The Nix(27)

Samuel thought how his father married to his mother was like a spoon married to a garbage disposal.

“May I be excused?” Samuel said.

Henry looked at him, wounded. “It’s family night,” he said.

“You’re excused,” Faye said, and Samuel leaped off the chair and scurried outside. He felt that familiar desire to go hide. He felt this way whenever the tension in the house seemed to gather up inside him. He hid in the woods, a tiny patch of woods that grew along a sad creek that ran behind their subdivision. A few short trees sprouting out of the mud. A pond that was at best waist-deep. A creek that collected all the subdivision’s runoff so the water had this colorful oily film after it rained. It was really pathetic, these woods, as far as nature goes. But the trees were thick enough to conceal him. When he was down here, he was invisible.

If anyone asked him what he was doing, he’d say “Playing,” which didn’t quite capture it. Could it really be called playing when he only sat there in the grass and mud, and hid in the leaves, and threw helicopter seeds into the air and watched them spin to the ground?

It was Samuel’s intention to come down to the creek and hide for a couple of hours, at least until bedtime. And he was searching for a spot, a convenient depression in the ground that would give him maximum coverage. A spot where, if he put a few dead branches over him, a few leaves, he would be hidden. And he was collecting the twigs and branches he’d use to cover himself, and he was beneath this one particular oak tree digging among the dead leaves and acorns on the ground, when something cracked above him. A snapping of branches, a creaking of the tree, and he looked up in time to see someone jump down from the tree and land hard on the ground behind him. A boy, no older than Samuel, who stood up and stared fiercely at him with eyes sharp and green and almost feline. He was not larger than Samuel, nor taller, nor in any way physically special except in the certain intangible way he filled up space. His body had a presence. He stepped closer. His face was thin and angular and smeared, on his cheeks and forehead, with blood.

Samuel dropped his twigs. He wanted to run. He told himself to run. The boy moved closer, and from behind his back he now produced a knife, a heavy silver butcher’s knife, the kind Samuel had seen his mother use when chopping things with bones.

Samuel began to cry.

Just stood there crying, rooted to the ground, waiting for whatever his fate was, succumbing to it. He vaulted right into a Category 3 slobbering wet helpless mess. He could feel his face constrict and his eyes bug out as if his skin were being stretched from behind. And the other boy stood directly before him now and Samuel could see the blood from close up, could see how it was still wet and shining in the sunlight and one drop dribbled down the boy’s cheek and under his chin and down his neck and under his shirt and Samuel didn’t even wonder where the blood came from so much as simply wail at the horrible fact of its presence. The boy had short reddish hair, eyes that seemed impenetrable and dead, freckles, something like an athlete’s sense of bodily control and self-possession and fluidity of movement as he slowly brought the knife over his head in the universal language for psychopathic murderous stabbing.

“This is what we call a successful ambush,” the kid said. “If we were at war, you’d be dead right now.”

And the cry Samuel let out summoned all his misery and channeled it in one wail, a great sad scream for help.

“Holy shit,” the kid said. “You are ugly when you’re crying.” He lowered the knife. “It’s all right. Look. Just kidding?”

But Samuel could not stop. The hysteria kept rolling over him.

“It’s okay,” the kid said. “No problem. You don’t have to talk.”

Samuel wiped his arm across his nose and came away with a long slick streak.

“Come with me,” the kid said. “I want to show you something.”

He led Samuel to the creek and then along the bank for several yards until he came to a place near the pond where a tree had tipped over, leaving a large depression between the roots and the earth.

“Look,” the kid said. He pointed to a spot where he’d smoothed out all the mud into a makeshift bowl. And inside the bowl were several animals: a few frogs, a snake, a fish.

“You see them?” he said. Samuel nodded. The snake, he could see now, was missing its head. The frogs had been slit open at the belly or stabbed in the back. There must have been eight or nine of them, all dead save for one, whose legs kicked, bicycling in the air. The fish were beheaded at the gills. They all rested in a bloody slime that gathered at the bottom of the bowl.

“I’m thinking about blow-torching them,” the kid said. “You know, with insect spray and a lighter?”

He pantomimed this: flicking the lighter, holding the spray up to it.

“Sit down,” he said. Samuel did as he was told, and the boy reached two fingers into the blood.

“We’re gonna have to toughen you up,” he said. He smeared the blood on Samuel’s face—two streaks under his eyes and one on his forehead.

“There,” he said. “Now you’re initiated.” He stabbed the knife into the mud so it stood straight up. “Now you’re really alive.”





3


THE SUN WAS SETTING, the day’s heat lifting, mosquitoes buzzing forth in squadrons from the woods as two boys emerged from the tree line, muddy and wet. They’d been walking across terrain Samuel had never seen before, taking him away from his own neighborhood and into this other one: Venetian Village, it was called. The boys’ faces were shiny and moist from where they’d used pond water to clean off the smears of animal blood. Though they were the same height, and the same age, and roughly the same build—which is to say short and eleven years old and tightly skinny, like ropes pulled to maximum tolerances—it was obvious to anyone seeing them that one of the boys was in charge. His name was Bishop Fall—he was the tree leaper, the ambusher, the animal killer. He was explaining to Samuel how he would someday be a five-star general in the United States Army.