The Troop (14 page)

THE TROOP 121
fear-sick gusts. He may have even spit at them. Dear God, had he actually
spat
on the boys?

Part of him—a shockingly large part—was okay being in here. Perhaps he was unfit for command. Fact: he was paralyzed with hunger. He kept catching whiffs of cotton candy from someplace. His eyes blinked uncontrollably. He kept hearing his mother, dead six years now, calling him home for supper.
Timmy, chowder’s ready!

Eat,
said this funny little voice. It wasn’t HAl or the undervoice. This one was different—sly and insistent, like baby rats clawing the insides of his head.

But there’s nothing to eat in here,
he told the voice.
Sure there is
.
There’s always things to eat, silly.
The rats kept clawing, clawing; before long they’d claw through

the soft meat of his brains and scratch through the bone of his skull. Tim pictured it: his skull bulging, his scalp and hair stirring with antic life, the skin splitting with the sound of rotten upholstery as a tide of hairless pink ratlings spilled from the slit, slick with blood and grayish brain-curds, squealing shrilly as they sheet clumsily down his face, past his unblinking eyes, bumping and squalling over his lips spread in a vacant smile.

Okay,
he answered that funny niggling voice.
But what should I eat?

Oh, eat anything,
it said with cold reasonableness.
Any old thing you can find.
The closet was wallpapered. Who the hell wallpapered a closet? The paper was torn in flimsy tatters. He tweezed a curl between his fingers. It ripped down the wall with a lovely zippering sound.
He placed the strip of wallpaper on his tongue. The ancient paste was vaguely sweet. He swallowed hungrily.
Lovely,
the voice said.
Just lovely. Now eat more.
Tim did as the voice asked.
Peeling and eating and peeling and eating.
The funny little voice was easy to obey. It didn’t ask for much and what it did request was simple to accomplish.
Just
eat.
And eat.
And eat.
A body settled against the other side of the door. Tim licked his paper-cut lips; his tongue had gone thick and gluey with paste. He whispered:
“max? Is that you?”
Silence.
“newt? ephraim?”
A song—sung in a low mocking warble:

Nobody loves me
Everybody hates me
I’m going to the garden to eat worms, to eat worms Big fat juicy ones, long thin slimy ones
Itsy-bitsy crawly-wawly woooorms.

THe siNgeR
was plugging up the space between the door and the floor.
Shelley?
Tim’s precious bar of light vanished in heart-stopping chunks.
“no,” he moaned. “What are you doing? no, please, no, please don’t . . .”
He pushed his fingers under the door to dislodge the barrier but his fingertips met with resistance. next came the
whooonk
ing sound of duct tape stripped off a roll. The last meager particles of light filching under the door disappeared entirely. Tim sat in total darkness.
He opened his mouth to beg for his light back. It was all he
had,
for God’s sake. The childlike plea died on his lips. Somewhere down inside of him—not too far down, either—he could feel that relentless squirming. His teeth snapped shut.
EAT.
The voice wasn’t so small or funny anymore.
Tim did as it said. He wept softly without realizing.

18

sHelleY Placed
the tape back in the kitchen drawer. His heart was beating a little heavier than normal. His eyes were hot and watery with dull excitement. The Scoutmaster was making faint pleading noises from inside the closet.

Shelley tried very hard not to laugh. He did not think the Scoutmaster’s noises were very funny—Shelley didn’t find anything funny, really. not ever.

He inhaled through the alcohol-soaked gauze over his mouth and nose. He understood the danger—he could practically
see
the microscopic eggs ringing the scotch bottle’s rim, the one Kent had drunk from last night. He saw the eggs hovering in the cool air above the dead man’s chest. This didn’t scare him. If anything it excited him.

He glanced at his handiwork on the closet door. He’d wedged two dish towels underneath and taped them in place. now the Scoutmaster had no light at all. If the other boys asked why he did it, he already had an excuse: Shelley had heard the Scoutmaster’s consumptive hacking and sealed him in so they wouldn’t all get what Tim clearly had.

Shelley opened the cabin door and slipped quietly outside. A fine band of golden light stripped across the horizon. The others still slept round the fire.

He went round the side of the cabin and found a spiderweb suspended between the east-facing wall and the overhang: an intricate hexagonal threadwork hung with beads of morning dew.

Shelley plucked a strand of gossamer near the web’s center as if he were strumming the world’s most fragile guitar. A spider crawled out of a knothole in the log. Its legs pushed out of the hole as one solid thing, all bundled tight like the ribs of a shut umbrella. To Shelley, it looked like an alien flower coming into bloom.

This one was big. Its bell-shaped body was the size of a Tic Tac. Its color reminded Shelley of the boiled organ meat his mother fed their dog, Shogun. The spider picked its way nimbly across its web. It had mistaken Shelley’s gentle plucking for a trapped insect.

Shelley pulled a slender barbecue lighter from his pocket. He always carried one. once, his teacher mr. Finnerty had caught him burning ants near the bike racks after school. The fat carpenter ants had made weird
pop!
sounds as they exploded: like Shelley’s morning bowl of rice Krispies.

mr. Finnerty confiscated his lighter. He’d given Shelley a cold, revolted look as if he’d just spied a caterpillar in his slipper. Shelley smiled back complacently.

He’d simply bought another lighter. He bought one every few weeks from different stores around town. He also bought mousetraps and ant traps. one time, a shopkeep had remarked:
You must live with the pied piper, son, all these mousetraps you buy.
That had concerned Shelley a little, and he’d made sure to steer clear of that store. It wasn’t wise to establish a pattern.

He flicked the ignitor. A wavering orange finger spurted from the metallic tip. Shelley worked carefully. It wasn’t a matter of savoring it— he’d done this so many times that his heartbeat barely fluctuated. He was simply methodical by nature.

He touched flame to the web’s topmost edges. The gossamer burned incredibly fast—like fuses zipping toward a powder keg—trailing orange filaments that left a smoky vapor in the air. The web folded over upon itself like the finest lace. The spider tried to scurry up its collapsing web, but it was like trying to climb a ladder that was simultaneously ablaze and falling into a sinkhole.

Shelley idly wondered if the spider felt any confusion or terror—did insects even feel emotions? He sort of hoped so, but there was no way to be sure.

He set fire to the web’s remaining moorings. The web fell like a silken parachute with the spider trapped inside. Shelley harassed the spider through the grass, nipping it with the flame. He liked it best when he could sizzle a few legs off or melt their exoskeletons so some of their insides leaked out. He tried not to kill them. He preferred to alter them. It was more interesting. The game lasted longer.

He harried the spider until it scuttled under the cabin. He exhaled deeply and blinked his heavy-lidded eyes. Soon the spider would crawl back to its hole and build another web. Spiders were very predictable. When it did, Shelley might return and do it all over again.

Shelley scuffed his feet over the charred grass. It was best to leave no evidence.
Take only photos, leave only footprints.
He worked carefully, reflecting on that fact that this—what he’d just started with the Scoutmaster—was something new entirely. Something terribly exciting.

Spiders couldn’t tattle on you; mice couldn’t squeal—well, they
could
 . . . but now Tim, he might just tell the boys what Shelley had done. But Shelley had an innate sense of leverage, a sixth sense he must’ve been born with; he understood that people in compromised positions were less believable. And even if the boys
did
believe Tim, or only a few of them—max might; newt
definitely
would—well, Shelley wasn’t sure that mattered now. He felt the pull of the island in his bones, a strong current anchoring him to it. The sun crawled over the water and Shelley felt this day, which had only begun, might go on forever.

The boys had not yet stirred. When they did, talk would turn to tiresome matters: when the boat would show up, how badly their folks would flip out, the identity of the dead man in the cabin. most of all they’d talk about how they’d be safe, real soon.

But Shelley was positive the boat wasn’t coming.
Shelley wasn’t particularly intelligent, at least according to the methods society had developed to measure that. He’d scored low on his IQ test. In school, he earned Cs and the odd D. His teachers gazed upon his pockmarked cheeks and slug-gray eyes and pictured Shelley fifteen years later in a pair of grease-spotted overalls, his slack and pallid moonface staring up from the oil-change pit at a mr. lube.
Shelley was aware of their opinions, but it didn’t trouble him. Shelley was actually happy with this perception. It made it easier to engage in the behaviors that gave him pleasure—though he failed to experience pleasure in the ways others did.
Shelley was far more perceptive than most gave him credit for. His impassive face was the perfect disguise. His expression hadn’t changed when he’d seen the dead man on the chesterfield, but his practical mind had immediately aligned it with the black helicopter that had hovered overhead during the hike.
He had also aligned the thick white rope that had come out of the dead man with the thin white rope that had come out of his dog’s bum a few years ago.
Shogun, the family sheltie, had gotten into some spoiled chuck in a neighbor’s trash can. He passed a seven-foot worm weeks later. Shelley was home alone when it happened. He heard Shogun yowling in the backyard. He found the dog squatted in the zinnias. A white tube was spooling out of his butt, some of it already coiled up in the cocoa shells his father had spread over the flower beds.
Shelley crouched down, completely fascinated. He flicked at the white tube, mesmerized. The thing wriggled at his touch. Shelley giggled. He flicked it again. Shogun reared and snapped at him. Shelley waited, then touched the tube again. Flicking and flicking it gently with one finger. It was slick with the dog’s digestive juices. Shogun mewled pitifully and craned his skull over his haunches to stare at Shelley with wounded, rheumy eyes.
After shitting it out, Shogun tried to bury the worm. Shelley shooed the dog inside. He wanted to study it. It was dying very fast. Its head was a flat spoon shape. many smaller spoon shapes branched off the biggest spoon: it looked like a Venus flytrap—the only plant Shelley found even remotely interesting. each of the spoons had a slit down the middle studded with tiny translucent spikes. That must’ve been how it had moored to the dog’s intestines . . . fascinating.
Shelley thought back to that sunny afternoon in the garden, Shogun’s plaintive yipping as that greedy tube spooled out of its bottom. He was filled with a certainty as keen as he’d ever experienced.
The boat wouldn’t come. not today. not for a while. maybe not ever.
And that was just fine with him. That meant he could play his games.
And if he played them patiently enough, carefully enough, he might be the only one left to greet a boat when—
if?
—it did show up.
He turned his vaporous test-pattern face up to the new sun. It was warm and not unpleasant. It would be an unseasonably hot day. new life could grow in this kind of heat. He walked back to the fire to rejoin the others.

19

WHeN THe
boys awoke, the cooler was gone.

It contained all the food Scoutmaster Tim set aside. Wieners and buns. A six-pack of Gatorade. A bag of trail mix. Hershey’s Kisses. All they had left until the boat arrived. max had placed it next to the fire the previous night. When they woke up, it was gone.

“Where the hell is it?” ephraim said. He stamped around the campsite, knuckling sleep crust out of his eyes. “I’m hungry, man.”
The others roused themselves slowly. Their sleep had been fitful, thanks to the ominous howls and sly scuttlings of the wild creatures lurking beyond the fire’s glow.
newt said: “The cooler’s missing.”
“no shit, Captain obvious,” ephraim said. “Which one of you guys took it? Was it you, newt, you lardo?”
newton beheld ephraim with bruised eyes. “eef, why would I . . .?”
“Because you’re a big fat fat-ass,” ephraim stated simply.
“newt slept next to me the whole night,” max said; he knew it was wise to calm his best friend down before he “lost it,” as eef’s mom would say. “If he’d tried to take the cooler, I’d have heard him.”
Shelley came round the side of the cabin.
“Where the hell were you?” ephraim said, the challenge clear.
“Hadda take a piss.”
“What happened to the cooler?”
Shelley set his flat-hanging face upon ephraim’s. “Dunno, boss.”
ephraim balled his fists. He wanted to plant one between Shelley’s cowish eyes. But he was distantly fearful that his fist would sink right into the placid emptiness of Shelley’s face. It would be like sinking into a bowl of warm dough studded with busted lightbulbs. Worst of all he got the queasy feeling that Shelley wouldn’t exactly mind it—and that his face would
eat
his fist. Dissolve it somehow, like acid.
ephraim inhaled deeply, willing himself to stay calm. His mother said he had a temper just like his father’s—the father ephraim hadn’t seen in years. The father who’d headed out to catch the afternoon stakes at Charlottetown downs and never came home. The shithead who’d busted his own son’s arm and didn’t even remember. The father who was currently a guest of the province at the Sleepy Hollow correctional center following a string of convenience store thefts—one of which netted the princely sum of $5.02.
He was also the man whose footsteps many figured that ephraim would inevitably follow.
The apple never falls far from the tree,
went the whispers around town. It didn’t help that ephraim looked almost exactly like his father: the same antifreeze-green eyes and open-pored olive complexion.
And, ephraim knew, the same temper.
one afternoon he and his mother had come across a construction site. An open sewer with a nest of hoses running down into it. Workmen had set up a large reflective warning sign. The top left side of the sign was crimped so that it read: