The Boy Who Drew Monsters: A Novel (3 page)

The sun had long since reached its winter day apogee and now arced toward the west as though rimed in mist. A frosty afternoon was sneaking in, and he was late. He left the crabs where they lay and hurried off. As he approached the Wellers’ house, he could see their son, Nick, waiting patiently on the front porch, cold as an icicle, and he raced to the Jeep as Tim pulled into the driveway, as if he had been a prisoner a long, long time and was now released from his sentence. His cheeks were red and chapped, and the boy beamed with an eagerness nearly impossible to bear. Nick was such a good friend to have for Jip. Such a good boy.

iii.

The grays hid as best they could on the icy white field, crouching behind the random nooks and crannies folded into the landscape. By the cut of their uniforms and the odd square lip at the bottom of their helmets, they gave themselves away as Germans. In a poised fist, one man held a grenade shaped like a hammer. Two snipers stretched out on their bellies, peering through the sights to await the foe. On the white hills above the ambush site, a squad of green Americans marched to their doom. The radio man’s antenna had snapped off in some ancient skirmish. The mine sweeper kept falling over on the soft surface. Five o’clock on a December Sunday, and the dusk concealed the soldiers.

A war cry, startling in its whooping ferocity, broke the stillness, and from the horizon, a band of red Indians swarmed on to the scene. Charging on red ponies, reins in their teeth, a pair of braves drew back their bows. The arrows whistled softly in long arcs and fell true. The gray captain gulped his last surprised breath as the arrowhead pierced his heart. One by one the army men turned in dumb shock at the unexpected arrival of the reinforcements, their savage intensity. From the pillows, the Americans cheered and huzzahed as they returned fire, launching grenades like winter hail. The kneeling bazooka man blasted a round, and bodies flew in all directions. In their feathered headdresses, their mohawks, and latticed breastplates, the warriors scrambled over the quilt, their hatchets raised with gleeful, murderous intent. Men fell through the ice and cried out full of panic in the frigid waters. At the height of the massacre, the bedroom door opened swiftly, throwing a rectangle of light from the hall against the far wall and illuminating the boys inside.

With a fistful of plastic Indians raised in midair, Jack Peter stared at the figure on the threshold. He froze, bewildered, as if awakened from a deep sleep. His shadow on the wall was as still as the toy soldiers strewn across the bed.

His mother kept her hand circled around the doorknob and stood halfway in the room, her gaze intent upon her son. “Boys, it’s getting late. Shall we send Nicholas home, or would you care to join us for supper?” Nobody ever called him Nicholas, not even his own parents. He smiled again at her constant formality.

“I could stay, if it’s okay with my mother.” Nick stole a glance at Jack Peter, but he showed no reaction. A flush rose on his face, and he tightened his grip around the plastic men.

“You boys will have to clean up now, and, Jack, you never made your bed today.” Mrs. Keenan took one step into the room, and her mere presence seemed to break the spell around her son. His rapid panting slowed into a gentle rhythm. He put down his toys and bowed his head like a penitent. Making parentheses of his arms, Nick scooped the soldiers and warriors to the middle of the mattress.

“Jack, Jackie.” His mother snapped her fingers, trying to get his attention. “Isn’t it nice Nicholas can stay for supper? But, Jack, you have to help clean up this mess. And make your bed, okay? I don’t want to have to tell you again. C’mon, my boy.”

In slow motion, he picked up the ponies that had fallen to the floor and added them to the pile. Mrs. Keenan turned and left the room, and in her absence, he began to move more quickly. With Nick’s help, they put the plastic soldiers in a pretzel tin on top of the toy box, and then they straightened the sheets and pulled smooth the quilt. The boys went about their work quietly, as Nick knew better than to distract his friend. He was always unsteady when transitioning, and it was best to be silent and let Jack Peter find his own way. When the room was tidy and everything in order, Nick pretended to clap dust from his palms. “Finished?”

On cue, his friend became a ten-year-old boy again. “Yes!” he shouted, and they raced each other downstairs. The wind rattled the panes of the picture windows on the lower floor and flung sand against the siding. Just beyond, whitecaps frosted the Atlantic, and the surf pulsed like a heartbeat. Cold and damp pushed against the old saltbox house, the joists creaking in the wind, and the furnace pushed back with an exhalation of heat. It was good to be inside on such a night.

The living room was dark except for the glow of the tiny colored lights on the Christmas tree, and the boys nearly bounced right past Mr. Keenan, nestled in his easy chair. “What ho, lads? Mr. Nick, I see, has joined us. And what have you fine fellows been up to all afternoon?”

“War,” said Jack Peter. “With the army men.”

“War? Mayhem and murder, J.P.? So soon to Christmas, do you think that’s wise?”

Jack Peter hovered beside his father’s chair, a step away from contact. “Pretend war. Just pretend. It isn’t real.”

“All in the imagination, eh, Jip?”

“Up here.” He tapped his skull with one finger.

“How about you, Mr. Weller? Which side were you on?”

The question embarrassed Nick, for he felt, in part, too old to be playing with toy soldiers. He had agreed at Jack Peter’s insistence, just as he nearly always had. “There were no sides. They were all mixed up, the Germans and the Americans and the Indians.”

“A healthy disregard for history,” Mr. Keenan said. “Good for you. There are many things more important than history. Imagination, for one. And dinner, for two. Are you boys washed up and ready for some grub? Let’s turn on some lights on the way. No need to be living in a graveyard.”

A fish stew bubbled on the stove top. Nick watched as Mrs. Keenan sliced a loaf of bread on a wooden board. As she concentrated on her task, a bruise on her cheek deepened to purple. They sat in their usual places, the grown-ups at the ends, Jack Peter and Nick facing each other. From the saying of the blessing, Nick began to sense the difference in the atmosphere, as though something or someone was watching them eat. None of the others seemed to take heed of the situation. Mr. and Mrs. Keenan chatted idly about the weather and the food, savoring a morsel of whitefish, a hunk of bread, a sip of wine, and Jack Peter, as usual, zoned in upon his task, chewing mechanically every bite. But Nick could not shake the feeling that they were not alone.

“You boys will never guess what I found today,” Mr. Keenan said. “I was up at the Rothmans’ place making sure it was shipshape for the winter, and I thought I heard the wind come in, so I go checking all the windows. In one of the rooms there’s a real peculiar smell. A stink, really—”

With his glass at his mouth, Jack Peter snorted into his milk.

“So I look under the bed, and what do you know, the kid had left a wet bathing suit under the bed. Been sitting since the end of summer, but that’s not all. Inside the pockets, what do you think? Hermit crabs. Four of them crammed in there. But here’s the weird part. I’m getting ready to leave and I hear this scribble-scrabble sound coming from where I laid them out upon the desk, and you guessed it. Those crabs come back from the dead, trying to escape the house and walk back to the ocean.”

“Ghost crabs,” Jack Peter said.

“That’s right,” Mr. Keenan said. “Figure they were hibernating or something. Nearly scared me half to death.”

Mrs. Keenan rolled her eyes and pressed her hand against her painful-looking bruise. Mashing a potato with the tines of her fork, she addressed the table. “Nick, we’re looking forward to having you stay over after Christmas.”

He reddened, remembering how his parents had foisted him off so that they could get away on a cruise between Christmas and New Year’s. Just the two of them, a second honeymoon, they said, although he wasn’t sure what was wrong with the first. The trip, he sensed, was intended as remedy for what had been broken over the years, but their attempts at rekindling left him out in the cold. They had given him the choice between a week with the Keenans or five days down in Florida with Nana and Pap. The spare bedroom at their condo in the retirement village was always hot no matter the temperature outside. Even Christmas was blazing. No snow, no friends. The endless afternoons. Dinner at five o’clock, in bed by eight. The nightly news, a game show with the television blasting full volume. Maybe you would like to do a puzzle? He loved his grandparents, but he’d rather be dead.

“Thanks again for having me. I’m happy to stay with you guys. And with Jack Peter.”

Across the table, his friend betrayed no emotion.

An idea jumped from Mr. Keenan’s brain to his mouth. “We could even get the old gang together during winter break. What were those boys’ names? Jip, you haven’t seen some of those guys since, what, second grade?”

Yes, second grade. Jack Peter had been an inside boy for over three years. Hadn’t been to school, rarely left the house. One by one, his few old friends had nearly forgotten about him, and they always gave Nick grief for continuing his strange friendship. Perhaps it would be better in Boca Raton.

“You boys will have the run of the place,” said Mr. Keenan.

A pair of eyes stared out at him from over Jack Peter’s shoulders. Mismatched askew eyes, the left larger than the right, pupils dark as holes, glowered at him. He nearly dropped his spoon. The giant face came into focus, a child’s pencil drawing taped to the refrigerator door. The portrait filled the entire page from side to side: a young boy with dark tangled hair atop a high bare forehead, a rudimentary nose, a slash of a mouth. He was primitive but intense, hatched and worked over, shadows radiating from the wild eyes. Nick could not resist the temptation to look more closely, so he rose from his chair and walked right up to the paper.

The drawing had a furious energy to it. There were no erasures, no signs of uncertainty, but rather the stray lines and swirls had been incorporated into its overall execution. A smudge ran the length of the jaw from the left ear to the chin, as though its maker was trying to soften the line and blur the edge. Though the picture looked similar to many children’s drawings, the boy on the page was animated by a different spirit, an air of unreality, that hypnotized Nick. As if the image had some power over him, life imitating art. He could not reconcile its skill with the impression he had held so long of his friend as simple, slow to talk or respond in regular ways, a boy who seemed much younger, more childish on the surface, yet there was a darkness to the drawing’s depth.

“Do you like it, Nicholas?” Mrs. Keenan called from her place. “Jack drew that. Completely out of the blue.”

Nick twisted his neck to look back at them over his shoulder. The boy in the picture kept watching.

Scraping his chair along the floor, Jack Peter inched around to face him, an intense expression in his eyes, flashing with a creator’s ardor. “Do you ever go swim in the ocean?”

“Of course I do. Don’t you remember? You and me used to go swimming all the time every summer. Not in the winter, but I still go swimming in the summer. When it gets hot.”

“People drown in the ocean. Ships crash on the rocks in a storm. The people get lost and confused in the dark, and they breathe in the water, and everybody drowns. Shipwrecks. Your mommy and daddy are going on a boat.”

Mr. Keenan laid his crust of bread over the top of his bowl of stew. “In the olden days, Jip, but not anymore. No more shipwrecks. The lighthouse on Mercy Point helps them steer clear. Now turn around and finish your dinner.”

Dutiful son, he scooched his chair back into position with his bottom, inch by inch. Nick took it as a signal to return to his place. “Who is that picture supposed to be?”

Jack Peter did not speak but instead tapped a finger insistently against his temple. He would not stop the jabbing attack, and it alarmed everyone at the table. He poked his skull so hard that Mrs. Keenan was forced to grab her son’s wrist to stop the compulsion. She strained against his strength, the veins and sinews piping along her forearm, her face colored deep red.

iv.

He had gone outside to warm up the Jeep in the driveway, leaving the motor idling in the bitter cold. In the clutter of the mudroom, Tim stomped his feet and clapped his gloved hands to get the blood flowing. The cross-country skis in the corner rattled, his breath exploded in white clouds, and the windows were laced with frost. He made a mental note to go round in the next few days to the rest of the summer houses to make sure the heat had been turned on low for the season. Nothing worse than frozen pipes bursting in the thaw. Winter was a-coming. Hell, it was already here. A single step separated the mudroom from the kitchen, and out of habit, he kicked the riser to knock the sand and dirt from the treads of his shoes before entering the house proper. The boy was already waiting for him, mittens and hat and boots, wrapped like a mummy in his overcoat and scarf.

“All bundled up and ready to go? All we need do is put a few stamps on your forehead, and we could mail you home.”

Nick waddled forward a few paces and was nearly to the door when he was stopped by a tug on his sleeve. “Will you be back?” Jip asked.

“Of course. I’ll come by one day after school same as always, and then we’ll have the whole week after Christmas. I’ll stay over.”

“How many nights?”

“From the day after Christmas to New Year’s Day.”

“Would you stay, Nick? Would you stay if your parents shipwrecked?”

Mrs. Keenan stepped between the boys. “That’s a terrible thing to say, Jack.” She turned her back on her son. “Now, don’t you go worrying about that. Your parents will be fine.”

“They can swim,” said Jack. “But not in the cold. Don’t go swimming in the cold water, Nick.”