The Monster Variations (2 page)

“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 know 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.”

“Huh.” Reggie drummed his fingers against the roof. “Then why are you going?”

The grin Reggie drew was large and disarming. Was it a friendly joke or the feint that preceded the first connecting blow? James opened his mouth to respond, but looking at Reggie made none of the available answers seem any good. He tried to return the grin and failed. Why
was
he going? Was it only to escape the scrapbook? Or was it all in hopes of bending those straight edges he had forged and refined throughout high school?

He was lost in this thought when the two little boys ran up to the car and stopped suddenly, holding one another, throwing one another away. The bolder of the two stared at James, then Reggie, and appeared ready to
speak. But then the father shouted, and both of them turned on their heels and hurried back to the safety of the pickup, angry and delighted. In their absence was noise: hammering, men shouting, an engine choking, music forcing itself through the small tin holes of a radio, murmured jokes as wadded dollar bills passed through truck windows. It was a cycle of events that had nothing to do with James. He looked down at his car.

“Hey, none of my business.” Reggie coughed. “Fill ‘er up?”

“No,” James said. “I can do it.”

Reggie waved him off and moved with quick, forceful steps, and suddenly he was right there, stinking of oil and perspiration and reaching for the pump handle. James tried to grab it first and their fists rammed together-mental flashes of tree-house heroics, cemetery mud, knife blades, monstrous things. Finally, it felt good, and James wanted more, his muscles ached for it, the thrill of blood and dirt.

“Back off,” Reggie grunted, and he leaned in, his shoulder knocking James aside. Those shoulders, that voice, those flashing eyes: James had to look down at his body to remind himself that he was not twelve, this was not that summer when too many people had died, and Reggie could not boss him around any longer. Instead, what James saw was his own clean shirt, his new slacks, those shoes that wouldn’t last one day working in an environment like this one. He chanced a glance at Reggie, who stuffed the nozzle into the tank and started the gas
flow,
thump thump thump
. Reggie looked wild and unsteady, as if the shoulder contact had also brought home to him visions of their past contact: hands boosting feet over fences, brilliant bloody noses, wonderful bruises.

They both felt the impact before it hit.

“You seen Willie lately?” It was Reggie who struck first.

These were the terrible words James had both yearned for and feared. He didn’t want to think about that summer—he had kept it from his mind for years and it had gotten him this far, all the way out of town—and the funny thing was, he felt certain Reggie didn’t want to resurrect it either. But James needed to finish the fight, and there was no other first punch to be thrown.

“Not in a long time,” James lied, so close he could feel the heat from Reggie’s skin. “You?”

Reggie snorted. “Man, I don’t have time for him anymore. He’s not exactly the most exciting guy I know.” He blinked, aimed another strike. “Remember those weird phrases he was always repeating?”

“Of course.”

“Remember the tree house? I still have the scars all over my legs.”

“Me too.”

“You remember the Monster?”

James felt his fingers curl into fists. Reggie’s eyes flicked downward at the movement. The fuel pounded into the tank,
thump thump thump
. Behind Reggie, a car squealed from the garage, a truck rumbled over to the
next set of pumps.
Thump thump thump
. Reggie saw dozens of trucks each day, James realized, and it was all too possible that one of them could be the truck that took that summer of their twelfth year and ruined it, and maybe ruined all three of them in the process-James, Reggie, and Willie. It was his heartbeat now:
thump thump thump
.

Reggie, as always, knew just what James was thinking. He lowered his voice and closed his eyes and said the final thing: “You remember the truck?”

W
illie Van Allen’s arm was gone. The truck that hit him escaped, silver and purring, and it swept up a gust that was almost refreshing. In the hazy afterburn he lay, his face blank as sand, white as foam.

Willie’s arm, or what was left of it, was tamped into the dirt, now part of the old tar road along with stones and bugs and beer cans and scrub-grass. There was blood, but it had mixed with dirt, become mud. There was bone, too, but the bone dove beneath the mud like a tree root.

His left arm was gone, but his shoulder was still there,
seared dark from hundreds of hours of baseball—they called it junkball—played upon a diamond with a right field wall of rusty, abandoned dinosaurs called Chevy and Ford, and left and center walls of buildings so dilapidated that people had long since given up trying to live there. The serious play was in the summer, just eight short weeks away, but the boys could not wait and hit the field while their breath still hung visible in the air and their tentative scurries were marked by morning frost. Willie was too short and too little to be much good, but that was fine: the vacant square eyes of these buildings were the only audience.

But perhaps summer, and junkball, no longer mattered. His left arm was gone. His left shoulder was larger than before, as if the weight of the truck’s tire had squashed the muscle from Willie’s arm upward, like you might squeeze a tube of toothpaste. Willie himself did not move, but he could feel the compacted ball of flesh inside his shoulder squirm with each beat of his heart.

Willie lay half on the road, half on the barren shoulder, trying to remember what had happened. He had been walking home from the diamond, in a hurry because there was school tomorrow—still eight more weeks until summer, an infinity—along with Reggie Fielder and James Wahl and that bully Mel Herman. Willie’s dad was supposed to have picked him up at the edge of the park, but he never showed up. Pretty soon the light began to fade. James stayed with him for a while, but eventually
he left, too. Finally Willie began the long trek home. He barely remembered seeing the silver truck approach. He was busy thinking to himself,
How come Dad forgot me?
He remembered shuffling to the side of the road to let the truck pass.

Now the warm firelight of an April dusk sealed him to the tar with the glue of his own blood, which slid to the asphalt and pooled beneath him. The fabric of his T-shirt hardened to a crust. There was no sound, but Willie imagined a soft sizzle.

He began to fully wake. He blinked at a sky so red it looked bloody. The grass around him screamed with bugs. Slowly, he let his head loll to the side until his warm cheek felt the earth’s skin. He saw his left hand. It was way, way over there, far, too far away. He thought about moving his fingers and then his fingers moved. But it must’ve been the breeze, because that hand was no longer connected to his body.

Then Willie began to
feel
again, and nails hammered one after another into his body, cold and fast, in places he could not predict: his forehead, his backbone, the webbing between his thumb and forefinger. His shoulder felt the worst. It was throbbing and itching like mad. There was also something wet pasting his hair to the back of his neck. Willie pretended it was gum. Mel Herman had thrown gum in his hair more than once and it took Willie’s mom over an hour to scrape it all out.

The pressure in his shoulder was building. He looked
at it, for the first time really scared. From the way his shoulder bulged, Willie almost expected to see a glittering mound of cockroaches tumble out of it, chattering and excited to be free. Instead, he saw only an arrowhead of bone. Willie made a face, his first one: he scrunched up his nose, and a delicate treble note briefly dimpled the soft skin between his eyebrows. It
hurt
. His shoulder really
hurt
.

Willie decided to get up. It was the toughest decision he’d ever made. Would it hurt even more? Would all his guts come pouring out the hole where his arm used to be? He had to try, he had to make it to summer—injury, maybe even death, would be permissible then, but not now, not eight weeks away. He creased his forehead and tensed his neck, trying to yank his narrow wedge of a chest into action. His body didn’t move. Willie felt like he was made of the same brittle twigs he saw on the ground all around him, and if he actually sat up, maybe his spine would snap.