The Troop

21

BEFORE THE boys entered the cellar, a fight broke out.

Ephraim ransacked the cabin cupboards for candles and a pack of matches. He picked nimbly around the dead man, whose limbs had stiffened at tragic angles and whose body now shimmered with fruit flies.

Newton dashed down to the fire pit and grabbed their sleeping bags. He cast a fearful glance at the ocean. The water was in complete turmoil. With the wind whipping about, Newton’s feet didn’t feel entirely moored to the earth anymore.

He raced around the side of the cabin to meet the others. Ephraim had thrown the cellar doors open, the plywood trembling in the wind. Snapped spiderwebs blew like the flimsiest lace over the yawning entryway. The fermented smell of the earth rose up. The sky had gone the color of a blood blister—only a weak sickle of light shone into the cellar. The first few dusty wooden steps were visible, but the remainder of the staircase was overtaken in pooling shadows.

Ephraim pointed at Kent. “Sorry, man. You aren’t coming down with us.”

Kent’s face somersaulted from shock to rage to speechless terror at the prospect of being left alone outside.

“You can’t…” He offered his hands in a wordless plea. “You can’t just—”

Ephraim crossed his arms. “You did it to the Scoutmaster.”

Max saw the strange electricity running behind Ephraim’s face: cruel voltages quivered his skin.

“That was different,” Kent said feebly.

“I don’t think so. I think it was smart.” Ephraim’s hands spanked together in a polite golf-clap. “Very smart.”

“We can’t just leave him out here, Eef.”

Ephraim wheeled on Newton. “You want to get sick next? Want to be sneaking off in the middle of the night to eat everyone’s food?”

“I’m sorry,” Kent whispered.

Ephraim cupped a hand to his ear. “What’s that? Can’t hear you.”

“I’m sorry.” Tears brimmed in the cups of Kent’s eyelids. “Just let me come down with you. Please. Don’t leave me out here.”

“No can do,” Ephraim said coldly.

“What are we going to do, Eef?” Max said, gesturing to the storm set to make landfall. “Just leave him?”

“He can go back inside the cabin,” said Eef. “It doesn’t matter n—”

Which was when Kent tried to bull past Ephraim into the cellar. Yesterday that confrontation would have been a coin flip. Now it was pitifully one-sided.

Ephraim pushed Kent—an instinctual move. His face wrenched with quick revulsion as he shoved Kent aside as one might a squirming sack of beetles. Kent went sprawling.

Newton said: “Eef, come on…”

Ephraim’s lips curled back. “Stay out of this, you fat shit.”

Kent crawled up and came again. For an instant, it looked as though Ephraim would step aside—this tormented expression came over him, stuck between confrontation and flight—but his rage took over. He punched Kent in the belly. His fist sunk into Kent’s gut in some terrifying way: it was as if Kent’s body shaped itself around Ephraim’s fist, welcoming it. Kent’s breath came out in a gust.

“Stay down,” Ephraim told him.

Instead Kent dragged himself up. He looked like some bloodless creature risen from his grave. His face had the pallid sheen of a dengue fever victim. The other boys ranged into a silent ring around Ephraim and Kent, the same ring that seems to form organically in school yards whenever a fight’s brewing. Rain now pelted down to soak them through to their skivvies.

Ephraim struck out impulsively at Kent. If his mother had seen him, she’d have noticed the quick, reckless anger in his eyes—so much like his father.

Eef’s fists zipped out and back rapidly, as if repelled by Kent’s yellowed flesh. In short order, he’d raised a goose-egg on Kent’s forehead and bloodied his nose and smacked him squarely in the left eye—a wound that would blacken nicely before long. Kent held his arms out, fingers squeezing and opening convulsively. His skin tore like crepe paper, stretched too tight over the flinty outcroppings of his face. Blood leaked out of his wounds only to be rinsed away by the heavy rain.

Kent kept trying to speak as Ephraim’s fists peppered him. “I’m sorry,” he said penitently, his voice unheard amid the peals of thunder. “I’m sorry, sorry, sorry…”

Ephraim’s fist sheared off Kent’s jaw. Blood leapt through the electrified air. Ephraim’s knuckles had split open. It went on forever, and then it stopped. Ephraim’s eyes remained wild, his nostrils dilated.

“You can stay out here with him,” he told Newton. “Your choice. But he’s not coming down.”

The hardest-hearted part of the boys realized that Kent had earned this. If you call the tune, you also have to pay the piper when he begs his due.

“We can’t just leave him, Eef.”

Ephraim rounded on Newton. “We can, and we’re gonna. Or I’m gonna—and Max, too. And Shelley, I guess.”

Shelley was already halfway down the cellar stairs. The other boys remained in the pelting rain, lightning spearing over the trees. Ephraim turned to Max.

“Come on, man. Let’s go.”