The Troop (6 page)

From
Troop 52:
Legacy of the Modified Hydatid
(
as PuBlisHEd iN
GQ
MaGaziNE
)
By cHRis PackER:
T
he hungry Man. Patient Zero. Typhoid Tom.

Before he was known by these names, he was known by the one his mother christened him with: Thomas henry Padgett.

Tom was born in St. Catharines, Ontario, 1,100 miles from Falstaff Island, where he would die thirty-five years later. Birth records from St. Catharines general show that Tommy was a healthy nine and a half pounds at birth.

“he was a chubby baby,” says his mother, Claire Padgett. “Chubby kid, chubby teenager. I’d take him shopping in the husky Boys section at the hudson’s Bay.”

She sits in her kitchen, leafing through a photo album. her boy lies frozen in time under the laminated pages. Sitting in the tub as an infant, his mom working baby shampoo into his hair. halloween as a toddler, dressed as a giant pumpkin. Tom had an open smile and unruly red hair. In one photo, he is captured building a sandcastle at the beach, his stomach hanging over the band of his swim trunks.

“he was a good eater,” Claire Padgett says. “as a kid, anyway. Then he got older and the shame set in. he didn’t like being big. Kids, right? They find the easiest soft spot and pick at it.”

Claire Padgett looks nothing like her son. It strikes this observer that she may subsist entirely upon the Player’s Light cigarettes—she chain-smokes them ruthlessly, lighting each fresh soldier off the ember of the dead one. But hers is a flinty, chapped-elbow leanness—a body built for a mean utility.

“Tough kid,” she says of her son. “Some boys thought that because he was fat, Tom must be a marshmallow. But he could defend himself. after Tom busted a few boys’ noses, the wisecracks about his weight stopped.”

as cutting as those schoolboy taunts had been, her son has been treated far more cruelly in death. Consider his media-given nicknames. The edible Man. Mr. Stringbean. Consider his legacy as the man who could have kickstarted a toppling-domino contagion worse than the Black Plague. Consider the fact that Dr. David hatcher, head of the Center for Contagious Disease, memorably labeled him “a runaway biological weapon.”

Tom Padgett has been badmouthed by scientists and politicos worldwide for—for
what
?
For being a pawn? For aligning himself with Dr. Clive edgerton, who earned his own nickname: Joseph Mengele 2.0? For being the kind of scratch-ass petty criminal who might actually
accept
edgerton’s offer?
no. Tom Padgett is hated in death because he
ran.
Because he failed to truly grasp the magnitude of what he was hosting and bolted. But mainly Tom is hated for the perception that he may have somehow thought he could
prevail
over the monster lurking inside of him.
Tom Padgett is hated even now, years later, for his ignorance of the fact that he was dead on his feet well before he reached Falstaff Island. his body just hadn’t gotten the memo yet.
“I guess some people must find it funny that Tom was a fat kid.” Claire Padgett smiles, but there’s not a drop of humor in it. “yeah, I guess a certain type of person would find that deliciously ironic, considering how things came out in the wash.”

8

maximiliaN KiRKWOOd
and ephraim elliot had been friends since they were two years old—although max wondered if that was precisely true.

They’d
been around
each other since they were two, anyway: max’s mom would drop him off at mrs. elliot’s house every morning; she always paid her babysitting fee in cash, as the island’s underground economy dictated. mrs. elliot said max and eef were the very best of friends—sharing their blocks, drinking out of the same sippy cup—but max didn’t remember that, same as he didn’t remember being born or cutting his first tooth. When his memories kicked in, though—
click!
like a light switch—ephraim was right there.

You’d never find a stranger pair. ephraim was a creature of pure momentum, pure chaos; 140 pounds of fast-twitch muscle fiber packed into a long, quivering frame. The air closest to eef’s arms and shoulders seemed to shimmer, same way a hummingbird’s wings exist in a blur of motion. max was stouter—not fat,
solid
—and possessed a preternatural state of calm unusual for his age; it wasn’t hard to picture him in the lotus position on north Point beach, eyes serenely shut, totally Zen-ing out.

It shouldn’t have worked—the differences in the boy’s personalities should’ve repulsed one from the other, like trying to touch magnets of conflicting polarities—but the opposite held true.

on summer nights, max and ephraim would hike to the bluffs behind max’s house, through the long, dry grass frosted white with the salt spray off the sea. They’d pitch a tent on the highest peak, the lights of max’s home only a pinprick in the dark. lying on their backs under endless vault of sky—so much wider than in a city, where buildings hemmed in that same sky, light pollution whiting out the stars. They knew some of the constellations—Scoutmaster Tim had taught them, though only newton bothered to earn a merit badge in stargazing. They could recognize the stars in their simplest alignments: the Big Dipper, ursa major and minor.

“It doesn’t really look like a bear,” max said one night.
“Why should it?” ephraim said, sounding angry. “That’s humans trying to, like, organize the stars to our liking. You think the Big Guy, the Grand Creator, Buddha or the Flying Spaghetti monster or whoever said:
Oh, guess I’d better make these flaming balls of gas look
exactly
like a bear or a fucking spoon so those stupid goons on rock 5,079 don’t get confused
?” He lip-farted. “
Ohyeah riiiight
,” stringing it all together.
They talked about the stuff best friends ought to. Stupid stuff. Their favorite candy (max: Swedish Fish, especially the rare purple ones; eef: Cracker Jack, which max claimed wasn’t exactly
candy
but eef said was sweet enough); who had bigger boobs, Sarah matheson or Triny Dunlop (both agreed Triny’s were technically bigger, although ephraim held the opinion, sadly untested, that Sarah’s were
softer
); whether God existed (both believed in a higher power, though eef thought churches treated their parishioners like ATms); and who’d win in a fight: a zombie or a shark?
“A zombie,” eef said. “
Of course.
It’s already dead, right? It’s not gonna be scared of . . . hey, what kind of shark? A sandy? A whitetip?
I
could win against a sandy!”
max shook his head. “Great white. Biggest badass in the ocean.”
“
Pfffffft!
” eef said. “Killer whales got it all
over
great whites. But anyway, I still say zombie. If it gets one bite in, it wins—the shark’s a zombie!”
“Who says sharks turn into zombies?”
“
Everything
turns into zombie, max-a-million.”
“Whatever. I say shark. You know how thick sharkskin is? I was down at the dock when a trawler came in with a dead mako. ernie Pugg tried to cut it open on the dock—his fillet knife broke. like trying to hack through a tire, man. Who says a zombie’s rotted old teeth won’t break, too? And anyway, what if the shark bites the zombie’s head off? A zombie can’t swim too well, it’s rotten-ass arms flopping around.”
eef considered this. “Well, if it bites the zombie’s head off and swallows it, its head will be in the shark’s belly—and it’ll still be
alive.
like, zombie-alive, which is really dead but whatever. So the zombie can bite the shark’s guts out from the inside.” ephraim pumped his fist in victory. “Zombie wins! Zombie wins!”
“Ah, go to hell,” max said, conceding.
“I been to hell,” ephraim said, his voice pitched at a Clint eastwood growl. “I ain’t afraid to go back.”
Sometimes their conversation meandered quite accidentally into topics of greater importance. one night both boys were in that gauzyminded state preceding sleep when ephraim said:
“I ever tell you that my pops busted my arm? I was like one year old, man. Can’t even remember. Guess I was screaming in my crib and he comes in, all pissed, lifts me up, and my arm gets stuck between the crib bars and he kept pulling and my arm just went kerflooey. It snapped.”
He rolled over and hiked up his sleeve, showing max the pale scar below his elbow hinge.
“Bone came out right there. Anyway, he went to jail three months later. my arm was still in a cast. But here’s the weirdest thing, max. Two years ago, I went to visit him up in Summerside prison. mom came with. We’re sitting in the visitor’s room, the chairs and tables bolted down, TV in a big mesh cage. Dad’s not saying much—he never does, right?—but he looks at my arm and sees the scar and asks how I got it. like, he thought I did it to myself.” A stiff, barking laugh. “So mom goes:
You did it, Fred. You broke his arm as a baby.
And my dad just gives her this shocked look. I’m telling you, max, I
swear to God
he didn’t remember. like, there’s this empty slot in his head where that memory should be. maybe he even remembers my arm in a cast but he doesn’t quite remember how it happened, right? For all I know his memory’s full of holes like that, just Swiss-cheesed with ’em, which is why he’s in jail. He can’t remember any of the shitty stuff he does—his mind erases it, so he just goes and does it all over again.”
In such ways friendships are built. In tiny moments, in secrets shared. The boys truly believed they would be best friends forever—in fact, as the boat had ferried them to Falstaff Island, max had looked at the back of ephraim’s head and thought exactly that:
Forever friends, man. Until the very end of time.

THe sKY
was scudded over with clouds by the time the boys shouldered their packs and made their way to the trailhead. They walked in the same order as always: Kent heading up the pack—recently Kent had even tried to break trail ahead of the Scoutmaster—then ephraim, Shelley, and newt. max pulled up the rear in his traditional sheepherding role.

once they’d passed beyond sight of the cabin, Kent waved max up. “You better give me the walkie-talkie,” he said, dead serious. It wasn’t worth fighting over—Kent might turn it into a fight. But

Kent wouldn’t throw punches. Wasn’t his style. He’d put max in a headlock and wrestle him down and simply take the walkie-talkie away. or worse, make max give it to him voluntarily, his head still smarting from the headlock.

Kent was old enough, fourteen years and a few months, to have lost the prominent tummy of childhood. You could see now that he might make a good linebacker, as far as width and bulkiness of shoulders went. The boys followed him for the simple reason that he was the biggest and strongest and harbored every expectation that he
should
be followed. It wasn’t that he had the best ideas—those were often traceable to newt. It wasn’t that he was particularly charismatic, like ephraim. It was that the boys were at an age where physical strength was the surest marker of leadership.

Kent had learned what little he knew of leadership from his father, who’d counseled:
It’s all how you present yourself, son. Draw yourself up to your full height. Stick your chest out. If you look like you’ve got all the answers, people will naturally assume that you do.

Kent’s dad, “Big” Jeff Jenks, often bundled his son into the police cruiser and drove a circuit of town—a ride-along, he called it. Kent loved these: his father sitting erect and flinty-eyed in the driver’s seat, sunlight flashing off his badge, the dashboard computer chittering with information of a highly sensitive nature—which his father was all too willing to share.
Got a call for officer assistance there a few weeks back,
he’d say, pointing to a well-tended Cape Cod belonging to Kent’s math teacher, mr. Conkwright.
Domestic disturbance. Trouble in paradise. The missus was stepping out—you know what I mean by that?
When Kent shook his head, his father said:
Breaking her marital vows. Enjoying the warm embrace of another fellow, uh? You get me? And that other fellow happened to be George Turley, your gym teacher.
Kent pictured it: Gloria Conkwright, an enormously plump woman with bottled-platinum hair and heaving, pendulous breasts that stirred confused longing in Kent’s chest, squashing her body on top of mr. Turley, who always wore shiny short-shorts two sizes too small—
nut-huggers,
as his father called them—his oily chest hair tufting in the V of his shirt collars; he pictured mr. Turley blowing on the pea whistle that was constantly strung round his neck, the air forced out in gleeful
whoof
s as Gloria’s body smacked down onto his.

There’s no fate worse than being a cuckold,
his father said.
You can’t let some woman go stomping on your balls—you just may acquire a taste for it.

Those ride-alongs, his father enumerating the secrets and shames of their town, made Kent realize something: adults were
fucked.
Totally, utterly fucked. They did all the things they told kids not to do: cheated and stole and lied, nursed grudges and failed to turn the other cheek, fought like weasels, and worst of all they tried to worm out of their sins—they passed the buck, refused to take responsibility. It was always someone else’s fault.
Blame the man on the grassy knoll,
as his dad said, although Kent didn’t really know what that meant. Kent’s respect had trickled away by degrees. Why
should
he respect adults—because they were older? Why, if that age hadn’t come with wisdom?

Kent came to see that adults required the same stern hand that his peers did. He was their equal—their
better,
in many ways. Physically this was already so: he was a full head taller than many of his teachers, and though he’d never tested this theory, he believed himself to be stronger, too. morally it was certainly so. like his father said:
Son, we are the sheepdogs. Our job is to circle the flock, nipping at their heels and keeping them in line. Nip at their heels until they’re bloody, if needed, or even tear their hamstrings if they won’t obey. At first the sheep will hate us—after all, we hem them in, stop them from pursuing their basest nature—but in time they’ll come to respect us and soon enough they won’t be able to imagine their lives without us.