Scowler (8 page)

For half an hour he dodged among the trunks and branches. No sooner did Ry find himself slowed by a deeper thicket than he heard the distant firecracker blasts of Marvin taking out intrusive limbs with the bat, and the ice crackle
of similarly obliterated thornbushes. They were the sounds of furious defeat: Because of the son’s unexpected burst of speed, the wife and daughter had escaped and soon police would be sent in pursuit. Marvin had lost control and there was nothing else of equivalent value to lose.

“Hmmmm hm hm hmmmm.”

This song was the only way to keep focus in the face of such failure.

Marvin was twenty or thirty yards away, in some perilously indeterminate direction, and Ry bucked himself away from the flaky bark of a red pine and kicked through the beetle-ravaged hull of a fallen hickory. Two action figures fell from his pockets; he felt the decrease in weight. Moments later a leap over a small creek released the last of the toys he had shoved into his underwear and they splashed down like turds. His toys, the future merriment he was owed, all of it would dissolve like shit in water. He gasped for breath with his hands on his thighs, and wondered if this was what it had felt like for his mother to be hounded day after day and year after year.

Living was a burdensome impulse. He kept moving for one incredible hour, then a fantastic second. Then three, then four, or more, he lost track—his body was a miserable machine and time passed like a slowly breaking bone. To throw off his father, he made every unpredictable turn that he could, but Marvin always came roaring back. Sunlight dove away and still neither father nor son slowed his pace. Beneath the braided and purpled canopy, sharp things ripped at Ry’s ears, obstructions cracked his kneecaps, and barriers sent him clawing for alternate avenues. After stuffing a gritty handful of snow into his mouth in place of water, he used his cold
fingers to probe, just for a moment, the site of his wound. His forehead was spongy and swollen. A concussion, was that what he had? Or was it something worse? His thoughts were unclear; they were just clear enough to know this.

More than anything he was freezing. Both shoulders, his back, and his legs ached from shivering and his exposed skin was inelastic and numb. He wasn’t stupid. He knew he couldn’t keep up this evasive effort. Full darkness had fallen, and there was no way he’d survive an entire night so inadequately clothed against subzero temperatures. He knelt alongside a hill and watched each joint of his body quiver with the promise of surrender and the welcome onset of hypothermia. He lowered his butt to the bank and enjoyed the comforting hitch of relieved sobs—it felt so good to give up. The birds of nightfall wailed a lullaby. He couldn’t remember them ever sounding like that before.

Patting at his empty coat pockets led to a crushing realization. It was his toys that had given him away—dozens of them, their chilly little corpses creating a trail far better than breadcrumbs. Ry laid his head down in the cold twilight, set his arms at his sides, and gazed up at the branches that made cracks in the smoked glass of the sky. If he removed all suggestion of rebellion, perhaps his father would kill him quickly.

There was something in his left pants pocket. Forcing in his knuckles and fingers was like stuffing in rocks and twigs, but after some fumbling he withdrew not one object but two. No—even farther down, a tiny third object as well. This was curious. He debated tossing the traitorous toys into the snow. On the other hand, he felt an idle interest in the identity of these survivors. After all, it still might be a couple of minutes before he was overtaken.

He laughed at the motley sight. A gathering of odder bedfellows would have been difficult to produce. The first one was Mr. Furrington, a portly turquoise teddy bear with a sewed-on bow tie and bowler hat. He had been a baby gift, and Ry had warm memories of taking him along to the bath and potty and dropping him into both when Furrington asked to approve the contents. This cheap wad of cloth and stuffing had guided him through scary bedtimes, ominous mealtimes, and episodes of sickness and worry. Marvin had implemented a zero-tolerance policy on stuffed animals a few years back, and Ry had placed each offender in a garbage sack with eyes clear and dry, though his mother, for some reason, had cried. That night, Furrington reappeared in Ry’s sock drawer, and though Ry knew it was his mother who had salvaged the toy, he preferred to imagine Furrington himself scaling the trash can and brushing off the filth in regal distaste before readjusting his hat and strolling back into the house. To keep him hidden, Ry put him in the cardboard toy box, where men with guns and mutant villains soon overwhelmed him.

Jesus Christ was the second toy. Ry recalled that the figure had come as an unexpected bonus from the stupefying chants and papercraft drills of Sunday school. Jesus Christ was an eight-inch bendy figure in the Gumby mold, entirely pink save a white swaddle of cloth around his midsection, a brown beard of nodular texture, and the painted dashes and dots of his face and stigmata. When Ry had seen the Jesuses being handed out, he felt a rush of fantasy: He would break out the blue and black markers from the arts-and-crafts bin and turn Jesus Christ into Marvel Comics’ Reed Richards, a.k.a. Mr. Fantastic. It was a disappointment when he got his hands on Jesus Christ and found that he did not stretch at
all. He only bent. Ry had stuck Jesus Christ’s legs behind his head and knotted the arms, and when he released the plastic messiah from his tortures the limbs snapped back into place. There was a disarming intensity to Jesus Christ’s pupil-less white eyes, and yet there was also something peaceful in the blankness. Ry felt a quiet. In truth the contemplation of Jesus Christ’s features was the closest thing to a religious experience Ry had ever had at church. This did not mean that Jesus Christ was fun to play with; Ry gave up after just a few attempts. Throwing him out, though, seemed like sacrilege, and over time, when he saw the pink skin peeking through layers of more popular toys, Ry could not shake the hunch that there remained in Jesus Christ a Mr. Fantastic potential.

The third and last toy was Scowler. Ry stared at it, fearful of making any sudden move. Mr. Furrington and Jesus Christ he may have remembered if asked to mentally catalog the contents of the cardboard box. Scowler, though, he had willfully forgotten. It was a toy only in the broad technical sense. There was nothing fun about it. Ry had found it in a dusty apple box that his mother had brought home from an estate sale. He had been lifting aside yellowed issues of
Life
and swirling a hand through a metal soup of pulleys and hinges and buckles, when suddenly he saw a mouth gaping up at him. Ry withdrew the figure carefully. Its insides crunched like cornmeal. It was naked and humanoid, a collection of rancid lumps, and no more than four inches long, with half of that length owing to its cone-shaped head. The waxy texture of its skin suggested oilcloth, and though its intended color was yellow, it had bleached to a hue almost fleshlike. There was a crisp outer film that had once adhered to the skin with waterproof tightness, but now blistered away like sausage
casing. Dominating the head was a huge downturned mouth, a dry open hole defended by dozens of daggered teeth made of seashells. Shallow depressions, imprinted by the artisan’s thumb, served as its empty eye sockets. Its abbreviated limbs were gnarled like roots, and tiny nails erupted from repair zones like patches of iron acne. Sharp sawed-off pipe edges poked from the ankles and wrists, evidence of the thing’s metal skeleton. It felt to Ry like a dreadful talisman—for what purpose, he did not care to know.

He had begun to lower it for instant reburial when his mother craned her neck over his shoulder.

“Look at that,” she said. “That’s folk art.”

“It’s dirty,” Ry said. Attacking the object’s cleanliness was a savvy tactic.

“Someone worked hard on that,” Jo Beth said. “Look at the workmanship. Look at that slipstitching. There’s not a single gap between those teeth. Somebody loved this little guy.”

“I don’t like it.”

“Well, you’re spoiled. The person who made this probably didn’t have money for real toys. They had to make do with their imagination and whatever they had handy. You keep it. I’ll bet it outlives every other toy you have.”

Ry rolled it over in his palm. Its weight seemed deceptive.

“What does it do?”

“What does it do? Does it have to
do
something?” She leaned over and squinted. “He scowls.”

“He scowls?”

“In fact, he kind of looks like you.”

He turned to her in alarm. “What do you mean?”

Smiling, she pointed at her son’s expression. “Right there, see? You and Scowler are like two peas in a pod.”

Ry looked back down at the thing. The eyeholes offered nothing.

“Okay,” he said. He set Scowler on the floor and later placed him facedown at the bottom of his cardboard toy box. He assumed it would go missing along with the turquoise teddy bear and bendy religious icon. Through brisk shuffling of the box’s contents, it would even dismember and disintegrate. Death—that’s what boxes were for. Only it didn’t die. Scowler showed up repeatedly throughout the years, its hollow eyes and voracious mouth poking their ways into the topmost space of the toy box, the knives of its exposed skeleton spearing gun belts and jet packs. Ry would extricate these entanglements and assure himself that they were accidental.

The fat one, the tall one, and the small one: Ry fanned out the trio beneath the moonlight. How odd that he would spend his final moments with these companions. He gathered them to his chest and struggled for the icy breath that would be one of his last.

You can do it
.

Ry smiled. This encouragement was pleasant, even if it came too late.

I believe in you, old boy
.

It was a jolly falsetto with a punctilious British accent. Ry was warmed by it, even tickled.

There’s no telling what you could do if you just moved your bloody bum!

Ry laughed. He raised an arm and regarded Furrington. The brown marble eyes winked in the dawn. That couldn’t
be right; Ry pressed the heel of his other hand to his forehead in consternation. This agitated the mushroom swelling of his wound, and his vision splintered into rays of color. He fought to hang on to his last thought. What was going on? Oh, yes, this stuffed animal was speaking to him—of course it was; it was his old friend Mr. Furrington.

I’ll never give up on you
, Furrington said.

“Thank you,” Ry whispered.

Give it a go, old chum
.

“Should I?”

Why not? You might be surprised
.

For Furrington, he’d try. He ignored the advancing
hmmmm hm hm hmmmm
and tightened the muscles in the small of his back. He found himself sitting straight up, his extremities tingling with—could it be?—a kind of warmth. He smiled down at the turquoise bear. Furrington tipped his bowler, or maybe Ry did it for him. Either way, he was moved by the chubby little guy’s modesty and decided to repay him with effort. Ry took to his feet—a miracle, a miracle. There was no feeling in his toes but there remained some compliance in his ankles, and he chanced a couple shaky steps down the bank. Another miracle. His teeth ached in the evening air and that’s what told him he was—miracle of miracles!—smiling.

I love you
, said Furrington,
dear friend
.

“I love you, too,” Ry gasped. Tears crystallized at the corners of his eyes. His foot landed wrong and he went scrambling sideways.

Balance, chap, balance!

“Sorry,” Ry said. A black oak bounced off his face, but then he was righted.

Crackers! Watch the old bean
.

“The old bean,” Ry said. “You got it.”

Ry gazed down at the three figures in his hands and was overwhelmed with the thrill of camaraderie. Yes, he would cavort through the timber with friends of his own choosing, and no, he didn’t care what his parents thought of his playmates or the places they chose to play. He wedged the three beneath his belt. Ry and Furrington and Jesus Christ and Scowler: best friends. He skipped and the bad landing vibrated all the way up into his jaw. In these conditions careless tomfoolery could lead to death—he recognized this—but why not die by splitting himself in half with the force of his play rather than suffer a tedious and predictable murder?

The euphoria fueled him for five more astonishing hours. Then his feet became rocks. Then, worse, they became trees, planted so that each step was an uprooting. A cold ripped at his ears like pulled duct tape, and a fluid, maybe cranial, drained from his forehead. Furrington kept up the droll chatter but it was hard to hear over the shriek of the cold. The police, where were they? Bad question. He knew where they were. Black Glade had them, too. He strained for an audible sign, but all he heard was the humming. His father was closer than ever, a short sprint away if only the brambles would let up.

Thou art lost
, observed Jesus Christ.

Ry stopped moving, dislodged the plastic figure from his belt, and looked at the pink face, the all-seeing dots of its eyes. It was time to admit the truth.

“I’m going in circles,” he said.

Do not despair
, Jesus Christ responded.
Remember thy teachings
.

Oh, yes
, Furrington added.
Capital idea. Capital!

Though he could hear, so incredibly close, his father’s fingers ripping through frozen briar, Ry did not resume his flight. Instead he took up Furrington in the other hand and faced him toward the elastic savior.

“Furrington, this is Jesus Christ,” he said. “Jesus Christ, this is Furrington.”

Blessings unto thou
, said Jesus Christ.

Right, right
, said Furrington.
Aces
.

“Now.” Ry tried to control the trembling in his voice. “You said teachings. I don’t remember any teachings.”

Thou dost
.

“No, I don’t.” The humming was as loud and jagged as a lawn mower. “He’s coming. Help me.”

Thy teachers have toldest thou how
. His voice was deep and soothing, each syllable placed with unhurried assurance.