The Searcher(22)

“Squirrel,” he says, pointing out the window to the garden. “One of these days I’ll shoot me a few of them and make us a squirrel stew.”

Trey considers this, watching the squirrel scrabble under the hedge. “What’s it taste like?”

“Pretty good. Gamey. Stronger’n chicken.”

“Squirrel bit my sister once,” Trey says. “On the finger. I’d eat ’em.”

“When I was about ten,” Cal says, “I was staying with my granddaddy, and me and three of my buddies, we used to camp out in the woods back of his place. The first time we did it, my granddaddy told us we oughta be careful, because there was a thing called a squatt living out in those woods. Cross between a squirrel and a cat, but bigger’n either one, and fiercer. It had great big claws and fangs, and orange fur, and it’d go either for your throat, if you were sitting down, or for your balls if you were standing up. You could tell it was getting ready to attack because you’d hear it making this weird noise. Like growling mixed with chattering.”

He demonstrates. Trey listens, watching him and scraping the filling out of a cookie with his teeth. Cal has gotten into the habit of telling Trey whatever comes into his head, purely for companionability, without paying much heed to whether or not he gets a response.

“We camped out anyway,” he says, “but we made ourselves a big pile of rocks in the tent, just in case. Late at night, we were just getting comfortable in our sleeping bags, we heard a noise outside.” He makes the noise again. “We about shit ourselves. We snuck out of the sleeping bags, got ourselves a big handful of rocks each, and came out of the tent firing. Got in a few good hits before we heard my granddaddy yelling for us to stop. Someone got him right in the face, split his lip open.”

“It was him,” Trey says. “Making the noise.”

“Sure was. No such thing as a squatt.”

“What’d he do? He beat you?”

“Nah. Laughed his ass off, cleaned up the blood, brought us out a big bag of marshmallows.”

Trey digests this. “How come he did that? Pretended?”

“I guess he wanted to see what we’d do,” Cal says, “if a bad situation came up. Seeing as he was letting us stay out there all by ourselves. The day after that, he started teaching me how to shoot a rifle. Said if I was gonna go fighting things that scared me, I might as well do it right, and I better know how to be damn sure what I was shooting at before I pulled the trigger.”

Trey considers this. “Can you teach me?”

“I don’t have a gun here yet. When I get one, then maybe.”

Apparently this is good enough: Trey nods and finishes his cookie. “Bobby Feeney says he seen aliens up the mountains,” he says, out of some train of thought of his own. “I heard in school.”

“You planning on shooting an alien?”

Trey gives Cal his idiot look. “There’s no aliens.”

“What, you figure Bobby made it up to mess with people, like my granddaddy?”

“Nah.”

Cal grins, drinking his coffee. “Then what’d he see?”

Trey shrugs, a one-shouldered twitch that means he doesn’t want to discuss this. “You don’t believe in aliens,” he says, watching Cal to check.

“Probably not,” Cal says. “I like to keep an open mind, and I figure they might be somewhere out there, but I haven’t seen anything that would make me think they’re coming visiting.”

“Have you got brothers and sisters?” Trey demands, out of nowhere. The kid hasn’t mastered the art of small talk. Every question comes out sounding like part of an interrogation.

“Three,” Cal says. “Two sisters, one brother. ’Bout you?”

“Three sisters. Two brothers.”

“That’s a lot of kids,” Cal says. “You got a big house?”

Trey blows air derisively out of the side of his mouth. “Nah.”

“Where’re you? Oldest? Youngest?”

“Third. What’re you?”

“Oldest.”

“Are you close to the others?”

This is the most personal Trey has ever got. Cal risks a glance at him, but he’s focused on taking another cookie apart. He has a fresh buzz cut, but it looks like maybe he did it himself: a patch towards the back of his head got missed.

“Close enough,” Cal says. In fact his are half siblings, he’s never met any of them more than a couple of times, and there could well be more out there somewhere, but none of this information seems like it would be useful here. “How ’bout you?”

“Some of them,” Trey says. He shoves the cookie abruptly into his mouth and stands up: break is, apparently, over.

“Drink your milk,” Cal says.

“Don’t like milk.”

“I bought it. You drink it.”

Trey throws back the milk, grimaces, and slams the mug down on the table like he’s just taken a shot. “OK,” Cal says, amused. “Let’s do this. Hold on.”

He goes into his bedroom, comes back with an old plaid shirt and tosses it to Trey. “Here.”

Trey catches it and looks at it blankly. “What for?”

“You go home covered in paint, your mama’s not gonna be happy.”