Scowler (2 page)

All at once Ry was angry with Sarah, and for bad reasons, which only made him angrier.

“It’s hot as hell and we’re not going to find your stupid tooth. Let’s just go so she’ll shut up already.”

“If we go now we’ll lose our place,” she said.

And there it came again, their mother’s voice, somehow cutting through the condemnations of the crickets and the blamings of the birds. Ry squinted up at the midday sun. You could set your watch to the twelve o’clock dinner; it was a reflex left over from a decade of feeding Marvin and his ungrateful posse. Her persistence in satisfying such ghosts infuriated Ry. Would she continue these pointless drills when the farthest her kids could stray was to the other end of the apartment?

“She’s so mean to us,” Sarah said. “Isn’t she mean?”

“Yes.”

“And she’s cruel. Don’t you think she’s cruel?”

“I do, in fact.”

“And she’s bitchy. She’s a gigantic bitch.”

A smooth dagger of pain, different from that in his heart, lanced the starburst scar between Ry’s eyebrows. It was the exact location of the wound that had changed everything in all of their lives. For the most part the memory was buried, but sometimes sun exposure released a beam of recall: his father giving chase through the icy forest, the arrival of the Unnamed Three, the blood draining from Ry’s forehead so that it painted a replica of his father’s face-hole. Now Sarah was the one with blood running down her face, and that was even worse—it was unacceptable that she could be anything like Marvin Burke.

“No. Sarah, no.” Ry pushed his shoe at a sprig of weed that could, in theory, be nesting a stray tooth. The Unnamed Three—how long had it been since he had spoken their names? “Don’t say that. She’s under a lot of stress. You see how much sewing came in this month? Hardly anything. She’s mean sometimes but that’s totally different than being a bitch.”

“You’re just excusing her.”

“So what? You should listen to me anyway. You’re the kid, remember?”

“You’re excusing her because you’re a cocksucker.”

He shrugged. “Better than being a shit-eater. Think about it.”

“Dirty cocksucker.”

“Filthy shit-eater.”

“Dirty poop-face cocksucker.”

“Colossal maniac shit-eater.”

The silence that resumed was more comfortable having been padded with these courtesies. Though it really was not silence at all; the birds were louder than Ry had ever remembered—they were screaming. Sarah looked up at them, then took the opportunity to make another quick scan of the sky.

“You know how many meteors fall every day?” Sarah asked.

“I don’t want to know.”

“Three or four. An average of twenty pounds each.”

“Holy shit. So amazing.”

“Did you know that the heaviest meteorite weighs sixty tons?”

“No. But thanks. Now I can die in peace.”

“Dinosaurs were killed by a meteor, you know.”

“Please don’t start in with dinosaurs now.”

“
Dinosaur
means ‘terrible lizard,’ even though they weren’t lizards.”

Ry stole a glance at her. She was scouring the ground, unaware. He shook his head in a mixture of irritation and amazement. Sarah might be able to move to town without so much as a backward glance, but this dirt was who he was. He could no more escape it than he could escape himself. When they departed the land would keep most if not all of his soul, after it had already taken so many of his dreams and so much of his blood. And this tooth that it had taken from his sister—

There it was. A miracle, really, finding this speck of bone in a world of dust. There was a brown spot of blood on the tooth’s root, and to Ry it seemed the encapsulation of the bum deal of life: a once-perfect thing plucked and bloodied and tossed to the dirt.

Briefly he considered wrenching out a tooth of his own and offering it up—surely it would be worth double the going rate. Instead he kicked at Sarah’s tooth until it slid into one of the earth’s cracks. It would be the part of his sister left behind to keep company with the segments of his own body that would never be able to leave. Worse fates were everywhere. Just look around.

T
he birds did not quiet. Not during the mournful march across the McCafferty Forty with a grieving Sarah. Not after a lugubrious lunch of meat and bread so dry it pebbled
upon the tongue. Not after five more hours of knocking wasp nests from gutters, righting wronged fence posts, and wadding and disposing of chicken wire still tufted with evidence of chickens. The birds screamed into one another’s beaks and bristled their plumage, and with their own wings made cages they seemed frantic to escape. Ry sympathized.

Dusk had begun its squeeze but at this time of year would take hours. Ry was at the top of a ladder outside the window of his mother’s second-floor bedroom. Her face appeared in the top-right pane. She gestured fruitlessly. Ry glared. She held up a finger—
wait
—and walked away. Ry heard her every step down the wooden staircase before losing her signal, but he knew her steps would soon resume upon the enclosed back porch.

He wolfed his last free moment. Locking a heel onto a rung, he let his body pivot like a barn door opening along a draft until he leaned with his back to the ladder. The buildings of the farm were like parts of his body; he had to concentrate to really see them. To the left of the house was the multipurpose dairy barn, once the center of the farm’s sounds and smells. At its peak it had housed sixty-five Holsteins, shuffling and edgy behemoths that had been the only creatures on the planet bold enough to eye Marvin Burke with outright distrust. The dislike was mutual. Each cow was artificially inseminated in a process Marvin seemed to enjoy making as uncomfortable as possible. Births were no more pleasant. Ry himself had reached into at least a dozen hot wombs to grab purple and quivering babies, and he’d seen more than one get stuck in the birth canal, which often meant killing the mother or child—a task Marvin took up without hesitation. His trusty twelve-gauge Winchester 1200 was always at the ready.

To the right of the house was the vacant northeast pasture. It was in that field that the males had been castrated and dehorned. The former was somehow bearable: The calves had an underbelly doughiness that ceded testicles effortlessly. The removal of horns, though, was a feat of carnage that haunted Ry each day. Sometimes when the first blast of water hit him in the morning shower he mistook it for the jets of black blood that would strike his face during the dehornings. The steers knew what was coming; they lowered their heads as if trying to elude the holocaust stench. It did not help. A hired worker would pull the animal into position and Marvin would regrip his implements and take aim. It was Ry’s job to apply caustic to the deep and spurting wounds, and he’d do it pretending that he was merely reaching his hands into another womb, that this was the torture of birth, not the first stage of an ignominious death.

Beyond the pasture stretched three hundred acres of dead farmland. Each field was ruthlessly named after the farmer from whom it had been purchased, a litany of conquest: the Costner Eighty, the Strickland Sixty, the Bowman Plot, the McCafferty Forty. And beyond that was Black Glade—the largest forest in the state, a place without light, the origin of a hundred schoolyard legends. Ry had only gone past its edges once and it wasn’t something he liked to think about, not ever.

The only thing not pelted with dust or rust on the entire farm was the For Sale sign, which whistled sweetly in the breeze. Ry heard it, blinked himself awake, and hid his eyes so that he would not have to see it. This was the Burke farm, over four hundred acres of nothing, and he was terrified to leave it.

T
he screen door sounded like another angry bird. Jo Beth Burke’s shoulders dipped side to side as she walked into view, as if she were carrying an extra fifty pounds of weight, and her muscles, even those in her face, slouched toward the earth. But she had a good face—nothing could change that. Her eyes were heavily lidded and that was their burden, but in the rare moments that those lids fully withdrew, you became sure she was going to reach out and tickle you. And all throughout his youth she had done just that. It was yet another thing that Sarah was missing.

“Why do you make me walk all the way down here?” Jo Beth’s arms hung slack at her sides; this was her most exasperated posture, as if even posturing were a wasted effort. “Just open the window so I can ask you. I can’t open it from my side—that’s the problem.”

“I know what the problem is.” He looked away from her and across the yard. The doghouse next to the garage was empty; the coiled-up, never-used chain where the dog usually rested his muzzle sat undisturbed, as did the chain’s padlock, which had lain open since the key vanished a decade ago. Sniggety had never recovered from his master’s abandonment and was just riding out his time, sleeping for twenty hours a day, deaf and twitching in the shade. His absence was unusual.

“And you’re going to fall,” Jo Beth said. “Look at you.”

“You want to do this?” He bucked his back so that, for a moment, only his heels touched the ladder. It was a deliberate incitement and he saw Jo Beth draw back in fear. Instantly
he regretted it and took a firm grip of the top step. “I’m not going to fall.”

“If you could just raise it an inch,” she said. “Then I could grab it from the other side and we could try together.”

“And then what? Have you thought this through? Then you’ll have a window that won’t close. The wood’s all warped. If I get it up, it’s not going to come back down. When it rains it’ll get all over your floor. You really want that?”

She sighed and wiped hair back from her sweaty temples. She spoke quietly, perhaps to herself. “Yes.”

He wondered if it was true. Because the more things went wrong around the farm, the more his presence was required. This was the terrible unarticulated truth. Jo Beth Burke was thirty-eight, which meant she had been Ry’s age when she gave birth to him. At nineteen she was married, living with her husband, feeding farmhands, keeping house, and nursing a child. He, on the other hand, was a year past graduating near the bottom of a class of forty kids, and he’d yet to make a single feint toward a life of his own. There were community colleges within a few hours’ drive. There were jobs holding road signs in Bloughton. There were other farms that, despite the hard times, would pay him hourly wages. They might keep a close eye on him for a while—the son of Marvin Burke, poor messed-up kid—but eventually his pedigree would be overlooked. His hand strayed from the ladder and touched the swelling of a new pimple alongside his nose. It seemed symbolic of the issue: Was he an oily-faced kid, or was he a man?

Sarah’s head poked out from under her mother’s arm. A faint pinkness of eye was all that betrayed her earlier crying.
One thing was clear: She had gotten paid. It glittered all over her.

“Mom’s got stuff for the Crowleys,” she taunted. “Don’t you want to go to the Crowleys’?”

Four miles was a long way to go for your nearest neighbor, but that was the distance to the Crowley farm. Sarah had somehow gotten it into her head that Ry was in love with Esther Crowley, the eighteen-year-old daughter with a mane of black hair that sometimes caught under her ass when she sat down. He was not, in fact, in love with her, but he had, in fact, nearly had sex with her two years ago, a traumatic incident that marked the only attempt at physical relations he’d ever had with a girl. He refused to think of it, ever—he’d think of algebra, baseball statistics, anything to keep the memory away. How Sarah suspected the truth was beyond him, but he was pretty sure Jo Beth had never picked up on it. He’d like to keep it that way.

“We do have some mending for them. A nightgown. A beautiful nightgown.” Jo Beth paused. “But I can drive it over if you want.”

That pause—did she suspect after all? His mother imagining him putting his clumsy hands to a girl’s bare skin made his ears boil. He took the hammer from his belt loop. “I’ll do it. It’s fine. It’ll take me like twenty minutes.”

“You should take longer,” Sarah suggested. “You and Esther could watch the Jaekel Belt together. It’s very romantic.”

Ry sighed. “But I can’t do it tonight.”

“Then I’ll have to do it myself,” Jo Beth said.

“Well, enjoy the walk.”

Her face fell. “The car? Oh, Ry.”

He gripped the hammer more tightly. “Don’t give me that. The car what? The car is not my fault.”

“But you said you’d have it done.”

“What am I supposed to do? Grow spark plugs next to the strawberry patch? I put the order in with Phinny and he’ll be here.”

“When? I just feel so bad about that nightgown; she must be wearing something of Kevin’s—”

“Tonight? Tomorrow? He’ll be here when he gets the part.”

“Ry, how many times is this going to happen?”

“That depends on how many times you plan on incinerating the spark plugs.”

“Can we order more than one box?”

“Can we get a new car?”

“Ry.” She shielded her eyes even though the falling sun was behind her. “Can we order more than one? Is it too late?”

“Will you calm down? Phinny’s bringing a bunch. The Crowleys can wait for their damn pajamas. I’ll install the plug and drive over there tomorrow morning, end of story.”

Ry chanced a look at his mother and saw both resignation and gratitude. He should have felt good about that, about solving yet another of the farm’s myriad problems, but instead felt only the sensation of further sinking. He was six foot three and shaved every day; his continued presence here was becoming a mockery. He mashed his lips and told himself that he deserved an extra year of childhood—a year at the very
least
—for all those months stolen by doctors, psychiatrists, and the Unnamed Three.

“Fine,” Jo Beth said with hushed complacency. Beside her Sarah had twisted so that she could stare at the sky again, and
her mother’s arm supported her weight with offhand expertise. “Sarah lost another tooth. Didn’t you, Sarah?”