by Nick Cutter
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 the Sleepy Hollow prison. Mom came with. We’re sitting in the visitors’ 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 are friendships 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 whoofs 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.
Suffused with this sense of righteousness his father had instilled, Kent held his hand out to Max. “Give me the walkie-talkie, man. You know that’s the way it should be.”
When Max handed it over, Kent clapped him on the back.
“Attaboy, Max.” He swept his arm forward. “Tallyho!”
STUNG, MAX loafed back to his customary position. Newton tugged on his sleeve.
“You didn’t have to give it to him, you know.”
“I don’t care. I don’t need it.”
“Yeah, but Scoutmaster Tim gave it to you.”
“Oh, shut up, Newt.”
Max regretted speaking so harshly, but there was something so . . . exasperating about Newt. His hidebound determination to stick to “The Rules.” Like this thing with the walkie-talkie. Who gave a shit? It didn’t matter if Scoutmaster Tim had given it to Max—they were away from the adults now. Different rules applied. Boys’ rules, which clearly stated: the big and strong take from the small and weak, period.
There was just something about Newt that made Max want to snap at him. A soft, obliging quality. A whiff of piteousness wafted right out of Newt’s pores. It was like catnip to the average boy.
Max felt a deeper, more inherent need to treat Newt shabbily this morning. It had something to do with the strange man on the chesterfield and the tight unease that had collected in Max’s chest when he’d gazed at him. Something about the unnatural angularity of his face, as if his features had been etched with cruel mathematical precision using a ruler and compass.
Max’s mind inflated the details, nursing the image into a freakish horror show: now the man’s face was actually melting, skin running like warm wax down a candle’s stem to soak into the chesterfield, disclosing the bleached bone of his skull. Max’s brain probed the tiny details, fussing with them the same way his tongue might flick at a canker sore: the smashed radio (why had the man wrecked it?), the crumpled box of soda crackers in the trash (had the Scoutmaster eaten them?), and the itchy smile plastered to the Scoutmaster’s face, as if fishhooks were teasing his mouth into a grin.
Max pushed these thoughts away. Scoutmaster Tim had made the right call by sending them off. It was easier out here: the dry rustle of leaves tenaciously clinging to the trees, the sla
p of waves on the rock face. He glanced at Newt—his wide ass hogging the trail, each cheek flexing inside tight dungarees. He reminded Max of a Weeble, those old kiddie toys.
Weebles wobble but they don’t fall down . . .
Newt never did fall down. He withstood the boy’s torments with stoic determination, which made it easier—Newt could take it, right? Picking on Newt uncoiled the tension in Max’s chest. It was awfully selfish, yet awfully true.
9
“WHAT WOULD you rather,” Ephraim said, “eat a steaming cowflop or let a hobo fart in your face?”
It was one of their favorite games, a great way to pass the time on long hikes. Had Scoutmaster Tim been leading, the game would’ve been far more vanilla—What would you rather: get bit by a rabid dog or swallow a wasp in your Coke can?—but now, no adults around, it took on a saltier tone.
“What kind of hobo?” Max asked. It was common to mull these choices from several angles in order to make an informed selection.
“How many types of hobos are there?” said Ephraim. “Your run-of-the-mill smelly old hobo, I guess, the ones who hang out at the train yard.”
“How big a cowflop are we talking about?” Kent called back.
“Standard size,” Ephraim said. The boys nodded as if that was all he’d needed to say—he’d perfectly set the size of this hypothetical cowflop in their minds.
“Is this hobo diseased or anything?” Max asked. “Like, his ass rotting out?”
“His morals are diseased,” Ephraim said, after a pause to think. “But he’s been given a clean bill of health.”
“I’d eat the cowflop,” said Newton.
“What a fucking surprise,” Ephraim said.
Eventually they all agreed that, of both scenarios, scarfing a cowflop was marginally better than a strange, smelly man’s hairy ass cheeks ripping a wet grunter in their faces.
“It’d singe your eyebrows off,” Kent said to appreciative laughter. “It’d put a center part right down your hair!”
“What would you rather,” Newton said, “give a speech in front of the whole school or get your bathing suit sucked down the filter at the public pool?”
Ephraim groaned. “Oh, for fuck’s sake, Newt, that’s so laaaaaaame.”
“Yeah, but,” Newton mumbled, “you’d be naked, right? Your bum hanging out.”
“Your bum?” Ephraim scoffed. “Your bum, really? Your pink little tushie?”
Ephraim pulled a cigarette out of his pack, along with a brass Zippo. He fixed the smoke between his lips and lit it with an elaborate flourish: drawing the Zippo up his thigh, popping off the lid, then swiftly running it down again, sparking the flywheel on his trousers. He touched the flame to the tobacco, inhaled, and said:
“Nothing like a smoke when you’re stuck out in nature.”
Ephraim was the only boy in their grade who smoked. A recent affectation. He bought them in singles—four, five cigarettes at a time—from a high schooler named Ernie Smegg, whose doughy carbuncled face looked like a basket of complimentary dinner rolls.
“You smoke the wrong way,” Kent said. “You’re holding it all wrong.”
“What?” Ephraim said. He pinched the cigarette between his thumb and pointer finger, the way you’d hold a pipe. “What’s the matter?”
“My dad says only Frenchmen smoke like that,” said Kent. “And fags.”
Ephraim’s jaw went stiff. “Shut your big fucking mouth, K.”
“You shouldn’t smoke,” Newton said fussily. “My mom says it turns your lungs black as charcoal briquettes.”
Ephraim’s chin jutted. “Yeah? Your mother’s so dumb she stares at an orange juice carton all day because it says: concentrate.”
“Hey!” Kent barked, bristling. “Don’t rag on his mom, man.”
Ephraim snorted but eventually said, “Sorry, Newt. So what would you rather: jerk off a donkey or fingerbang Kathy Rhinebeck?”
Kathy Rhinebeck was a sweet girl who’d been branded the class slut due to the rumor—unsubstantiated by anyone aside from Dougie Fezz—that she’d masturbated Dougie Fezz “to climax” in the back row of the North Point Cinema. Christ on a bike, she didn’t know what the hell she was doing, Fezz told a gaggle of pop-eyed boys in the school yard, his tone one of withering scorn. What, was she yanking weeds out of a garden?
“What’s a fingerbang?” Newton asked, predictably.
“I’d jerk off the donkey,” Shelley suddenly said. “Who wants sloppy seconds?”
This, the boys silently acknowledged, was precisely the sort of response you could expect from Shelley Longpre—he had this way of sucking the air out of the game; out of any game, really.
They hiked in silence around the eastern hub of the island. The trail deteriorated until it was nothing but a strip of loose shale edged by chickweed and stinging thistles. It led around a rocky outcropping facing out over the gunmetal sea.
“This the way?” Newton asked.
“Where else?” Kent said challengingly. “Tim didn’t send us on a granny walk.”
They worked their way up. The shale sat upon a base of solid granite holding the same pink hue of the outcropping. Loose stones kept pebbling away under their boots. The path—which had seemed quite solid at the outset—soon became a series of treacherous collapsing footfalls.
And it then narrowed at the midpoint of their ascent. They could barely crowd both their feet together on it. Below them lay a steep slope carpeted with the same soft shale. It was not so sheer that they risked free falling, but steep enough that they would slide painfully down, boots pumping and hands clawing for purchase. If they couldn’t stop in time, they’d hit the cold, gray sea.
Ephraim said: “Whose smart idea was this again?” When nobody answered—they lacked the energy or inclination, focused entirely on their task, which had abruptly turned very grim—his gaze zeroed in on Kent, clumsily edging his bulk around the rock face.
You big dumbfuck, Ephraim thought. You stupid shit, you.
The boys turned their faces into the outcrop, edging along the rock face with hesitant stutter-steps. Newton cried out, his nose scraping on a pitted extrusion of granite, peeling off a layer of skin. Straggly weeds grew off the bare rock, the tips of their withered leaves frosted with sea salt. How could anything survive in such a place, tilted crazily over the water?
The boys’ fingertips hummed over the rock like bugs, searching desperately for handholds. “Grab here,” Ephraim told Shelley, pulling the boy’s hand to the right spot. “That seam there. Feel it? There.”
Next Ephraim pivoted his hips and kicked one leg out, making an X with his body: one hand gripping the rock while the other was outflung in space; one leg safely moored, the other kicked out over the waves crashing a hundred feet below.
“Top o’ the world, Ma!”
“Stop it!” Newton shrieked, sagging jelly-kneed against the rock face.
“Come on, Eef,” said Max, his fingers hooked like talons into the stone.
Ephraim’s eyes narrowed, a look indicative of future devilry, but he only swung himself back against the cliff. “Keep your skin on, Newt. Don’t give yourself a heart attack.”
Ephraim became aware of the sound of his breathing as it whistled madly against the stone. The waves crashed rhythmically into the cliffs below, the water sucking back out to sea with a foamy gurgle. His arms trembled. The long tendons running down the backs of his calves jumped.
We could die—this thought cleaved Ephraim’s mind like a guillotine blade. One of us could start to fall, and someone will try to help—Scout Law number two: A Scout is ever loyal to his fellows; he must stick to them through thick and thin—then another and another until everyone gets pulled down like a string of paper dolls.
From his vantage at the head of the pack, Kent now realized this couldn’t be the right route. But whose fault was that? Tim’s, for sending them out alone. Dull metallic anger throbbed at Kent’s temples. It was stupid Tim’s fault that Kent’s mind was no
w paralyzed by fear. Stupid stupid stupid . . .
The trail widened on the other side of a tricky ledgeway. Kent held out his hand to help Ephraim across, then Shelley, then Newt and Max. They walked silently along a shallow upswell, sweating and breathing heavily. The trail emptied onto a flat rocky expanse overlooking the ocean.
Ephraim set both hands into Kent’s chest and pushed. The bigger boy staggered back.
“Great idea, brainiac.”
“It wasn’t— I didn’t do it on purpose,” Kent said, his neck bright red.
“Nobody better give you the keys to an airplane, man.” Ephraim’s chin was angled up, nearly butting into Kent’s. “With your sense of direction, you’d fly everybody into the sun.”
Ephraim’s hands curled into fists. Kent knew Ephraim wasn’t shy about throwing them. Eef had been in fights. Kent, not so much. Sure, he’d shoved other boys down and put them in headlocks—but he’d never squared off with another boy and thrown real punches. He’d never had to. Being bigger had acted as both threat and deterrent.
But here stood Ephraim, a creature of coiled muscle and quick rage, challenging him. Kent’s hair was plastered to his forehead with clammy sweat. His blood beat a hi-hat tempo inside his skull. He pictured Ephraim’s fist clocking him on the chin, saw himself falling with one leg twisted painfully beneath him. The image caused bitter saliva to squirt into his mouth.
Ephraim gave him a dismissive shove. “A fucking granny walk, eh? Bozo.”
Kent hated the sudden shameful fear that rose in his throat, choking him—hated himself for feeling it. The sheepdog had behaved weakly—he himself had become a sheep.
Baaaah. His father’s mocking voice kicked up inside his skull. Baaaah, baaaah, Kenty-sheep, have you any wool? Yes sir, yes sir! Three bags full . . .
Kent bit down on his tongue. His father’s voice switched off like a radio as his mouth filled with the tinfoil-y taste of blood.
They stood on a stony promontory. The salt-heavy wind riffled and snapped at the boys’ clothing. At their backs lay the darkness of the forest. Kent screwed his eyes against the shivering water. Perhaps a mile away the white surf crested on the rusted bones of a sunken freighter. The sky met the sea at the horizon. Kent found it impossible to separate one from the other: sea and sky welded together without a joint.