The Troop

“No shit, Captain Obvious,” Ephraim said. “Which one of you guys took it? Was it you, Newt, you lardo?”

Newton beheld Ephraim with bruised eyes. “Eef, why would I…?”

“Because you’re a big fat fat-ass,” Ephraim stated simply.

“Newt slept next to me the whole night,” Max said; he knew it was wise to calm his best friend down before he “lost it,” as Eef’s mom would say. “If he’d tried to take the cooler, I’d have heard him.”

Shelley came round the side of the cabin.

“Where the hell were you?” Ephraim said, the challenge clear.

“Hadda take a piss.”

“What happened to the cooler?”

Shelley set his flat-hanging face upon Ephraim’s. “Dunno, boss.”

Ephraim balled his fists. He wanted to plant one between Shelley’s cowish eyes. But he was distantly fearful that his fist would sink right into the placid emptiness of Shelley’s face. It would be like sinking into a bowl of warm dough studded with busted lightbulbs. Worst of all he got the queasy feeling that Shelley wouldn’t exactly mind it—and that his face would eat his fist. Dissolve it somehow, like acid.

Ephraim inhaled deeply, willing himself to stay calm. His mother said he had a temper just like his father’s. The father who’d headed out to catch the afternoon stakes at Charlottetown downs and never came home. The shithead who’d busted his own son’s arm and didn’t even remember. The father who was currently a guest of the province at the Sleepy Hollow correctional center following a string of convenience store thefts—one of which netted the princely sum of $5.02.

He was also the man whose footsteps many figured that Ephraim would inevitably follow. The apple never falls far from the tree, went the whispers around town. It didn’t help that Ephraim looked almost exactly like his father: the same antifreeze-green eyes and open-pored olive complexion.

And, Ephraim knew, the same temper.

One afternoon he and his mother had come across a construction site. An open sewer with a nest of hoses running down into it. Workmen had set up a large reflective warning sign. The top left side of the sign was crimped so that it read:

ANGER

KEEP

CLEAR

You should heed that warning, his mother had said.

And Ephraim tried to. But people were always pushing his buttons—which he had to admit were more like huge hair-trigger plungers. Whenever his emotions threatened to spill over, he’d follow his mother’s suggestion to breathe deeply and count slowly backward from ten.

10… 9… 8… 7… 6… 5… 4… 3—

“Wild animals must have dragged it off while we were sleeping,” Kent said. “We should have hung it in a tree or something.”

Kent looked nothing like last night’s world beater. A dirty ring of sweat darkened his T-shirt collar; the same dark patches bloomed under his armpits. His eyes sat deep in his skull, the flesh around them netted in fine wrinkles: it looked a little like the wattle on an old biddy’s neck.

“Bullshit,” said Ephraim. “How would we not have heard animals making off with it?”

“I was pretty zonked,” Max said.

Ephraim pointed at Newt. “You figure the Masked Skunk made off with it, too?”

Newton winced. “I was wiped last night, too. I mean, it could have—”

“Fuck, man—if one of you took it, just admit it,” Ephraim said, his voice taking flight to an upper octave. “What do you think I’m going to do—go crazy? Start laying you guys out?” He raised his hands, all innocence. “You couldn’t have eaten it all, right? So we’ll just say you’ve had your fill and leave it at that.”

“Animals,” Kent croaked.

White-hot rage pounded at Ephraim’s temples. His molars ground together so hard that he could hear them in his skull: thick plates of shale scraping against one another.

He stalked away from the campfire in the direction of the cabin… but he took a wide berth around it, continuing on into the sparse woods behind.

He pulled a battered old Sucrets cough drop tin from his pocket. Three lonely cigarettes jostled inside. He’d hoped to duck away with Max, sharing a smoke down by the shore while they stared at the stars. Max didn’t smoke, but Eef planned to convince him to be his smokin’ buddy. Otherwise it was just him, alone, launching off lung rockets. Snacking on cancer sticks. Which painted a pretty lame picture, actually.

He poked a cigarette into his mouth, flicked his brass Zippo, and touched the flame to tobacco. He inhaled, coughing as the gray vapor rasped his throat—at first it’d felt like swallowing fiberglass insulation, the pink kind stacked in bricks at the hardware store—hissing the smoke between his teeth. He tried to blow smoke rings, puffing out his cheeks, but the wind rose out of the west and tore them apart.

Birds called in a metallic rhree-rhree-rhree: a sound like a rusty axe drawn across a cinder block. The nicotine hit his system, nerve endings a-tingle.