Scowler (26 page)

B
y the time his hand cramped, daybreak was smoldering through the window shade. Ry yawned and let the pinking shears drop. He noticed that his feet were gone, buried in the dress’s remains. He kicked his right foot and white silk butterflies and golden lint mosquitoes briefly spotted the air. Two pearls rolled across the floor like sad white drops of blood. White Special Dress, the result of nine years of toil, was no more than a pile of cold guts, and he had acted as butcher.

He lifted his chin. There would be a proud smile waiting for him from his father, there had to be. But the man he
found was a wracked ghoul, bent with the passage of hours. Over in the corner was Jo Beth, slouched and silent. There was a smell like bile. Had someone thrown up? As he sniffed, the stench became the embodiment of his parents’ disgust. Hate was everywhere, shared between and directed at everyone.

Marvin’s eyes crawled across the attic wreck, brave enough to dwell upon the shredded gown for only a few seconds. He dragged an unsteady palm over his shaved head, through his sweaty mustache. His glasses were left askew.

“My house,” he whispered, “is a mess.”

He turned with a slowness reminiscent of Jeremiah. His first step was uncharacteristic, a stumble upon some unseen piece of miscellany. Both arms went out to buffer his fall and the gun tumbled to the floor, briefly free. No one went for it. Marvin took it back in his hands and trudged forward, gesturing the barrel at his wife in a vague way but never getting close to meeting her eyes. Jo Beth took a breath that shook her whole body.

A spark of insight flared somewhere inside Ry. He remembered waking up after being attacked with the owl lamp and realizing how many hours had passed, how the next time he’d seen his mother she was wearing a set of new clothes. Marvin had not touched a woman in nine years and she had known that; there was no telling how far she’d gone to distract him from hurting her children. Now it was all wasted effort. She moved listlessly toward the door and began to lower herself onto the ladder. Her knees popped. Marvin’s did, too. Their feet made rat noises as they left behind their son.

Ry stood there wheezing. He swept his eyes over the entire attic but could not bear to land them anywhere for long. The devastation was a larger reflection of the unspeakable thing
he had done to the dress, itself only the latest example of his lifelong cowardice. It would have been better for everyone if Black Glade had sunk in its root teeth, pulled him into its stone belly, and spent nine years over his digestion.

He’d fit nicely up here amid the debris. All he had to do was fall. His knees had begun their weakening when, like the lit end of a cigarette in a darkened theater, a small red container caught his eye from across the room. Barely peeking through the upheaval, the container was roughly the size of a shoebox, though the flaked paint of a long-lost commercial logo betrayed its age. Marvin’s tornado must have dislodged it; Ry was certain that he’d never seen it before. His knees siphoned strength from curiosity and he found himself climbing over the refuse, reaching for the container, bringing it into his arms.

Ry discovered that his palms were swampy and his wrists sore with the force of his racing pulse. The container weighed very little. The wood was flimsy, the lid fitted like a cigar box. And yet this small capsule was important. He could feel its undeniable energy in his fingertips, his eyeballs, the crack of his forehead. He walked over to the attic door, closed it, and sat on top of it—this gift unwrapping was private. He placed the box on the floor, took hold of the lid from both sides, and began to shake it free. Wood squeaked in protest. Finally the lid separated and the box itself fell to the floor, blowing out a rectangle of dust. Ry licked the air, recognized the taste. He set the lid aside.

There, not burned, not buried, lay the Unnamed Three.

J
o Beth and Marvin came down the back steps connected so closely by the shotgun that the arrangement could have been mistaken as arm in arm. It was dawn, and a warm one, and yet both of them wore gloves. Marvin’s pockets jingled with car keys. The sequence of events was clearly outlined and the McCafferty Forty was the preordained destination. Jo Beth slanted toward it.

But Marvin caught her elbow with the shotgun and tapped her in a different direction. She wavered but soon enough caught the drift: the doghouse. Sniggety was part of this final chapter too, she had forgotten, and she recalled hearing Marvin slap the canine’s hind end while she had been inside trying to talk sense into her son. That effort had failed spectacularly. Marvin, however, had succeeded in rounding up his dog.

They stopped at the dirt patch just outside the small yellow house. Inside Jo Beth discerned the fussy rearranging of a crouched animal. It was fitting, she thought, that Sniggety had so readily turned his back on those who had taken care of him for the past nine years. Betrayal was all around.

“Snig,” Marvin muttered. “Hm.”

The animal shifted about but did not emerge.

Marvin knocked the heel of the gun against the roof.

“Snig. Hm hm.”

The breaths emitting from the darkness were thin and rapid. Jo Beth was surprised by her instinctive concern; perhaps the mutt’s master had punished him for his earlier delinquency and that friendly slap she’d heard was actually the breaking of old bones. Marvin reared back with a foot and
kicked the wall sharply, once, twice, thrice. Jo Beth’s heart, weakened by hour after hour of fresh shock, fluttered with each crack.

“Sniggety,” she said. “Now.”

Marvin looked askance at her as if annoyed that she would think her contribution necessary. But, in fact, it worked. They both heard the throat whine of a pleased dog. Except it came from off to their right. They looked to the east and saw, over by the machine shed, wagging his tail, Old Snig.

Their reaction took an extra beat. The low sun obscured their vision and exhaustion had made them both sluggish. That was all the time it took for a small hand to dart from the doghouse, run the long-dormant dog chain around Marvin’s ankle, cinch it tight, and swiftly insert and clamp the antique padlock.

Deep in Jo Beth’s heavy chest, life stirred.

“Sarah!”

Marvin jerked back as if he had been bitten, and within two backpedaling steps the chain pulled tight and his arms pinwheeled as he lost his balance. Without warning Jo Beth was taken with the conviction that her entire life had led to this moment, this single instance of physical contact where she—not he—was the aggressor. Her arms shot out and pushed. It was more than his equilibrium could withstand, and he fell. His back hit the ground perfectly flat and his breath expelled in one loud burst. Jo Beth was already moving away when her eyes landed upon her daughter’s wide-eyed face poking out from inside the doghouse.

Marvin was coughing, orienting himself, and Sarah was frozen.

“Here!” Jo Beth screamed.
“Here!”

Sarah wiggled through the small opening. Her bare feet danced right over Marvin’s empty left hand, which shot up by instinct, the fingers scratching at her ankle, fumbling with her dirty skin. But she was too speedy and she tripped out of his clutches and went pirouetting.

Jo Beth caught her. They spun for a moment with the girl’s momentum and by the time they found their footing, Marvin was sitting up and pulling on the chain and finding it difficult to slide past the bones of his ankle. He began to tussle with his shoe to remove it before registering the heaving breaths of his wife and daughter. He twisted himself around on the dirt patch and brought up the shotgun. The muzzle caught a tuft of grass and gave Marvin a moment’s trouble.

Jo Beth pushed Sarah at the house. One second later she was carrying her by the armpits. They hit the steps with their shins and elbows, and though pain was everywhere she somehow flung the screen door wide, putting an obstruction between them and Marvin that would at least make it harder for him to aim, but then it didn’t matter because the two of them were rolling into the enclosed back porch, Sarah smothered into her mother’s chest, Jo Beth choking on her daughter’s hair, and they were alive—they could feel it and taste it—at least for a few more wonderful seconds.

R
y knew that every piece of advice his mother had ever received regarding these ugly, squalid, shameful dolls had been the same: Destroy them. Yet she had not. It was as if she had known that one day Ry would need them again and so secreted them here in the attic. Up here was so much
more than was offered by the endless, laggard suspense of the farm’s soil. Packed away in these boxes, and now haphazardly spilled, were his very memories, emotions, hopes, and fears. They were here for the choosing.

Ry withdrew Mr. Furrington. He was gray with filth and small enough to sit in the palm of a nineteen-year-old boy. Next he removed Jesus Christ, a crusty nub of rubber whose edges looked gnawed upon—by attic mice or by a nervous boy nine years earlier? At the very bottom of the box was a hollow of sharp white teeth. Ry addressed the scurvy ogre with utmost caution. His fingertips sunk into the grubby cloth and made indents into the cornmeal belly, while the stiff outer layer of skin segmented like a hardened glaze of mucus. The exposed metal leg had acquired a dull brown sheen and Ry could not help but appreciate how this frosting of rust made it all the more lethal.

Scowler was still tiny, still eyeless, still starving.

The doll convulsed hard enough to shake Ry’s entire body. No, it was the door beneath him rattling. Beneath his tailbone he felt the hammering of fists and he heard his mother shouting all kinds of demands:
Open up, hurry! He’s going to get free and we have to leave!
Beneath that was Sarah’s voice, crying her brother’s name over and over. Jo Beth gave a valiant shove and Ry lifted an inch, but then he readjusted and pushed downward. He needed a moment; he needed to think.

The amazing thing was that he could. His mind had shifted into a more fluid gear, shuttling ideas around with a clarity that was astounding after so many years in the fog. Troublesome tasks became easy. For example, he plucked an umbrella from a nearby pile, jammed the pointed end beneath a heavy crate, and brought the hooked end across the
attic door. Like that, Jo Beth’s leverage was gone. She withdrew with a weepy moan. Courage, long absent, flooded Ry’s body, stirring to a froth other long-lost stimulants: creativity, intelligence, ruthlessness.

Scowler wormed. He wanted out. He wanted
big
. That’s what Ry wanted, too, though from within the bones of the house came the ghostly protests of whatever remained of Furrington and Jesus Christ. Their whining instructions were all too familiar: Find your family and run. Yet again, run. It appealed to Ry in a way, the idea of flight, the return once more to the Black Glade of his youth.

But the vibration of the doll’s razored metal was as strong as the electric fences Ry had taken hold of a half-dozen times in his stupid life. He unwrapped his fingers to find the beast huge-mouthed and laughing, because this was exactly the point that Scowler wanted to make: There were certain things you could not run from.

The memory swept in like a fetid gust: Ry toting the tidy package of sewing from his mom and Esther Crowley taking it from him and letting him inside and pouring them both tall glasses of iced tea. Ry’s revulsion was instant. Why was Scowler screening this horror film at the very moment he was feeling, for the first time in a decade, the stirrings of strength? Scowler’s giggle was a million children’s fingernails tickling an infinite chalkboard. More details than Ry had ever cared to remember came into focus. He heard Esther’s small talk, stuff about teachers and classes. He saw her body stretch to open the refrigerator and then, a few minutes later, the living room door, how her summer clothes made no secret of the plump lavishness of her legs, the drama of her waist.

Next came the comfortable music cues, hick narration,
and car-chase blurs of
The Dukes of Hazzard
and Esther declaring how she liked Luke but not Bo and Ry saying he agreed and Esther just about dying with laughter. Wait—was that Scowler behind the TV, laughing too? He wanted out of that room, out of this memory, and so was thankful when Esther invited him upstairs to see her room. They had yet to touch. It was only when he was seated on her bed did she lean over and do everything at once: matched her lips to his, swiped her tongue across his teeth, scrunched his hair with one hand, found an exposed stretch of his back with the other, and drew up her left knee so that it hooked over his right hip. Everything was in motion. He held on.

The kissing was fast and resolute; when she moved her lips to his neck or ear it felt to Ry as if she were crossing off items from a checklist. Ry followed suit and ran his thumbs over those swooped hips until she wiggled in a way that made him think he was rubbing her raw. It turned out she was just pulling her legs out from under her so that she could take off her pants and panties. Unsure if it was custom or what, he paused to take off his own jeans and underwear and then, as if by legal agreement, they both moved to recumbent positions.

Uncoiled, everything was in reach. His hands grew brave. She sat up to wrestle her arms out of her shirtsleeves and he saw moles on her back, a dozen of them, and he looked away, feeling as if he had seen something even more private than what had already been revealed. She helped him take off his own shirt. There were no moles on his torso and he felt unexpectedly perfect. She sealed her bare skin to his. They had not looked into each other’s eyes since about the time that Luke Duke was telling Daisy how they had to go help Bo.

He was marveling at the spice of unfamiliar sweat when she lodged her hands in his armpits and began to raise him into position for penetration. She did it with an effortless savvy. Their sexes nudged. Something felt wrong. He checked the point of contact. The organs themselves became abstract shapes, and then it was all over. What he saw down there was the red bat—his mom had always said that someday the true ownership of it would revert to him.