“Shut up,” Max said irritably. “Cowboys aren’t all on the prairies anyway.”
Ephraim laughed and scratched his elbows. He’d scratched through his Windbreaker. Max noticed blood dotting the torn nylon.
“Not prairie dogs,” said Newton. “Birds. I’ve read about them. Instead of making nests in trees, they burrow underground.”
Max said: “Can we catch one?”
Newton looked doubtful. “I’ve never seen a rope trap for birds—you need box traps for those, with chicken wire. I don’t think it’d be worth it. They’re pretty much just bones and feathers, right?”
Max thought about those dead shearwaters on his kitchen table and said: “Let’s not bother, okay?”
“Whatever we do eat out here, you can bet it’s going to be a bit weird,” Newton said. “We ought to be prepared for that.” He smiled gamely. “Just think of it all like chicken or something.”
They crossed the plateau to a granite shelf overlooking the sea. The clean mineral smell of the rock hit their noses. Sunlight filled in the slack water between the waves in mellow gold. White ospreys took flight from their cliff-side nests, arcing over the water.
Ephraim kicked a stone over the edge. It clattered down the cliff and nearly crushed an osprey nest sitting on a jagged outcrop. Ephraim pointed at the trio of brown-specked eggs in the nest and said:
“You want to climb down for those? I could go for a three-egg omelet.”
Newton looked dubious. “There’s nowhere to tie the rope. If you slip, it’s a long way down.”
Ephraim picked his tongue along his upper teeth, still considering it. “I’d have to share the eggs with your fat ass, Newt—wouldn’t I? I do all the work and you horn in on the reward.”
“You can have them,” Newton said stiffly. “I just don’t think it’s worth getting hurt over.”
With the prospect of eggs fading, they wandered down a switchback descent that emptied into a salt marsh to the east of the cliff. The ocean water leached into a mucky terrain of buckled trees and diseased-looking hummocks. A rotten stench boiled up from the long grass, which was exactly the sort of grass Newton hated: the serrated-edge kind that raked your shins when you walked through it in shorts.
They trudged through, trying to avoid soakers. Their boots cracked through skeins of crusted bile-colored salt that looked like the scum topping a pot of boiled meat. Late-season grasshoppers flung themselves off the grass and stuck to the boys’ clothes with their barbed legs. Newton flinched every time one pinged off his hips.
His gaze kept drifting to those hummocks. They looked like half-submerged rodents—giant mole rats suckled on plutonium-enriched water that had somehow quadrupled their normal size. They dotted the marsh like hairy icebergs, the worst parts hidden underwater. Newton pictured what might lurk below the surface: long, narrow faces and thin black lips studded with sharp rat-teeth that protruded at busted-glass angles… ringed pink tails sweeping through the filthy water waiting to wrap around an unsuspecting ankle.
They came upon a rotted tree stump. Newton dug his field book out, riffled through the pages, and skimmed a passage. He grabbed a flap of bark hanging loosely from the stump and pried it back. It snapped with a puff of dust. The boys knelt and stared inside. Things wriggled in the loose wood pulp. They wriggled just like worms.
“Grubs,” Newton anounced. He opened his book and read: “Witchetty grubs are the large, white, wood-eating larvae of moths.”
The grubs were a speckled white with a wrinkled exterior that resembled the skin of an apple that had sat in the fruit bowl too long. Their bodies were as big as a toddler’s finger and crimped like beads on a necklace. Their back ends tapered to a pooched orifice. They moved in frantic wriggling paroxysms: they resembled creatures in a perpetual state of being born.
“The raw witchetty grub tastes like almonds,“ Newton read. “When cooked, the skin becomes crisp like roast chicken, while the inside becomes light yellow like a fried egg.”
Max blanched. “Jesus. You’re kidding, right?”
“Didn’t I say that whatever we ate, it’d be weird?”
“Yeah, but… you can’t eat a grub, man,” Max replied. “You’d be depriving that young moth of its life goal of bashing into a lightbulb all night.”
Newton plucked one out of the stump. It writhed in his palm like a section of intestinal tract trying to pass a stubborn lump of food.
Max said: “I dare you. Double dog, man.”
Newton popped it into his mouth. Pulped between Newton’s molars, the grub made an audible squelch. Watery pus-colored fluid seeped between his teeth.
“I can’t believe you just did that,” Ephraim said, awestruck.
“Ooh,” Newton gagged. “Bitter. It’s not almondy!” He dropkicked the book. It sailed across the marsh, pages fluttering like the wings of a crippled bird. “It’s not almondy at all!”
Ephraim and Max doubled over laughing. Newton refused to spit it out—he seemed to hold the grub’s revolting taste against it. He chewed with dour discipline, clenching his fists as he swallowed.
“Wait a sec,” Max said, nervousness replacing mirth. “Did you say it tasted like bitter almonds? Isn’t that like, poison?”
Newton rolled his eyes. A bit of the grub was still stuck to his lip. It looked like a bleached shred of tomato skin. “No, that’s cyanide. This didn’t taste like almonds at all. It tasted like bitter… shit. A bitter nugget of shit.”
“How do you know what shit tastes like?” said Ephraim, swiping a tear off his cheek.
“How about you shut up,” Newton said, stooping to retrieve his field book. “At least I’m trying, Eef.” He held his arms out, an all-encompassing gesture. “You see a Burger King out here?”
27
SHELLEY WAITED until the boys had humped around the island’s southern breakwater before starting his games in earnest.
He’d hid in the high brush east of the cabin. The boys called his name without much gusto. The sun slanted through a bank of silvery knife-blade clouds, hitting his skin and buzzing unpleasantly—Shelley didn’t care for the sun. His favorite time of day was twilight, that gray interregnum where the shadows drew long.
His fingers fretted with his lip, which Kent had split. Squeezing the wound, the cleaved flesh only semi-healed. Blood squirted, running down his knuckles. Shelley didn’t feel it much at all.
Newton’s voice had drifted over to him. “Should we go anyway?”
Yes, thought Shelley, playing with the blood. Just go. Leave, now. Enjoy your hike.
He’d followed Newton, Max, and Eef to the south shore, skulking through the brush on the low side of the trail. He disguised his presence well—Shelley was a natural chameleon; it was one of his more undervalued talents.
He was intrigued by Newton’s belly and back flab. It spilled over the waist of his pants like soft-serve ice cream over the edges of a cone. He wondered how it would look if the fat boy got worms. He imagined the buttery folds of skin lapping up on themselves like those ugly-looking dogs—what were they called? Shar-peis. Newton would have a shar-pei body. Inside all those yards of empty skin, his bones would be left to rattle around like pennies in a jar. Boy, that would be something to see.
Once the boys were gone he backtracked to the cabin. He was excited. Oh so excited. It took events of precipitous magnitude to pierce the Teflon plating surrounding Shelley’s emotional core and make him feel much of anything.