The Alex Crow (21 page)

The U-Haul van slowed
to a stop in the middle of Route 600, directly in front of where we stood.

“Do you think he'd be willing to give us a ride back to camp?” Cobie Petersen asked.

“There's nothing in the rules that says we can't hitch a ride,” Max said.

“I thought in America, people always tell kids to never get in cars with strangers,” I said.

“Loosen up, Ariel,” Max argued, “besides, it's a moving van, not a car. Nothing bad ever happens to kids in moving vans.”

When the van stopped, the shadowy figure behind the wheel rolled down the driver side window and stuck his arm out, waving for us to come around to him.

I carried our flag. Cobie Petersen and Max followed me out into the road and we walked around the front of the moving van so we could see what the driver wanted.

I think the three of us simultaneously recoiled as though we'd all been slapped when we got a clear view of the man behind the steering wheel. And the truck itself gave off the hot smell of rotting meat and maggots.

“Holy Jesus,” Max whispered.

“Something's wrong with that guy,” I said.

I have seen some things more repulsive than the man at the wheel of the van, but they were all either nonhuman or dead. The melting man was outside of both of those group classifications. He wore a plaid hat with a narrow brim that turned down in the front, and his head was bandaged around with stained medical tape that attached small plastic windup timers to his ears. The lack of eyebrows and eyelashes made him look almost fishlike, and his skin burbled with oozing pink blisters. A small worm-trail of blood slithered a sluggish path from his right nostril toward his upper lip.

Cobie Petersen, mouth slightly open, looked at Max, then me, then he spit down onto the asphalt between his feet and grimaced.

- - -

“Hello, friendly bears!”
The melting man said, “Do you need a lift? Where are you heading?”

“Shoot them, Leonard! Do something right!”

“Oh. Uh. No thanks, but thanks anyway,” the tall bear said, backing away slightly. “We're just out for a walk while our porridge cools.”

“Dude, I'll play three bears with you, as long as I'm not the mom,” the small bear—the one without the flag—said.

If the melting man had eyebrows, they would have gotten closer together. He had a sudden thought. He pointed at flag-bear's chest. The melting man happened to be missing the fingernail on his pointer.

“You are pointing at the bear. You are pointing at the bear with the green camp T-shirt on.”

“Hey!” The melting man said, “That's exactly where I'm heading!”

Each of the bears was wearing a Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys log-fonted T-shirt, with adhesive Jupiter name tags.

“Jupiter?” the tall bear said.

“Unclick the safety, Leonard.”

“You are unclicking the safety. You are—oh, Lenny, you are going to shoot the bears.”

“Ha-ha! No! Camp Merrie-Seymour for Beavers!” The melting man bounced up and down in his seat. This was all like a scene from a hallucinogenic dream.

“
Um. Stranger danger, guys,
” small bear with no flag whispered. “Looks like the dude's
freeing some kittens in the disco
there.”

“Do it, Leonard. Shoot them. Now.”

Tall bear said, “Yeah. Okay, well, bye now.”

As the three bears backed away from the melting man's truck, he waved again. “Wait! No! I'll give you a ride to Camp Merrie-Seymour! Don't be scared, little bears!”

“It's okay. Really,” tall bear told him.

“My brother's there. He works at Camp Merrie-Seymour for Beavers. He invited me to visit. Maybe you know him?” the melting man asked.

“I doubt it,” small bear with no flag said.

“You have unclicked the safety. Your finger is on the trigger. You are holding the gun.”

“His name is . . . Uh . . .”

The melting man couldn't seem to remember. He rubbed his forehead with two fingers and popped some blisters, which made pus run down the bridge of his nose.

“Dude. Really. You should probably towel down or something,” the tall bear said.

“Larry! His name's Larry!” The melting man looked overjoyed. Well, he looked like a hairless, infected, overjoyed fish with a bloody nose.

“Larry? Our Larry?” the small bear without a flag said.

“Yes! Do you know him?” the melting man asked.

The bears looked at one another.

“Small world,” tall bear said.

“Your finger is on the trigger.”

“Make them get into the van with you, then take them out into the woods and shoot them, Leonard.”

“And what about the Beaver King? Do you bears know if the Beaver King is there with Larry, too?” the melting man asked.

The tall, friendly polar bear scratched his head and spit on the roadway. “I think Momma Bear and Baby Bear and I need to be getting back to Jupiter.”

“No! Wait!”

“You are raising the gun. You are raising the gun.”

Suddenly, the melting man jerked his head, the way someone would if he was being screamed at. He said, “Bears, this is Crystal Lutz, my girlfriend. She's really good at the accordion. Crystal, meet the talking polar bears. Um? What did you say your names were?”

The tall bear raised his hand and said, “Poppa Bear, ma'am.”

There was nobody else in the van with the melting man.

Small bear with the flag whispered, “
We really need to go
.”

“Now, Leonard! Now! Do something right!”

The melting man behind the wheel moved his right arm again, and when he raised his hand up to the window, he pointed a pistol.

“You are shooting. You are shooting.”

Welcome to America.

“
Those were the nicest
talking polar bears I've ever shot,” Leonard Fountain said.

“You should have forced them to come with you, and shot them somewhere else!” Joseph Stalin, as always, was angry at the melting man's incompetence.

“Oh!” The melting man's feelings were hurt. He was nearing the breaking point with Joseph Stalin. He pounded the timers into the sides of his head. Naturally, this hurt very much, and caused him to bleed from his ears, too.

“You are winding the timers. You are winding the timers. You are driving. Keep your eyes on the road, Lenny!” 3-60 said.

“How could I force three polar bears to come with me? There's only enough room in the cab for me and Crystal,” Leonard Fountain whined.

“Idiot!” Joseph Stalin said.

“You are crying. Oh. Poor Leonard, you're crying,” 3-60 said.

“I'll play something happy for you, Igor!” Crystal Lutz said.

Crystal Lutz played something on her accordion that did make the melting man happy. It was an old Boy Scouts campfire song he remembered from when he was a boy. The song was called “I Met a Bear (The Bear Song).”

And Leonard Fountain, the melting man, Igor Zelinsky, wept and smiled and sang and bled from his nose and ears and got an erection as he drove down Route 600 toward Camp Merrie-Seymour for Bears and Beavers, and the timers ticked and ticked and ticked.

The other day I met a bear,

Up in the woods a way up there!

Three days after I
put the fire out on the cake Major Knott brought me while I was asleep, we rode in a troop transport vehicle that took us on a rocky road west out of the valley of the city of tents to a military airfield where we boarded an enormous plane filled with American soldiers who were all so happy to be going home.

I was numb and in shock. I had nothing but the clothes on my back, a small plastic sack containing my pajama scrubs and two pairs of socks and underwear, and a brand-new American passport that identified me as Ariel Jude Burgess. I didn't wonder about how things like new identities and passports could happen so fast. Major Knott could make anything happen, I was convinced.

To be honest, I didn't want to go to America, Max. This is an appalling thing to say, but in many ways I felt as helpless and as swept along by the tide as I did on that first day in the orphans' tent, when Isaak and Abel and those other two boys took me with them.

“I have never been on an airplane before,” I admitted to Major Knott.

I sat by the window. He told me all boys like to sit by the window on airplanes. I desperately did not want to throw up on Major Knott. And the plane was so noisy. Behind us, a group of soldiers began singing a song about a prostitute named Ruby.

They were drunk.

“Are you excited?” Major Knott asked.

“I'm really very scared,” I said.

“There's nothing to be frightened of, Ariel. You'll see. You're going to love it.”

I knew I was definitely not going to love it.

And when the plane took off, and I looked out the window at the world slanting this way and that below me, at the great silver wing rising up and then pointing terrifyingly down at the smaller and smaller gray-and-brown grids of towns and cities below us, I could feel myself being torn away from something I would never be able to return to.

What could I do?

I closed my eyes and wished for sleep, but everything was noisy and the plane shuddered and dipped and all I could think about was how scared I was. And Major Knott, who knew everything about what was happening to me, put his hand on mine and told me everything was okay, and that he would always be here whenever I needed him.

Nothing is true though, is it, Max? Because everything is really something different than we think it is.

I was every bit the same as that crow, forced to come back, to be saved again and again and again.

I was flying, and I never wanted to fly again. I never wanted to talk again. Does that make sense to you now? I'm sorry. I'm sorry for these terrible stories. There's nothing you or anyone else can do about them now.

The library has been built, right?

The shelves are full.

And as the plane began to descend, my head felt as though it were splitting apart. I didn't sleep at all for the entire way. When I needed to pee so bad I couldn't stand it, I climbed over Major Knott's gawky knees and he didn't stir at all. And making my way to the toilet, a soldier stopped me and he told me how lucky I was. He said, “Welcome to the United States of Fucking America, kid. Do you know how lucky you are?”

And I said I didn't really know how lucky I was, so I asked him if he knew how lucky I was, because I'd really like to know.

And he said, “That's a good one, kid! I don't know, either!”

You never know, right, Max?

So I asked him if he'd let go of my sleeve, because I was about to pee in my pants, and they were the only pants I owned.

Then the soldier got angry and he said, “You don't have to be a dick about it. It's not my fault your country is fucked up. Do you want my pants or something? Here. Take everything we own.”

The soldier shifted in his seat as though he were going to take his clothes off.

I told him no, I actually just wanted to pee.

I think it was the fact that I was actually holding my dick that he let go of me. Otherwise, I could tell he wanted to continue having a discussion about how fucked up my country was compared to his, and how I was going to take everything I could get my hands on once I came to America.

Welcome to American airspace, kid.

But as we came down, lower and lower, I was certain something was wrong with me. I had felt pain before, but nothing like this. I was convinced I was dying. I shook Major Knott awake and told him what was happening to me.

“It's okay, Ariel. Let me take a look,” Major Knott said.

Then he took a small instrument out and looked into my eye. He had something in his hand that was about the size of the remote control for the television in the break room in the city of tents. He pushed some buttons. Major Knott told me to close my eyes, and he pressed his thumb on my temple and made small circles in my hair. I felt a buzzing, a slight tickle, and Major Knott put the little device on the side of my jaw. Then he slipped the thing back into his jacket pocket.

“Is that better?” Major Knott asked.

I don't know what he did, but whatever it was worked.

I took a deep breath.

“Yes,” I said, “I'm feeling better now.”

Behind us, the soldiers sang and sang.

When someone is shooting
at you, it's impossible to think about the future or God, and you don't really care about bringing your flag back home, either.

The man shot six times. I counted them all: one, two, three.

Four.

Fivesix.

Max's frequent obsession with escape routes may have sunk in. When the man raised his pistol and aimed at us, Max, Cobie, and I scattered and ran in separate directions.

I dropped Jupiter's flag in the middle of Route 600.

I think I only made it thirty or so feet into the woods on the other side of the road. Everything seemed to slow down tremendously. My legs weighed tons, and I couldn't seem to move. It was all so much like the afternoon I'd hidden in a muddy irrigation ditch with Thaddeus.

And I lost one of my shoes in the brush. Four steps later, my foot got twisted up in some weeds and I tripped. I lay there against the ground, panting, unable to suck in enough oxygen, listening, listening. My gasps were so loud I couldn't hear anything else, so I held my breath until it felt like my lungs would implode. Everything was so quiet. The shooting had stopped, and if Max and Cobie were anywhere near me, they weren't making a sound.

I took a breath, held it in.

As I lay there, I tried to think about directions: where I had come from, and where I was going, where was the man in the truck, where might Cobie Petersen and my brother be? I found myself wishing I could tell them about some of the stories I knew, that this is what happens when somebody shoots—how you have no choice, really, because when you're alive you only know how to do one thing. When you're not alive, I suppose you only know how to do one thing, too.

Then, off through the trees I heard singing.

The other day I met a bear,

Up in the woods a way up there!

Then the motor on the old moving van started up, and I waited and listened as the sound of the truck receded down the road.

It seemed as though several minutes passed. It may have only been seconds. Who could tell? I rolled over onto my back and stared up through the treetops.

Something glinted in the sky just above the trees, hovering directly over me. It looked like a small silver box that gyrated and then vanished into the blue.

“Max?”

I sat up.

“Max? Cobie?”

Something moved in the trees behind me.

“I'm over here,” Max said.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah. Are you?”

“I lost my shoe. Do you know where Cobie is?”

And from farther off in the woods came Cobie Petersen's voice: “That fucker shot me, guys.”

“Well, at least your left hand seems to be okay,” Max said. “Thank God for that.”

“Yeah. It's a miracle,” Cobie Petersen said.

Of the six bullets fired at us, only one of them had found a mark. It went directly through the center of Cobie Petersen's right hand. I felt terrible for him; the thing looked awfully painful. Cobie held his bloody hand palm up, with the fingers half curled in paralysis. The flesh around the wound was drained, and his wrist was swollen straight down from the thumb joint.

Max sacrificed his shirt and tore strips from it, which I used to wrap Cobie's hand as tightly as I could. I had done this sort of thing before, after all. But I would not go back to look for my lost shoe. Although none of us said it, we were all afraid the crazy man with the gun was coming back for us.

So between my missing one shoe and Cobie Petersen's wounded hand, the trip back to Jupiter through the woods proved difficult and slow.

- - -

“What are you boys doing here, and why do you only have one shoe?”

“Huh?”

“I said—why do you only have one shoe?”

The man who'd been watching the three of us wade through Sugar Creek seemed angry over the fact that I was carrying only one shoe. My other had been abandoned somewhere behind us near Route 600.

Of course we didn't see him standing there until he spoke, we were all so intent on watching our footing on the slick algae-covered rocks on the creek's bottom. And when we did see him, there was little we could do. You can't just take off running like crazy when you're balancing, knee-deep in the middle of a stream.

For all any of us knew, we could have just walked directly into the man with the gun again. We froze there, shocked speechless in midstream.

“You there—are you hurt or something?” the man pointed a stick-finger at Cobie.

Cobie Petersen just said, “Huh?”

“What is
wrong
with you kids?”

What was wrong with us was that we'd narrowly escaped with our lives after being shot at by a melting man inside a U-Haul van, and now we'd come face-to-face with one of the strangest human beings I'd ever seen.

“Is that the Dumpling Man?” Max asked.

Cobie Petersen shook his head and whispered, “No. No horns. I don't know what he is, though.”

The man was skeleton thin and stood at least six and a half feet tall, wearing bib overalls, barefoot, and shirtless. His skin glowed in the dapples of sunlight like fresh snow—the whitest man I had ever seen—and his straight and lifeless shoulder-length hair was absolutely colorless.

“Are you all dumb? I asked if you was hurt,” the white man said.

“Some crazy dude shot at us back there by the road,” Max said.

We still hadn't moved from our spot in the middle of Sugar Creek.

“Is it bad?”

“I don't think so,” Cobie answered.

“Well, come here. Let me see if I can help some.”

Marshmallow Jeff did not turn out to be the child-killing monster that Larry had described on the night we sat by the fire and told scary stories. In fact, he was probably one of the kindest human beings I'd encountered since coming to America. He even carried Cobie Petersen on his back all the way to the edge of Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys, and I got to wear Cobie's shoes, as opposed to stumbling around and hurting myself.

“Do you really carry marshmallows around everywhere?” Max asked him.

“Naw. That's dumb. I don't even like marshmallows,” Marshmallow Jeff said. “The name comes from this.”

He stuck out his paper-white arm and turned it over in front of us.

“They still making up stories about me to scare you kids?”

“I called horseshit on the story as soon as he said it,” Cobie said.

Marshmallow Jeff, who'd never owned a pair of shoes in his life, told us the counselors at Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys made up stories about the man living in the woods, just to keep the boys in camp from wandering too far from their home planets, and that he'd never worked at the camp, and didn't know the first thing about the nonsense that took place there.

“It's like a prison camp for insane teenagers,” Max said.

“Well. What's wrong with you three, then?” Marshmallow Jeff asked.

We walked for several moments, each of us trying to come up with some kind of answer for that, and finally Cobie Petersen offered: “One of us got shot through the hand, one of us doesn't talk, and one of us is obsessed with practicing his five-digit multiplication tables. Other than that, we don't belong at Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys.”

Max nodded. “Practicing my five-digit multiplication tables. I like that.”

We got back to the cinder-block well house after dark, flagless, and in last place. And Marshmallow Jeff said good-bye to us there, explaining he was as afraid of the boys at Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys as they were of him, present company excluded.

Every other planet had beaten us back to Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys; and Trent Mendibles and Robin Sexton had given up waiting for us, convinced that we had only intended to ditch them in the woods with a bottle of piss-tasting water, just so we could laugh at them.