Scowler (12 page)

It was Marvin Burke, all right. A pale tongue emerged to slake blanched and riven lips, and this alone provided proof that he was not a corpse, or a ghost. He looked awful, though—chewed up and regurgitated. His prison garb, baggy, striped, wrinkled, and filthy, was identical to Jeremiah’s, except crudely flayed, and Ry could imagine him wriggling beneath several sets of barbed-wire fences. The patterns of color were mosaicked but not hard to identify: Brown was blood, gray was mud, black was soot. Though no critical wounds were visible, evidence of injury was everywhere, especially in a dark red crust covering his heart. Marvin Burke had torn, or fought, his way out of something terrible.

The familiar facial features were disguised with wrinkles, which struck dozens of anguished new intersections. Most shocking, though, was the hair. No longer trapped beneath a dome of tight skin, the hair ran dangerously wild. No areas of thinning, no lines of retreat; in fact, the hairline was lower on Marvin’s forehead than on Ry’s, giving the father the swept-back pelt of a silverback. There was something insidious about how long Marvin had hidden this lushness; it recalled the unchecked growth of Black Glade. The trademark mustache was gone too, replaced by a wiry month-old beard that began high on the cheekbones, circled the mouth like a ski mask, and dove into his shirt collar. The glasses had also changed over the years but remained too big for his face, as if attempting to conceal what little skin his hair had not already eaten. Nothing, of course, had changed with the teeth—teeth revealed you. Big square blocks fed into that same ravenous gap.

“Did I ever tell you about the time I bagged a bear?”

The words grinded out like crushed ice. The gun was pointed at a place near their feet, while Marvin’s red eyes roved to see who would answer first. Would the winner, Ry wondered, get shot? He glanced at his mother to see if she was taking the bait; she, though, seemed to have been paralyzed by the question’s absurdity.

“Well, let me tell you.” Marvin’s tongue came out again and made its languid rounds. “I bagged and bagged that bear to let me go.”

Ry blinked as if subjected to a pulled punch. Jo Beth choked like she’d seen something revolting, and Sarah extended her epic silence. Not even the joke’s teller chuckled; he frowned and raised the weapon until it was pointed at Ry’s chest.

“I worked on that for three years.” Marvin’s voice was tightly controlled. “The Professor heard it so many times he swore he’d slice my throat. But he was the one who convinced me I ought to say it to you if I ever got the chance. The Professor was brilliant, brilliant, but on this? On this I thought he was nuts. Until I got here and I looked around at what you did—what you’ve
done
. Only right then did I see the poetry. A little humor before the pain—it might focus you. It might focus
me
. It might make it all the more meaningful. Don’t you think?”

Jo Beth moaned. “Let’s be calm. Let’s talk. Please? Can we?”

“You’re a sight for sore eyes, Jo.” Marvin did not allow himself to look at her. “But right this second’s not the time for us. I’ve got serious business with our son. I’m sorry but that comes first.”

“Ry, is it okay?” Sarah whispered. Of course she whispered. It was how the two of them communicated anything of real importance.

“Yes.” This response was his duty.

“No.” Marvin shook his head. “No, see, it is not. This is my farm—surely you haven’t forgotten that. So there wasn’t any debating about where I should go. My reasons were simple. The first was to get some money. The warden, the guards—they’re good at their jobs and when the dust settles they’ll come after me, and I’ll be on the run. I’m not worried about that, but a little money would ease the journey. And then I saw. Even in the dark, I could see—the colors and how they were all wrong. Everything supposed to be green was yellow. Everything supposed to be white was brown. The fields are—I still can’t believe it. And I’m going to
take
something? What on earth would I take? There’s not a single thing left. Then I go inside, and the kitchen? There’s garbage, scraps of paper everywhere. There’s syrup all over the counters and there’s ants in the syrup. There’s a—and I can’t believe this. But there’s a tree. A tree in the kitchen. This is how savages live, you understand? You took the farm that I built with my own hands, my own back, my own brain, methods I invented myself, and you did not nurse it. Now it’s too late. Now it’s overrun. You let that crazy forest out there get a foothold, son, and that, I can tell you, is all it ever wanted.”

Ry had forgotten the craft behind these walls of words, laid one brick at a time with the patience of a master mason. It was how Marvin Burke had filibustered merchants, discouraged uppity field hands, silenced his family with checklists of everything he had done right that day, the things he would do righter the next. It was somewhat courageous, a speech
of this kind given under such duress, and Ry realized that he’d been foolish to reduce the man to a voiceless monster. He wasn’t even sure how it had happened. Scowler’s doing, perhaps.

“Evidently this place means nothing to you, but I’ll tell you something,” Marvin continued. “Thinking about these fields, these crops, kept me alive for thousands of days.
You
are the murderer. That’s why the second thing I came to do—to take care of you?” Marvin grimaced. “Can’t even feel bad about that anymore. Just one minute, that’s all I want. Not even one minute—thirty seconds. To see if you have anything to say for yourself, any explanation whatsoever.”

“Marvin.” Jo Beth took a deep breath and swallowed. “All you’ve done is run away. They’ll be lenient. I know they will, and I can speak on your behalf. But they won’t be lenient if you harm a child.”

Marvin removed an unsteady hand from the stock and scrubbed it over his weary face. Soot and blood coalesced to a muddy orange.

“You know everything there is to know, son.” His eyes conveyed genuine sorrow. “I saw to it. So I’m sent away and you don’t care. That I understand. But to throw away an education like that? To just let this place rot? I see no logic in that, and I’ve looked. I’ve spent the whole morning looking. Tell me now what I’ve missed. I want to hear it.”

Ry knew that his muteness was suicide, each beat of silence making space for the forthcoming bullets, yet he could find no words. This would be acceptable if not for the question he didn’t want to ask himself: What would happen to Jo Beth and Sarah after he was dead?

“I’m sorry,” Ry managed. “I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry. My God. You have no idea what you’ve done.”

“He’s scared,” Jo Beth said. “You’re being extremely aggressive.”

“Aggressive?” Marvin’s face was not easy to read beneath the beard and glasses and blood and grime, but the muscles appeared to rigidify into a pattern of disbelief. “Jo—there’s going to be shooting. It’s going to be very aggressive.”

“Marvin, no.” She was through reasoning. “Marvin, stop.”

Something about her pleading pushed him beyond patience. The butt of the gun squared with his shoulder. The weapon’s shadow, thrown across the lawn, was already at Ry’s head.

“There’s nothing for me here.” The raspy remnant of his voice crackled in a struggle for control. “I’ve never seen people with more nothing. Not even in prison. All you got is Old Snig, and you know what? Old Snig is coming with me.”

Hearing his forgotten nickname, the dog whined with pleasure, the twine leash snaking after him through the grass.

“Marvin, no, please,” Jo Beth said. “Marvin, please, no.”

“No way my dog would die without me, that’s what I told the Professor.” He reaimed the gun. His right eyelid twitched behind the sight, and he knuckled away a clot of soot. It left a mark, black and horizontal, as if he were a man who shot fire instead of dripped tears. “No one
—no one
—buries this dog but me. You understand that? No—”

Marvin broke off. His eyes had wandered to Ry’s right, but the person who had arrested his attention was not Jo Beth. It was Sarah. The girl stood perfectly straight with her chin tilted and neck craned, brazenly ignoring the threats, the gun, her father’s very presence, instead devoting herself to
gawping at the morning sky. Marvin looked baffled, even offended, and Ry opened his mouth to tell his sister to snap to attention, and quick, but then he noticed what his sister had noticed first.

The birds, at long last, were silent.

Into the void came a sustained and piercing shriek. Without even thinking, all four of them clamped their ears and twisted their necks. Fire was splitting the sky. They braced against it. A sword of yellow eviscerated the clouds and struck the telephone pole that ran alongside the road. The pole detonated. Ry heard the sizzle of sparking cables and saw curls of black circuitry head for the trees. Somewhere in the house, two windows shattered simultaneously as the projectile came in like a landing plane. It slanted over the house and the two trees directly above, the limbs blooming with red smoke, and then the people below were whipped by a storm of heat and ash. Sinuses were baked and throats seared; they lurched and felt one another’s confused hands. Toes stubbed steel—the shotgun was loose. Jo Beth tumbled, swatting at a tongue of flame in her hair. Ry whirled, breathless, and found himself staring at the McCafferty Forty, the location of Sarah’s lost tooth, at the very instant the fiery object buried itself into the field, spraying a half-mile curtain of earth into the blue canvass of a perfect morning. A slam of air hit their torsos and the four of them dropped like rocks. For a while, dirt continued to rain. After that, nothing moved.

T
he doctors spoke to Jo Beth as if Ry were not there. Ry noticed this. He also noticed how his mother, when greeting visitors, repeated the doctors’ stories with the giddy volume of one who has narrowly avoided tragedy. She used the doctors’ words and relished them: Her son’s story was a
miracle
of
survival;
his was an
astonishing
display of
courage
. The guests—mostly neighbors, folks from church, community well-wishers—would at this point invariably look to the hospital bed, seeking evidence of this paragon of human resilience. Instead they found a sullen, incommunicative, regular old boy. Ry didn’t care. He tucked himself farther beneath tight white sheets and brought Mr. Furrington and Jesus Christ closer. He wasn’t deaf and he wasn’t stupid. He just wasn’t much interested in adult conversation. Tentatively he
took hold of Scowler’s clammy belly and brought him closer, too.

“See his lips move? See?”

Tiny specks of scab marked the incision points between Jo Beth’s fingers, and similar scabs ran along the ridge of her left ear. But she smiled with wanton happiness. She thought her son’s hushed powwows with his three companions were cute. They were not cute. Ry would die for these friends, each of whom had saved his life.

A nurse tasked with changing the dressing on Ry’s forehead was the first to find out how not cute they were. She scoffed at Furrington’s missing leg, tsked at Jesus Christ’s grimy skin, and went silent upon uncovering Scowler and his blind contemplation. She tried to remove them, ostensibly to make room for the unrolling of bandages, but Ry snapped into action. He clacked his teeth and pounded his feet against the railings; his left foot, encased in plaster, was louder. Later, when the nurse detailed the episode to Jo Beth, Ry was disappointed to hear his behavior described as a “crying fit.” He had intended it as something more forceful.

No matter. He inhaled the familiar funk of his companions and felt pleasantly dizzy. Never in his life had he felt so secure, and everyone noticed. The very things that frightened children about hospitals Ry Burke took like warm milk: the unnerving cleanliness of the white walls and beige tile, the malodor of the elderly, the clockwork shock of nurses and their invasions. His friends made it all okay. They told him how to breathe when he awoke from nightmares; they gave him advice on which medicines to take and which to feed to the pillowcase. Trays of food went ignored until his friends deemed certain items edible (milk, potatoes) and
others trickery (fruit, greens). They told him how to be tough, and when he cried anyway they sang along until his sobs turned to laughter.

The toys were present for the first police interrogation. It did not go well. The uniformed men became frustrated at Ry’s inattention and snapped shut their notebooks. Ry glanced over the top of Furrington and Jesus Christ, who were cavorting upon his lap, and saw his mother wince at the men and touch her upper lip to reference their mustaches. The next time they came they were clean-shaven, and Ry talked. The men glanced at each other throughout the session, and when it was over one of them looked around as if what he was about to do were a lapse in protocol. He gripped Ry’s shoulder, leaned in, and said, “Don’t worry—the bastard’s going away for a long time.”

Ry nodded because he was supposed to, but he could not keep his eyes from the tiny columns of hair that were trying to push through the skin above the man’s upper lip. See? Right there? The world was not to be trusted.

The subsequent days were used to wean him back to solid food; to inflict two more procedures on his frostbitten extremities; to check on the cast on his left ankle; to fit him for crutches; and to stitch, poke, frown at, salve, and rebandage the hole in his head. Numerous sets of X-rays were taken of his brain, and when the doctor traced with a pen the areas of concern, Ry wondered if he was already dead—in the X-rays, he looked like a ghost.

The results, said the doctor, were both good and bad. What was good was that his reparative abilities were top-notch. What was bad was that, as tall and strong as he was, he was still a kid, and a trauma like this one could be compared to
dropping a baby on its head. Jo Beth, he said, using her name, needed to be vigilant until her son was full grown, and they needed to beware further trauma to the head, including the rattle of things like city buses or roller coasters, as well as strong magnetic forces, which could initiate relapse. This last warning worried Jo Beth because she did not know how to guard against it, but the doctor raised his hands in apology. He shouldn’t have even mentioned it; in all likelihood, they would never encounter a magnetic field that powerful.