The Troop

From Troop 52:

Legacy of the Modified Hydatid

^{(AS PUBLISHED IN GQ MAGAZINE) BY CHRIS PACKER:}

THE HUNGRY MAN. Patient Zero. Typhoid Tom.

Before he was known by these names, he was known by the one his mother christened him with: Thomas Henry Padgett.

Tom was born in St. Catharines, Ontario, 1,100 miles from Falstaff Island, where he would die thirty-five years later. Birth records from St. Catharines General show that Tommy was a healthy nine and a half pounds at birth.

“He was a chubby baby,” says his mother, Claire Padgett. “Chubby kid, chubby teenager. I’d take him shopping in the Husky Boys section at the Hudson’s Bay.”

She sits in her kitchen, leafing through a photo album. Her boy lies frozen in time under the laminated pages. Sitting in the tub as an infant, his mom working baby shampoo into his hair. Halloween as a toddler, dressed as a giant pumpkin. Tom had an open smile and unruly red hair. In one photo, he is captured building a sandcastle at the beach, his stomach hanging over the band of his swim trunks.

“He was a good eater,” Claire Padgett says. “As a kid, anyway. Then he got older and the shame set in. He didn’t like being big. Kids, right? They find the easiest soft spot and pick at it.”

Claire Padgett looks nothing like her son. It strikes this observer that she may subsist entirely upon Player’s Light cigarettes—she chain-smokes them ruthlessly, lighting each fresh soldier off the ember of the dead one. But hers is a flinty, chapped-elbow leanness—a body built for a mean utility.

“Tough kid,” she says of her son. “Some boys thought that because he was fat, Tom must be a marshmallow. But he could defend himself. After Tom busted a few boys’ noses, the wisecracks about his weight stopped.”

As cutting as those schoolboy taunts had been, her son has been treated far more cruelly in death. Consider his media-given nicknames. The Edible Man. Mr. Stringbean. Consider his legacy as the man who could have kick-started a toppling-domino contagion worse than the Black Plague. Consider the fact that Dr. David Hatcher, head of the Centre for Contagious Disease, memorably labeled him “a runaway biological weapon.”

Tom Padgett has been badmouthed by scientists and politicos worldwide for—for what?

For being a pawn? For aligning himself with Dr. Clive Edgerton, who earned his own nickname: Joseph Mengele 2.0? For being the kind of scratch-ass petty criminal who might actually accept Edgerton’s offer?

No. Tom Padgett is hated in death because he ran. Because he failed to truly grasp the magnitude of what he was hosting and bolted. But mainly Tom is hated for the perception that he may have somehow thought he could prevail over the monster lurking inside of him.

Tom Padgett is hated for his ignorance of the fact that he was dead on his feet well before he reached Falstaff Island. His body just hadn’t gotten the memo yet.

“I guess some people must find it funny that Tom was a fat kid.” Claire Padgett smiles, but there’s not a drop of humor in it. “Yeah, I guess a certain type of person would find that deliciously ironic, considering how things came out in the wash.”