Scowler (16 page)

“I believe you, Marvin. Honest, I do.”

Perhaps it was the word
honest
—used too often inside
penitentiaries by men who were anything but—that riled him. Marvin gave his head a shake and dug a thumb into his temple, drawing blood and smearing soot. Ry rubbed his own thrumming skull and shut his eyes. Words, when they next came, sizzled.

“You think I like this spot I’m in, you’re crazy. But you put me here, Jo. You and the boy. I’m not putting this gun down if that’s what you’re hoping. I can’t. The Bluefeather folks might think I’m under rubble at the moment, but that moment will pass. And then they’ll come. They’ll come
here
, and then I’m done for. That’s the situation and nothing in the world can change it except this rock.”

Ry slit open his eyes to find Jo Beth, her arm graceful upon emergence from the nightgown, reaching out to touch her husband’s chest with tentative fingers. The prison-issue shirt above Marvin’s heart was crusted into a brown, immovable snarl.

“You have to let me look at that.”

“No time, Jo.”

“You’ll drip. They’ll find you.”

The unjust dead ends of life momentarily appeared to overcome the man. His eyes wandered across the perishing plain, the infected air, his own damaged body. “It does hurt. No doubt you could work wonders. If things could be different, I’d say something else. You’d say something else. You’d be proud of me, even. God, who knows.”

He winced from more than one kind of pain and, as if for cover, he reached again for his pack of Luckies. Only this time Jo Beth’s fingers slipped in and plucked the pack and matches from his pocket. She withdrew a cigarette, inserted it into her mouth, struck the match, and then cupped her
hands around the flame like someone who knew what she was doing. She took a hard puff, a gray veil lifted in front of her face, and then she held the cigarette out to her husband. He touched his shirt pocket, making sure the secret object still lay untroubled, and then took the cigarette, putting his lips where hers had been.

Ry could blame it on the heat or the meteorite’s haze, but what he saw in Jo Beth’s expression was no illusion. Ry knew that look. He had seen it for years in department store checkout lanes as Jo Beth eyed the stacked cart of a woman with a thicker pocketbook, or during sewing deliveries as she stole glances at some woman’s new car or backyard pool. Though Jo Beth hadn’t had access to the Burke savings account in those days, it had been far from empty.

Marvin’s sins were serious but rarely had he erred in business matters.

“Your hair,” Jo Beth said, venturing to touch the thick black tufts. “Your beard.”

Marvin looked at his feet. “You shave by their rules in prison.”

“I like it,” she said. “I do.”

Ry could not bear another word. The time for crawling was over, and he shot to his feet on the uneven grade and hurled himself up the final few feet, at the same time altering his angle so that his body was in line with the meteorite. If Marvin shot, at least some of the buckshot would fragment the miraculously unfragmented rock. Ry wondered who would cry the loudest at this damage, husband or wife.

There was no chance to grab his father’s ankle. All things dreamy drained from Marvin’s face and the gun sprang.

“What are you doing?” Marvin demanded.

Ry raised his arms in surrender.

“Sarah, run.” He had to believe in the power of chaos.

“What?” Jo Beth was aghast. “Ry, no.”

“I don’t want to run,” Sarah said. “I want to see it.”

“Don’t cause trouble,” Marvin warned. “Either of you.”

“Sarah, do it.” Ry believed his own voice had never sounded so tired. “Run.”

He closed his eyes. He hoped to hear the gunshot. Even more, he hoped to hear the diminishing claps of his sister’s escaping feet.

Instead, he heard the voice.

(oh, no)

(do not lose faith)

(dear boy)

These words distracted him and by the time he heard his sister’s footfalls, closer instead of farther away, it was too late. The first thing he saw was the stunned faces of Marvin and Jo Beth. Turning around, blinking and twisting, finally he found Sarah, who was skidding down the embankment in pajamas. When he reached for her all he got was a quick, cool slide of blond hair across his palm. He spun, hit the incline, and lost his wind. Jo Beth’s shouting—
Sarah!
—brought him right back. His sister was trying to make good on her begging and go touch the damn thing, and he saw her slip down the fired slickness of the crater, her little thighs flexing in a brave attempt to stop her momentum. Her arms helicoptered and then flew forward to pad her fall, and though one of her arms caught beneath her chest, the other landed right where she had wanted, directly upon the meteorite. Her fingers wrapped around one of the black nodes like five tiny pink whips.

Sarah for a moment oriented herself in silence, taking note of her body and appendages. Her face, smudged and stupefied, at last discovered her right hand curled around the beautiful, glistening rock, and she shouted out long before taking any physical action.

“It’s hot,” she said. “It’s hot! It’s hot!”

“Sarah!” Jo Beth shouted. “Help her!”

Ry’s heart hopped into his mouth, fat and bleeding and choking off air. Sarah’s legs pedaled and her body jerked, and an instant later her fingers ripped free and skimmed through the mud, and were tucked into her gut before Ry could see their condition. Sarah, her pale lips quivering, shouldered up the bank as if she were armless. Ry’s paralysis broke and he fell over his sister like a cage, wanting to embrace her but afraid to touch because of the whimpering and weeping and now, quite suddenly, the coughing.

“She’s hurt! I’m bringing her up!”

Hearing genuine alarm in his voice was gasoline to the fire of Sarah’s panic, and on cue her whine amplified into a scream. Ry slid one of his arms under her knees and told himself that the rise in volume was not—was
not
—to be taken as an accurate gauge of her injury. He put his other arm beneath her shoulders, stood, and began the process of lifting and planting feet, recalling school film strips of astronauts, their boots crashing to the pale moon with arduous slowness.

Jo Beth’s arms tangled with his, sharp nails scraping at his wrists and biceps. Ry resisted—what right did she have to help now? Sarah, though, rolled toward her mother. Ry let it happen, unexpectedly furious, and dropped to his knees as Jo Beth stumbled from the crater with her new, thrashing
burden. Ry planted his elbows over the lip of the crater; he sucked for air, in, out, and watched the corresponding flit of a weed that had survived the interplanetary clash.

“Sarah, let me see.” How many times had Ry himself given in to that smooth, motherly firmness? “Let me see. It’s all right, let me see.”

“It hurts! It huuuuurts!”

“I know, sweetie, just let me see so I can make it better.”

Ry’s neck creaked when he moved it. Marvin was still there, the gun held inches from Ry’s temple but with only half of its former authority. A bead of sweat puckered from his father’s eyebrow, crept down the rim of his nose, and clung to the bulbous tip.

“We’re going back to the house,” Jo Beth said.

“Hold on,” Marvin said.

“That hole’s not going anywhere. Please.”

Marvin took a step away from the crater, folding the shotgun back against his shoulder. Jo Beth hoisted the girl’s fetal, twisting body. She could not hold her daughter indefinitely, and this more than anything tilted the entire afternoon onto its edge. Marvin spat his cigarette and held a fist to his injured heart.

“Fine, we all go. But we come right back and that’s not up for—”

Jo Beth staggered forth. Black, brown, then white dust enfolded her legs. Marvin watched for a long moment, then looked at Ry, the sweltering silence both accentuating the father’s failure in getting his prize and challenging the son to go ahead and do something about it. Ry sagged into his elbows; he was rid of energy, out of breath, and literally at his
father’s feet, though he could not help but feel a small victory had been won.

Marvin’s voice crackled like flame. “You think there aren’t worse things than sewing someone to a mattress?”

Ry screwed his fingers into the dirt and brought himself to shaky knees. Before long he found himself eye to eye with his father. They were the same height, look at that. Ry let a heedless smile exit through his mouth like a whisper. In the distance, Jo Beth was making fine time, already to the shed where they used to store commercial feed.

Marvin stepped aside and motioned with the gun. Blurred by Ry’s squint, the barrel took on a red hue and became the bat—it would always be the bat—and Ry wondered and feared, as he always did, if he would ever be brave enough to use it. He took a step toward the house and passed through a perimeter of the meteorite’s voltage; an elastic tension snapped away from his skin like latex. There was a matching throb at the center of his head, where the darkest of things had always filed their claws.

(so much light)

(how pretty)

(are you gone away?)

(hello?)

T
he universal dinginess that made everything the same color, the foot-worn stripes that marked a lifetime of shortcuts, the silos standing like once-fearsome kings with shoulders rounded by defeat—it was easy to believe the farm was
unchanged. The only clues otherwise were the few charred leaves still drifting across the back lawn. Ry managed to find one and stamp it before climbing the back steps on his way inside. The shotgun nicked his shoulder blade and the reedy wheezes coming from behind him made it evident that Marvin’s injuries were flaring. The house reacted to their weight; it tsked as if disapproving.

Jo Beth was at the sink filling a glass with water. Ry went no farther than the pantry door. Marvin stopped, too, as if they had intruded upon some private feminine ritual. She lifted her eyes only to make the quickest of identifications and then went about topping off the glass, setting it on the counter, and opening a cabinet.

“Well?” Marvin asked.

“Well, she’s burnt.” She withdrew a bottle of aspirin and shook it once before clapping it to the counter. “I don’t know. I think she’ll be all right. It’s hard to say. You know burns. There’s not much you can do for them. It’s pink—who knows what that means.”

“Rub freshly chopped onion on it,” Marvin said.

Jo Beth shook two aspirin into her palm. “Nothing’s fresh here.”

“Vinegar, then,” Marvin said. “It’ll take the edge off.”

“No home remedies,” Jo Beth said. “She’s got ice in a rag.”

The lid was half screwed on before the threads slipped and made a plastic grinding noise. Jo Beth threw the lid into the sink. She turned around and looked at her husband. Her eyes were expectant. Marvin inhaled noisily but said nothing.

“You should take a few of these yourself,” she said.

“I might,” he said. “But we’ve got to get back out there.”

Her lips went pale with pressure. Slowly she shifted her gaze to Ry.

“Would you take these to your sister?”

He glanced at his father, who was busy inspecting his wife for signs of treason. Cautiously Ry moved around the table, lifted the glass of water, and held out his hand. Jo Beth opened her hand over his and for a second he was convinced of a secret maneuver, that what would drop into his palm would be a small paring knife—just like that, reuniting them on the same team. Instead two white pills bounced across his palm. He closed his fingers and felt the aspirin soften and stick.

Ry moved away from the sink and toward the dining room. Below his feet a surreal glimpse of a past life: a scrap of holiday wrapping paper stuck to a splotch of maple syrup. Next he looked upon the limp needles of the makeshift Christmas tree, and that’s where the reverie ended, because above that was the phone, their savior. He paused just long enough to recall the utter destruction of the telephone pole across the road. There would be no more calls made from this house, maybe ever.

Sarah was curled up on the sofa. Piled on the floor, sent there by her cycling legs, was a piece of in-progress sewing. Ry flung it behind the chair before kneeling; Marvin hardly needed more evidence of the ways in which his wife had moved on without him. Ry set his elbow on the cushion next to Sarah, and her moan crescendoed.

“Shhh.” Ry opened his palm and looked at the aspirin. It was the first still moment of the day, and it provided unexpected space for Ry to acknowledge the morning’s enormities. Water sloshed from the glass. His shoulders were shaking.

With Ry mute and Sarah’s sobs reduced to a drone, their parents’ voices carried.

“We should get her to the hospital.”

“There’s no use asking that.”

“We don’t know anything about that thing out there. It could be radioactive. Just being near it might have done something to her.”

“We don’t know that.”

“That’s exactly right—we don’t know. How are
you
feeling?”

“I told you.”

“Not that. I’ll dress that. I mean your head. You’re going to tell me you don’t have the worst headache of your life right now?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Seriously? You’re seriously going to tell me that?”

“I am.”

Such a coarsening of voice typically forewarned hitting. Ry closed his eyes and waited for the meaty smack. Instead there was a drowsy silence in which nothing happened, though when Jo Beth next spoke her tone was less strident.

“Then you’re the only one, Marvin.”

“I’ve never felt better in my life and that’s the God’s honest truth.”

Sarah whimpered and Ry’s eyes shot open. He glanced at the door, thought about closing it, and judged it an unnecessary risk. They’d just have to keep their voices down.

“Hey. Sarah. Hey.”

Her feet did a little dance of pain.

He tried another tack. “Hey, shitburger.”

At this she turned, gasping as if woken from a nightmare.
The salty residue of tears striped her face pink and white. Water dripped steadily from the cloth around her injured right hand, darkening the sofa cushion, the pillow, and her pajamas.