his foot, desperately clawing and clinging, shouting something, maybe,
Don’t go, please Willie don’t go!
For an instant the world narrowed down: gone were the tree house, the tree, the truck, the noise, the night. The world reduced to two things: James’s hands and Willie’s left foot.

And then the tree shook and the truck backed up and Willie wriggled and the truck spun its tires and James screamed and the truck lurched ahead and then Willie dropped like a stone, heavy and silent, and James held only a single, tiny tennis shoe that was once worn by a boy named Willie Van Allen.

P
eople forget things. Even grown-ups, who spend so much energy insisting that they are right, and that they are the only ones who know the correct course to take, even they eventually forget why they are insisting. They get distracted by their jobs, by the monthly bills, by that damn car that keeps breaking down, by that rainstorm, by that snowstorm, by that visit from Grandma, by how fast the kids are growing, like weeds, taller and taller every day. In the dull light of such events, even the hit-and-run killer soon faded into shadow.

It was a tragedy, no doubt. It was on front pages for
weeks. Mr. Van Allen, boiling over with alcohol and consumed with grief and rage over the lifting of the curfew, had finally decided to disassemble the tree house that he himself had assembled, even if it meant smashing the thing to bits with his truck. He never heard over the engine the cries of the children above him, nor did he see his son when he dropped into the truck’s path.

What no one noticed was that Mr. Van Allen’s blue truck looked silver in the glow of the moon. All summer Mr. Van Allen had tried to bury a nightmare. He dreamt that one day in early April he had forgotten to pick up his son from that stupid junkyard, and so hurried to his truck and drove fast to make up time, but the alcohol fumes rising from his mouth blinded him and scrambled around all of his senses, and he barely noticed when he bounced something small and nearly weightless from the side of the road, then kept on driving.

When he sobered and returned to a changed wife and a son with one less arm, he knew all apologies were inadequate. The truth, in fact, would surely destroy all three of them. Instead he would keep the secret in the hope that it would consume him alone. But his self-destruction was worse than he expected, more prolonged and painful, and he pleaded each day for someone to end the torture and discover what he had done. When he read about the cancellation of the curfew, he knew it meant that his agony was forever—and then he heard about what someone had done to Greg Johnson’s grave, the last thing that poor little boy had
been given. It could wait no longer, the tree house had to come down; it was an affront to the Johnsons, to anyone who had to look upon the belongings of boys who had stopped existing.

When the grown-ups of the town saw Mr. Van Allen over the next few months—as he was placed into the back of a police car, led to the courthouse, and transferred to the county jail—they tried to tell one another about the tentative, exhausted, penitent smile that loosened his knotted face. The grown-ups tried to communicate this, but they failed because it scared them.

Greg Johnson’s killer was never identified, nor was the driver who desecrated Greg’s grave. There were rumors, unreliable sightings, supposed newspaper reports of similar patterns of slaughter. As months wore into years, the alleged locations changed, as did the methods of murder. But it was always the same killer, it had to be, for the threat felt identical to the grown-ups, who stirred their drinks with their fingers and used the blare of television to drown out the undying uncertainty. There were also occasional rumors of a quick and bloody justice, of groups of parents tracking the killer and bringing about a reckoning. The grown-ups knew this was only wishful thinking, and besides—there was something about these rumors that made them feel even worse.

This killer would live forever. In fact, he had already lived that long.

Before the police arrived at the scene of the accident, James escaped home and came upon a brightly lit living
room. His father was gone—again, he was
always
gone—and his mother was surrounded by wads of tissue as pink and as puffy as her eyes. Her makeup was mostly wiped away and her scar glowed bright like bone. James wondered how she had heard about the tree house so quickly. Then he realized that his mother had her own heartbreak: his missing father. James stood there panting in the corner, unseen and painted with the red hieroglyphics of wood scratches, and in that long moment he vowed to fix the family that lay scattered before him. If his mother and father were indeed too damaged to do anything but harm each other, he would become their emissary and take them proudly where they wanted to go: high school, college, and beyond. All this would be theirs, starting now.

Reggie was escorted home by a police officer. Like Mr. Wahl, Ms. Fielder was gone. Reggie waited in the living room. He turned on the stereo and the television, and turned up both so loud it hurt his ears and vibrated the fillings inside his teeth. Then he got a tub of ice cream and kept eating it, more and more, until it ran down his chin and neck and his entire face was so cold he couldn’t cry even if he wanted. Later his mother rushed in the door, her blond ponytail whipping about her shoulders, and when she saw him she stopped suddenly and her face trembled like she was afraid. She opened her arms.
I’m not hugging you
, Reggie thought to himself, the ice cream spoon buried deep inside his mouth. But a few seconds later there he was, across the room, his cold face
buried inside the hot, hard folds of his mother’s uniform. She pet his head with hands that felt like they belonged to Mom, not to Kay, and said, “Shhh, shhh, shhh,” over and over, even though he wasn’t making any noise. Reggie wrapped his arms around her skinny hips and told himself he would let go soon. He did not.

* * *

Summer ended.

Months ago, children would’ve bet money against it. But it happened—it ended just as suddenly as it had arrived. Now it was fall, and the new, cool air cut right through boys’ too-thin jackets and chilled their shoulders, shoulders that were a little broader and stronger than before. James and Reggie put on new sneakers and coats and hats and felt strange about how often they forgot Willie, but Reggie’s words had ultimately been proven true: there were places they would go that Willie could not follow. After a while, they thought of Willie only when they observed the pack of wild dogs roaming the woods near the old Van Allen place, scrapping for food and overturning trash cans.

On the late autumn day that James’s father boxed up his clothes and moved out of the house, James found himself at the vacant junkball diamond. It was not a divorce, not yet, but his parents could no longer live together, even though the relationship between Mr. Wahl and Ms. Fielder had ended. Thinking back on that sweltering day when the three boys had followed Mel
Herman home, it was funny how that shabby motel loomed increasingly large in James’s memory while Mel grew increasingly small. James kicked at the damp infield and could taste the dirt, just barely, inside his throat.

For some reason he felt nothing about his parents’ separation; he felt as if all his nerve endings had been severed just below the skin. When he returned home from the junkball field he was dreaming about the approaching snow, not his parents, and he had his head thrust deep inside the refrigerator before it hit him. His father was gone. James remained bent over the cold cuts and milk jugs for a long time, the heavy drift of frigid air turning his skin cold and white.

As if to fill the home that suddenly loomed too large, James’s mother loved him harder than ever before. She was always there for him, on time, even early. If she had a single unkind thought it did not pass her lips or alter her features. James should have been pleased, but there was something he did not count on. She annoyed him. He didn’t know if it was her constant, overeager smile and the fawning way she spooned him second helpings of absolutely everything, or the cautious way that she handled him, both physically and verbally, ever since Willie died. It was as if James was an animal that might bare its teeth or flee if his mother made a single threatening move. He thought about both: biting, running. He also thought something else. Maybe tiring of your mother was just what happened when you grew up.

His father lived in a nice apartment across town and
James saw him regularly. Never once did his father mention the theft of the Monster, nor to James’s knowledge did the news ever reach his mother. James was thankful, at least at first. Later, he felt angry that he was obligated to feel thankful. Then he began to wish his father would go ahead and tell on him, to his mother, his teachers, everyone, because until the secret was told James owed his father a loyalty. But his father did nothing, and James did nothing, too, and this uncomfortable, unspoken pact between father and son stretched out, further and further, until it became their lives.