by Tony Burgess
The children leap onto their desks and throw their books into the air.
And so begins the first day of school.
I sit back for a moment marveling at the terrible drama. Surely these people will see, surely they’ll change before they do something truly awful.
Chapter 5
Mr. Finchy lowers his head and opens the garden gate for the three police officers.
He raises a finger and starts to speak, but the last cop, Bobby Pop — a short, bald bullet of a man — turns abruptly and glares.
“Finchy, we got a kid took another kid and we need your dogs.”
“Dogs? What dogs? I don’t know anything about no dogs!”
Bobby stares at Finchy, who is getting nervous. Finchy has three vicious pit bulls.
It’s against the law to keep vicious pit bulls.
Bobby yells to his fellow officers, who have already disappeared into the garage. “Hey, boys! Hey! We got nothin’ to worry about. Finchy’s got the meanest dogs in town. Right, Finchy?”
Finchy bolts past Bobby. “Hey, those dogs . . . don’t go near those dogs!”
Bobby catches up to Finchy, squares off in front of him, then shoves him back hard. “We’re commandeerin’ your doggies on police business.”
Pit bulls bound out of the garage. Their lips dangle away from their mouths, revealing terrible teeth that hang in terrible white foam. Their shoulders and chests are as powerful as flood water. The dogs tear straight for the two men. Finchy drops to the ground and curls up into a ball. Bobby doesn’t drop; he pitches a potato straight into the slathering hell mouth of the lead dog. The potato shreds across yellow teeth, then disappears. The pit bulls leap over the gate and run directly down the middle of the street.
Finchy sits up, blinking. He reaches for Bobby’s hand, and is helped to his feet. The two men stare in silence at the empty street down which the monsters have escaped.
“It’s a plan,” Bobby says. “We give him a potato to put them dogs on the trail of the perpetrator.”
“Not a good plan, Officer Bob.” Finchy looks to the sky. “Anybody smellin’ like a potato today will be eaten.”
The other officers emerge from the garage, out of breath and badly bruised.
“We didn’t even get the cage open,” an officer says.
“They knocked some bars clean off soon as I touched the door,” another officer says. “They’re crazy dogs.”
The four men stand at the edge of the property and scan the rooftops of the town. Finchy strains to hear the sound of dogs ripping apart the townspeople the officers were appointed to protect. He steps back from the cops and scoops up the pieces of potato from his lawn.
“So this person smells like a potato?”
“No, his name is Potato.”
“Well, dogs can’t smell a name,” Finchy says. “It was a real dumb move, letting them damned dogs get — wait, you said his name was Potato? Potato, as in Idaho?” He hoots and slaps a knee. “Well, fellas, I bought these dogs especially for this day.”
“You did what?”
Finchy takes off his sun hat and wipes his brow. “Yes, sir, they were trained from birth to hunt the flesh of Idaho Winter.”
The officers’ mouths drop open.
“You’re kidding,” Bobby says.
“Nope, not even. His mommy used to cut through our yard to get to the Feed Store, and she’d push that wailing beast in an open carriage, right through here.”
“That a fact?”
“Yup. Poor woman. That boy was a terrible burden, even then. You could see it in her eyes. So one day I look out and I see a little baby’s bonnet on the grass and that’s when I put together my plan. That Idaho Winter, I figured, would one day be walkin’ on his own and I wanted to make sure he didn’t come through here. For obvious reasons.”
The police officers nod and sigh. The boy should never have been free.
“So, I found them dogs and I tormented ’em for the whole first year of their lives with that hideous little blue cap.”
“You found them dogs. What do you mean you found them dogs? They ain’t normal dogs.”
“Well, funny story. The original owner said he went out into the barn to check on his pregnant dog and she was gone. Just these three pups there.”
“Where’d she go?”
“Well, he says, far as he can tell, the pups ate her.”
“Ate her?”
“From the inside. Born through holes they bit out of their own mother.”
The cops whistle.
“The owner told me he thought the father might have been a devil.”
“You sure they’re after the Potato?”
“No one else.”
“They gonna kill him?”
“Eat him, kill him, bury the bones.”
“Well, guess it’s a good thing we came and got your dogs.”
“Yeah, good thing.”
“Good thing.”
Chapter 6
The noon sun turned the oak into a mass of floating emeralds. Idaho watched a black caterpillar swinging on a thread over the stream. It had dropped rapidly and was now losing the battle against its own weight to return to the safety of the tree. Idaho slipped off the rock he sat on and held a long white stick out to the caterpillar. It abruptly curled around the stick and let its thread drip from its body. Idaho carefully drew the caterpillar to the safety of land, going hand over hand up the length of the stick. He brushed the side of his thumb against the soft blue lashes fanning along the small creature’s side.
It is not possible to understand everything that happens. We do, generally speaking, expect that there are explanations, some easy to come by, and others waiting, in time, through our persistent asking, to be revealed. The lion attacks the antelope because it needs to eat and a beach ball floats because it is full of air and air always sits on top of water. Explanations. So why, exactly, does the caterpillar, when safely conveyed in the careful cup Idaho makes of his hand, vomit and twist and scream? Does the caterpillar know? Does it sense that its savior is a boy so loathed that even crossing guards would run him over? A child so monstrous that even kindly old men train beasts to tear the boy apart should he ever pass by? Idaho watches the caterpillar rolling and turning, a high-pitched squeak coming from its tortured body. Even Idaho doesn’t suspect that he himself is the source of the caterpillar’s suffering. He lowers his hand to release the bug, but it falls dead to the ground. Killed by what? Revulsion? Fear? Hatred? How could this happen? Poor, innocent Idaho stares, curious, at the stiff little body. He doesn’t know.
A nearby robin has abandoned her babies, knocked the nest out of the branch. Little babies plunk into the cold water like nuts from a tree. The fish have gone, too. This small elbow in the river is now famous in the brief history of this afternoon, for being a place of evil and foulness. The minnows turn and fight the current; the turtle lolls back from a log and rips its feet on sharp stones to escape. Idaho notices the stillness, the quiet, as if this part of the world had become a lifeless image of itself. An empty place. Idaho sighs. Empty Idaho sighs.
I worry about him, but I can’t say I am immune to the widespread dislike. In fact, I confess that I don’t like him. But there is one other person besides the little girl named Madison who doesn’t carry this wound of hatred, this built-in anger.
And that person is you, the reader. You. New to this world, you can see, truly see, the awful unfairness. Look! Look! A dark cloud in the sky above Idaho: even the sun holds up its hand to hide him. But nothing can be done, can it? You can’t do anything. You’re a reader. You can’t alter these facts. All you have are words that really come from nowhere but me. I don’t even know who you are. Where you are. Nothing. Unless you can think of a way to interfere, I’m afraid little Idaho Winter’s fate is sealed. An unfair and supernaturally corrupted fate �
�� pinned like a grasshopper to an ether pad, this poor boy. At least there are no feelings in his sad, lowered head, just the sound of days, echoing in an empty space.
And only you feel for Idaho. You and Madison Beach.
“Idaho?” Madison, the lost child, with her shoes and socks in her hand, wades through knee-high water to the edge of the river where Idaho sits in his pointless silence.
Idaho looks up, not to Madison, but further up, to the sky. Madison squints to see what he sees. A fierce black cloud rumbles with little pins of lightning in its heart.
“I’ve never seen anything like that,” she says. “What is that?” She drops her shoes and Idaho looks down to them. Shiny blue leather with clean white laces. Idaho gasps. Madison hears this and looks down.
“What is it? Oh. My shoes. They’re Miss Kays. They cost a lot.”
Idaho notices her dress, a white and pink dress with complicated yellow flowers printed along its edge. Madison sits on the log beside him, turns and smiles. Idaho lowers his face. Dirty, ashamed. He is aware of light coming off the girl — the light of being clean.
“You don’t have a very good life, do you?”
Idaho turns and looks at her knees. He has heard the question, but can’t quite understand it. Like her, the question is somehow too clean. It has no angry shadow in it. None of the rage that distorts most things said to him.
“Do you, Idaho? You don’t have a very nice life?”
Idaho looks into the girl’s eyes. Light blue. Pretty blue. Red freckles on her nose.
“I don’t think so,” he says.
Madison touches his hand, but he pulls it away quickly. “Why? I’ve never seen you do anything bad. Have you ever done anything bad?”
Idaho feels a little more confident. “Everything. Everything I do is bad.” He is astonished that she doesn’t know this. “Don’t you know that?”
Madison shrugs and picks up Idaho’s caterpillar stick. “I guess. I see that’s what people always say. I don’t feel it, Idaho.”
Idaho watches the mother robin return to her nest. The nest hangs like a weed crown, empty and dark over the quick silver water. She sits on the branch and stares with the tiny black beads of her eyes at her own reflection.
“Do you feel it, Idaho?”
“Feel what?”
“You know, the badness of you. The bad that you have done.”
Idaho blinks. He is shocked by the question, and also by the experience of looking for a feeling within himself. He closes his eyes and waits. The feeling of being bad, of being wrong. Of having done wrong. He opens his eyes and looks at Madison.
“No. I don’t feel it.”
Madison sighs deeply and wraps her arms around the tops of her knees. “Ever since I can remember, everyone always said how . . . how awful you were. Talking about what they’d do to you if ever you . . . And I was always scared. Scared of you. But also scared of what happens to people whenever your name comes up. They change, they get cold and serious and they start looking around, in the sky, in the bushes. As if mentioning your name somehow means you might appear.”
Idaho looks at her feet. The river mud is drying on her toes, a soft clean lining of silt capping her skin. Madison looks down. She spots a rag tied to Idaho’s wrist and undoes it. Idaho watches, fearful and fascinated, as she dips the rag in water and rubs the dirt from her toenails. She smiles and hands him back the rag. Idaho accepts it and holds it up so he can see sun shine on the edge, a prickly clean light where it holds the mud from her toes.
“I like you, Idaho.”
Idaho sits back suddenly. He closes his eyes to feel it, the warmth of her words. He can picture the words, between his shoulders, under his chest; her words, soft and buttery and happy somehow, good words sitting close to his heart. Idaho can feel the tears on his face too. Big and warm and salty, wobbling and streaking down his pale cheeks.
“I’m sorry, Idaho.”
Idaho opens his eyes quickly, afraid. His face is wet. It is melting.
“I didn’t want to make you cry. I wanted to . . . I desperately want to see you happy.”
This is too much for Idaho and he feels his arms fall to his side, his head flop forward. He isn’t sure if he could continue sitting upright. He is aware of a soft, sad noise coming from somewhere inside him. Madison’s cool arm curls over his back and her perfect hand cups his shoulder.
They stay like this, in silence, both aware that they have created something together. Defiance. A pushing back of a darkness that no one has ever pushed at before. A wonderful, criminal liberty to love that which has been so viciously called unlovable.
What they don’t know is that several feet away, up in the bushy bank directly in front of them, crouch three monstrous and murderous hounds. And their blood-rimmed nostrils are flaring, sucking in the scent of Idaho as it reaches across the cool water from the curled toes of Madison Beach.
Chapter 7
School was let out and children ran like mice from a barn — down the steps and out across the lawn. When the last of them had escaped, Mrs. Hail emerged at the top of the steps, opening both doors at once so her arms stretched like wings as she walked out. She scanned the field and roads, listening to the sounds of sirens in the distance. A hard coal of a cloud hung over the meadow near the east bridge. Mrs. Hail brought binoculars to her eyes. The cloud contained little snaps of electricity. She lowered the binoculars. A very odd cloud. Not weather. Not weather at all. Mrs. Hail spun on her heels and spread the doors, entering the school in the same manner as she had exited, that is to say, as a raptor.
“It’s a sign!”
Mr. Cull, the janitor, is replacing fallen letters from a bulletin board display. He looks over, wide-eyed and fat-faced, with a large pink J in one hand a white airplane in the other. “What’s a sign?”
Mrs. Hail glares at Mr. Cull. “That Winter boy has poor Madison Beach down by the river and we must save her. At the very least, we must kill that boy.”
Mr. Cull held his letter and airplane tight, quite frightened of the teacher. She was flinging the contents of her purse across the floor. She finally snatched up her cell phone and dropped the purse altogether. She dialed, then held the phone to her ear, watching Mr. Cull as she tapped her heel.
“You wouldn’t understand, Mr. Cull. Some children are different than others.”
Mr. Cull dropped his letter and walked over to Mrs. Hail. He stopped just short of stepping on her toes and leaned into her face.
“Some are different, Mrs. Hail. Even I know that. I have two hatchets hanging in my broom closet.”
“You do? Whatever for?”
“For an occasion like this.”
“You keep hatchets for occasions like this?”
“Yes, I do, ma’am. For when the call comes and I’m asked to chop up that Potato boy.”
Mrs. Hail closed her phone. This was not the Mr. Cull she had come to know. The quiet, hat-tipping, hymn-humming Mr. Cull who ate his lunch by the wide front window so he could watch the children playing hopscotch. No, this wasn’t that Mr. Cull at all.
“Well, then, Mr. Cull. The call has come.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“The time has come to lop off the head of a truly terrible boy.”
Chapter 8
And so they rush out onto the streets, all of them, the young and the old, the mothers and fathers, the grandmothers and grandfathers, everyone swinging and jabbing their angry fists and clubs, heading for the riverside to set upon little Idaho Winter and free his captive, the innocent Madison Beach.
The mayor is there. Having fled his office in haste he has only had time to grab a rubber plant from the foyer. He plans to flail the boy with it, if only to add some measure of humiliation. Two firemen are in the middle of extinguishing a picnic fire in the park when they hear the hubbub. They scoop up an old man from a ben
ch and hold him aloft as they run. Their plan involves battering the boy kidnapper out of this world using the spotty head of a sleeping man. The police officers of the town fire their guns into the sky as they run. An ice cream man is busily rolling dog turds into waffle cones with the intention of giving them free to the nasty child. Crows blacken the edges of the sky and the sun half turns so the shadows point magically in the direction of the boy.
In this wonderful old town, where children race their homemade carts down the gentle slope of safe streets and pies are left to cool on sills by smiling grandmothers, a boy is wished so much ill — wished it, in fact, by everyone and everything — that everything is in a perfect harmony of dark dislike. His plainness might explain why people turn away when they pass him, but it doesn’t explain why those same people, after passing him, bend down and scoop the high heels off their feet and hurl them at his back. His shyness might explain why he has so few friends, but it doesn’t help us understand why, on his birthday, his classmates hold a lottery to see who will have the pleasure of holding his face in a puddle while others club his bare feet with cardboard tubes. It is barbaric and shameful, but it goes on and no one questions it. No one seems to think that this evil behavior represents any kind of stain on their perfect, sunny, pious lives. Even now, the school’s guidance counselor, Mr. Oncet, sits in his office trembling in anticipation of what he hopes will be the final account of poor Idaho Winter.
His long pencilly fingers scribbling nervously in his brittle gray sideburns, he jumps when the phone rings.
“Oncet here.”
He pushes back from the desk and does a turn on his swivel chair. He rubs the pant crease on his knee with a comb as he speaks.
“Oh, yes. I think you do need to have professionals on hand. That little girl will have been crying the entire time she’s in his presence. Hmm?”
He stands and begins stuffing papers into a thin briefcase.
“I’m leaving now. They’ve cornered him near the bridge? Good. Are they going to just hold him under the water . . . Or? Oh, yes. I see. Of course. Custody, take him in. I suppose asking him a few questions is proper form. But after that, I can tell you, as an expert in the field of disturbed children, this one, if he is to be kept alive, must have no contact with others. That’s right. We can’t jail him, he’s too young, but we can tie him to a good secure drainpipe or something then . . . you know . . . winter comes, there’s nothing we can do about that.”