The Troop

Tim and Max stood breathing heavily in the dim light of the cabin. The hacked-off portion of the tube slid out of the vent in the man’s shirt, hitting the floor and wadding up like a huge tube sock. The brown goo had run over Tim’s fingers and down his knuckles like watery molasses. Overcome by instinctive revulsion, Tim wiped his fingers on his pants—and when even that closeness was too much, he unbuttoned them, yanked them down and off, wiped his hands on the fabric, and hurled the pants into the corner. He stood shivering in his underwear. His thighs were unbearably thin: knobbed sticks on a forest floor.

“Jesus,” he said softly, then gave Max a sharp look. “Did you swallow any of that stuff? Get any in your mouth or eyes?”

“I don’t think so.”

“That’s not good enough.”

“No,” Max said. “I didn’t get anything in me.”

“You kept the gauze over your mouth the whole time?”

“Yes.”

“Okay… okay, good.”

Tim staggered to the table and drank scotch right out of the bottle.

“If you drink whiskey, you’ll never get worms, Max.”

Kent pounded on the door unrelentingly. “Tim! Tiiiiim!”

The Scoutmaster stumbled to the sink and washed his hands. He did this for some time; the hard island water made it difficult to get a good lather going. His legs trembled like a newborn foal’s. When he was finished, his hands were a raw, nail-scraped red. Did it matter anymore? He shuffled into the bedroom, not speaking to Max, coming out with pants on.

He kicked the chair away from the door—he had to kick three times; he seemed to lack the energy to do it properly—and flung the door open to catch Kent red-faced and fuming, his hand raised in midknock.

“Get away from the fucking door, Kent.” Tim’s voice belonged to something recently dug from its grave. “Get your ass far, far away.”

14

TIM SAT at the fire and explained what he could. Most of it failed to make sense to him at all.

“A worm?”

“Yeah, Newton: a worm. Not a night crawler or something you’d dig out of your mom’s garden. A tapeworm.”

Tim had experience with tapeworms. Any GP would. They were a common enough affliction. A person could pick them up anywhere.

As easy as petting your dog. Providing your dog had rolled in a pile of shit earlier that day—as dogs tend to do—you could get microscopic particles of said shit on your fingers without even knowing. A thousand eggs stuck between the whorls of your fingertips. And after petting ole Spot, let’s say you ate a handful of popcorn and licked the salt off your fingers. Bingo-bango-bongo. You’ve got worms.

At least once a month, he’d see a kid in the waiting room scratching his keister through the seat of his pants and say to himself: worms. One time a kid’s mother handed him an ice cream tub with one of her child’s chalky turds inside. “I thought you’d want a sample,” she’d told him solemnly. “For proof.”

Tim would prescribe an oral remedy that demolished the tapeworm colony over a few days. Tapeworms were, at most, a nuisance.

“He’s dead,” Tim said simply.

Ephraim said: “From worms?”

“No, Eef—from a worm.”

Kent said: “How the hell can a tapeworm kill someone? I had worms when I was eight. I crapped the little buggers out.”

“I know,” Tim said. “I gave your mother the medicine to do it.”

This one wasn’t the size of any regular worm, Tim thought. He’d heard that beef tapeworms—the ones you can get from eating tainted meat—could get pretty big. Twenty, thirty feet. He recalled a case study where a doctor pulled one out of a cattle rancher’s leg. It had balled up between the layers of muscle. A lump the size of a baseball. The doctor made a slit into the muscle and pulled it out of the rancher’s leg like teasing out a piece of thread. The worm was incredibly skinny, like a strand of angel hair pasta. It snapped. The rest of the worm died inside the muscle and started to rot. The rancher almost lost his leg. But even so, the longest worms weren’t really that thick.

Ephraim said: “What did it do to him?”

What could Tim tell them? The truth? The truth—which even he wanted to avoid—was that the tapeworm had done what tapeworms do: eaten everything the man was supposed to eat. Like having a furnace turned up to full blast inside of you: everything you throw into it, it burns up. No fuel left for you. Tim thought about the blood-leeched whiteness of the man’s flesh and realized the worm may’ve consumed other things, too. His blood and enzymes. That would have shut down his kidneys and liver and other organs… some kind of vampire.

But he couldn’t say this. It would terrify the boys. And yet he’d nearly told them anyway—sharing the terror seemed like the only way to defuse it, even minimally. But they were just kids. Even now, with the mainland and hospitals and help seeming so far away, Tim understood his obligation to these boys and to their parents. He must keep them safe. Scout’s honor.

“Are you okay?” Newton asked. “You and Max? Did anything… y’know, touch you?”