Jason Lee Brown teaches writing at Eastern Illinois University and is a contributing editor to River Styx. He has received awards from the Illinois Arts Council, Academy of American Poets, and Illinois Press Association.

Jay Prefontaine taught writing at Eastern Illinois University for fourteen years, and his fiction received several awards, including the Writers at Work Fellowship. He died shortly after the completion of New Stories from the Midwest.

New Stories from the Midwest 2012

Indiana University Press

Contents

Mr. Scary

Charles Baxter

for Richard Bausch

THERE WAS SOME SORT OF commotion at the end of the check-out line. Words had been exchanged, and now two men, one tall and wide-shouldered, the other squat and beefy, were squaring off against each other and raising their voices. Their shoes squeaked on the linoleum. The short one, who had hair from his back sprouting up underneath his shirt collar, was saying a four-letter word. The other man, the tall one, shook his head angrily and raised his fist. An elderly security guard was rushing toward them. He didn't seem up to the task, Estelle thought. He was just a minimum-wage retiree they had hired for show.

"Good God," Estelle said to her grandson. "There's going to be a fistfight."

The boy didn't glance up from his phone gadget. He held it in his palm and was rapidly clicking the letters. "They're just zombies," the boy said quietly and dismissively after a glance.

"Well, how do you know that?" the grandmother asked, trying for conversation. "I've never met a zombie." The men seemed to have calmed down a bit. They were just rumbling at each other now.

"Zombies like discount stores," the boy, whose name was Frederick, said patiently, as if he had to explain everything. He still wasn't looking at the two men. "They eat plastic when they can't get brains." The boy glanced up, showing his grandmother his bright blue eyes. "Just look around if you don't believe me," he said. "This junk? It's all theirs." The fight between the two men seemed to bore him, before the fact. Almost everything bored him.

Another security guard had arrived, a red-faced fellow with a crew cut. He would put a stop to things. Together with the older security guard, he herded the two men toward the service area. So: that had happened. Now it was over. Estelle handed the baseball bat she was buying for Frederick to the check-out clerk, who scanned it and who then held out her palm for money.

"You don't see that every day," Estelle said to the clerk, who was frowning.

"Ain't none of my business," the clerk said with shrug.

Estelle handed the bat to her grandson, who took hold of it in his left hand while keeping up his writing with his right.

"You're giving this to me because why?" the boy asked, glancing up.

Estelle sighed. She no longer waited for thanks for anything from him. Gratitude was simply beyond his abilities.

"For your baseball games," she said, over her shoulder.

"What baseball games? I don't play baseball."

"Thank you," the checkout clerk said behind her, belatedly, as if prompting Frederick. He followed his grandmother, his eyes downward again, oblivious to her, to the partly cloudy sky outside the automatic doors, to the untied shoelaces on his left foot, to his own waddling walk, to the folds of fat under his T-shirt, to the gift of the unthanked aluminum baseball bat. The poor child. He had been so beautiful once, years ago, with a smile to light up the world, and now ... well, just look at him.

They drove across Minneapolis and stopped for a red light in front of the Basilica. At the corner traffic island stood a bearded panhandler with a cardboard sign that read, "HOMELeSS VetERaN. ANYThING WILL HeLP. GoD BLeSS." The man's face was wreathed in sunburned desolation, and she was reaching into her purse for a dollar when her grandson spoke up from the back seat.

"Grandma, don't give him anything."

"What? Why?" Estelle asked.

"He's a pod," the boy said.

"What?"

"You know. A pod. A replicant."

Estelle looked in the rearview mirror and saw the boy scowling malevolently at the homeless man.

"No, I don't know. Why do you say such things?"

"See, for starters, he's in the stare-at-you army," the boy said, with his eerie talent for metaphor. "They stare at you. That's the pod game plan. I can always tell. I haveradar. That guy is garbage." Frederick laughed to himself. "He's the lieutenant colonel of garbage."

"No human is garbage," his grandmother said defiantly, rolling down her window, "and I don't want to hear you talking like that."

"Okay, fine," the boy said, "but I'm just saying? How come you like these creeps?"

But she had already reached through the car window and placed a dollar bill in the man's palm, and when he said, "Thank you, and God bless you," Estelle felt a small feeling of satisfaction and pride. He might be a bum, but he knew how to be thankful.

"I suppose you think he's a zombie too," Estelle said, as she rolled the window back up.

"No," the boy replied. "He's a ... replicant. Like I told you. He looks like a human being, but he isn't. Just like this car we're in now seems like a real car." Frederick smiled at his grandmother, a private smile, but the smile seemed to be poisoned somehow by the baby fat on his twelve-year-old face and by the boy's customary malice, a thin screen for his unhappiness. Often his face was unreadable: it was as if he had trained his facial expressions to be ungrammatical. The poor child: he even had a double chin, making him look like a preteen Rotarian. Curled into himself, having returned to his phone gadget, Frederick irradiated waves of unsociability and ill will. His being hummed with animosity toward the world for having staged the enactment of his various miseries. His revulsion at life had a kind of purity, Estelle thought.

Really, all she wanted to do was to take him into her arms and hold him. But he was too old for that now. What had worked once, all that love she had given him, no longer did.

"Mass times force equals velocity," the boy said, just before his grandmother dropped him off at Community Day Camp. "It's true. Did you know that?"

"No, I didn't. But actually, Freddie, that doesn't sound quite right."

"Well, it's true. Absolutely. I've been studying physics. And mass times force equals velocity. That's why a baseball travels faster if you hit it hard. You're forcing the ball to, like, accelerate." He waited for his words to sink in. "To escape inertia. You want to hear something else? This is even more amazing. Gravity equals weight times voltage. That's Yardley's Theorem."

"Yes. Well, OK. We're here," Estelle said, pulling to a stop in front of the Community Day Camp building, a grim yellow concrete-block affair with a flagpole hoisting a limp flag just inside the turning circle. During the winter, the building served as a community center. During the summer, they offered activities for kids from ages eight to twelve, with trips to spots of local interest. Last week the boys and girls had visited an institution for assisted-living, giving each old person a gift of their own devising. Frederick had given his own old person an African violet. The day camp counselors also staged sports activities on the playground in back. Frederick hated all of it and performed his sullen silence with great majesty whenever Estelle picked him up.

"Do I have to go in there?" the boy asked, once she had stopped.

"Well, I did drive you over here. Kiddo, give it the old college try."

"I've done that all summer."

"So do it again."

"They all hate me," Frederick said. "They throw their lunch food at me."

"Throw it back."

"Yeah, that'll work. They throw sandwiches. Which explode."

"Well, can't you—"

"—I got a cupcake in my hair yesterday."

"—Make an effort—"

"—All right, all right," he said.

"—to go in there—"

"—I said all right."

There was a brief air-pocket of dead silence.

"See you in a few hours," Estelle muttered, as her grandson heaved himself out of the car. He was still writing something on his phone. He also had words penned on his arm.

"Don't bother coming back. Just call the coroner," the boy shouted, closing the car door and causing the baseball bat to roll again on the floor.

Her husband Randall, down on his knees in the garden, waved to Estelle absentmindedly with his trowel as she pulled up on the driveway. "Not enough fertilizer for the pansies," he said to her once she was out of the car and behind him, leaning on him. Using his customary tone of comic despair, he said, "And I've been overwatering the snaps, damn it. Look at them." He stood up, shaking his head before turning and giving Estelle a quick kiss on the lips. When he did, the brim of his sun hat poked against her forehead. "Drop him off OK?" Randall asked.

"So I bought him a baseball bat," Estelle said, putting her hand on her husband's shoulder. "It was a hopeful gesture." She straightened her husband and dusted him off. "But he stayed grumpy. Oh, and this is interesting: there was a fight in the checkout line at the K-Mart."

Randall nodded, gazing at her carefully. "Sure. Of course there was," he said. As always, she was taken aback by his capacity for understanding her, for knowing her least little mood. "Stel," he said, "I've made some lemonade, and ... Freddie's disposition isn't your fault, you know."

"I know," she said. "I know." She whistled to the dog, who regarded her with indifference from his shade under the crabapple tree. "I just wish sometimes that Freddie were, oh, I don't know, more ... normal, and I hate myself for wanting that. Who wants normal?"

"You do," he said. "Well, let's have a softball game on the vacant lot when he gets home. Us and a few normal neighbors. With his new baseball bat."

"A softball game?"

"Yes. With Freddie. Or maybe we should just let him be." He gave her hand another squeeze and preceded her into the house, holding the door open behind him. How considerate! Randall had always been considerate: he was one of those easygoing persons—affable, graceful, thoughtful—on whom the sturdy world depended, and although her little secret was that she was fatigued with him and felt almost no passion for him, she still needed to have his calm presence around. He was like a preservative, and she would fight to keep him if she had to. He played poker once a week with his chums; he drank one beer per evening; he was semi-retired from his veterinarian practice; he never raised his voice. He was even a graceful and attentive lover. What a paragon of virtue Randall was! Nothing to excess, this husband. But he had never been wild, and Estelle couldn't help herself: she was bored by people like him. Secretly, men who started fistfights attracted her. They had sap. But it was boredom that had the staying power.

"Here," Randall said, handing her a lemonade in a Dixie Cup.

"Thank you," she said, leaning forward into him again. His skin had a kind of slippery silkiness, an odd texture for the exterior of a middle-aged man. Her first husband, the dreaded Matthew, whose nickname had been "Squirrel"—winsome womanizer, alcoholic, self-centered bum, gate-crasher, liar, charmer, deadbeat, and cheat—had felt like hair and sandpaper. Sex with him had always been burningly raw and fecund. Children came from it, three of them. Where was Squirrel Van Dusen now? Pittsburgh? Or was it Tucson he had recently called from, yes, somewhere in the Southwest, that sunny haven for bums, asking for a tide-over loan for his newest harebrained scheme? It was hard to keep track of him: Randall had taken the most recent call and kept her from whatever Squirrel had asked for. She still had a soft spot for the guy. The flame could not quite be extinguished. Human wreckage had always attracted her. "The Bad Samaritan," Randall had called her once, in that not-quite-teasing way of his.

"It's a stage he's going through," Randall said, sitting down at the dinette. "Frederick's going through a stage. All boys go through a stage. They have to practice at being bad before they become men."

"You were never bad."

"Well, okay. I guess I never was," Randall said thoughtfully, nodding his head once and turning away from her. "Not like that."

"You always got up at five o'clock. To pray. With the birds. Like Saint Francis. You were a boy scout," she said, knowing she was being petty. "You still are."

"That's unkind. And I never prayed, not like that. I prayed to someday meet someone like you. Actually, Estelle," he said, fixing her with a look, "what are we talking about? This isn't about me, is it? Or Frederick?'

"No, I don't suppose so."

"Well, my dear, what is it about?"

She looked at him. Behind her, she could hear the leaves of the ash tree stirring in the dry summer wind. She could even hear the electric clock in the stove, which gave off a dull but thoughtful hum, as if it were planning something.

"It's about the usual," she said. Of course he knew what it was about. He always knew.

They'd run off together as teenagers forty-five years ago, Estelle and Squirrel, and when their kids were still toddlers, they'd crisscrossed the country in the Haunted Buick. What fun it was, being young, rootless, those hours of driving when music would start up for no apparent reason underneath the car's dashboard and then stop a few minutes later. There was a short in the radio, but Squirrel liked to say that the Buick was haunted. An announcer would begin speaking in mid-sentence from that same place under the dashboard, and Squirrel would say, "Where did he come from?" You couldn't switch the radio off: the dial didn't work. The Buick was beyond all that.

In those days, Estelle and Squirrel never stopped anywhere for longer than a few months. They would cross the border into yet another state they hadn't yet ravaged looking for opportunities, surefire moneymaking projects to put them on the map, as Squirrel liked to say. That was the expression he used after dark in bed with Estelle in one motel or another, whispering to her about what and where they would be, some day. They'd be settled, and happy, and rich. They'd be on the map. The children, the two boys and Isabel, the youngest, whom they called Izzy, slept in the other bedroom, a clutch of little snorers and bed-wetters.

All the trouble had been manageable at first. In Maine, there had been midnight phone calls from a girlfriend Squirrel had acquired somewhere, and a day later they were treated to her sudden arrival on the doorstep of their rented duplex. She'd been coarsely attractive, this girlfriend, furiously chewing bubble gum, and her waitress name-tag was still pinned to her blouse over (Estelle could not help noticing) her plump right breast. Cheryl. She was pregnant, this waitress, this Cheryl, said. She wanted satisfaction. Satisfaction! What a word. Or else. Or else what? She would be back, she said, with a court order. Estelle and Squirrel packed the car that night and were gone the next morning, the kids still asleep in the back seat by the time the sun came up. Estelle didn't speak to Squirrel, except about necessities, for a month after that.

In Montana, Squirrel's partner-in-business threatened them all—another midnight call!—with a court suit and, if that didn't work out, personal revenge Western style with a semiautomatic. By the time they had relocated in northern Minnesota, as temporary managers of the Trout Inn on Nine-Mile Lake, Estelle thought they were finally free of adventures. They'd come to the calm expository part of the movie, the part after the big opening attention-getting mayhem. Squirrel's mischief-making had been all used up, she thought, just flushed right out of him, and she was relieved.

And then one night Estelle had awakened to find that Squirrel had entered her while she'd been sleeping and was thrusting into her with a wild look on his face, with his hands around her neck as if he planned to strangle her, and she screamed at him and shook him off. She loaded the still-sleeping kids into the Buick, against Squirrel's pleading, and took off for Minneapolis. She remembered to take what money there was, and the credit cards, Squirrel pleading with her but not stopping her, and the children crying.

That was Part One of her life. Now she was in Part Two. There would never be a Part Three. Of that she was sure.

* * *

Mid-afternoon, Estelle pulled her car into the turning circle for Community Day Camp. Of course, Freddie was already there out in front, staring up into the sky as if he were waiting for helicopter rescue. He lumbered toward the car, opened the front passenger-side door, and poured himself in. He aimed the air-conditioning vents toward his face.

"How was it today?" Estelle asked, too brightly.

Freddie sat silently as if the question was much too complicated to be answered. Finally, he said, "We're going to put on a play."

"Yes, I think you told me that," Estelle said. "What is it? What's the play?"

"We're all writing it. Or they are. The kids and the counselors." He gave her his best sour look. "It's called Wonderful World."

"And who do you play?" Estelle asked.

"Me? I play Mr. Scary."

"Mr. Scary? Who's that? And what do you do?"

"I stand up at the beginning of the play, and I recite my fear monologue and scare everybody."

"Well, that's nice," Estelle said, trying to put the best face on things. "Do you have it? The monologue? Could you read it to me?"