AS TALL AS MONSTERS A Thesis Presented to The Graduate Faculty of The University of Akron In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Fine Arts James Bigley II May, 2014 AS TALL AS MONSTERS James Bigley II Thesis Approved: Accepted: _________________________________ ____________________________________ Advisor Dean of the College Mr. Christopher Barzak Dr. Chand Midha _________________________________ ___________________________________ Faculty Reader Dean of the Graduate School Mr. Robert Pope Dr. George R. Newkome _________________________________ ___________________________________ Faculty Reader Date Mr. Imad Rahman _________________________________ Department Chair Dr. William Thelin ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page CHAPTER I. PROLOGUE…………………………………………………………………………….1 II. A POINT OF IMPACT………………………………………………………………... 2 III. THE CANDY MAN………………………………………………………………... 12 IV. A FAMILY AFFAIR……………………………………………………………...... 31 V. CHILD’S PLAY……………………………………………………………………...49 VI. A GATHERING OF STRANGERS………………………………………………... 74 VII. THROW BACK………………………………………………………………….....94 VIII. THE CALM BEFORE THE STORM……………………………………………120 IX. CONVICTIONS…………………………………………………………………....156 iii CHAPTER I PROLOGUE The sun was just coming up over the cornfields when I found Johnny walking on the railroad tracks. He was holding his arms out on either side for balance as he stepped lightly along one of the rails, like someone walking on a tightrope without a net and with miles and miles of nothing underneath him. He was without a shirt and his back was covered in mud. I could barely make out the scar on his left shoulder, but noticed right away that his hands had been painted red. The air was unsettled with yellow dust so that it seemed like there were a thousand tiny fireflies rising up slowly from the ground all around us. I could hear the sirens from far off in the distance as they made their way through town, and I called out to him. He stopped and turned to look at me. He was clutching his shirt stained with the same blood-red color that covered his hands, and he was crying. For a moment we were just two boys facing each other as if for the first time in the low-lit dawn, not very far from home but far enough that we were alone. Neither of us said anything, but as the sirens started to get louder I realized that I never loved him more than when he turned and started walking away. 1 CHAPTER II A POINT OF IMPACT There are some beginnings that are more identifiable than others—moments that you can look back at and say without hesitation, “That’s when everything changed.” For me, that moment happened during the summer before high school, when my friends and I found ourselves caught in the throes of a small-town tragedy. It’s only been a few years, but it’s all right there in the back of my mind like it happened yesterday. Whenever I feel unsure of myself or I start to question the events of that summer, I look back at it the way you would pull a book off of a shelf and flip through the pages to find your favorite lines. To understand everything that happened, though, I have to sometimes force myself to go farther back, because what happened during that summer wasn’t the beginning of the story, but merely the start of something that was always going to happen. I met Johnny for the first time when I was six, maybe seven years old. Both of my parents were working full-time jobs; my mother, a nurse in a hospital forty-five minutes outside of town; my father, a car salesman not any closer. While they were away, I spent my time with a lot of the other kids in town over at the Sanders’ home. Back then, before Mr. Sanders passed away, Mrs. Sanders was someone everybody looked up to and a lot of the parents relied on her to take care of us while they were at work. It’s hard to believe there was a time when that woman was happy, or at least significantly less insane than she ended up, but back then she was highly respected. People liked her because she was 2 strict. She had a way of making us listen when no one else could. She was authoritative and direct, but capable of terrifying us into doing things we never thought to do otherwise, as we’d quickly find out on our own. She had a son my age named Steve, who went by his last name because he thought Sanders had a better ring to it. He had a pair of gold-rimmed glasses that he wore since the day that I met him, and he was scrawnier than any of the other kids. Over time, I developed a theory that he went by the name of Sanders because it made him feel more masculine, like the name gave him more control over who he was than who his parents wanted him to be. They had always been religious, some of the most conservative people in town, but where they were sometimes vindictive, Sanders was always a good kid with a kind heart and apt to never hurt anyone if he could help it. In a way, Sanders was like a younger brother I never had. We were playing out in the sandbox in the backyard behind his house one summer when Johnny showed up for the first time. He was holding on to the back of his mother’s jeans as they walked across the yard towards us. She was a beautiful woman, and not very old though you could tell from the bags under her eyes and the sallow tone of her skin that she slept little and was under a lot of stress. Though Johnny was tall for his age and walked with a certain directness, there were similarities in his face that made me think he might have been ill when I first saw him. His mother left him there with us, standing beside the sandbox, while she walked away with Mrs. Sanders and continued their conversation with hushed voices. I expected him to say something, or even step inside the box, but he just stood there staring at us like he was unsure of what he was supposed to do. 3 “Are you okay?” I asked him after a minute or two. He nodded his head, as if to say yes. “Do you want to play with us?” I asked, holding out a plastic shovel, and moving over so that there was enough room for him. He took the shovel out of my hand and sat beside me, and for the rest of the day he didn’t say a single word to either of us, though we tried talking to him. Instead, he kept digging holes in the box and then covered them when he reached the plastic at the bottom, only to dig the same hole again and recover it in the same way. He was like this for several weeks, keeping to himself and never saying more than a word or two so that it became a game between Sanders and I to see who could get him to talk. It was clear right away that nothing we did was ever enough to get him to react the way we wanted him to. Instead, he’d just play with us silently, never saying much more than he had to. The only time we ever saw him excited about anything was when his mother arrived to take him home, and even then, there was a certain sluggishness about him that made it seem as if even that excitement was nothing more than for show. He got worse when his mother stopped bringing him by and his father started dropping him off and picking him up in her place. Where she would always get out of the car and walk him up to the house, waving at us and smiling, he would always stay in his truck at the end of the drive, staring out the front of his windshield like he was waiting for a light to change. It was around this time that Johnny stopped coming around us at all, but he would sit far away and watch as we played or he would lay down in the grass and stare up at the sky for hours. It wasn’t long before we got bored with him, and left him to 4 do whatever he wanted, so that there was a brief moment in time when we were all at the same place five days a week but estranged from one another. While all of this was happening, Mrs. Sanders was having a crisis of her own. It had rained nearly every day for the last few months of spring so that the ground was still swollen by the middle of summer. Her garden was barely producing any vegetables after being oversaturated with water, and while she was busy being devastated over their stunted growth, air pockets started turning up in the yard so that there were tiny hills running from the house to the edge of the property and the woods behind it. If you stood with your head cocked to one side, you could see them running in rows like lattice work, as if someone had been burying tiny plastic tubes underneath the surface of the lawn overnight. By the time Mrs. Sanders had noticed she had an infestation of moles, it was already too late, the backyard had been overrun. Mr. Sanders tried setting up little cage-like traps using peanut butter as bait, but the moles were more clever than anyone had expected, having the ability to take enough of the prize without ever getting caught.