The Troop

“That’s it? That’s the reason—because?”

“Yep,” Ephraim had said.

“Thanks, Eef,” said Newt.

Ephraim said: “Shut up, pork chop.”

Next Scoutmaster Tim had entered the bunkroom and told them that their asses better remain in bed. Soon after came the commotion: the stranger’s scream—“Reeeeaaagh!”—followed by a scuffle, a crash, and the acrid smell of smoke wafting into their room, mingling with the sweetly rotten stench.

Kent had leapt out of bed, attacking the door with savage shoulder-butts; it wouldn’t budge, but Kent kept flinging his body at it, the way he always did—hurling his unthinking bulk at any obstacle with the ironclad surety it’d eventually buckle. He’d only quit when the Scoutmaster threatened to tell his father; Kent stepped away from the door breathing like a bull, his wide-set and faintly bovine eyes reflecting dull smokeless hate.

Around four in the morning, Newton had sat bolt upright in bed. He’d been awoken by the noise of cupboard doors opening and slamming shut. Next had come… crunching sounds? Monotonous, plodding, softly grinding.

“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.”