The Troop

“Oh oh oh!” Newton said excitedly. “The cannolis at Stella’s Bakery. The best.” He threw his hands up with an air of finality, as if he’d settled some hard-fought argument with a fact that was beyond dispute. “Crunchy on the outside, filled with sweet cheese and chocolate chips on the inside. They crack apart in your mouth and that filling just…” His tongue inched out of his mouth. “…splooshes. It splooshes onto your taste buds. I could eat about a million of them right now.”

Max bent over, clutching his belly. Newton’s rhapsody had left him a bit light-headed. “Crap. Maybe we ought to talk about something else.”

They found a skunk den—it was clear by the smell—and what may have been a fox run, but no sign of Shelley. They debated where he might be hiding, or whether he was hiding at all.

“Maybe he’s following us,” Max said, a possibility that spooked the hell out of them.

“We should follow our noses,” Newton said. “Like Toucan Sam, y’know? The stranger and Scoutmaster Tim and even Kent—they all started to smell sweet, right? Like, gross sweet.”

Max nodded. “Yeah, like rottenny kinda? Like someone’s puke after he ate two cones of cotton candy at the fair and got on the Zipper.”

“I guess like that, yeah. So if we smell that—”

“We’ll know Shelley’s close. Okay.”

The sun slipped lower in its western altar. Twilight piled up along the horizon in ever-darkening layers. The boys hunched their shoulders into the brisk wind.

Newton laughed and said: “You know, my mom’s going to kill me when this is all over.”

Max loved that Newton still thought that way—that he still saw a time when this would all be over. When they would be home, safe.

“Why would she, Newt? For what?”

“For all this. Getting myself into it.”

“None of this is our fault, Newt. It’s just some awful thing that happened.”

“I know, I know. My mom’s just like that sometimes. She cares too much, y’know? Makes her crazy. Remember that flour baby project we did for home ec?”

Of course Max did. Their teacher had given them each a bag of flour to take care of as if it were a baby. Some students hadn’t taken it seriously. Eef tossed his flour baby off the school’s supply shed and hooted as it detonated across the hopscotch court. Kent duct-taped the entire bag to avoid ruptures. Their teacher frowned on this. You wouldn’t duct-tape an actual baby, would you? she’d asked Kent. Are you suuuure? Kent replied with a sly smile, earning sniggers from the rest of the class.

“I really tried to take good care of that flour,” Newton said. “I drew a face on the sack and everything. But the thing is, I’ve got sweaty hands. It’s a condition. Sweaty armpits and feet, too. Can’t help it. Every time I touched it, the sack got wet. It started to come apart. I told myself to stop fussing with it, but I couldn’t help it. I kept touching it just to know it was there and safe. It ripped a little and then a little more until it finally ripped right open. My flour baby… well, died. I guess I killed it.”

“It was just a stupid sack of flour, Newt.”

Newton made a face that said: You don’t get it, man.

“I’m just saying that sometimes the more you care for something, the more damage you do. Not on purpose, right? You end up hurting the things you love just because you’re trying so hard. That’s what Mom does with me sometimes. She wants me to be so safe that it ends up hurting me in a weird way. But I get it, y’know? It must be the hardest thing in the world, caring for someone. Trying to make sure that person doesn’t come to harm.”

THE SKY was the color of a bone-deep bruise when Max caught the first traces of a high sweet stink.

“You smell that?” Max whispered.

Newton nodded. “Where’s it coming from?”

They held their noses up, zeroing in on the location where it seemed to emanate from: a cavern set into a shale-strewn hillside.

They retired out of earshot to formulate a plan.

Max said: “Should we yell down to him?”

“Maybe he’s sleeping. Why wake him up? We can just pluck them off him.”

“Right out of his pocket?”

“If that’s where he’s keeping them, I guess we’ll have to.”

“Okay, fine,” Max said, expelling a few rabbity breaths. “But what if he’s awake? What if he fights back?”

“Are you asking if we should hurt him?”

“I don’t know. I guess so. I mean, you already cracked him over the head, so…”

Newton bit his lip. “Let’s just hope he’s asleep. Rock, paper, scissors for who goes in first?”

Newton’s hand came down clenched in a fist. Max’s hand came down flat. Paper covered rock.

“Forget it,” Max said. “We go down side by side.”

Newton shook his head. “It looks too narrow and anyway, fair’s fair.”

44

THE CAVERN floor dipped just past the cave mouth, plunging them into darkness. A sticky, coagulated darkness that coated their skin like oil. It was as if the rods and cones in their eyes had been shut off like flicking a light switch: click!