The Troop

“I ever tell you that my pops busted my arm? I was like one year old, man. Can’t even remember. Guess I was screaming in my crib and he comes in, all pissed, lifts me up, and my arm gets stuck between the crib bars and he kept pulling and my arm just went kerflooey.”

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.