“How many types of hobos are there?” said Ephraim. “Your run-of-the-mill smelly old hobo, I guess, the ones who hang out at the train yard.”
“How big a cowflop are we talking about?” Kent called back.
“Standard size,” Ephraim said. The boys nodded as if that was all he’d needed to say—he’d perfectly set the size of this hypothetical cowflop in their minds.
“Is this hobo diseased or anything?” Max asked. “Like, his ass rotting out?”
“His morals are diseased,” Ephraim said, after a pause to think. “But he’s been given a clean bill of health.”
“I’d eat the cowflop,” said Newton.
“What a fucking surprise,” Ephraim said.
Eventually they all agreed that, of both scenarios, scarfing a cowflop was marginally better than a strange, smelly man’s hairy ass cheeks ripping a wet grunter in their faces.
“It’d singe your eyebrows off,” Kent said to appreciative laughter. “It’d put a center part right down your hair!”
“What would you rather,” Newton said, “give a speech in front of the whole school or get your bathing suit sucked down the filter at the public pool?”
Ephraim groaned. “Oh, for fuck’s sake, Newt, that’s so laaaaaaame.”
“Yeah, but,” Newton mumbled, “you’d be naked, right? Your bum hanging out.”
“Your bum?” Ephraim scoffed. “Your bum, really? Your pink little tushie?”
Ephraim pulled a cigarette out of his pack, along with a brass Zippo. He fixed the smoke between his lips and lit it with an elaborate flourish: drawing the Zippo up his thigh, popping off the lid, then swiftly running it down again, sparking the flywheel on his trousers. He touched the flame to the tobacco, inhaled, and said:
“Nothing like a smoke when you’re stuck out in nature.”
Ephraim was the only boy in their grade who smoked. A recent affectation. He bought them in singles—four, five cigarettes at a time—from a high schooler named Ernie Smegg, whose doughy carbuncled face looked like a basket of complimentary dinner rolls.
“You smoke the wrong way,” Kent said. “You’re holding it all wrong.”
“What?” Ephraim said. He pinched the cigarette between his thumb and pointer finger, the way you’d hold a pipe. “What’s the matter?”
“My dad says only Frenchmen smoke like that,” said Kent. “And fags.”
Ephraim’s jaw went stiff. “Shut your big fucking mouth, K.”
“You shouldn’t smoke,” Newton said fussily. “My mom says it turns your lungs black as charcoal briquettes.”
Ephraim’s chin jutted. “Yeah? Your mother’s so dumb she stares at an orange juice carton all day because it says: concentrate.”
“Hey!” Kent barked, bristling. “Don’t rag on his mom, man.”
Ephraim snorted but eventually said, “Sorry, Newt. So what would you rather: jerk off a donkey or fingerbang Kathy Rhinebeck?”
Kathy Rhinebeck was a sweet girl who’d been branded the class slut due to the rumor—unsubstantiated by anyone aside from Dougie Fezz—that she’d masturbated Dougie Fezz “to climax” in the back row of the North Point Cinema. Christ on a bike, she didn’t know what the hell she was doing, Fezz told a gaggle of pop-eyed boys in the school yard, his tone one of withering scorn. What, was she yanking weeds out of a garden?
“What’s a fingerbang?” Newton asked, predictably.
“I’d jerk off the donkey,” Shelley suddenly said. “Who wants sloppy seconds?”
This, the boys silently acknowledged, was precisely the sort of response you could expect from Shelley Longpre—he had this way of sucking the air out of the game; out of any game, really.
They hiked in silence around the eastern hub of the island. The trail deteriorated until it was nothing but a strip of loose shale edged by chickweed and stinging thistles. It led around a rocky outcropping facing out over the gunmetal sea.
“This the way?” Newton asked.
“Where else?” Kent said challengingly. “Tim didn’t send us on a granny walk.”
They worked their way up. The shale sat upon a base of solid granite holding the same pink hue of the outcropping. Loose stones kept pebbling away under their boots. The path—which had seemed quite solid at the outset—soon became a series of treacherous collapsing footfalls.
And it then narrowed at the midpoint of their ascent. They could barely crowd both their feet together on it. Below them lay a steep slope carpeted with the same soft shale. It was not so sheer that they risked free falling, but steep enough that they would slide painfully down, boots pumping and hands clawing for purchase. If they couldn’t stop in time, they’d hit the cold, gray sea.
Ephraim said: “Whose smart idea was this again?” When nobody answered—they lacked the energy or inclination, focused entirely on their task, which had abruptly turned very grim—his gaze zeroed in on Kent, clumsily edging his bulk around the rock face.
You big dumbfuck, Ephraim thought. You stupid shit, you.
The boys turned their faces into the outcrop, edging along the rock face with hesitant stutter-steps. Newton cried out, his nose scraping on a pitted extrusion of granite, peeling off a layer of skin. Straggly weeds grew off the bare rock, the tips of their withered leaves frosted with sea salt. How could anything survive in such a place, tilted crazily over the water?
The boys’ fingertips hummed over the rock like bugs, searching desperately for handholds. “Grab here,” Ephraim told Shelley, pulling the boy’s hand to the right spot. “That seam there. Feel it? There.”
Next Ephraim pivoted his hips and kicked one leg out, making an X with his body: one hand gripping the rock while the other was outflung in space; one leg safely moored, the other kicked out over the waves crashing a hundred feet below.
“Top o’ the world, Ma!”
“Stop it!” Newton shrieked, sagging jelly-kneed against the rock face.
“Come on, Eef,” said Max, his fingers hooked like talons into the stone.
Ephraim’s eyes narrowed, a look indicative of future devilry, but he only swung himself back against the cliff. “Keep your skin on, Newt. Don’t give yourself a heart attack.”
Ephraim became aware of the sound of his breathing as it whistled madly against the stone. The waves crashed rhythmically into the cliffs below, the water sucking back out to sea with a foamy gurgle. His arms trembled. The long tendons running down the backs of his calves jumped.
We could die—this thought cleaved Ephraim’s mind like a guillotine blade. One of us could start to fall, and someone will try to help—Scout Law number two: A Scout is ever loyal to his fellows; he must stick to them through thick and thin—then another and another until everyone gets pulled down like a string of paper dolls.
From his vantage at the head of the pack, Kent now realized this couldn’t be the right route. But whose fault was that? Tim’s, for sending them out alone. Dull metallic anger throbbed at Kent’s temples. It was stupid Tim’s fault that Kent’s mind was now paralyzed by fear. Stupid stupid stupid…
The trail widened on the other side of a tricky ledgeway. Kent held out his hand to help Ephraim across, then Shelley, then Newt and Max. They walked silently along a shallow upswell, sweating and breathing heavily. The trail emptied onto a flat rocky expanse overlooking the ocean.
Ephraim set both hands into Kent’s chest and pushed. The bigger boy staggered back.