Andrew Smith - The Alex Crow

I arrived here in Sunday little more than one week after my fifteenth birthday.

A year had passed since the miracle in the schoolhouse.

Happy birthday to me, once again.

Mother—my American mother, Natalie Burgess—has the most confusing habit of making everything seem insignificant and small. My brother Max calls her the Incredible Shrinking Machine.

Here is what happened: When the top jar tumbled from its eye-level placement, it caught the edge of the metal cage basket on the shopping cart and exploded in a fetid shower of cabbage and knife-shards of glass.

Mother was dressed in salmon-colored shorts and pale yellow sandals.

One of the glass shards slashed across her leg, mid-calf.

She said, “Oh.”

I had only been here four days, but the way she said it sounded like an apology to me, as though it were her fault for being in that precise spot inside the Sunday Walk-In Grocery Store at the exact moment the jar slipped from the shelf.

We had dropped Max off at school earlier. I was not enrolled yet, because the officials at William E. Shuck High School insisted on testing and testing me to determine whether or not I was an idiot, or could speak English, which I could do perfectly well despite my aversion to talking.

“Oh,” Mother said again.

I shifted my weight from foot to foot. I didn’t have any idea what I was supposed to do. Maybe I was an idiot of some kind. But here I was in this grocery store, which may just as well have been some gleaming palace or gilded mosque, watching in confused silence while Mother bled all over the speckled linoleum floor.

It was a nauseating scene; so much so that I vomited, which made everything just that much more repulsive, and Mother said “Oh” again because we were making such a mess on aisle number seven.

Mother reached into her purse and gave me a handkerchief so I could wipe my face. The handkerchief smelled like perfume and mint chewing gum. Then she pressed some wadded napkins into the cut on her leg.

A clerk wearing a brown apron came running up the aisle toward us. I thought he was mad because of all the mess we’d made, but he was most concerned about the injury to Mother’s leg.

“We’re calling an ambulance!” he said. “Please sit down!”

And he flailed his arms as though he were swimming toward us.

But Mother said, “No. No. I’ll be fine! I’m so sorry for all this.”

And while the man pleaded with her, bent forward so she could press her soaked napkins against the wound, she grabbed my clammy hand in hers and led me out to the car.

“I’m sorry. This is so embarrassing, Ariel,” she said as we climbed in.

We did not make it home. Mother passed out behind the wheel less than a mile from the Sunday Walk-In Grocery, due to all the blood she’d lost.

She was like that.

- - -

Here is Joseph Stalintelling the melting man what he had to do.

Joseph Stalin’s voice came from the air vents on the dashboard of the melting man’s recycled U-Haul moving van. Joseph Stalin also spoke to the melting man through the radio.

The melting man tried to do anything he could to make Joseph Stalin shut up.

He removed the radio at a rest stop near Amarillo, Texas, and left it dangling wires atop the hand dryer in the men’s toilet, but Joseph Stalin’s voice still came through the old speakers.

At the same time Leonard Fountain—the melting man—crossed the border between Oklahoma and Arkansas, Joseph Stalin told him this: “They are coming to get you, Leonard. You know that. You must not let them catch you.”

Leonard Fountain drove his recycled U-Haul truck all the way from Mexico City, where he’d assembled the biggest bomb he’d ever seen at a rented flat on the top floor of an apartment house across the street from one of the sixteen Holiday Inns in the city.

Leonard Fountain believed he had to stop the Beaver King. The Beaver King was hiding somewhere near a shopping mall called Little America. He knew that, because Joseph Stalin told him all about the Beaver King. The Little America Mall had an animated Statue of Liberty in the center of its welcoming gates. The statue could spin its crowned head around in a full circle, and its torch-bearing arm could lower and flash colorful beams of lights at the dazzled shoppers.

No doubt, had the French been more technologically advanced, the original Statue of Liberty would perform the exact same tricks.

Leonard Fountain had a fascination with bombs. He grew up in Idaho, where kids were naturally expected to blow things up.

What else would you do?

When he was thirteen years old, although he spent the majority of his waking hours playing video games or masturbating, Leonard Fountain helped out his neighbors by blowing up beaver dams.

On his fifteenth birthday, Leonard Fountain, who hadn’t started melting yet, made a remote-controlled bomb from three sticks of dynamite and lashed it to the neck of a dairy cow.

They never found the cow’s head.

Leonard Fountain loved blowing things up.

“They are coming for you, Leonard,” Joseph Stalin said. “There is a drone flying directly above our truck. You can see it. When you look at it, it will disappear.”

Outside Arkadelphia, the melting man pulled the truck onto the shoulder of the highway. He knew what to do. He pretended to be distracted, and then looked up into the sky behind the rear gate on the U-Haul.

Leonard Fountain saw something in the sky.

What he saw was a perfect rectangular prism that hovered soundlessly, fifty feet above his head. The thing was metallic and shiny, about four feet long, and as soon as the melting man focused on it, the thing rotated diagonally and vanished—became invisible.

They were watching Leonard Fountain. Leonard Fountain knew it all along.

From time to time, when he’d get out of the van to pee or sometimes vomit alongside the road, the melting man would suddenly jerk his head around and glance up into the sky, and the little floating box—it resembled a package of tinfoil—would always be there, and then it would turn slightly and disappear.

And it was while the melting man drove through Arkansas, in the direction of Tennessee, that Joseph Stalin became particularly nasty.

“Look at you,” Joseph Stalin scolded. “You’re disgusting. You better get this done before you dissolve into a puddle of pus and goo. Now pay attention.”

Leonard Fountain did not want to pay attention. He drove with an old Hohner Special 20 harmonica in his mouth, and he’d blow the loudest noise through it every time Joseph Stalin said anything about what he wanted the melting man to do. But the harmonica didn’t work. So Leonard Fountain bought two spring-winding kitchen timers at a drugstore and he taped them over his ears with medical gauze, hoping the metallic tick-tick-ticking of them would stop the Communist dictator’s voice.

He thought Joseph Stalin’s voice must have been beamed into his head from a government satellite. What other explanation could there be?

Actually, there was another explanation, but Leonard Fountain never figured it out.

Leonard Fountain was insane and melting, and he needed to blow something up.

- - -

Here we see the family pet—a crow we call Alex.

The bird is named after a barkentine steamer commissioned by the U.S. Navy in the late nineteenth century. The ship became icebound—trapped—during an expedition to discover a fabled open seaway to the North Pole in 1879.

Alex is a product of my American father’s research.

I don’t think the research turned out very well for Alex.

What my father does, I believe, is less research, and perhaps more appropriately called “aimless scientific wandering.”