“You don’t remember anything else?”
The boy shook his head.
“Your mother? Your father? What you had for breakfast yesterday?”
The boy was silent a moment. He examined his palms.
“Can I… can I see your hands?” said the boy.
“Where are these words coming from then? What you’re saying? Who taught you to speak and speak like us?”
The boy shrugged. He was crying again.
Brooke put out his palms. They were caked in dirt, a little blood in the deeper wrinkles, which had run from a small crack in the skin between his knuckles. The boy slid his hands under his legs, palms down and pressing into the dirt.
Sugar approached.
“What’d you get?” said Brooke.
“What business is it of yours?”
“Are you sick?” said the boy.
“No,” said Sugar.
“Are you hurt?”
“You’re a curious little egg, aren’t you? We’re done with this. You need to get along anyhow. Back to nowhere.”
“Sugar,” said Brooke.
“And if someone comes looking for us tonight, tomorrow, or any day after this, for that matter,” Sugar leaned in, “we’re going to know where he came from. Whether or not you actually said something, we’ve got to act on what we know, pursue reason and statistical likelihood above all else — so we’re going to find you and the people who matter most to you. Did we explain what it is we do for a living, son? Did we make it clear enough? We’ll go right to work on you, and anyone who knows your name.”
“Sugar,” said Brooke.
“We’ll erase you. Any trace of you.”
“Sugar,” said Brooke.
The boy was crying openly, his palms still buried beneath his thighs. He was flexing his fingers and digging into the leaves beneath him, loosing small rocks and the end of a buried twig.
“I’m telling the truth,” said Sugar.
“You’ve scared him, Sugar. Now leave him alone,” said Brooke.
Finally the boy brought his hands to his face, tried to turn away from them. Sugar snapped him up by the wrists and held out his arms as if the boy were pleading. The boy stared up at him but said nothing.
“Sugar, let him go,” said Brooke, and Sugar held out the boy’s palms to Brooke and pointed with his chin. The palms were blank, staring back at them. Smooth as stones.
“Have you ever caught anything before?” said Brooke.
The boy was on his belly at Brooke’s side and they were watching two deer hoof their way crosswise up a steep and sudden incline only a mile or so from where the men had been camped that morning.
“I don’t know,” said the boy.
“Let’s say you haven’t,” said Brooke. “You’re going to feel a certain kind of pride, a sense of accomplishment. But you’re also going to feel uneasy with that, as if there’s something wrong with it. There isn’t. It’s as natural as breathing. That guilt is all fear, anyway. Fear that one day you’re going to be on the receiving end of a blow, and the sudden wish that no one had to do that kind of thing ever. You can rid yourself of all that if you just accept what’s coming to you in the general sense, and work to prevent it in the immediate sense. No matter what you let live you’re going to die and it’s just as likely it will be of a rock falling on your head or getting a bad cough as it is that someone will decide they want you gone. So accept it now and move on.”
“Okay,” said the boy.
“Are you ready?” said Brooke.
“I think so,” said the boy.
“We’ll wait then,” said Brooke.
The deer worked their way up the steep incline without struggle. As they neared the top, the boy said, “I don’t think your brother likes me.”
“He doesn’t trust you,” said Brooke.
“Why?”
“He’s no reason to.”
“Okay,” said the boy.
Brooke watched him a moment. Then the boy said, “I’m ready,” and they rose up and loosed their stones from their slings.
The boy missed entirely, but Brooke’s stone made contact with the larger of the two and when the creature stumbled, stunned, a few feet down the incline, Brooke took off. He collapsed onto the stunned animal, gripped its jaw, its shoulder, twisted and snapped some hidden, necessary part. Everything about the deer went still, then it kicked, shuttered, and went still again.
“We’ll eat,” said Brooke.
“I won’t eat it,” said the boy.
Brooke was sawing the skin from the kill, its legs spread and tied to two separate trees. Brooke shrugged and placed the knife beneath a long length of flesh.
“Then you’ll die,” said Brooke.
That night they heard men on the road. Voices in the dark. The boy woke first. He trembled and rubbed his body beneath the shirt Brooke had given him, which the boy hadn’t put on, but chose instead to lay over himself as a blanket.
He heard laughter from several men and a single struggling voice. Grunting and squealing just a little, breathing in spurts.
“I think someone’s found us,” said the boy.
Brooke and Sugar did not stir.
“Brooke,” said the boy. “Sugar. I think someone’s — ”
And Brooke was up. He was quiet, moving, sifting through his bag. His hand withdrew clutching a piece of metal that shone silver in the moonlight. Brooke disappeared then, into the trees. Sugar, the boy suddenly noticed, had vanished too.
As the voices approached, the boy scrambled toward a large dark tree and crouched down on the side opposite their apparent approach.
A limping body scrambled into their campsite, knocking their empty cans with its feet and tripping into the bundles of their supplies. It struggled to lift itself with two skinny arms but four men were suddenly upon it. They dragged it from amongst the supplies and blankets, out to an open spot of grass, faintly lit from the light above. There, they proceeded to kick and strike at the body without a word between them. One stepped back to grab a slick bundle of deer meat from the food pile and bring it down upon the struggling body with something like a laugh, cough, or wheeze. The bundle burst and the boy could hear the meat spilling out and into the grass, then their kicking and stepping on it as they moved about.
“It’s meat,” said a voice.
“Did we kill him?” said another.
“It’s animal meat,” said a third.
“Is he dead then?”
The body was no longer struggling, but the boy could make out the chest’s movement from several feet away. It breathed like a man asleep, long, deep breaths punctuated by only a moment of stillness.
“He’s not dead.”
“It’s a campsite.”
“Who’s here?”
“No one.”
“The blankets are warm.”
One man held Sugar’s blanket to his face, smelling and then rubbing it against his cheeks.
“It’s a woman,” he said.
“Let me,” said another voice, grabbing the blanket and pressing it to his face.
“Where is she?”
“Got to be near.”
The beaten man began to rise again, lifting himself on two skinny arms then pushing off from the dirt and setting out to run while bent at the waist, clutching his gut as the loose bits of deer fell from him and back into the grass.
“He’s up,” said a voice, and pursued him.
The one holding the blanket wrapped it around his waist and tied a knot.
“It’s mine,” said a voice.
“Get after him,” said the one with the blanket, and within moments, they set upon their pursued.
They had him down again, pressed against the earth. This time, a knife was drawn. One of the shadows set to sawing at the howling body, and it writhed for a moment before settling back into the ground like a dark, dull piece of landscape.