The Troop

41

MAX DREAMED he was in the mortuary with his father. It’s the only chance he got to see him some days. People didn’t die that often in North Point, but they did like to hunt and fish, meaning his father had a backlog of taxidermy projects. The nature of taxidermy being what it is—framing the anatomies of dead animals before they begin to decay—timing is everything. Of course, the same held true for human anatomies.

His father worked in a white-tiled room beneath the city courthouse. The air held the sharp undertone of charcoal from the air purifier that pumped away in a corner. The shelves and fixtures were stainless steel. A huge steel slab dominated the room’s center.

Max watched his father work. He wore a long white coat—the kind pharmacists wore—and an apron of black vulcanized rubber. His dad whistled while he worked. Today it was “The Old Gray Mare.”

“The old gray mare she ain’t what she used to be, ain’t what she used to be, ain’t what she used to be…”

A woman’s body lay on the table. She had died at a very old age. A white sheet was draped over her hips but her chest was bare. Her breasts were long and tubular, as if something had pulled them out of shape. Her empty sockets were withered like two halves of a cored-out squash forgotten for days on a countertop.

His father worked with his back to Max. He picked up an ocular suction cup.

“What happens is,” he told Max in a weird singsong voice, “the eyeballs get sucked down into your head after you die. Did you know that, Maxxy?”

His father never called him Maxxy.

He thumbed the ocular cup into the woman’s socket. Tiny barbs on the cup attached to her naked eyeball. He pulled. The eyeball sucked back into its socket with the sound of a boot being pulled out of thick mud.

“All better…”

His father was whistling again. A sputtering, wheezing noise—it sounded as if it was being made with a different orifice altogether. Fear slammed into Max’s belly.

His father turned. At first Max thought his head had been submitted to some incredible pressure: it was flattened, elongated, pancaked. It projected upward and curled over on itself like a lotus petal.

“Oh Maxxy Maxxy Maxxy…”

A worm’s head jutted from his father’s lab coat. It was the greasy white of a toadstool. Noxious fluid leaked from its ribbed exterior, dribbling down to form a pumicey crust on the collar.

“Thee ole gray mare, thee ain’t what thee useth to be…”

The voice was coming from a pit in the middle of its head: round and ineffably dark like the air in a caved-in mine shaft. The pit was studded with translucent teeth that looked like glassine tusks.

“Thee ole gray mare…” his worm-father sang, swaying and burping up goo.

A pair of yellow dots glowed in the direct center of the pit, looking like the headlights of a car shining up from the bottom of the ocean. Before he woke up, Max swore he could hear another voice coming from the deepest part of the worm—the ongoing scream of his own father, trapped somewhere inside of it.

NEWTON WAS shaking him.

“Max! Max!”

He jerked up. The sunlight stabbed at his eyes. The dream drained thickly from his brainpan, departing his body through uncontrollable twitches and shivers.

“You okay? You were screaming in your sleep,” Newton said.

“Yeah. Just a bad dream.”

It was morning. He didn’t know how long he’d slept. His spine was knotted and his gut kicked over sourly.

They walked to the shore. The ships still charted their distant orbits. They were like the heat-shimmer on the highway: no matter how fast you drove, it didn’t get any closer or draw any farther away. Max wanted to scream at them, but why bother? A waste of his swiftly diminishing energy.

Newton rubbed the sleep-crust out of his eyes and wandered toward Oliver McCanty’s boat. He hauled on the motor’s rip cord. The motor went wuh-wah—the same discouraging sound it’d made when they’d tried a few days before. Newton pulled it again. Again. Again. He thought about the poster in science class—Albert Einstein, shock-haired with his tongue stuck out above the quote: The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results. Defeated, he let go of the cord, staggered back, tripped, and sat down on his ass. He cupped his hands over his eyes, lowered his head between his knees, and wept.

“Hey,” Max said. “Hey, Newt, it’s—”