Scowler (20 page)

Sarah was not with them. She had been left nearly catatonic on the living room sofa, new ice bundled to her right hand, a fresh glass of water perspiring on the end table.
Marvin had repeated instructions about what she was not allowed do, which was everything, the reason being, of course,
that he had killed a man
, and that meant there would be no more fooling around. Jo Beth, who had finally traded her nightgown for a sad and threadbare dress, took a moment to restate her husband’s instructions in kinder tones. The words fell ineffectually against pillows and blankets. Sarah’s eyes had long since slid away from her parents’ faces. She did not look capable of sitting up, much less escaping. Ry prayed that she was faking.

Jo Beth was the last one out of the car, carrying the rope and hooks and gloves that Marvin had plucked from the garage walls. Her cameo features surrendered nothing and Ry swallowed an unbearable frustration. He didn’t begrudge her plots—plots were anyone’s prerogative. What burned was her refusal to share them. Her son’s involvement in subterfuge, it was clear, guaranteed failure. Ry stepped up to the crater edge with humiliation storming in his ears. What Jo Beth thought of him was absolutely true. He was the one, after all, who spoke to teddy bears.

The fumes were terrible: fat, immobile, yellow.

“We’ve got to hook it.” Marvin unknotted the rope. “Hmmmm it and drag it.”

Ry stopped cold.

“What?” he asked. “
What
it and drag it?”

“Hook it and drag it. Hook. Drag.”

“Yeah, I know,” Ry said. “But—”

“I’d do it myself. The speed, the efficiency, your jaw would drop. You’ve probably forgotten what efficiency looks like. But I can’t be the one. Someone’s got to hold the gun and I’m the one who took a man’s life.”

Ry pulled on the gloves and displayed his ready fingers. Sarah’s best chance of escape came if everyone was busy staring into the crater. So safety be damned—downward he would go. He nabbed the rope from his father’s hands and with three brisk shakes untangled it. The hooks, black and almost invisible against the charred dirt, were knotted to either end of the rope. He gathered the slack rope around the bracket of his forearm and started toward the crater. He chanced one more glance at the farm to see if Sarah had emerged.

Instead he saw Furrington skirting the edge of the field. Portly, gallingly limbed, and down a leg, any movement was hardship, but perhaps he too had heard the humming soak through Marvin’s words like blood through bandages. Ry recalled a time when he had been just as loyal, refusing to go anywhere without his teddy bear. Only children knew devotion; it gave him hope for Sarah. As he took his first step into the crater and punched through the skin of the magnetic field, he told himself to go ahead, breathe deep and swallow, be a connoisseur of poison—both Sarah and Furrington deserved it.

Crouched at the bottom two minutes later, he leaned over the muddy water, inches from the meteorite’s surface, and examined the silky contours, the fantastic terrain, the obsidian brilliance. He lifted the hooked rope, ready for the plunge, but before committing he stole one more upward glance. He had to squint; the fumes were thick enough to dull colors. There was Marvin, bisected by a blade of yellow—the shotgun in the sun—and Jo Beth, red hair snapping like flames.
Good
, thought Ry.
Run, Sarah. Now, now, now
.

Ry looked to the opposite side of the crater’s edge.

A bowler hat peeked over, black as the meteorite against the clear blue sky.

“Giving it the old college try, eh?” Furrington asked.

“Didn’t go to college,” Ry said.

“Willikers,” Furrington said. “Well, heave ho and all that.”

Ry nodded and drove one arm into the water. Sunk to his bicep it was warm; to his forearm, warmer; where his gloved fingers touched bottom, the water was simmering. The hole was deeper than Ry had estimated. He twisted his neck to keep his ear from submerging, and the slight readjustment sent the water sloshing. A droplet hit his lip and it burned. Contorted and sputtering, Ry made another unhappy observation: His sweat went unbothered. There were no bugs, no mosquitoes. And still no birds—not a single one had returned.

“Don’t much care for it,” Furrington said. “Being back out here, that is.”

Ry went at it blind, jabbing the hook beneath the chocolate swirls of water, hoping it would snag onto one of the many protuberances so that the rock could be hauled up the bank like a ball and chain. Clanking noises reverberated through water, but the hook did not catch. Shouts came from above, and though the splashing kept Ry from understanding, he sensed impatience and wondered if now might be the moment Marvin’s chatter about his first murder gave way to his second, and the last thing Ry would see would be his own brains splattered colorfully across glossy black stone—

The hook caught with a satisfying tug. Ry gasped in surprise, pulled the rope to keep it taut, and flopped to his back like a fish.

“Got it,” he called, panting. “Got it, got it.”

Up above the gun lowered. The heads of husband and wife touched as they peered.

“Blimey,” Furrington said. “Upsy-daisy time?”

The pain in his skull tugged at the scar on his forehead. He nodded at Furrington. It was time to get out. On all fours he climbed. At the top Marvin was there to twist the rope around his own arm and run it to the car. Ry collapsed over the edge of the crater, seeing multiple Marvins whip the rope in figure-eight patterns around the bumper. The rope remained tight—Ry could see dust thrum from the strained fibers. The engine coughed to life. Ry refocused and saw Marvin behind the wheel, the driver’s-side door open, the gun sticking up like a headless scarecrow in the passenger seat.

“Tee-hee,” Furrington laughed. “Tee-hee.”

Ry raised his chin from the hard black dirt.

“What?”

“Don’t you see? In the car? Tee-hee.”

“See what?”

“The shotgun,” Furrington giggled. “The shotgun’s riding shotgun.”

Ry chuckled. Jo Beth looked down at him as if he were urinating on her shoe.

“Stop laughing.” Her eyes shone. “It’s going to work.”

The Beetle gunned, a peevish bee drone that was pretty funny too. Ry tucked in his lips to muffle his laughter and heard the hiss of the rope slicing through dirt, though it was the second noise that shut him up: a heavy, wet slurp coming from the bottom of the crater. Ry froze, his face still caught in an arrangement of hilarity.

“It’s out?” The cry was coming from the front seat of the car. “It’s out?”

Jo Beth peered over the edge. Ry scuttled until he was standing upright and facing the hole. Marvin’s plan had worked. The lower portion of the crater was slathered in
gooey mud ejected during the meteorite’s dislodging, and the rock itself now rested on the incline. A layer of ooze hid much of its majesty, but even as they watched, mud slopped off to reveal tantalizing glimpses. Roughly two feet in diameter, it was a shimmering infinity of tunnels and mazes.

“It’s so black,” Ry said.

“It’s so gold,” Jo Beth responded.

“I do not like it here,” Furrington added. “Like it here I do not.”

The car horn honked and Jo Beth turned around and waved enthusiastically, nodding that yes, yes, the rock was out. Ry waved too, feeling the unaccountable desire to cheer this fabulous accomplishment. Marvin’s right arm braced itself against the passenger seat as he looked backward at the crater. The front wheels turned, and dust began to rise as if the field were being cooked. Ry and his mother turned to watch the progress of the meteorite. The rope stretched to sewing-thread thickness and the rock budged. It waggled in a way that suggested it was surprisingly lightweight; it was the embankment itself that was the problem. With painstaking slowness, the rock shaved through six inches of scorched clay. The engine whined, and then came another magnificent three-foot surge.

The rock abruptly stopped its progress. Mother and son gasped in perfect unison. Ry turned and saw the Beetle, several car lengths away now, shuddering within a gray and swirling fog. The back wheels, trapped in a gulley, whirred with unchecked speed. The engine cried out and then receded to a putter. Brake lights strained weakly in the sun, and the shotgun was plucked from its shotgun position—Ry felt a twinge of humor, even now—and Marvin bolted from the car.

Both Jo Beth and Ry shrank back. Marvin leaned over the edge of the crater, his knotted face loosening upon seeing the object of his desire at such close range. He held out a hand as if needing to touch it. The rock’s whale skin winked wetly in the summer glare. He had to shake his head to clear it, and there, standing in his vision, were his wife and son.

“We’re stuck,” he reported.

“I’ll push,” Ry said.

“We’re
stuck
.” Marvin scratched his beard as if it were a colony of ticks that had taken root on his face. “Pushing won’t do any good. We need to tamp down the … if that will even … we need a …” He peered into the crater gingerly and Ry followed suit. The hole at the bottom was like an open throat. “We need a hm hm.”

Ry looked at his mother. Her lips were parted, the picture of caution.

Jo Beth ventured forth. “A what?”

“A hm hm. If we’re going to get this out.”

Marvin took in his family’s feeble bewilderment. His knuckles shook, rattling together wood and steel parts of the gun. Ry opened his mouth to say anything at all.

“Good gracious me,” Furrington declared. “Away she goes.”

Ry knew at once what he meant: Sarah. He shifted his gaze and saw his sister exiting through the back door of the house just as instructed. Even at this distance her dizziness was evident. Her arms were aloft as if pinching a dress to curtsy and she gawked at the buildings around her. Ry experienced the awful certainty that she would start stumbling toward the McCafferty Forty, just like Furrington, but then she banked toward the road.

“You’re not listening,” Marvin seethed. Ry flicked his eyes back to his father, who was staring at Jo Beth with a knowing intensity. “We can get this thing. There’s a path to success. It’s the same path as always: Pay attention, follow orders.”

“I am, Marvin,” Jo Beth said. “But you said.… I can’t understand.… ”

Sarah stumbled. Something like a sob rose through Ry’s chest.

“Your thoughts are elsewhere.” Marvin tore at his cheek; flecks of stripped skin littered the beard like dandruff. “You think I don’t still know your mind? You think I didn’t notice the boxes?”

Sarah kept moving, beneath the clothesline, past the ruins of the old milk house.

“Boxes? What boxes?”

“In the car, Jo. The backseat, Jo. Boxes, packed and taped. You were that close to leaving this farm.”

Sarah, halfway across the lawn, paused to touch a tree’s lowest leaves. Ry’s urge to yell at her conflicted with an awe for her youthful grace.

“I was …,” Jo Beth said. “Those boxes have been …”

“You’re handing a death sentence to a place that has given you so much, if only you’d take a step back and see it.”

“We had to.” Jo Beth’s tone was steady. “At some point we had to.”

Sarah snapped from her trance and resumed her waddle. Ry sketched the best path across the lawn, forty-five degrees southwest, and how the dairy barn would hide her in less than sixty seconds, thirty if she picked up her damn feet. He pretended to look at his father, but could not help but follow the white light of hope: Sarah’s white nightgown, the white
cloth on her hand, her white-blond hair, the white skin everywhere else. She was going to make it.

And then the barking began.

Marvin’s jaw snapped shut and his chin lifted. Ry almost screamed—
Run! Run! Run!
—because Sarah was just standing there, staring at the dog loping at her from the east, the direction of the old Horvath Property, the dog who had been hiding since the blast from the sky and was now deliriously happy to find a friendly human. The barking ratcheted in volume. Marvin mouthed a word
—Snig
—and turned toward the house.

The deadliness of the moment made some kind of sense to Sarah and she pulled herself behind the same tree she had been fondling. It was too small for the job, and if you knew where to look, there were her arms stuck out to either side. But Marvin was watching Sniggety, who lingered beside the concrete block shed on the eastern side of the house to lift a leg.

“Sniggety.” Marvin licked raw lips and shouted. “Snig! Here, boy!”

The dog disappeared behind the house but would reemerge in mere moments to reveal Sarah’s location. Ry had no time. He opened his mouth but no brilliant words of distraction emerged. Then inspiration hit: Furrington would help! A few panicked seconds later, Ry located the bow-tied bear, but he was drunkenly hopping away from the crater, his paws paddling before his muzzle as if dispelling a swarm of bees.

“Snig!” Marvin was manic. “Here, boy! Sniggy!”

The dog appeared on the western side of the house, doing his best trot, oblivious to his master and focused on Sarah.
Marvin followed the action. Sarah would be discovered in seconds. The weight of grief planted itself on Ry as a yoke.

“The dog’s deaf,” Jo Beth said. “He can’t hear you.”

Father and son both turned to look at Jo Beth. For Ry the realization was a punch to the gut: She
knew
. She knew her daughter was out of the house; she knew the tree behind which her daughter was hiding; she knew the handful of seconds Sarah needed to make her escape. Jo Beth favored Ry with a glance, and with torrential force Ry’s heart ripped open to make space for this storied protector, this queen of saving graces—damn him forever for his doubt.

Marvin gave his wife a disgusted frown. Somehow the dog’s deafness was her fault. Sarah was psychic: At this instant she scrambled, exposing herself for five seconds before ducking behind the toolshed. At that point, Marvin looked back to see Sniggety moving in the shed’s direction, his barking hoarse and adamant. Nine years had affected Old Snig in many ways but some things did not change: This was not a dog that barked for no reason, and Marvin knew it. He took a step in the direction of the house.