The Monster Variations Read online

  For Benjamin Huff

  Contents

  NOW

  Hit

  THEN

  I Smell Meat

  Where All Jokers Must Make a Jump

  Kids (Poor Creatures) Often Fight Good Sense

  Everyone Just Leaves

  Parents, Prepare My Cage

  Desperate Boys Get Destroyed—Hated, Stubborn, Stupid

  Last Chances Don’t Matter

  Cut Down

  I Am a Pawn

  My Panic Inches Closer

  Many Vanish Entirely, Many Just Soak Up New Pains

  Let’s Go and See Why Everyone Prays

  Devil, Come Home Swiftly

  An Animal Eats and Never Suffers Again

  Every Good Boy Deserves Forgiveness

  A Common, Everyday Grave

  Good Endings Leave Nothing Definite

  NOW

  Run

  NOW

  Hit

  Five more minutes and I’m gone.

  This was all James was thinking as he muscled the wheel left and pulled the car across yellow lines, pocked cement, a sleet of gravel and dust. Five minutes and a tank of gas and he would be on the road—no more stops until he saw the university rise from the hills. Then these towns, all of them, would be behind him and his new life would begin. He might never come back.

  But first, fuel. James was just thirty minutes outside of town, in an even smaller township made up of little more than one sleepy tavern, a scattering of silos reaching up from competing cornfields, and a single derelict gas station contaminating the leafy countryside. There had been filling stations back in his hometown, three of them, but he had wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible. James aimed his vehicle at the fuel pump. These small towns, he thought, tasting rust in the air and feeling the sting of burnt oil in his nostrils. Goodbye to them forever.

  The tassel from his graduation cap swung from his rearview mirror, and as he rolled the car up next to the pump, it bounced and twirled, striking out the sunlight, then blinding him with it, as it had been doing since he had set out, as it had been doing ever since graduation. His friends hung their tassels from their rearviews, so he did as well, but all summer it had been a constant, dangling annoyance that would not quit reminding him of the town he was leaving and the bright future that everyone kept assuring him was waiting for him just up the road, just a few short hours away.

  James struck the tassel with the back of his hand. It exploded into a pompom as cheery as the crowd of parents that had applauded when he had given his class’s graduation speech two months ago. He’d taken his diploma on that stage and shaken the hand of a school superintendent he had never met before but who nonetheless gripped his palm and purred through clamped teeth, “We’re all proud of you, son. Go get ‘em up at State.” James had nodded obediently and now regretted it. How much longer would he have to be obedient? How many more times would he do what his mother, his teachers, his classmates told him to do? Not much longer, he thought, glaring at the tassel. Five more minutes and I’m gone.

  Getting out of town had been a nightmare. His parents, divorced but living just ten blocks from one another, had seen to that. After all the years of waiting, and after all he had been through, James thought getting to college would be as easy and as pleasant as getting into his car and driving there. He was wrong. It involved one hundred hours of strategy, toil, negation, inspiration. To his parents, the end of the world was tied up with one question: which of them would get to accompany James on the trip? His father, a hand clutching at what was left of his hair, explained slowly to his mother that James was a young man, moving into a dormitory full of other young men, and it was against nature to be brought into such a world by a woman. James winced—his father walked right into that one.

  “Who brought him into this world in the first place?” his mother replied, her bottom teeth fretting against the old scar that slanted through the pink of her upper lip. “I’ve raised him,” she said, keeping her voice as steady as she could. “Five years, me alone, in this house, cooking his food and hanging his laundry, and with whose help? No one’s. And I didn’t do it so I could pass him off to you like a football, so you could score the touchdown.”

  It was an apt comparison. James felt battered by these endless negotiations. But what else was life? You be quiet, you get a cookie. Sit still for church and we’ll go out for burgers. As far as he could tell, only the stakes changed with age. So he sat calmly as they argued—he even smiled on occasion—while envisioning for the both of them a thousand gruesome deaths: hacksaws, stranglings, meat grinders, escapee elephants. The violence of these images used to surprise and shame him. Both feelings, he had discovered, wore off.

  His father believed that life was math, ratios, fractions, all things at which he excelled, so his arguments towered over those of James’s mother; they were masterpieces of logic more convoluted than the advanced-placement calculus tests James had recently aced. Given enough time, his father could prove that mankind descended from calico cats or that the West had won the Civil War. Yet this was one campaign he could not win. His ex-wife, James’s mother, had one single, unassailable point, which she repeated with myopic persistence: “It’s not fair.”

  What they really wanted was to have the final word, the opportunity to impart some divine piece of parental wisdom that would trump all that came before it. But if there actually was wisdom to impart, thought James, why had they both waited this long to hand it over? And if they were so wise, then why couldn’t they come up with a way for the three of them to get along?

  Revenge fantasies could get him only so far. It was time for action. James considered his options and just one made sense: he needed a clean break from the people and memories that surrounded him. So, one week before leaving, James woke up early, called his girlfriend, Clara, and dumped her. He started to feel guilty; he re-focused and didn’t back down. She cried and James timed it: ten minutes, not bad. For the past several months she’d been a nice enough girlfriend, but he’d really only miss their physical contact, and knew that beneath the perfunctory tears she felt the same. Clara went to a different school, as had his previous girlfriend, Jennifer, and the thing he liked best about the arrangement was that they were ignorant of his anesthetized daily life: the smiling boy scoring straight A’s in a world without risk or danger. With Jennifer and Clara he had savored the intoxicants of nastiness, flavors he hadn’t sampled since he was twelve. He could treat these girls badly, and had, because there was no social consequence at home or in school. It was wrong, he knew that, but he was not willing to give more of his heart than was necessary to keep a girl’s interest—his heart, in fact, seemed lost somewhere in the past. At college no one would know him and he hoped this would further facilitate recklessness. Perhaps the imaginary pain he inflicted on everyone would no longer be necessary because there would be real pain, his included, instead of this numbness that stole his life’s every second.

  His talk with Clara emboldened him. He called up his dad and told him his decision about the trip: “Dad, I’m driving to college alone.” Objections followed but James obscured them by imagining piano wire around the throat, knees knocked out with hammers. Then he went upstairs and politely told his mom the same thing. He could not bear to watch her summon the tears, so in his mind he covered her with honey and gave her over to an army of ants.

  Just as the first tremble reached her lip, the phone rang. James excused himself and took a shower, hoping the noise of the water would drown out the accusations flying from his mom to his dad about how this was his fault, if only he was not so selfish, so arrogant. Their spilled blood, never there in the first place, swirled past James’s toes down the drain.r />
  Even the goodbyes had to be simultaneous. His parents stood in the driveway looking as pitiful as scorned children who, having misbehaved, were being left behind while their guardian went to the circus alone. His mother’s hair, tied tight at the nape of her neck, seemed to be the only thing keeping her face from folding in on itself. She avoided histrionics, but only because the neighbors would overhear and she didn’t want it getting around that she had been denied a rite of passage this crucial. His father did an even better job of burying his disgruntlement. It must have been hard for him, having been denied a four-hour car ride during which he could’ve bestowed uninterrupted advice about his favorite topic, college. But James had heard it all before. How to win the respect of professors, how to handle his alcohol, how to have fun with girls, and all while keeping his eye on the donut, not the hole. This had been a favorite phrase of his father’s ever since James’s childhood, and James knew very well what made up the donut: the diploma, the lifelong buddies, the connections that would score him jobs. All other distractions, the noise of everyday life, just let it fall down the hole.

  He issued hugs and drove away. I won, he thought as soon as his parents were out of sight, but he did not feel it. He was off to the college they wanted him to attend, the very place where they had met and fallen in love. When James had toured the campus it had crossed his mind that he might like it there, too, but his likes and dislikes seemed immaterial. His arrival at State would be just another entry in the scrapbook his mother had dutifully kept since he was a baby, overflowing with news paper clippings and report cards and party invites and school programs. The scrapbook had long been an enemy. It seemed to him an already written biography filled with only successes, no failures—a record that no real person could live up to.

  On the way out of town, he passed friends’ houses and saw their cars missing from curbs, saw mothers standing strangely at windows and fathers pacing the lawn, looking for trouble. These days recent graduates were being lost to college with shocking regularity, the way young men must have vanished during war years. It was James’s duty to go, and if his calling was to die in the field or return maimed, so be it. He drove the long way out of town to avoid running into any more familiar faces, but it did not help. Every landmark and intersection was haunted. He was low on fuel but there was no way he was stopping, not in this town, not with ghosts waiting for him everywhere.

  So he stopped at this discolored gas station stranded in the middle of a cornfield. He would fill up and then drive until he was truly free. He turned off his car. Seconds later there was a bell clanging and a figure in stained overalls loping toward him, wiping his hands on a filthy scrap of rag. It was someone he recognized. He looked again. Yes, it was someone he knew. James found that he could not breathe; his breath was sucked away and replaced with combustible fumes. A single spark and he would be in flames, and here that spark came: it was not just someone he knew, it was Reggie.

  Each giant step Reggie took seemed to James to take an entire year, and the days and months peeled away in seconds: one step, two steps, three years. James braced for collision. Reggie was huge, his shoulders a whole size broader than the blue uniform that clung too tight around his arms and chest. There were small triangles of blood on his knuckles and elbows, wounds that were salved by grease and dirt and left to harden. If not for the name sewn into the wrinkled work shirt, James might not have believed that this was the same boy he had grown up with, the same boy with whom he had played and laughed and—that summer when they were twelve-screamed.

  James stumbled from the car, looked over the hood. He felt it, dry in his throat, stinging his eyes: panic. This meeting was bad luck, the worst imaginable, and with Reggie’s speed there were no paths to escape. Reggie stuffed the rag into the back pocket of his overalls, spit onto the sawdust that soaked up an oil spill, then leveled his dark eyes. Leaves skittered across the cement, bad engines wheezed and spun in the periphery. The recollection crawled over James’s flesh like fire: a fight, this was a fight, remember? It started in a junkyard six years ago and still had not ended. Reggie stopped walking and squinted across the car, his face in shadow.

  “Hey,” said James. His heart raked itself across the sharp blades of his ribs.

  Reggie sniffed, ran a hand across his forehead, replaced sweat with dirt.

  “How you been?” James added. His own voice sounded strange to him, shrill and childish.

  Reggie made two fists and locked them under his armpits.

  “Nice goddamn car,” Reggie said—and that voice, though deeper than the last time James had heard it, was as terrible and exciting as it had always been: dangerous, jubilant, and taunting. The last words James had shared with Reggie had been after school one day near the end of ninth grade, when they had both found themselves in the boys’ room, James having just finished tennis practice and Reggie having just wasted an hour’s worth of detention. It had been three years after all the blood, three years since the fight in the junkyard where they both should have thrown punches and hadn’t. And there they were, alone, with enough hard surfaces to beat them to meaty pulps. But they had not fought that day. Instead, they had exchanged grunts, which banged off the urinals and sinks and mirrors but managed not to reach any ears. Then they had stepped around each other and Reggie had left the restroom. When tenth grade started up that fall, Reggie’s face had not been among the crowd. The fight, yet again, went unfought.

  Three more years and here was Reggie, having inexplicably grown to two times his previous size. James felt tiny before him. He always had, even back when he and Reggie and Willie all had been best friends, long before James began to compensate for that feeling of smallness by stacking up the achievements his parents pushed him toward: good grades, sports, the school newspaper, dating the nice girl from the right family—all fodder for the dreaded scrapbook. As he had continued through high school, he had kept focus on these activities but could not shake the memory of Reggie, lurking behind the school, hanging out in the parking lot, concealed in a cloud of cigarette smoke, laughing, maybe at him.

  But not now, not here. James glanced at the tassel hanging from his mirror and tried to bury the flush of embarrassment. After all, he was the one leaving for a college education and Reggie was the one stuck working in some abysmal garage in some worthless town. James exhaled sharply, sent a murk of exhaust and oil from his lungs. There was a ring on Reggie’s little finger, almost lost amid the mud and hair. A tattoo snaked out from one of his sleeves. This was the kind of kid James’s dad warned him about, and maybe for once his dad was right. Yet there was nothing to fear here. James was Reggie’s equal, if not his superior.

  “Where you been? You live here?” James asked, and it came out loud, like a demand.

  Reggie’s chin, lightly dotted with hair, made a vague gesture. “Not far.” He took another look at the car, saw the boxes of clothing stacked in the backseat. “Off to school. Let me guess. State? Keeping your eye on the donut?”

  James had not expected this, but should have—it was a tactic Reggie had perfected as a child, a method of throwing you off guard before going in for the kill. James paused for a moment as the hot wind pushed a drop of sweat down his cheek.

  “You remember the donut,” James said carefully. He threw a glance at the corrosion all around them. “Lots of hole around here.”

  “I’m not sure how to take that, sounds kind of dirty,” Reggie said. “How is the old donut man these days?”

  “The same, mostly. Older.”

  “Your mom, too? Older?”

  James nodded, but cautiously, unsure of where he was being led. “She’s still a mom. Doing what moms do. She laughs a lot—” James stopped; he had not meant to say this, but now the truth of it struck him. She did laugh a lot in his presence, maybe too often, and for the first time he wondered why. This was followed by an unsettling new concern. Would she laugh at all now that he was gone?

  “Huh,” said Reggie. “You know, I don’t kno
w if I can remember my mom laughing, not once.”

  “She’s here?” James took another look at the gas station: the sun-blasted truck tops, the flakes of old paint twitching in the wind. “I mean, you still live with her?”

  Reggie took a moment, then nodded once. “Works down the road at the bar. She’s older, too. Older than you might remember.”

  Images of Reggie’s mother flashed through James’s mind. Ms. Fielder—or Call-Me-Kay as he and Willie had been instructed—young and pretty and often asleep, smiling plenty but laughing only in dry, insincere coughs. It was impossible to imagine her aged and wrinkled, fit to play a proper mother at last.

  A pickup truck pulled in at the opposite pump. Two boys, nearly twelve themselves, leapt from the bed, pushing, falling, one second hostility, the next camaraderie. They spilled onto the pavement, blackening knees, and shot past Reggie. James tore his eyes away from them: the little boys, for all of their bluster, were too young, had not yet begun to truly fight. He turned back to Reggie. “You graduate?”

  Reggie laughed. To his surprise, James found himself laughing, too. He had forgotten how infectious the sound was, how energizing; immediately he wanted the laugh back. Reggie was trying to unnerve him. With a flare of dirty fingernails, Reggie threw his greasy rag at James. Too light, it landed on the roof of the car.

  “Bite me,” Reggie said, still laughing. “Yeah, I graduated. You wouldn’t believe the kids here, they make me look halfway smart. I graduated. I mean, I have the piece of paper that says it. I didn’t prance around onstage or anything.”

  “I did.” James said it like a taunt.

  “Course you did. You probably made a speech, too, I’d bet money.” Reggie took another step closer, laid a hand on the car as if evaluating its worth. “What are you going to study?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, what’s your major?”

  “I don’t have one.”