This Plague of Days (Omnibus): Seasons 1-3

by Robert Chazz Chute

  “It was taken, not lost,” Theo said.

  “Well, no wonder,” Kenny said.

  They spent the next hour shooting the target with the pellet gun. The gun was less frustrating to master. They only stopped because it was suppertime and they heard Theo’s mother calling from the back step of the family’s cottage.

  The next Saturday, Theo was back and Kenny was waiting, already firing at glass bottles and cans he had set up on a rock.

  “Glass bottles aren’t so good as targets for arrows,” Theo said.

  Kenny handed him another pellet gun. “Belongs to my older brother, Jimmy,” Kenny said. “Figured you’d be along. Don’t ever tell him he lent you his pellet rifle. He don’t know how generous he is. Wouldn’t want him to get a big head.”

  That night Kenny had dinner with Theo’s family. The following weekend, Theo told him to come over after dark on Saturday night. Theo brought a telescope out into the backyard.

  Impressed, Kenny let out a low whistle. Kenny called Theo “Moneybags” after that, and later, simply “Bags.”

  Theo could name all the constellations. Theo taught Kenny what he knew about the moon, stars and planets. “The country’s so dark and the air’s so clear, it’s like the stars are closer out here than they are in Poeticule Bay.”

  In return, Kenny told Theo about girls from school he liked. He was convinced several of them were very close to going to third base, though the meaning of the expression was hazy to both young boys. “Damn teases always chicken out just short of third base,” he complained. “I get a few kisses and they get too girly about it.”

  Theo was shy around girls, so he was doubly impressed with Kenny’s progress. It never occurred to him that Kenny was lying, or that his feigned worldliness was an amalgam of boasts he’d heard from his older brothers.

  When challenged, Kenny replied that it didn’t matter if it was a lie. “Just don’t let me bore you. It’s about a good story. A good story keeps us from looking at the shit.”

  That fall, a couple of weeks before Theo’s family was to close up the cottage for the winter, Kenny brought a sleeping bag and the boys stayed in the backyard through the night to watch a meteor shower.

  “They’re falling at four or five a minute,” Kenny said at the shower’s peak. “This is better than fireworks. I mean, you have to keep your eyes open and really look for them. It’s like hunting, but the payoffs come faster.”

  The boys should have stuck with hunting shooting stars.

  The next day, a Sunday, Kenny left early but soon returned. He found his friend in the wood house chopping lengths for the wood stove. In his hands, Kenny held two shotguns. “Don’t tell my brother Brian that you borrowed his .20 gauge. He don’t know how generous he is.”

  Theo hesitated. “I don’t have a license or anything.”

  “That’s why I took the .20 gauges. The .12 has too much kick for a little girl like you.”

  “Then how come you don’t have a .12 gauge for yourself?”

  He shrugged. “Eh, makes too much mess of the rabbit.”

  Kenny held out the shotgun and Theo grasped it. He liked the weight of the weapon in his hands. The closest he’d gotten to a shotgun was watching criminals use them on TV.

  Theo handed it back his friend and told Kenny to wait behind the outhouse. Theo raced into the house. He made two ham sandwiches and grabbed a couple of cold bottles of Coke from the refrigerator.

  “I’m going for some target practice with Kenny in the woods!” he yelled up to his parents, who were both still in bed.

  “Okay, honey. Be careful!” his mother yelled back.

  The boys walked the logging roads that led deep into the forest. “My dad says there are goldmines around here somewhere,” Theo said.

  “Gold?”

  “Well, all the gold’s mined out now probably.”

  “So, there are big holes and tunnels around here somewhere?”

  “Somewhere,” Theo said.

  “Cool. Didn’t know that. We should find one and make a fort.”

  They saw no rabbits but satisfied their lust to try out the guns by shooting their cartridges at the Coke bottles they’d brought. The bottles shattered, each boy hitting his target the first time.

  “Good shot, Bags. You’re ready to move up from hitting the broadside of a barn.”

  “You know what we should do next time?” Theo said. “We shouldn’t drink from the bottles first. Think what it would look like if we’d shot at them when they were full!”

  “That would be ten times cool,” Kenny replied, “but wasteful. There’s an old logging truck in the woods behind the mill. It’s a wreck, but there’s still some glass left in it.”

  “Twenty times cool,” Theo said.

  “We better wait till next summer, though,” Kenny said. “We’re far back here, but the woods by the mill is right up close to civilization. I wouldn’t want to be caught with a couple shotguns. Take the course and get a license this winter, will you?”

  “Sure,” said Theo, not sure he was old enough to get a license, but he’d be eleven soon.

  “Good. You gotta man up, Bags. If my brothers knew I was running around with a summer kid who can’t even shoot, they’d beat me senseless and make me marry you. But we have to get married, anyway. You’re pregnant.”

  “It’ll be a tasteful ceremony, but you can’t wear white.”

  “Yeah, I’m a big ol’ slut,” Kenny said.

  That was the last time Theo ever truly giggled. They had laughed as boys laugh, giving themselves over to it with abandon. For the last time on a cool autumn afternoon under falling blood-red maple leaves, the boys’ laughter rang through the listening trees.

  When they recovered, Kenny flicked his head in a come-along gesture. “Bags, it’s long past time we went to the moon.”

  “You aren’t going to show me your bum, are you? I was just kidding about the whole marriage thing. I can’t marry you. You’re a slut.”

  “I can’t marry you,” Kenny replied. “I want a bride with long blonde hair.”

  The boys followed a logging road back to the mill. It was Sunday afternoon and no one was around. Before them stood a huge mountain of sawdust, four stories tall. “Welcome to the moon,” Kenny said.

  They hid the shotguns in the bushes and climbed the sawdust mountain. It was made of discarded sawdust, wood chips and small pieces of wood. It was hard climbing, but the fun was in hopping back down. They bounced down in spongy, springing lunges.

  “Told you! No gravity! We’re on the moon!” Kenny yelled.

  They raced up and jumped down, over and over. When they tired of that, Kenny showed Theo the top of the mountain. Long narrow chasms cut deep into the surface. Some reached a depth of seven to ten feet. “Frost did that,” Kenny said.

  “Looks like those pictures of ice caverns in the Arctic,” Theo said.

  “Looks like it could swallow you up, doesn’t it?”

  At that, Theo jumped into one. Kenny went white. “Jesus! Get out of there! If it collapses, you’ll smother or burn or die smothering and burning!”

  “You’re full of it.”

  “No, seriously, Bags! Get the hell out of there!”

  Finding traction on the side of the steep chasm was harder than Theo expected. Wood chips and sawdust gave way under his feet. Kenny lay on his stomach and reached down. Theo grasped his hand and climbed. Kenny pulled, rescuing his friend from the narrow cut. When Theo finally did throw a leg over the lip of the hole, he managed to roll out onto his back. Both boys gasped for air and coughed on the rising dust.

  Kenny fell back, breathing hard. “Don’t do that again!”

  “And you call me a girl.”

  His friend sat up, took Theo’s bare hand and thrust it under the surface of the sawdust.

  “Ow! Agh!” Theo yanked his hand back out into the open air and shook it.

  “Yeah, it gets pretty hot, huh?
On a summer day, you could cook a chicken in there in a few minutes.”

  “Sorry,” Theo said.

  “Hey, I wasn’t doing it for you. What if you up and died in there? I’d have to carry two shotguns all the way back on my own.”

  Theo punched Kenny in the chest and they chased each other around the surface of the moon.

  Then Theo stopped short and took in the view of the Corners below them.

  “Yeah, we’re up pretty high. There’s the Mersey River. In the spring, they have the eel traps down there. The traps look like wooden boxes.”

  “Are you kidding? Eels?”

  “Somebody eats ’em. They pay a lot of money to eat that snaky fish.” Both boys shuddered. “The traps go all the way across the river. It’s kind of neat to see as long as you don’t think too long what it’s for, you know, with all the wriggling of those things in there.”

  “People are crazy,” Theo said.

  “Yep.”

  They bounced on the sawdust mountain. Before they were done, the boys ran up five more times, each time telling each other, “Just one more time!”

  When they were sweaty and covered in wood chips, they retrieved the shotguns from their hiding place in the bushes and headed back to Theo’s cottage.

  “I’m tired, Bags. Let’s cut through the field. I know a shortcut. This way.”

  The boys left the logging road and walked through the forest amid patches of ferns and sorrel. The green moss felt softer and deeper than any carpet.

  “When will you be back to your farmhouse?” Kenny asked.

  “It’s just a cottage now. My dad talks about making it a real farm again, with goats.”

  “Cottage? Still bigger than my house.”

  “We’ll open it up again in the spring, though dad has some friends who want to come out in November for deer season. We won’t be here that much till the end of black fly season. Mom gets claustrophobia. She says the black flies are like walls closing in. And the ticks freak her out.”

  “I don’t blame her,” Kenny said. “I’d love to be anywhere else, but especially in the heat of July. It’s not as bad with the wind off the lake. Black flies and ticks. I hate the ticks!”

  “You ever get down to Poeticule Bay? It’s not far and with the wind off the ocean, you don’t have to worry about black flies. ”

  “We never go anywhere, except Waterville sometimes to visit my brothers.”

  “They got a place there?”

  “They got a cell there, yeah. They call it the Kennigan hotel because one of them always has a suite reserved at the detention center. They act like it’s no big thing, but I’ve seen all of them cry at sentencing hearings every time they go to court. Even Brian, and he’s the toughest of my brothers.”

  “How come they don’t just stop doing things that get them sent to jail?”

  “They figure they’ll never get caught. Then they do. They don’t know nothing else.”

  “You’re not like them,” Theo said.

  “Nah. I got high hopes. Maybe I’ll make it as far as Bangor.” He shrugged. “Big deal. Guy like you, you’ll call me up one day from some fancy office in New York with hot and cold running secretaries and you’ll say ‘Remember that great day we spent doing nothing?’”

  “Yeah,” Theo replied. “And you’ll say, ‘Who the hell is this?’”

  Both boys were quiet for a time, walking slower the closer they got to their destination. It was almost dusk when they came to a rusted barbed wire fence, twisted and sporadic, that ringed one edge of the field behind the Spencer family cottage.

  “There’s a rock fence up the side of the field,” Theo said. “Dad says it’s all the rocks they pulled from this field when they farmed it. He’s talking about putting in Christmas trees next year. He’s thinking of filling up this field with them, to make it pay.”

  “That’s why you’re Moneybags, dude. Your dad’s always thinkin’ and mine’s always drinkin.’” Kenny put his shotgun on the other side of the fence and climbed over. “Pull your balls up,” he said as he pulled down on the barbed wire to give Theo room to swing a leg over.

  “Oh,” Kenny said, stepping forward to stop Theo. “Wait, don’t climb over wi—”

  Boom!

  The shotgun blast tore through Kenny’s chest and left shoulder, knocking him off his feet and into the tall, soft grass.

  Theo dropped the gun. The trigger had caught on a sharp tine of wire. The echo of the shotgun blast rolled back to him, freezing him for a moment, one leg still on the ground, the other still up, his pant leg caught in the fence wire.

  He tore his pants to break free, threw himself flat and scurried under the wire. Theo ran to Kenny, who had landed on one side, twisted in mid-air as the pellets had ripped through his left lung.

  “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” Theo cried.

  Kenny blinked wide blue eyes at him. He winced and coughed up blood. Theo dared a look. He saw the white flash of Kenny’s bared ribs and looked away.

  Shotguns forgotten, Theo grabbed the shoulders of his friend’s jacket and dragged him toward the house, shouting for help as he went. After forty feet, he felt so weak he doubted he could go on.

  At the top of the rise sat the lone tree, a twisted oak, in the center of the fallow field. He made that his destination. From there he’d be able to see the cottage and then maybe his parents would see him or hear his screams for help. The nearest doctor was in Poeticule Bay. Theo pulled Kenny again, in desperate lunging spurts.

  How much blood does one person have to spare? The boy didn’t know. His brain drained of any thought but the pulling.

  The light was dim as Theo pulled Kenny under the big tree. He stood and looked down the field. The car was gone. His parents were out, probably picking up the farewell dinner. They’d talked about getting Chicken Burger take-out. The boy didn’t know how long it would take them to return.

  Theo looked down at his friend in the grass. A long bloody trail had followed him up the rise to where Kenny lay. Kenny waved him to come closer. He was breathing in short gasps, but he managed to whisper in Theo’s ear.

  “Say I did it,” Kenny said. “Say I did it.”

  “That doesn’t matter now,” Theo said.

  “They’ll kill you,” Kenny gasped. “I did it. Brian will kill you.”

  “I’ll go get help!” Theo said, but Kenny grabbed his sleeve and held on.

  “Stay…don’t leave me alone…stay…not much longer.”

  Theo held his friend in his arms and cried. After another moment, he pulled some moss away from the base of the tree behind them and put it over the gaping wound. He put pressure on the wound like they said to do in movies. Theo leaned heavily on the moss.

  After some time passed, Kenny spoke again in a high voice. “Doesn’t hurt anymore.”

  The ground beneath them was soaked black in the dull light.

  “Cold.”

  Theo gave up on pushing on the moss and hugged his friend. He held him and cried and rocked and shouted for help.

  The light abandoned them to the creeping dark and stars arrived to welcome the dying boy. Soon the night took over and the Milky Way unfurled overhead.

  “Shooting stars?” Kenny murmured.

  “I don’t know, man. We’ll watch and see. There must be a few more left over from last night. Must be. We’ll wish on one. My parents will be home soon. We’ll wish and we’ll get help.”

  Some time passed. Theo was never sure how long.

  Headlights from his father’s car swept the field, but Kenny had already left through the Gateway.

  Theo lay beside him, staring up into space, wondering where Kenny went. In church, they sang a hymn called “I’ll Fly Away.” Theo tried to remember the words, not to sing to his friend, but for clues. It was so quiet and clear, Theo could make out every cold star, every indifferent constellation.

  His parents went into the cottage, each carrying a bag.
In a moment they were outside calling his name.

  “If Kenny’s gone somewhere…if he’s not just gone…give me a sign.”

  His father had bolted back inside the house and returned with a flashlight. They were headed his way, heading toward the field where he and Kenny usually played with the bow and arrow and shot targets.

  “They’re coming,” Theo whispered an urgent prayer. “Give me a sign, God, please!”

  No loon called. No warm breeze caressed his cheek. Not a single shooting star shot across the sky.

  * * *

  Theo opened his eyes and regarded the outline of his silent son in cool morning light. “People make a big deal about lots of things, but time moves on. People change and move. I moved away as soon as I could. I escaped to a boarding school. I went to university. I reinvented myself. No one knew I killed Kenny in a careless moment. Nobody knew I lied about how it happened. I got away with it.”

  His chest spasmed and he coughed hard for a few minutes, bringing up green sputum and spitting it into a tissue. Jaimie didn’t move. Theo expected no reaction from his son. It was as if he was making his confession to a stone.

  After another wave of coughing ebbed, he looked at the ceiling. He relaxed talking to Jaimie, his secret as safe as talking to himself. “After all’s said and done, guilt is just geographical. Something bad happens, and if you move far away, the artificial borders we put on places is enough.”

  Jaimie detected the empty sound in his father’s voice. He thought it likely that was the first lie his father had spoken to him. But is it a lie if you don’t know it’s a lie?

  “Eventually, we’ll have to go to Papa’s farm. Out under that old oak tree, by the stone, that’s where you’ll find it. Southeast from the back step, hidden amongst the stand of Christmas trees my father planted the year after I shot Kenny. That’s the Gateway to the Spirit World. It’s where I go. There would be a symmetry to that. We’ll go there, or maybe I’ll meet you there. Or maybe you’ll have to carry me there. That’s where I should go. I should leave Earth from where D’Arcy Kennigan left.”