“Max?” he’d whispered. “Max, you awake?”
“Go to bed, Newt,” Max said from the bunk below, his voice so thick with sleep that his words ran together: GotobedNewt.
Newton had been shocked that Max and the others were able to sleep with those smells and awful noises beyond the door… maybe Max was just pretending to sleep to avoid talking about them. Maybe he’d thought sunlight was a cure-all.
HOURS LATER, sunlight filtered through the sap-yellowed window, sparkling the dust motes that hung in the stagnant air. The boys rose and dressed silently, pulling on bulky sweaters and lacing their boots. Ephraim caught Max’s eye, raised a quizzical eyebrow, and mouthed the words:
You okay?
Max shrugged, smiled wanly, finished double-knotting his boots. Like the others, he’d caught a whiff of the rank sweetness drifting in from the main room, where the Scoutmaster slept. He’d heard the crunching sounds, too.
Max’s grandfather was a farmer. The past few summers he’d paid Max and Ephraim seventeen dollars a day to dump chicken bones into “Jaws,” a stainless steel industrial grinder in the barn. He purchased the bones from a poultry processing plant in Summerside, a dollar a sack. Legally it was called “animal byproduct,” same as cowflops, hog shit, and hen feathers. Max and Ephraim would slit the woven-fiber sacks and dump the clattering bones into Jaws’s hopper. It was gross, mildly disturbing work—Island work, wearying and melancholic, and there was an expectation that all boys should enjoy it.
At least they got to do it together. Max and Eef were best friends. They’d been so for years informally, but a few months ago they’d cemented it: they’d both notched a shallow cut in their thumbs with Ephraim’s Swiss Army knife, pressed them together, and solemnly intoned: Forever friends. They were one better than BF’s—they were FF’s.
Once the bones were in the hopper, Max’s grandfather would switch the machine on. The gears made quick work of them; when the collection receptacle popped open, inside was a drift of fine white powder.
Bone meal, Max’s grandpa said. It’s magic, boys—nothing grows plants any better than bones.
Hearing this, Max wondered why farmers didn’t plant potato fields over cemeteries… the answer had dawned on him before long.
Last night, lying quietly in bed, Max wondered if Ephraim was awake, too. Was he hearing those crunching noises? If so, was he thinking what Max was thinking—that it sounded like tiny brittle bones pulverized between the steel teeth of Jaws?
AFTER DRESSING, the boys followed Kent into the kitchen.
Tim greeted them in the main room with a wan smile. The strange man lay on the chesterfield, his body covered in blankets. All they could see were the contours of his face: the sunken cheeks and eyes, teeth winking through the blanched fillets of his lips.
Crumbs lay scattered round the easy chair. Newton spotted those same crumbs on Tim’s lumberjack vest, though the Scoutmaster brushed most of them off. An econo-size box of soda crackers lay in the trash can, along with some wadded-up cellophane cracker sleeves.
Tim caught Newton’s look. “Attack of the midnight munchies, boys. I had to keep an eye on this guy.”
Newt scanned the kitchen. He couldn’t help but notice the busted radio. A pinworm of dread threaded into his chest. What if that storm rolled in? What would we do? He eyed the cabin warily—the frame seemed sturdy enough, but the roof was old. He’d seen what those late autumn storms could do. A few years ago, one of them had ripped across the mainland and dragged a car across the street into a ditch. Newt had watched it happen through the window of Dan’s Luncheonette on Phillips Street. The car was an ancient Dodge Dart—what the old-timers called “two tons of Detroit rolling iron.” The driver was equally ancient: Elgin Tate, a long-retired music teacher. Newt had watched him white-knuckled and greasy-faced behind the wheel as the wind hammered the car amidships, rocking it up on two side wheels and letting it fall with an axle-grinding thump, then gusted again and bore it steadily across both lanes into the ditch. The Dart’s tires had been pure smoking as Tate tried to muscle it back onto the road, but its hind end tipped over the edge of the ditch, its front wheels canted up and spinning uselessly. Once the storm had passed, Tate clambered out the window and staggered onto the road. His gray hair was stuck up in wild corkscrews and he was smiling like a man who’d cheated death. Hellfire! he’d shouted at nobody at all. Hellfire and damnation!
“What are we gonna do?” Newt asked.
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out.” Tim hooked his thumb at the stranger. “He’s obviously sick. He also, as you can see, smashed our radio. Why, I don’t know. Could be he’s in trouble—maybe with the law. I certainly don’t know who he is.”
“What about his wallet?” Ephraim said.
“I checked.” Tim’s hands groomed each other, an unconscious gesture: one hand washing the other. “His pockets are empty.”
“He looks empty,” Shelley said softly.
The boys’ eyes kept flicking to the man, then just as quickly away. Newt threw his entire head back as if the very sight repelled his gaze.
“He probably didn’t look like that all his life,” said Kent.
“Of course not,” Tim snapped, annoyed at Kent’s unalloyed disgust. “As a precaution, I’ve tied his arms and legs. Who knows what else he’d decide to bust up.”
“Yeah, good idea,” Shelley said. “I mean, he could go berserk. Kill us all with a butcher knife.”
Tim glanced at the tall, slender boy with the blank gray eyes. His brow furrowed, then he said, “I have something to ask all of you. I want you to be honest. I promise you I won’t be angry. Tell me: Did any of you bring a phone?”
Newt said: “You told us not to.”
“I know what I said, Newton. But I happen to know that teenage boys don’t always do as they’re told.” He looked at Ephraim. “What about it?”
Ephraim shook his head. “I thought about it, but…”
“Shit,” Tim hissed, pushing the word through his teeth on a burst of pent-up air. He tasted a weird sweetness, a saccharine tang on his tongue. “Listen, boys, we’re going to be fine. Really. This is unexpected, is all. My only concern is that this guy needs medical attention in short order. I don’t have the proper equipment.”
“You said he came by boat,” said Kent.
Tim had already been down to the dock at sunup. The boat wouldn’t start. The spark plugs were gone. Could this man have unscrewed them and… what? Thrown them into the ocean? Hidden them somewhere? Why do that?
“There’s a boat, yes,” Tim said for now. “Oliver McCanty’s, by the look of it. You know how small it is. We can’t all ride back in it.”
“A few of us could,” said Kent. “We could tell my dad what happened.”
Kent’s father was Lower Montague’s chief of police, “Big” Jeff Jenks: a towering six feet seven inches and two hundred and fifty pounds of prime law enforcement beef. Most afternoons he could be spotted behind the wheel of his police cruiser (looking, Tim thought, like an orangutan stuffed into a kitchen cupboard), circuiting the town. If anything, his face reflected sadness—perhaps at the fact God had given him a body so big and strong that he considered it a cosmic injustice that he couldn’t put it to use on deserving criminals. But he’d picked the wrong jurisdiction: the closest thing to a felonious mastermind in Montague County was Slick Rogers, the local moonshiner whose hillside stills occasionally exploded, burning down an acre of scrubland.