Scowler (13 page)

Nine days later Ry was back at home. He dug up one of his mother’s old leather purses, modified it into a hip sack, stuffed in his three companions, and hobbled off to do his chores. In his mother’s face he saw concern about what he supposed was his serious and dutiful manner, but she did not realize how little time there was for playing or laughing when one was fielding so many important whispers.

Jo Beth watched him line the toys alongside his supper plate, facing outward as if watching for attack. She watched him readjust their sentry positions upon the sink or tub before hand washing or bathing. Each night when she tiptoed inside his room to whisper good night, three other tiny heads poked out above the bedsheet, and soon she began to include them in the nightly ritual: “Night-night, Jesus. Sweet dreams, Mr. Furrington. Sleep well, Scowler.” It was the best part of every day for Ry, a moment of directionless joy. He had the best mother in the world and no one to thank for it.

School presented a bigger problem. Was he just going to pose these figures on the edge of his desk? Jo Beth’s bold, unspoken decision was why not? Upon crossing the school’s concrete threshold and entering the familiar calamity, Ry felt the fear dry from his skin like perspiration. These chilly halls
were no colder than Black Glade, their distances no crueler. Ry concentrated on the stab and swing of his crutches, the sheet-metal reverberation of his locker, the fifth-grade classroom’s incense of ground pencil. He kept his head down during Miss Plaisted’s welcome back and said nothing when Carla Green scooted her desk over to help him catch up with assignments. It was afternoon—math—when he finally succumbed to the trifecta of whispers and unzipped his hip sack. They crawled out and claimed three of the desk’s four corners. He was aware of the looks; he turned his eyes to Miss Plaisted and saw that she was a bit slack-jawed herself. A moment later, though, she remembered the chalk in her hand. Ry felt his shoulders relax and began following her lecture for the first time that day.

The dolls made everyone nervous and uncomfortable. The dilemma, from an adult point of view, was that Ry had begun to excel. For years he had been the personification of the C-minus student. Now he was distinguishing
their
from
they’re
and
who
from
whom
like it was second nature, and his victory at the ballyhooed fifth-grade spelling bee had juvenile oddsmakers clutching their heads in disbelief. Math, long his worst subject, had rocketed his name through the ranks until it sat among the crème de la crème of Miss Plaisted’s grade chart. To Ry, though, succeeding in the class was no more notable than carrying out chores—though his amazing innovations of wood and wire all across the farm were making those tasks easier, too.

Ry knew that he wasn’t really any smarter. What he was feeling must be comparable to when a kid with lousy vision looks through prescription glasses for the first time. Furrington was naturally fussy about words; his fur tickled Ry’s
ear when he giggled their proper placement. Jesus Christ, meanwhile, had an extensive knowledge of history; writing down which president did what and when was a piece of cake. And math had become the easiest subject of all, though also the most unpleasant. Each calculation was rent with the slashes and puncture wounds of division signs and fraction bars, evidence of Scowler’s impatient attack upon the helpless numerals. Ry finished each page of equations sweaty and gasping, the pencil ruptured, the paper ripped. Miss Plaisted picked up the homework, blew away the lead dust, smoothed out the ripples, and edged away. At home Ry observed the same look of uneasy pensiveness in his mother. Both adults waited for the next development.

An excuse for action came in a matter of weeks. Jo Beth was called to the school to pick up Ry, who sat placidly in Principal Teague’s office with his unzipped hip sack and pristine white cast—she hadn’t noticed until now that not a single student had signed it. The other boy, Teague assured her, had been in no shape to wait around for Jo Beth’s appraisal. He was bleeding far too profusely and, in Teague’s experience, the sooner stitches went in, the better.

Ry was aware that this was his prompt to express remorse. Yet it was hard to feel bad about trouncing a sniveling, smart-lipped little monster, which was exactly what the boy had looked like through Scowler’s eyes. Ry looked at his mother’s hands, clasped but shaking in her lap, and started to feel bad anyway. He swallowed and zipped his hip sack shut.

Scowler began hissing immediately, so Ry barely heard when Miss Plaisted knock-knocked, entered, and began unleashing her pent-up observations. Ry Burke was secretive.
He hid his drawings in art class so no one could see them and smashed flat his clay sculptures before the teacher could grade them. Ry Burke was crafty. After taking a hit in gym-class dodgeball, he had gotten a bathroom pass, scoured the thawing playground for dog feces, and during recess smeared the feces to the underside of his attacker’s desktop. Ry Burke was highly intelligent. This, too, was true, at least according to the books, although let’s be honest—weren’t the books a little suspicious, given everything else? And now Ry Burke was violent. This wasn’t the first incident, Miss Plaisted insisted. The ensuing pause conjured up nightmares of unspecified blacktop beatings.

Finally the school could recommend what they had wanted since day one, and Jo Beth could accept that recommendation with an air of reluctance. Psychological evaluation—that was the ticket. There were handshakes. Pats on backs. Positive progress had been made today, they were sure of it. His mother’s clasped hands, Ry realized as they got up to leave, had not been shaking from fear. They had been shaking from excitement.

The first therapist, Dr. Kent Thurmond, wasted no time blaming it all on Ry. The child had survived a trauma, he said during the very first interview, and that engendered a good deal of cognitive dissonance. The long day and night in the woods had also inspired strong feelings of invincibility. To handle the runoff, the boy had instilled his toys with some of these unrealistic attributes. These invented personalities simply needed to be uninvented; from this moment on, they were to be known only as the Unnamed Three. Ry grinned because he liked the new moniker. Jo Beth, however, forced
an apologetic smile and asked if it was normal for a psychiatrist to offer such conclusions with the young patient sitting right there.

He was fired. Other therapists followed, but none were up to handling the Unnamed Three. There was Paul Pulchalski, who wanted to peel back the layers of quote unquote normal ego functions. Jo Beth said that sounded painful. There was Janelle Smith-Warner, a violent-trauma survivor herself who chewed anxiously on her long blond hair while fretting about her own career and romantic orbits. There was the stoop-shouldered Monroeville doctor who declared Ry a “tasty” challenge because of how he was firmly in the latency stage, so much more interesting than those in the phallic or genital. The sole standout was an Iowa City shrink who intrigued Ry with his talk of a “death instinct.” Ry bristled, though, at the man’s misquoting of his companions’ names as “Furryman,” “Mr. Jesus,” and “Frown Guy.”

Just when all hope was lost, there came the butcher. Handing Jo Beth a white-papered parcel of pork loin at Sookie’s Foods, the aproned man took one look at the toys poking from Ry’s hip sack and decided not to let go of the parcel when Jo Beth tried to take it. The two strangers bridged the counter, connected by meat. The overhead music cut out in favor of a price check.

“My sister can help him,” the butcher said.

The accuracy of this snap judgment seemed to crush her. Ry did not fully appreciate his mother’s new responsibilities—he knew she spent increasing amounts of time yelling at farmhands, on the phone with bankers, and driving to the Bloughton courthouse to deliver statements—but one thing he understood was despair. He could not bear seeing a woman
of this caliber defeated. Her sleeve was right there, so he tugged it.

“It’s okay,” he whispered. “I don’t mind.”

Jo Beth took her son’s chin between her thumb and index finger and gave him the kind of dazed examination usually reserved for new fiancées testing the clarity and cut of their diamonds. After a while she let go, squared her shoulders, and nodded at the butcher. The man wiped his hands and used his wax pencil to write a name and number.

“Her name’s Linda.” He winked. “You tell her I said to give you the pork-loin special.”

Linda Colson worked from a home that doubled as a floral arrangement business, which she ran with her sister. The air was syrupy and the carpet seeded with spines of baby’s breath, and a clacking curtain of beads was all that separated the rest of the world from the living room where Linda met her clients. The space was brown and orange and dappled with motes of dust soaking in the ample sun. Ten or twelve crystals spun from a western pane and their associated pellets of rainbow twirled across the walls. Linda, a tall, hefty, owlish woman with braided hair all the way down her back, folded herself onto the frowsy carpet across from Ry, billowing her long skirt about her so that her lower half was concealed in a jellyfish drape.

“He thinks his dolls are real.” Jo Beth seemed way up high on the sofa.

Linda Colson looked incredulous. “Who says they’re not?”

Ry came to think of her as his greatest ally. The other specialists had poked at him as if they had been the butchers, each of them after the choicest cut of meat. Linda, though, displayed no similar appetite. Mostly they talked
about cartoons. Ry had lost track of them but she brought him up to date:
Archie’s TV Funnies, Deputy Dawg, Woody Woodpecker, The Jackson 5ive
. They also talked about toys, another topic she was well versed in: Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots, Erector Sets, walkie-talkies, electric football. She asked him what other toys he had, and he told her that most of them had gotten lost in the forest, but that it was okay since he had the most important three. What the hell—he introduced them. After a couple weeks, Linda asked Ry to translate their whispers and, feeling emboldened, he did. Furrington and Jesus Christ’s bits of advice sounded fortune cookie-ish when spoken aloud, but Linda looked rapt. She even laughed at the right places.

When she asked to clean Jesus Christ with some rubbing alcohol and cotton balls, Ry consented. The swarthy tan of his skin buffed to a bubblegum pink, and rich stigmata resurfaced on the diminutive palms. Ry was impressed. On future visits she sewed shut Furrington’s leg stump and used her own finger to tuck in the frayed ends of Scowler’s skin. Ry felt Scowler’s displeasure; that was no surprise. The surprise was Ry’s response: He found that he
liked
ignoring Scowler. The trick was how to get away with it.

A month before the school year ended, Linda broke it down.

“They’re parts of you,” Linda said. “I’m not telling you that.
You
told
me
that.”

“I did?”

“Why do you think Jesus Christ only quotes from the Lord’s Prayer?”

Ry had never realized that before.

“Because I know it?” he ventured.

“That’s right. It’s the only verse you know. And the rest of what he says?” Linda flapped a dismissive hand. “It’s just a big bunch of
thees
and
thys
and
thous
.”

“Oh.” Ry looked at Jesus Christ. The figure was lukewarm and lightweight.

“You’ve told me quite a bit about Mr. Furrington, too.”

“I have?”

“You’ve told me he’s smart. He’s funny. He cares about people. He has a good imagination and tells good stories. You know who else is smart and funny and creative?”

Ry felt his ears burn.

“Me,” he mumbled.

“Also, I’d like to know of any real British person who says
crackers!
You find me one, I’ll give you fifty bucks.”

Ry laughed. He clapped a hand over his mouth.

“But, hey, look,” Linda said. “You can say
crackers!
all day long if you want. That’s what’s so good about pretending. Anything you want to be okay is okay. You know what I mean?”

“I guess.”

“And there’s another really good thing about pretending too. A really important thing. When you pretend—”

“Wait!” Ry cried.

Linda stopped. For an instant she looked annoyed but her smile ingested the annoyance like a wisp of smoke. “What’s up?”

“What have I told you about Scowler?”

Linda sighed and folded her hands on her skirt. “I admit that Scowler is a harder nut to crack. He’s our man of mystery, isn’t he?”

“Uh-huh.”

Linda gathered her hair behind her head. Her knuckles fought the plastic balls of a ponytail holder for a while. Even when that was done, she spent some time taking the measure of the boy in front of her.

“Let me ask you something,” she said. “This is just an idea. If you don’t like it, that’s cool. But do you think that the people in your family influence your personality? Because I wonder if these pretend voices that are part of you, like we were just saying, are also reflections of your family, kind of. Take, for example, our friend Mr. Furrington. Mr. Furrington sort of reminds me of your sister, Sarah. You know how much she loves you, always following you around. Not to mention that she’s small! You might have noticed Mr. Furrington’s rather small himself. And Jesus Christ, well, he’s so smart and takes such good care of you that I wonder if he’s not a little bit like your mom. Your mom’s the one who helps you with schoolwork, right? And feeds you and takes you to the doctor and brings you here to see me. Now, Scowler … well, maybe Scowler—and like I said, this is just an idea, so it’s okay with me if you don’t agree with it—but Scowler is, maybe, kind of a little bit like your dad.”

Ry held his breath and waited for the screams to start.

“Ry?” Linda leaned in. “You okay, buddy?”

Scowler emitted no screams, no whines, no ghastly choking noises, just a silence of colossal and damning grandeur. Ry scrapped for a distraction.

“You said,” he began, replaying the conversation. “You said there was another good thing about pretending.”