Manny was good for it all, was always game.
Until we kind of just left him behind like a baseball glove we didn’t need anymore. Like a tricycle we’d outgrown. Like a friend we’d decided we didn’t need to talk to anymore.
I can still see his hand lifted in pre-wave, though. Just waiting for someone to drive by, notice him.
We deserved him coming for us, yeah.
I’m just sorry it had to start with Shanna, who wasn’t even in on the prank.
But if Manny’d started with me, then a whole lot more people would have ended up dead, so, yeah, sorry, Shanna. Guess it sort of had to be like this. The greatest good, all that, which is also just a way of saying the least bad, which, I know, a truck running off the service road and through your window at sixty miles per hour, that’s pretty bad, right?
But yeah, I could have maybe called to warn you, sure. Probably I even should have. And okay, I didn’t have it all figured out so much yet then, but, I mean, I could have told you about that rattling I was hearing in my backyard anyway. Particularly around the shed. The rakes and shovels, the tomato planters my mom always pins so many of her hopes on.
What I didn’t tell you was that my dad sent me out there to chase whatever raccoon or dog away, but instead of a raccoon or dog, I saw a flash of Band-Aid-pale skin in the bushes for a moment. My heart nearly stopped. I froze, looked harder, finally cued in to a painted-on eye watching from a break between the bushes.
Manny.
When we’d been posing him here and there and everywhere, he’d always been stiff, hard to make do what we needed him to.
The level his eye was at now, though, I had to imagine the rest of him crouched down like at the starting blocks for a race. Meaning his fingertips, which had always been more like the front edge of a paddle, had to be holding him up, had to be able to spread wide enough to do that. And his feet would have to be a body length behind him almost, ready to blast him up and away from getting caught doing whatever he was doing.
Was he trembling from the effort of holding this awkward position? Was that trembling making the front half of one of his thighs start to calve off, the dowel in there at just the right angle to slip? Was he still wearing our dads’ cast-off clothes or was he naked now, which doesn’t really matter for him?
Was he happy to see me?
I was still thinking that, then.
So, yeah, after walking out of the theater like a normal human person, he’d—he hadn’t had anywhere to go, anywhere to be, so he’d gone feral, right? Maybe he’d lived on the golf course for a few nights, then remembered where our old fort was back in the trees and gone there, hoping to find us still being kids, still ready to play, still ready for more and more hilarity. But he had to be just operating on dim memories, I figured. And those memories had brought him here, to my backyard, so he could sneak into the garage, maybe. So he could ride away on my dad’s Kawasaki, save us the trouble of having to deal with the guilt of him always standing out there at the edge of things. That’s the kind of guy Manny would have been, I mean, if he could have been human.
I couldn’t leave the garage open for him, though. Even if he could get my dad’s motorcycle started, he wouldn’t know how to ride it, not really. He’d lay it over the same as my dad had, and his limbs and head and body would go spilling every which way, and I’d get busted for it, of course, because he couldn’t have done this himself, he’s just a thing, Sawyer, try telling the truth for once, why don’t you?
All the same, I couldn’t let him starve, could I?
I whispered to him to wait, then went inside, scavenged for what I imagined a mannequin might eat. It turned out to be bubble wrap and packing peanuts and mayonnaise.
I walked two steps past the light in the backyard, my heart pounding, dropped it all and ran, then came back thirty minutes later to tear the corners off the mayonnaise packets.
The next morning it was all still there, but it was scattered and smeared around, like Manny had looked in this junk for the food part, not found it. But the shed door was swinging back and forth in the breeze, and it had definitely been shut the night before. For absolute sure, because if it wasn’t, the raccoons were always out there in their black masks, waiting.
I tiptoed in, saying Manny’s name not really hopefully, but like a shield, I guess. Like reminding him I’d known him, once upon a time.
He wasn’t there, but my mom’s jumbo bag of generic Miracle-Gro had its side ripped open in the most obscene way, most of its pellets not spilling out, just plain gone. As many of them that slick plastic fingers would have been able to get out, anyway.
“You eat that?” I said out loud to him.
“Eat what?” my dad said back, standing in the open doorway right behind me, then, before I could answer, he asked if I’d seen his Redskins cap, and my traitor of a brain kicked up the rakish angle he usually wore it at, and then suddenly knew why I’d put it at that angle on Manny.
“Maybe Mom put it in the dishwasher again,” I told him without looking, and that was enough, he faded like dads do, leaving me with this plundered bag.
“You’re growing, aren’t you?” I said to the idea of Manny.
The idea of him nodded back.
He was hungry, he was growing, and he sort of remembered us.
That combination left me feeling a certain kind of uneasy. A suspicious, dready sort of uneasy.
And then that Mack truck veered off the road into Shanna’s room. Unrelated, right?
Wrong.
Because her login was still on my old laptop, I spidered over to her account to see what she’d been pirating the night those headlights came through her window. My idea, I guess, was that if the download had been interrupted, I could finish it for her, at least give her that much closure.
It had been the same superhero movie we’d taken Manny to. I guess—I guess, working there, she only ever saw the credits and the after-scene, right? And, since we’d all watched the first two together so many times, now that she was shut off from us, pissed at us like she should have been, she could still sort of hang out with us by watching the third movie. Or maybe she just wanted to see it, yeah. Mom’s right, I always do make things more complicated, see motivations and agendas where there’s not much of anything.
Still, this movie?
“No, no, no,” I said, and shut my laptop, held it down with my hand like the truth was trying to rise up, force itself on me.
That it was that movie downloading, it told me all I needed to know about how the world was working.
What had happened was some trucker had been lollygagging down the road half-asleep—“lollygag” is my dad’s second-favorite word, and his favorite for his first son—but that trucker had been just driving half-asleep like they do, zombies of the highway, and he’d taken the exit without even registering he was leaving the interstate, and then something that had been crouched down on the road in front of him stood up all at once: a mannequin juiced on Miracle-Gro, grown up to sixteen or eighteen feet tall, probably. Maybe twenty. Anybody would have swerved away from hitting a walking nightmare like that, wouldn’t they?
Shanna was surely already dead by the time Manny stood up into those headlights, though. He had killed her somehow, probably just strangled her with his plastic hands, then directed the truck through her wall to cover his tracks. That was why they hadn’t been able to properly tell what smear of meat was her, what was her mom, which was her little brother, what was dog and what was human.