“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:
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 skulclass="underline" 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.
Settle down, he chastised himself. So what if one of those assholes ate the food. You’ll be at your own kitchen table with a big plate of spaghetti in, like, what, two hours, right? Away from this island. Away from…
From the dead man. Which, truth be told, had freaked Ephraim out more than anything in his life. Seeing the man laid out stiff with his limbs jutting at weirdo angles and his chest slicked in brown gunk—that had been the worst part: that he’d died streaked in filth—Ephraim had barely managed to tamp down the high-pitched wail that had threatened to spill over his lips.
He’d never seen a dead person before. The closest he’d ever come to anything remotely like it was the time he’d been walking home from school and saw a hydro worker get blown off a power pole by a jolt of electricity. The guy had been thirty feet up in a cherry picker. A current surge must’ve ripped through the transformer. Ephraim remembered the guy’s face and body lighting up like a Fourth of July sparkler. The flash was so bright that it printed everything on Ephraim’s eyes in negative for a minute afterward.
The man rocketed out of the cherry picker as if there were dynamite in his boots. He hit a sapling on his way down; the limber little tree bent with his weight before snapping with a crisp green sound. By the time Ephraim ran over, the workman was up and walking a dazed circle. The electricity had melted the treads of his boots: the rubber pooled around the soles as if he’d stepped in black jelly. Ephraim found it painful to breathe: the dissipating electricity left a lingering acidic note. Smoke spindled out of the man’s overalls, right through the coarse orange weave of the fabric, rising off his shoulders in vaporous wings.
“Ah God ah God,” the guy was saying over and over. Mincing around in stiff stutter-steps like a man walking barefoot over hot coals. “Ah God ah God ah God ah God…”
The flesh over his skull had melted down his forehead. The electricity had somehow loosened his skin without actually splitting it. Gravity had carried the melted skin downward: it wadded up along the ridge of his brow like the folds of a crushed-velvet curtain, or the skin on top of unstirred gravy pushed to one side of the pot. His hair had come down with it. His hairline now began in the middle of his forehead. The man didn’t seem to realize this. He kept hopping around saying “Ah God ah God…”
In the calm eye of horror, Ephraim became aware of the tiniest details. Like how the hairs on the man’s head were melted and charred, like the bristles of a hairbrush that had drawn too near an open flame. Or how the skin on the man’s head—sheerer and hairless and now stretched with horrifying tension over the dome of his skull—was threaded with flimsy blue veins like the veins on a newborn baby’s skull.