The Monster Variations (21 page)

The divorce did come eventually. Alone with his mother, money was not as plentiful as before. Louise, after over a decade with the family, had already been let go. James’s mother once again found herself facing the backyard clothesline on windy days, wrestling with laundry, those twisted, anguished cords. Only this time instead of turning to her husband for permission to quit, she turned to her son. James did not feel it was his permission to give and so withheld it.

High school began. James never forgot the chief lesson he had learned the night the tree house came down: he was not breakable. After the death of his friend and the divorce of his parents, he felt deep within him the need to test this theory, to do things liable to injure and scar him. But he honored the vow he had made to his parents and instead kept his mind on the donut, escaping his mother’s relentless cheer by immersing himself in tennis, basketball, the drama club, the student
newspaper. He volunteered at a nursing home and worked fundraisers for local associations. He met girls and stayed out late, but not too late, even learning how to kiss them. The scrapbook his mother kept, stagnant for so many years, began to thicken.

Reggie was part of none of this. The junkyard fight remained interrupted. When tenth grade began and Reggie was not there, James did not investigate the reason, though he thought about it for months, wondering if Reggie had dropped out, if he still lived with his mother just a few blocks away. In a way, James was glad he was gone. Forgetting the summer of his twelfth year was already a goal nearly achieved, and seeing Reggie’s face in the crowd had only made that goal more elusive.

Yet even as he was nominated to the homecoming court, made the all-state track team, graduated at the head of his class, and started to pack for college, James still longed for the danger of his childhood summers, those days of rushing through scrap heaps and thorns, those nights of broken curfews and cheated deaths. With peril now kept at such a distance, each day that passed was a mere drop of blood from a wound that, though mortal, would take a lifetime to drain.

Sometimes James’s eyes would open in the middle of the night and he would lie there, caught in a dream vision of Willie. It was always the same. There he was, helping Willie limp away from the junkyard, Willie weighing little more than a laundry bag filled with old bones. As the memory took him, dozens of Willie’s
nonsense sentences whispered in his ears, and he wished that someone would write them down in memory of Willie, because soon they would be forgotten. In the violet shushing of night, none of this disturbed him. He believed that he had been a good friend to Willie. Maybe a best friend. He was glad.

* * *

The day after Willie’s funeral, Reggie’s mother threw some stuff in the back of the car and they took a vacation, the two of them, their first one ever. Without makeup, her hair flying free, Reggie’s mother drove with her right leg pushing the gas pedal and her left propped acrobatically against the dash. With no destination in mind they drove for nearly two hours without a word, perhaps because the wind blasting through the open windows made conversation impossible, or perhaps because his mother’s mouth was too busy beckoning the ashes of one cigarette after another.

Around noon they pulled off at a roadside diner. His mother walked inside and Reggie followed. They sat in a booth. Music jangled loudly from a jukebox. Even louder, the hiss of a grill. Reggie stared at his menu and felt as if, once more, he was being held inside for recess until he could complete a difficult assignment—the menu was all letters and numbers and none of it added up. He stole a look at his mother and she was glaring at him.

“You want the burger,” she said. “Mustard, mayo, pickle on the side.”

A waitress appeared. His mother recited their choices with brusque authority. Reggie tried not to watch but was spellbound. He soon realized why. He was at a restaurant with his mother and
she was not the waitress
. She was the one sitting down. She was the one giving her order. Later, as he gnashed his pink hamburger and sucked down the limp yellow pickle, he watched his mother complain about cold onion rings and receive steaming hot replacements, he watched her demand not two coffee refills but three, he watched her slap down money for the bill and send a tip skittering across the flyspecked tabletop.

She drained her cup and sized up Reggie over the rim. The stillness of her unpainted eyes, her chipped and bitten nails, the disarray of her blond hair: she was so tough, and he so small. Reggie felt a stubborn thickening of his chest. He flattened his bottom lip and squared his jaw. Two could play at this game. He was tough, just as tough; she was nothing he couldn’t become. And so they sat there and frowned, enduring corny jukebox harmonies and the high-pitched exasperation of the grill.

“Finish your fries,” she grunted at last.

“I’m finished,” he grunted back. She considered this for a moment, then sat taller. He sat taller, too, propping a leg beneath himself for the boost. A puff of air flared her nostrils. She palmed her smokes and got up. Outside, on the way back to the car, she smacked the back of Reggie’s head; without hesitating Reggie twisted a leg and booted his mother in the rear. They did not look at one
another when they sat down in the car, but both had the feeling that the other was concealing a grin. They were worthy rivals, the two of them. They knew it and relished the challenge.

Their trip together lasted half a lifetime, even more. Or so it seemed when Reggie thought about it three years later, when his mother moved both of them into the home of her newest boyfriend, Darren. Reggie wondered how it had happened—he had promised himself he would not go through this again. Yet when the moving day came, he did not run away. He helped his mother pack and they moved, this time thirty minutes away and into a different school system.

He had to make new friends, which wasn’t much fun, and he had to accustom himself to another new house as well as another fake dad with his own unpredictable smells and habits and rules. Reggie had to admit that Darren treated Kay decently, or at least better than his predecessors had treated her. It was not long before she took a job tending bar down the street from the gas station where Darren worked; they often met for lunch. Sometimes Reggie joined them, because he too was working at the garage. The first morning Reggie had woken up in Darren’s house, Darren had marched him down to the garage and told the boss, Gerald, to hire him. Reggie was handed a pair of overalls. He began to foment a new plan of escape.

Then something unexpected happened. One day while hammering metal, changing tires, and persuading
bolts into sockets, Reggie found something he was not looking for: pride. He was good at fixing cars. No, he was better than good. He was the best mechanic in the whole garage, and he was only a kid. His fantasies of flight-hitching a ride down South, joining the military, going wherever the nearest railcar would take him—soon fell from his mind. He was exactly where he should be.

The age difference between him and his mother flattened and disappeared. They became more like roommates than mother and son; she was more Kay to him now than Mom. By the time he was a senior, it felt as if he had overtaken her in age and that he was the parent, she the child. He had to remind her of her shifts at the bar. He had to tell her when she let Darren get away with too much bullshit. Sometimes the phone would ring in the early morning and it would be Gerald saying that someone was calling in sick and they needed Reggie down there pronto. And Reggie would get up, pull on his overalls, and bang on his mother’s door to make sure she woke up on time. As he walked to the garage he didn’t think to himself how grown-up he was acting. Instead he thought that he owed this much to Kay, because if he turned out all right she might believe she had been an all right mother. Stepping into the familiar coolness of the garage, Reggie remembered the junkball plays Mel Herman had tried to teach, and recalled that the hit-and-run rarely worked but the sacrifice fly was possible if you just concentrated.

Reggie graduated from high school with a C average, but found something better than high marks: Addie, a
girl he met one day at the garage. She was perfect, much better than he deserved, and once he had her he did not let her leave his side. That was easy, because she didn’t want to.

He told Addie about Willie Van Allen. She was the first and only person he’d ever told. Had he been able to predict Willie’s death, he told her, he would’ve guessed that it would toughen him up, make him more like the older kids he had idolized and finally become. Instead, remembering Willie dragged Reggie back to those days when he was smaller and weaker. For a long time, he had hated Willie for that.

But after they moved in with Darren, recollections of Willie’s sincerity and gratitude stopped Reggie from landing in more trouble. He
wouldn’t
push that kid into his locker. He
wouldn’t
sass Gerald to his face. Reggie would walk away from these near-incidents with fists trembling and a love for Willie Van Allen flickering white hot in his gut, his eyes, his ears—he could feel Willie alive all over his skin. Reggie never thanked Willie for these interventions, at least not out loud. However, the way in which he protected the memory of that sickly looking, long-nosed, one-armed, brace-faced, forever-young little boy was, to say the least, very out of character for him—and both he and Addie knew it. Allowing Willie to forever hide away inside his head … well, it wasn’t much. Reggie still hoped it was worth something.

* * *

One week after Willie Van Allen’s death, school started up. Mel Herman was not there. There were theories, each wilder and more haunting than the last. Finally a rumor went around that Mr. Camper, the art teacher, knew what had happened to Mel. When asked, Mr. Camper was shruggy and mumbly, almost as if he had been sworn to silence. A few kids, however, claimed that if you really searched among that long hair, beard, and pilled flannel collars, there was a clue—look there, can’t you see it? Mr. Camper is
smiling
.

What do you do when a lifelong threat disappears all at once? The kids did not know and did not relish finding out. With Mel Herman gone, they felt more vulnerable than ever—now there was no telling where to look for life’s next attack. So they spoke of Mel the way the grown-ups spoke of the hit-and-run killer, as something mythic and dreadful that would return the very day they relaxed their guard. Over the summer someone had stolen the Mel Herman paintings that had formerly lined the school hallways. There was nothing left to challenge his boogeyman status.

Mel did in fact leave one thing behind, though very few ever saw it. That winter, when the coroners came to remove Miss Bosch, who had passed away silently during the night, they found her lying within the most spectacularly painted bedroom they had ever seen. Scab reds, sweat yellows, bruise purples, leather blacks, latchkey golds, sidewalk grays, road-sign oranges, dollar-bill
greens, medicine-bottle tans, poached-egg whites, oxygen-tank blues, baseball-bat browns, girlie-mag pinks, knife-blade silvers: it was mesmerizing, and the coroners fell to the floor twisting their necks. As they lifted Miss Bosch from her bed they remarked that they kept expecting her eyes to shoot open, for a nest of such colors made it seem nearly impossible for the woman to be dead.

Mel came back to town when the arts academy let out at Christmas, and his father’s new nurse met him at the door with a cry of delight. Her name was Louise, and she was the unexpected result of an anxious phone call Mel had placed to the community hospital the night before he had taken a bus to the city. “My dad needs help,” he had said, and after ascertaining that there was no immediate medical emergency, the man on the phone had assisted him, made a few calls, and found a wonderful woman who had recently lost her job and was looking for just this kind of work.

Louise was nothing like Mel was expecting and like no one he had met before. She laughed like a storm siren and tore around the house crying this and demanding that, throwing open drapes and chucking musty stacks of paper into the trash. When Mel sloped past her on his way in the front door, she told him he stank—hit the showers and make it quick because there’s turkey roasting in the oven. As she snapped and chuckled and thundered through the narrow hallways, Mel’s father snorted
and groused. “You’re going to kill me,” he muttered to her with a trace of a smile. A smile—on his father’s face! Mel panicked and dove into the shower.

Why had it not occurred to him earlier that help like Louise was available? Mel thought about it as hot water covered him and realized that sometimes big changes, like going away to school, shook up not only your life but the lives of everyone around you. Those changes could be good or bad, but you’d never know unless you started shaking.

It was a strange dinner, consisting of foods Mel could not believe his father would eat. But he did, after muttering plenty of halfhearted complaints. Louise did all the talking while Mel and his father scrutinized one another, their faces flexing over mouthfuls of turkey. “Your dad wants to know if you’ve seen your brother,” Louise said. Mel kept chewing, shook his head. “Well, will you let us know if you see him? Your dad talks about him more than you would believe.” It was an easy request to grant. Mel thought about his brother constantly, and clung to a dream that one day his brother would hear a rumor about a student at the arts academy so talented you had to see him to believe, and at that moment his brother would know it just had to be Mel.

Mel kept chewing, nodded. “I’ll let you know,” he answered.

Late that night Mel crept into his brother’s room and placed the switchblade back where nearly a year ago he had found it. Almost at once, his chest ached. But in the
city, at the academy, where paint flowed so fast that it swept sudden, uncertain friendships along in its startling tide, he was afraid a heart of metal would make him sink.

Walking back to the bus station on New Year’s Eve, Mel Herman was the only one in town to see Mrs. Van Allen pack up and leave town. Mel paused beneath a tree just down the street, snowflakes thickening his lashes and melting into his blinking eyes, and he watched the stocky woman struggle to lift scores of boxes and suitcases into the back of a rental trailer. Mel thought of helping her, maybe without even asking for money, but he could not make his cold bones move. Mrs. Van Allen went from the house to the trailer, over and over again. Her silver hair was dyed brown and done up nice, but the steady snowfall pounded it.