They sat round the fire pit as dusk settled between the trees. A cool wind howled over the grass, making each blade sing like a tiny instrument.
“We have no choice but to make camp here,” said Micah. “Return tomorrow morning.”
Micah caught Minerva’s unspoken worry: What if those things are still hanging around? He had no assurance they weren’t, but it seemed wiser to batten down in a spot with clean sight lines and establish a watch rather than hike back through the unlit woods.
“Reverend’s gonna know we’ve been gone for sure now,” said Otis.
Charlie nodded. “Got to accept it. We’ll make our amends if it comes to that.”
They got a fire going. They ate the food Micah and the others had bought back in Grinder’s Switch—it was completely untouched, even the bread. They skewered bits of Spam on sharpened sticks and grilled it over the fire. It tasted bad, and not just because it was Spam: some bitterness in the wood imparted a foul essence into the meat. Being ravenous, they ate it anyway.
One of them would have to keep watch. Micah volunteered to take the first shift. Minerva took one tent. Charlie and Otis bedded down in the other.
Micah fed the fire. Acrid smoke spiraled up. The flames warped the woods beyond, creating shapes where there were none.
He would sit that way, nearly unblinking, for many hours.
23
THE NIGHT AFTER he returned to Little Heaven, Eli Rathbone paid a visit to Nate.
They weren’t even friends, not as Nate saw it. Eli had always been kinda mean—and he’d gotten a lot meaner the past few weeks, right up until he vanished into the woods.
Eli was a tall, skinny redhead with a wiry frame and bony hands. He liked to hold the smaller kids down and give them the Rooster Peck: sitting on their chests and jabbing his fingers into their breastbone while they struggled to name ten chocolate bars, which was the only way to get him to stop.
Milky Way… uh, ah, AH—Hershey bar, aaaaah! Payday! Milky Way!
You said that one already, dummy. Start again!
He’d done it to Nate, too. Elton and Billy Redhill laughed when Nate had gotten hung up on nine. His brain froze. He could think of any number of candies and gums and soda pops—Flipsticks, Lemonheads, Black Bart, SweeTarts, Frostie Root Beer!—but not one stupid chocolate bar. Eli’s fingers punched into his breastbone so hard that Nate had been sure his chest would cave in.
“Scooter Pie!” he had screamed.
Eli said, “Judges?”
Elton and Billy shook their heads. “Nah, that’s a cookie,” said Elton.
Eli grinned. “Start over!”
Eli could be mean as rattlesnake venom, as Nate’s grandmother might say. But he was sweet as pie when the Reverend came around. A real honey-dripper—a suck-up. Eli knew the Bible well. His ability to recite catechism made him one of the Reverend’s favorites, although it seemed to Nate that the Reverend looked at kids the way Nate looked at the monkeys at the zoo.
And it was Eli’s voice Nate heard now. He could swear it, even though that would be crazy. Eli’s voice, coming from the darkness just beyond his bunkhouse window.
Nate… wake up, Nate…
When Nate first showed up, Eli hadn’t been bullying anybody. Back then they were supervised by Missus Hughes, a foreboding woman who didn’t take any sass. But then Missus Hughes broke her leg and had to leave. The kids had been left to do whatever they wanted, pretty much; their only obligation was to attend the sermons. Eli used this newfound freedom to torment his chosen targets.
Eli hadn’t always been quite so nasty. Rooster Pecks, sure, but that was the same sort of treatment Nate had received from bullies back home. Everyone had to deal with bullies, Nate reasoned, until you became an adult, at which point everyone stopped acting so mean… except that his dad’s old boss, Postmaster Jim, was a bully, too—a grown-up version of Eli. He used to make fun of his father to his face, even when Nate was right there. “Sunny” Jim would slap his father between the shoulder blades so hard that his dad would stagger, and laugh and say something like, You’d be better off in a flower shop, wouldn’t you, Reg, pruning pansies. And the other mailmen would laugh, which was what kids did, too—laughed along with the bully so they didn’t get picked on themselves.
It was times like that when Nate wished his mom was still around. She would have slapped Sunny Jim in front of everyone for speaking that way—which was sad when you thought about it, because Nate’s father wouldn’t even defend himself. Nate often wondered why his mother even loved his father, or vice versa; they were so unalike it was as if they were different species. But if Sunny Jim were to say, You need your wife to defend you, Reg? his mother would slap him again. And if Sunny Jim ever raised his hand to her in return, she’d find something sharp to stick him with. And if ole Sunny Jim did the same to her, well, Nate was sure his mom would get a gun next. Her temper wasn’t just hot; it was lava. She went supernova.
Which was why she was in jail. Society frowned on people who couldn’t keep their rage in check—even if they were defending someone they loved. But his mom wasn’t in jail for that reason. She broke the law trying to make money. And even though she had cried and told Nate she only did it for him, he couldn’t fully forgive her—because her crimes meant he had to move with his father to Little Heaven.
Nate rolled over in bed. The cot springs squealed. It was dark inside the bunkhouse. His father snored a few feet away. They used to live in a house. A teensy three-bedroom with a postage stamp lawn, but still. Now they lived in something a hunter might squat in while trapping minks in the winter. There was no indoor plumbing, so Nate had to use the outhouse. Sometimes he had to pee at night, which meant he had to cross the square to the jakes, as they were called, and squat over a pool of dark, smelly waste. As he tried to force his pee out, something would scratch-scratch on the outhouse. Just the branches of a tree, he knew, but at three o’clock he couldn’t help picturing a witch, all dried up and pruney with teeth like busted periwinkle shells, raking her nails on the boards behind his head. His piss tube would clamp shut in fear. Some nights he lay in bed in abject agony, his bladder bursting, cursing himself for having that second glass of water at dinner. Better his bladder burst, better he soak the mattress with pee, than he have to crouch in that outhouse with those witch’s nails scraping at him.
Nate got out of bed. The bunkhouse was cold. His bare legs broke out in gooseflesh.
The phosphorescent hands on the alarm clock read 2:55 a.m. He screwed his knuckles into his eyes and stared blearily at the window. Nothing there…
…but he could feel something out in the dark. Just a few feet away from the window. Waiting.
Little Heaven hadn’t been quite so bad when they first showed up, but Nate had never felt at home here. His mom didn’t put much stock in religion—People can eat whatever they want, she’d said, but they better not show up on my doorstep asking if I want a bite of their apple—so Nate was at a disadvantage from the start, seeing as he didn’t know the Bible. He had to wear thick wool pants to every service; now his legs itched like fire whenever the Reverend even opened his mouth—this was called a Pavlovian response. Nate had learned that back at his old school, where they studied things like science and the human brain. Such things weren’t talked about at Little Heaven. Science gets in the way of our communion with the Lord, Nate was told. He missed his old school. He missed other things, too. TV and comic books and the smell of the dime-store vanilla perfume the girls in his class used to wear and even the smell of car exhaust and of cigarettes in movie theaters—even though, if you’d asked him, he would have told you he’d never miss tailpipe fumes and throat-itching Marlboro smoke, not in a million years. What Nate really missed was going places in cars. Just like he missed watching movies at the theater. But that all got mixed up in his head with the bad smells associated with those joys—and he couldn’t give voice to those more sophisticated thoughts. He was a boy. He just felt.