The Troop (5 page)

It was the same at school. Kent was the kid who’d butt in front of you at the water fountain—
literally
butting, a solid hip-check that’d send you flying—saying
I got cuts
with a chummy backslap, his voice a full octave lower than anybody else’s. The boy who’d grab your sandwich off the wax paper your mom wrapped it in, take a humongous bite, and go
You mind?,
flecks of egg salad spraying between his lips. He wasn’t truly mean-spirited, though. max thought of him as a Saint Bernard: big and slobbery, a bit dumb and oblivious to his own strength, but his heart was usually in the right place. Kent constantly threw down these gauntlets, though, and dared you to run them. most days it was easier to surrender your spot in line or bite of sandwich.

lately Kent had been testing how far he could challenge adults. He’d raise his hand in class, grinning sunnily while asking the teacher:
Are you suuure?
He’d started to call teachers by their first names, too. It wasn’t mr. reilly in homeroom anymore—it was earl. The boys were waiting for the day when Kent sauntered into the teacher’s lounge, took a bite of the gym teacher’s lunch, and said,
You mind, George?

When Kent got out of bed and crossed the bunkroom to the door, only newton had spoke up.
“Better not, Kent. The Scoutmaster—”
“Shut up, flapjack,” Kent had shot back, so casually that you couldn’t even call his tone dismissive: more like how you’d shush a yappy dog. “If I wanted your opinion I’d—”
“For real, bro,” ephraim had said. “Don’t go out there.”
Kent blinked, his head cocked at an inquisitive angle. ephraim was the only boy who worried him—there was something a bit crazy about eef, this jittery powder-keg quality that made Kent uneasy.
“Gimme one reason why not, man.”
ephraim just said: “Because.”
“That’s it? That’s the reason—
because
?”
“Yep,” ephraim had said.
“Thanks, eef,” said newt.
ephraim said: “Shut up, pork chop.”
next Scoutmaster Tim had entered the bunkroom and told them that their asses better remain in bed. Soon after came the commotion: the stranger’s scream
—”Reeeeaaagh!”—
followed by a scuffle, a crash, and the acrid smell of smoke wafting into their room, mingling with the sweetly rotten stench.
Kent had leapt out of bed, attacking the door with savage shoulderbutts; it wouldn’t budge, but Kent kept flinging his body at it, the way he always did—hurling his unthinking bulk at any obstacle with the ironclad surety it’d eventually buckle. He’d only quit when the Scoutmaster threatened to tell his father; Kent stepped away from the door breathing like a bull, his wide-set and faintly bovine eyes reflecting dull smokeless hate.
Around four in the morning, newton had sat bolt upright in bed. He’d been awoken by the noise of cupboard doors opening and slamming shut. next had come . . . crunching sounds? monotonous, plodding, softly grinding.
“max?” he’d whispered. “max, you awake?”
“Go to bed, newt,” max said from the bunk below, his voice so thick with sleep that his words ran together:
GotobedNewt
.
newton had been shocked that max and the others were able to sleep with those smells and awful noises beyond the door . . . maybe max was just pretending to sleep to avoid talking about them. maybe he’d thought sunlight was a cure-all.

HOuRs laTeR
sunlight filtered through the sap-yellowed window, sparkling the dust motes that hung in the stagnant air. The boys rose and dressed silently, pulling on bulky sweaters and lacing their boots. ephraim caught max’s eye, raised a quizzical eyebrow, and mouthed the words:

You okay
?
max shrugged, smiled wanly, finished double-knotting his boots. like the others, he’d caught a whiff of the rank sweetness drifting in
from the main room, where the Scoutmaster slept . . . and he’d heard
the crunching sounds, too.
max’s grandfather was a farmer. The past few summers he’d paid
max and ephraim seventeen dollars a day to dump chicken bones into
“Jaws,” a stainless steel industrial grinder in the barn. He purchased the bones from a poultry processing plant in Summerside, a dollar a sack. legally it was called “animal byproduct,” same as cowflops, hog shit, and hen feathers. max and ephraim would slit the woven-fiber sacks and dump the clattering bones into Jaws’s hopper. It was gross, mildly disturbing work—
Island
work, wearying and melancholic, and there was
an expectation that all boys should enjoy it.
At least they got to do it together. max and eef were best friends.
They’d been so for years informally, but a few months ago they’d cemented it: they’d both notched a shallow cut in their thumbs with
ephraim’s Swiss Army knife, pressed them together, and solemnly intoned:
Forever friends.
They were one better than BF’s—they were
FF’s.
once the bones were in the hopper, max’s grandfather would
switch the machine on. The gears made quick work of them; when
the collection receptacle popped open, inside was a drift of fine white
powder.
Bone meal,
max’s grandpa said.
It’s magic, boys—nothing grows plants
any better than bones.
Hearing this, max wondered why farmers didn’t plant potato fields
over cemeteries . . . the answer had dawned on him before long. last night, lying quietly in bed, max wondered if ephraim was
awake, too. Was he hearing those crunching noises? If so, was he thinking what max was thinking—that it sounded like tiny brittle bones pulverized between the steel teeth of Jaws?

afTeR dRessiNg,
the boys followed Kent into the kitchen.

Tim greeted them in the main room with a wan smile. The strange man lay on the chesterfield, his body covered in blankets. All they could see were the contours of his face: the sunken cheeks and eyes, teeth winking through the blanched fillets of his lips.

Crumbs lay scattered round the easy chair. newton spotted those same crumbs on Tim’s lumberjack vest, though he’d brushed most of them off. An econo-size box of soda crackers lay in the trash can, along with some wadded-up cellophane cracker sleeves.

Tim caught newton’s look. “Yeah . . . attack of the midnight munchies, boys. I had to keep an eye on this guy.”
newt scanned the kitchen. He couldn’t help but notice the busted

radio. A pinworm of dread threaded into his chest.
What if that storm rolled in? What would we do?
He eyed the cabin warily—the frame seemed sturdy enough, but the roof was old. He’d seen what those late autumn storms could do. A few years ago, one of them had ripped across the mainland and dragged a car across the street into a ditch. newt had watched it happen through the window of Dan’s luncheonette on Phillips Street. The car was an ancient Dodge Dart—what the old-timers called “two tons of Detroit rolling iron.” The driver was equally ancient: elgin Tate, a long-retired music teacher. newt had watched him whiteknuckled and greasy-faced behind the wheel as the wind hammered the car amidships, rocking it up on two side wheels, let it fall with an axle-grinding thump, then gusted again and bore it steadily across both lanes into the ditch. The Dart’s tires had been pure
smoking
as Tate tried to muscle it back onto the road, but its hind end tipped over the edge of the ditch, its front wheels canted up and spinning uselessly. once the storm had passed, Tate clambered out the window and staggered onto the road. His gray hair was stuck up in wild corkscrews and he was smiling like a man who’d cheated death.
Hellfire!
he’d shouted at nobody at all.
Hellfire and damnation!

“What are we gonna do?” newt asked.
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out.” Tim hooked his thumb at the stranger. “He’s obviously sick. He also, as you can see, smashed our radio. Why, I don’t know. Could be he’s in trouble—maybe with the law. I certainly don’t know who he is.”
“What about his wallet?” ephraim said.
“I checked.” Tim’s hands groomed each other, an unconscious gesture: one hand washing the other. “His pockets are empty.”
“
He
looks empty,” Shelley said softly.
The boy’s eyes kept flicking to the man, then just as quickly away. newt threw his entire head back as if the very sight repelled his gaze.
“He probably didn’t look like
that
all his life,” said Kent.
“of course not,” Tim snapped, annoyed at Kent’s unalloyed disgust. “As a precaution, I’ve tied his arms and legs. Who knows what else he’d decide to bust up.”
“Yeah, good idea,” Shelley said. “I mean, he could go berserk. Kill us all with a butcher knife.”
Tim glanced at the tall, slender boy with the blank gray eyes. His brow furrowed, then he said, “I have something to ask all of you. I want you to be honest. I promise you I won’t be angry. Tell me: did any of you bring a phone?”
newt said: “You told us not to.”
“I know what I said, newton. But I happen to know that teenage boys don’t always do as they’re told.” He looked at ephraim. “What about it?”
ephraim shook his head. “I thought about it, but . . .”
“Shit,”
Tim hissed, pushing the word through his teeth on a burst of pent-up air. He tasted a weird sweetness, a saccharine tang on his tongue. “listen, boys, we’re going to be fine. really. This is unexpected, is all. my only concern is that this guy needs medical attention in short order. I don’t have the proper equipment.”
“You said he came by boat,” said Kent.
Tim had already been down to the dock at sunup. The boat wouldn’t start. The spark plugs were gone. Could this man have unscrewed them and  .  .  . what? Thrown them into the ocean? Hidden them somewhere? Why do that?
“There’s a boat, yes,” Tim said for now. “oliver mcCanty’s, by the look of it. You know how big it is. We can’t all ride back in it.”
“A few of us could,” said Kent. “We could tell my dad what happened.”
Kent’s father was lower montague’s chief of police, “Big” Jeff Jenks: a towering six feet seven inches and two hundred and fifty pounds of prime law enforcement beef. most afternoons he could be spotted behind the wheel of his police cruiser (looking, Tim thought, like an orangutan stuffed into a kitchen cupboard), circuiting the town. If anything, his face reflected sadness—perhaps at the fact God had given him a body so big and strong that he considered it a cosmic injustice that he couldn’t put it to use on deserving criminals. But he’d picked the wrong jurisdiction: the closest thing to a felonious mastermind in montague County was Slick rogers, the local moonshiner whose hillside stills occasionally exploded, burning down an acre of scrubland.
“You guys are going on your wilderness trek as scheduled. You were going to be trekking solo, anyway, as part of your merit requirement. So just fend for yourselves and navigate your way back. no help from me.”
“That’s crazy, Tim!” Kent stabbed one thick finger at the stranger. “We need to neutralize the threat”—one of his father’s pet phrases—“or else . . . or else . . .”
Kent trailed off, the words locking up in his throat. Tim dropped a hand on Kent’s shoulder. The boy’s eyes narrowed—in that instant Tim was certain he’d brush his hand off. When that didn’t happen, he said, “What we need is to remain calm and proceed with the established plan.”
“But it’s all different now. The plan is . . . it’s
fucked.
”
A shocked gasp from newton. nobody ought to speak that way in front of an adult—in front of their
Scoutmaster.
Tim’s eyes took on a hard sheen. His hand tensed on Kent’s shoulder, fingernails dimpling the fabric—close to but not quite a claw.
“Scout law number seven, Kent. repeat it.”
Kent wormed in Tim’s grip. His eyes held a bruised, hangdog cast.
“A Scout . . .” Tim said softly. “Go on, tell me. A Scout . . .”
newt said, “A Scout obeys his—”
“Quiet, newt,” said Tim. “Kent knows this.”
“A . . . Scout . . . obeys . . .” Kent said, each word wrenched painfully from his mouth.
“Who does he obey?”
“He obeys his Scoutmaster without . . .”
“Without
what,
Kent?”
“. . . without question. even if he gets an order he does not like, he must do as soldiers and policemen do; he must carry it out all the same because it is his duty.”
“And after he has done it,” Tim continued, “he can come and state any reasons against it. But he must carry out the order at once. That is discipline.”
Tim forfeited his grip; Kent stepped back, rubbing his shoulder. Tim pointed to a pair of walkie-talkies on the table.
“You get into a jam, radio me. We’ve done plenty of orienteering together, right? This won’t be anything new. It’s a nice morning, no foul weather in today’s forecast.”
no other boy spoke against the Scoutmaster’s plan. nobody wanted to be here, in this cabin, with . . .
that
. They were all too happy to invoke that particular license of boyhood, the one that stated:
Let the grown-ups handle it
. events that seemed overwhelming and terrifying to their boyish brains were dispelled like so much smoke when the adults took over. Adults were Fixers; they were Solvers. The boys still trusted Tim, even Kent. So they would depart into the crisp autumn sunshine, their lungs filling with clean air; they would wrestle and run and laugh and enjoy their freedom from this strange responsibility, whatever it entailed. And when they returned everything would be fine. They sincerely believed this because, up until that very point in their existence, it was a fact that had always held true.
It had been Tim’s intention to go with them. But he needed time to figure out what the hell was the matter with this man. The fact the spark plugs were missing was an additional worry—and not only because it cut them off from the mainland. What kind of man would incapacitate his only method of escape? A criminal? A hunted man, perhaps. or a man on an extinction vector.
once the boys had left, he’d go down to the ocean, roll up his pants, and search for those damn plugs. Anyway, the boys were resourceful. The island was safe. There were more hazards on the mainland: pellet guns, dirt bikes, Slick rogers. They’d hike a few hours, complete their trail-craft requirements, and be back in time for supper—by which time he’d have this mess sorted out. He, too, believed in the power of adults.
Tim didn’t feel quite up to a hike today, anyway. He shot a quick look at the man on the chesterfield, hoping the boys didn’t catch the quiver in his eyes. The spot where the man coughed on his skin burnt with an edgeless heat; he pictured it eating right through his skin, a gaping hole in his cheek—the glistening connective tissues of his jaw, iron fillings winking in his molars—and shook his head, dispelling the image.
Could be he was coming down with something. A fever?
Starve a cold, feed a fever, right?
Yes,
definitely
a fever.
He picked up one of the walkie-talkies. After a short deliberation, he gave it to max, ignoring Kent’s miffed look.
He gave the boys a curt salute. “You’ve got your marching orders, dogfaces.”