The Alex Crow. Andrew Smith

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.”

      And he finds things you’d never know were out there.

      Alex is a morbid being, obsessed with his own death, and gruesomely despondent. I know that’s an odd set of qualities for a bird, but Alex should not have been saved to begin with. He is a member of a species that has been extinct for more than a century, and I think all Alex really wants to do is go back to where he’d been pulled from.

      My father, and the company he works for, are tireless in their obsession with saving things from nonexistence, and by doing so, controlling the course of life itself. Unfortunately, sometimes paths and directions can’t be so easily controlled, as the men on the ill-fated steamer Alex Crow found out. And sometimes things don’t want to be saved or brought back from where they’d been trapped.

WE FIVE BOYS OF JUPITER

      It came as no surprise that our interplanetary archery competition was canceled the day Bucky Littlejohn shot himself through the foot with a field point arrow.

      What was surprising, Max—my American brother—told me, was this: No kid before Bucky Littlejohn had ever been cunning enough to devise such a foolproof plan for getting out of Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys.

      “Why didn’t I think of that?” Max said.

      Probably because Max was not as self-destructive or desperate as Bucky Littlejohn, I thought.

      It was also surprising that Bucky Littlejohn did not cry or scream at all as the arrow drilled through his foot all the way to the plastic yellow feathers of the shaft’s fletching. It mounted Bucky Littlejohn like an insect pinned for display to a spreading board, tacking the boy to the soft ground of the lakeside field. And Bucky, transformed into a silent, human version of a draftsman’s compass, spun around and around a bloody pinpoint in his sea-foam green plastic clogs, while he stamped out an impeccable circle with his free right foot.

      So there was an empty bunk that night in the Jupiter cabin of Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys, where Max and I slept with a reduced-to-two additional bunk mates and Larry, our counselor.

      If only the archery contest depended on our team’s willingness to inflict self-injury, we would have beaten the unbloodied boys from the Neptune, Mercury, Mars, Saturn, and Pluto cabins.

      There was no populated Earth cabin at Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys, and the camp’s directors had decided to shut down and abandon the Venus and Uranus cabins as well. Those planets came with too much psychological baggage for teenage boys.

      The night before—our first night at Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys—I felt certain that some terrible mistake had been made. Lying in my dingy bed, in a damp room that smelled of urine and sweat, I couldn’t sleep at all due to the incessant rustling of bedding, and one of our roommates’ depraved sobbing that never slackened in the least.

      I believed that Max and I had erroneously been committed to some