The Troop (2 page)

THE TROOP 7

If this gets out, it’ll make Typhoid Mary look like Mary Poppins.
He was not an evil man. He’d simply been trapped and had done what any man in his position might do: he’d run. And they were coming for him. Would they try to capture him, return him to edgerton? He wondered if they’d dare do that now.
He wasn’t going back. He’d hide and stay hidden.
He doubled over, nearly spilling over the side, hunger pangs gnawing into his gut. He blinked stinging tears out of his eyes and saw a dot of light dancing on the horizon.
An island? A fire?

NATURAl REsOURCEs CANAdA GEOGRAPHICAl sURvEY REPORT
Falstaff Island, Prince Edward Island

Situated fifteen kilometers off the northern point of the main landmass. Highest point: 452 meters above sea level. 10.4 kilometers in circumference.

Two beachheads: one on the west-facing headland, one on the northeastern outcrop. A granite cliff dominates the northern shore, dropping some 200 meters into a rocky basin.

Terrain consists of hardy brush-grasses, shrubs, jimsonweed, staghorn sumac, and lowland blueberry. Vegetation growth stunted by high saline content in the island’s water table. Topsoil eroded by high winds and precipitation.

Home to thriving avian, marine, mammal, reptile, and insect life. Pelicans, gulls, and other seafowl congregate on the northern cliffs. Chief stocks: salmon, cod, bream, sea bass. Sea lions bask off the island in the summer, drawing pods of orcas. Small but hardy indigenous populations of raccoon, skunk, porcupine, and coyote. These specimens are likewise smaller and leaner than their mainland counterparts.

A single winterized dwelling, government-owned and -maintained, acts as an emergency shelter or host to the occasional educational junket.

Absent of full-time human occupation.

2

Tim Riggs—
Scoutmaster Tim, as his charges called him—crossed the cabin’s main room to the kitchen, fetching a mug from the cupboard. unzipping his backpack, he found the bottle of Glenlivet.

The boys were in bed—not
asleep,
mind you; they’d stay up telling ghost stories half the night if he allowed it. And often, he did allow it. nobody would ever label him a killjoy and besides, this was the closest thing to a yearly vacation a few of these boys ever got. It was a vacation for Tim, too.

He poured himself a spine-stiffening belt of scotch and stepped onto the porch. Falstaff Island lay still and tranquil under the blanket of night. Surf boomed against the beachhead two hundred yards down the gentle grade, a sound like earthbound thunder.

mosquitoes hummed against the porch screen. moths battered their powdery bodies against the solitary lightbulb. The night cool, the light of the moon falling through a lacework of bare branches. none of the trees were too large—the island’s base was bare rock pushed up from the ocean, a sparse scrim of soil on its surface. The trees had a uniformly deformed look, like children nourished on tainted milk.

Tim rolled the scotch around in his mouth. As he was the sole doctor on Prince edward Island’s north shore, it wasn’t proper that he be caught imbibing publicly. But here, miles from his job and the duty it demanded, a drink seemed natural. essential, even.

He relished this yearly trip. Some might find his reasoning strange—wasn’t he isolated enough, living alone in his drafty house on the Cape? But this was a different kind of isolation. For three days, he and the boys would be alone. one cabin, a few trails. A boat dropped them off with their supplies earlier this evening; it would return on Sunday night.

It almost hadn’t happened. The weekend forecast was calling for a storm; weather reports had it rolling in off the northern sea, one of those thunderhead-studded monsters that infrequently swept across the island province—half storm, half tornado, they’d tear shingles off houses and snap saplings at the dirt line. But the latest Doppler maps had it veering east into the Atlantic, where it would expend its fury upon the vast empty water.

As a precaution, Tim had ensured that the marine radio was fully charged; if the skies began to threaten, he’d radio the mainland for an early pickup. In truth, he disliked the necessity of the shortwave radio. Tim had strict rules for this outing. no phones. no portable games. He’d made the boys turn out their pockets on the dock at north Point to ensure they weren’t smuggling any item that’d link them to the mainland.

But considering the weather, the shortwave radio was a necessary evil. As the Scout handbook said:
Always be prepared.
A bark of laughter from the bunkroom. Kent? ephraim? Tim let it go. At their age, boys were creatures of enormous energy: machines that ran on testosterone and raw adrenaline. He could barge in there, shushing and tut-tutting, reminding them of the long day ahead of them tomorrow—but why? They were having fun, and energy was never in short supply among that group.
Fact was, this trip was as necessary for Tim as it was for his charges. He was unmarried and childless—a situation that, at forty-two, in a small town harboring precious few dating prospects, he didn’t expect to change. He’d grown up in ontario and moved to PeI a few years after his residency, buying a house on the Cape, learning how to string a lobster trap—
See? I’m making a genuine effort!—
and settling into the island rhythms. Hell, his voice had even picked up a hint of the native twang. Yet he’d forever be viewed as a “come-from-away.” People were unfailingly friendly and respectful of his skills, but his veins swam with mainlander blood: he bore the taint of Toronto, the Big Smoke, the snobby haves to PeI’s hardscrabble have-nots. Around here, it’s as much a case of
who
you’re from as
where
you’re from: bloodlines ran thick and the island held close its own.
mercifully, his Scouts didn’t care that Tim was a “come-from-away.” He was everything they could possibly want in a leader: knowledgeable and serene, exuding confidence while bolstering their own; he’d learned the native flora and fauna, knew how to string a leg snare and light a one-match fire, but most crucially, he treated them with respect—if the boys were not quite yet his equals, Tim gave every impression that he’d welcome them as such once they’d passed the requisite boyhood rituals. Their parents trusted Tim; their families were all patients at his practice in north Point.
The boys were tight-knit. The five of them had come up together through Beavers, Cubs, Scouts, and now Venturers. Tim had known them since their first lodge meeting: a quintet of five-year-olds hesitantly reciting the Beaver pledge—
I promise to love God and take care of the world
.
But this would be their last hurrah. Tim understood why. Scouts was . . . well,
dorky.
Kids of this generation didn’t want to dress in beige uniforms, knot their kerchiefs, and earn Pioneering badges. The current movement was overpopulated with socially maladjusted little turds or grating keeners whose sashes were festooned with merits.
But these five boys under Tim had remained engaged in Scouting simply because they
wanted
to be. Kent was one of the most popular boys in school. ephraim and max were well liked, too. Shelley was an odd duck, sure, but nobody gave him grief.
And newton . . . well, newt was a nerd. A good kid, an incredibly smart kid, but let’s face it, a full-blown nerd.
It wasn’t simply that the boy was overweight; that was a conquerable social obstacle, no worse than a harelip or pimples or shabby clothes. no, poor newt was simply
born
a nerd, as certain unfortunates are. Had Tim been in the delivery room, he’d’ve sensed it: an ungrippable essence, unseen but deeply felt, dumping out of the babe’s body like a pheromone. Tim pictured the obstetrician handing newton to his exhausted mother with a doleful shake of his head.
Congratulations, Ms. Thornton, he’s a healthy baby nerd. He’s bound to be a wonderful man, but for the conceivable future he’ll be a first-rank dweeb—a dyed-in-the-wool Poindexter.
All boys gave off a scent, Tim found—although it wasn’t solely an olfactory signature; in Tim’s mind it was a powerful emanation that enveloped his every sense. For instance, Bully-scent: acidic and adrenal, the sharp whiff you’d get off a pile of old green-fuzzed batteries. or Jock-scent: groomed grass, crushed chalk, and the locker room funk wafting off a stack of exercise mats. Kent Jenks pumped out Jock-scent in waves. other boys, like max and ephraim, were harder to define— ephraim often gave off a live-wire smell, a power transformer exploding in a rainstorm.
Shelley . . . Tim considered between sips of scotch and realized the boy gave off no smell at all—if anything the vaporous, untraceable scent of a sterilized room in a house long vacant of human life.
newton, though, stunk to high heaven of nerd: an astringent and unmistakable aroma, a mingling of airless basements and dank library corners and tree forts built for solitary habitation, of dust smoldering inside personal computers, the licorice tang of asthma puffer mist and the vaguely narcotic smell of model glue—the ineffable scent of isolation and lonely forbearance. over time a boy’s body changed, too: his shoulders stooped to make their owner less visible, the way defenseless animals alter their appearance to avoid predators, while their eyes took on a flinching, hunted cast.
newton couldn’t help it. A trait burdened to his DnA helix, inexcisable from his other attributes—which, Tim gloomily noted, were numerous but not valuable at his age: newton was unfailingly kind and polite, read books, and made obvious attempts at self-betterment— the equivalent of an air-raid siren blaring in a tranquil neighborhood:
NEeeeerd-AleeeRT! NEeeeerd-AleeeRT!
Tim felt incredibly protective of newton and was saddened by his inability to help . . . but an adult protecting a boy only opened that boy up to further torments.
Tim stepped off the porch to turn off the generator. mosquitoes zeroed in; he felt them at the back of his neck like drunks at the bar set to guzzle their fill. He slapped them as he walked around the back of the cabin, his fingers brushing the log wall for balance—he’d drank that scotch too fast . . .
Here they came, the mosquitoes alighting on every bare inch of skin, sinking in their proboscises and injecting itchy poison. He stumbled upon the generator, barking his shin on its metal housing, fumbling blindly for the switch while swatting at the hovering bloodsuckers; after an increasingly distracted search—he paused to wave at what felt like a massing sheet of insects—he thumbed it off.
The porch light dimmed. In the new darkness, the mosquitoes seemed to multiply exponentially; Tim felt them everywhere, their bloodless legs dancing on his flesh, the maddening whine of their papery wings filling his ears. He slapped wildly, barely tamping down the sudden yelp that rose in his throat. A semisolid wall pulsed on every side—a buzzing, biting, poisonous shroud. In his ears, tickling his nose, fretting at the edges of his eyes.
“Bloodthirsty bastards . . .”
Grasping blindly for the porch door, Tim flung it open and staggered inside. He slapped himself down the way a ranch-hand whaps the dust off after tumbling from a horse, relishing the soft crumple of the mosquitoes’ bodies.
Tim let out a ragged exhale that ended as a mirthless laugh. His hands were sticky with pulped insects. He thought about Gulliver tied down by thousands of little People—a scene that had never stirred fear in him until now. The prospect of being beset by thousands,
millions,
of tiny assailants was actually quite terrifying.
In the new silence, he heard a steady drone rolling across the water—the sound of an outboard motor. An emergency on the mainland? no. Someone would have radioed him first.
He went inside and checked the shortwave radio. It gave off a low hiss that indicated a functioning frequency. outside, the motor’s burr intensified.
Tim lit a Coleman lamp and sat on the porch. He clawed at the whitened bumps on his neck, wrists, and hands. A shiver rolled up his legs and through his gut, which clenched painfully as gooseflesh broke out on his arms. He laughed—a confused, gooselike
whoonk!
—and smoothed his hands over his skin, which was pebbled like orange rind. His bladder tightened with piss as the pleasant scotch taste soured in his mouth.
It is a fact that cannot be denied: the wickedness of others becomes our own wickedness because it kindles something evil in our own hearts.
Carl Jung. undergrad psychology. Jung, Tim would later conclude, was a blowhard and a crank and anyway, his theories were of limited value to a small-town GP whose day-to-day consisted of administering flu shots and excising ingrown nails from the toes of windburnt fishermen. As such, Tim had forgotten the name of Jung’s book and the name of the professor who’d taught it—but the quote came to him whole cloth, the words leaping from a dark cubbyhole in his memory.
The wickedness of others becomes our own . . .
Tim riggs stood in the screened patio, vaguely uneasy for no reason he could lay a finger on—the wind called a mordant note through the sickly trees while other, less explicable sounds scraped up the beachhead toward him—waiting for that unknown wickedness to arrive.

EAT EAT—
Dark. So dark.
Empty.
Before, there had been light. He’d been following it. moth to a

flame. now it was gone. Just this insane eye-clawing darkness . . . and the hunger.

The man crawled up a stony beach, skidding on the water-smooth pebbles. The rocks were slick with cold, snotlike algae. He scooped it up and shoveled it into his mouth, sucking the dark green strings through his lips like a child slurping egg noodles.

There!
Skittering along, its exoskeleton glossed in the moonlight. A sand crab. His hand closed over it—its ocean-coldness wept into his flesh—and stuffed it between his lips. He felt it dancing along his tongue with its hairy little legs. He bit down. A gout of salty goo squirted in his mouth. Its pincer snipped the tip of his tongue in a death spasm, bringing the penny-bright taste of blood; he swallowed the twitching bits convulsively, the spiny exoskeleton tearing into the soft tissues of his throat—which felt so
thin
now, nothing but a fleshy drainpipe, the skin stretched tight as crepe paper over his esophageal tube.