“Oh no you don’t,” Ephraim had hissed.
He’d dug his fingers into the wound and tweezed with his fingertips. He felt the bare nub of his ankle bone—cold as an ice cube. His fingers closed around the worm, he was sure of that… almost sure. The parted lips of his flesh were rubbery and slick, gummed with the blood that was still flowing quite freely.
He’d gotten hold of it, just barely. A strand of spaghetti cooked perfectly al dente (“to the tooth,” as his mother would say): a mushy exterior with the thinnest braid of solidity running through it. Did worms have spines? Maybe this one did.
Squeezing his fingers, he’d tried to pinch his nails together, praying he could decapitate the horrible thing. Afterward, he figured he could pull the rest of its limp body out using the Swiss Army knife tweezers. If he was unsuccessful, he guessed it would just rot inside of him. It might create internal sepsis. His innards could be riddled with ulcerated boils and pus-filled lesions. He might die screaming, but at least he’d die empty rather than infested.
He’d die totally alone.
In that moment, he’d thought: Do I really want that, to die alone? Where were Max and Newt? It was nearly dark by then and they’d promised to return. Instead they’d abandoned him. Max, his best friend, had left him alone. Friends until the end? Bullshit. Ephraim only had one friend left in the whole world.
He’d gripped it—the tips of his fingers pincering the hateful thing. For an instant it had thrashed fretfully between his fingertips… Ephraim was pretty sure, anyway. But he’d pulled too quickly. It squirted through his fingers. He’d reached again, desperately. Gone. He’d had his opportunity and lost it. It was safe inside him again.
“It gob abay, Shel,” Ephraim said with despondent, childlike petulancy—marble-mouthing his words on account of the warm syrup in his mouth.
“You have to keep trying. Or are you weak… a sucky-baby, like everyone says?”
What? Who’d have the balls to—nobody said that. Did they? He pictured them on the school yard—a gaggle of boys casting glances over their shoulders, sneering and laughing. He saw Max laughing at him. Rage tightened the flesh of his forehead. Something thorny and superheated surged against his skull, threatening to shatter through.
“I hear it all the time, friend. At school, behind the utility shed where the big boys smoke cigarettes. They say Ephraim Elliot acts tough, but he’s a pussy. He’s a cuckoo—his mommy makes him see a shrink because his head’s all messed up…”
Ephraim’s gaze fell upon his stomach. His shirt had ridden up to expose a slip of taut flesh. It rippled as something surged beneath it.
Maddening, mocking, playing peek-a-boo.
Ephraim picked the knife up. The blade was still keen.
How deep could he cut?
It all depended. How deep did his enemy lie?
What would you rather?
“BIG” JEFF JENKS, as the locals call him, isn’t so big anymore.
The events on Falstaff Island shrunk him. He admits as much himself—and from a man like Jenks, still possessed of a larger-than-life self-image, this is a big admission indeed.
“I stopped eating for a while there,” he tells me as we take a spin in his cruiser down the sedate streets of North Point. “The appetite just wasn’t there. Used to be before a shift I’d head down to Sparky’s Diner and mow through their breakfast platter: eggs, rashers of bacon, pancakes, toast, plenty of coffee. And this was after my wife had made breakfast at home.”
Nowadays Jenks’s frame might be charitably described as utilitarian—although the word threadbare comes to mind. He floats inside his old police uniform. His arms sticking out of the XXL shirtsleeves put me in the mind of a child trying on his father’s clothing. When he leans over to hawk phlegm out the window I see the fresh holes he’s punched into his old belt so that it cinches his dwarfed waistline.
“It was the toughest thing I ever had to do,” he says distantly. “Just sit on my hands and wait. That’s not me, right? When something needs doing I’d always stepped up to get it done. Around here my word is law. But now here were these MPs and high army muckety-mucks saying I couldn’t go get my own damn kid.” He lapses into silence before saying: “My love can’t save him. I remember thinking that. I think all of us—the parents, y’know?—were thinking the same. All the love in your body, every ounce of will you possess… matters nothing at all.”
Though he admits the decision to steal Calvin Walmack’s boat was a foolish one, he stands by it.
“You’re telling me that most every responsible, loving father on God’s green acre wouldn’t have done the same? Now what the military won’t admit and never will, I’ll bet, is that those MPs beat me and Reggie pretty bad after they ran us down.”
He pulls up his shirt to show me a long roping scar running up his hips to the bottom of his rib cage.
“They beat me so hard with batons that they busted the skin wide open. Right there on the deck of the boat. They didn’t say nothing while they were at it, either. Just a long, silent beating. Reg got it just about as bad. We didn’t think to fight back. The MPs all had guns.” His voice drops to an agonized whisper. “Fact is, I’d never been beat anything near that. Not by anyone, ever. I was always the one doling that kind of stuff out… but only if you forced my hand.”
We drive up rows of old Cape Cods, their exteriors permanently whitened by the salt spray that blows over the bluffs. It’s a beautiful town. Anne of Green Gables pretty. The sort of place Norman Rockwell would paint.
“The official report is, nobody knows exactly what happened to my son,” Jenks says. “But I’ll tell you, that boy was a survivor. That’s the way I raised him. You can’t be Jeff Jenks’s kid and not be a tough sonofabitch. But then, what you’re talking about—the enemy, I guess you’d call it. Them. I mean, how can you fight something like that?”
He drums his fingers on the wheel. A big vein ticks up the side of his neck.
“They never found him. Never could bring my son’s body home for us to bury. Just to give me and my wife some closure, right? Kent’s still technically considered ‘missing’—that’s how it is in the books. And I’ll tell you, man, missing can be worse than dead. Missing is like a book with the last few pages torn out or a movie missing the final reel. Missing means you’ll never really know how it ends.”
He looks as though he might break down but pulls himself back together.
“So I guess I’ll never really know,” he says after a while. “There’s not a lot of evidence to go by, is there? But I’ll tell you this: my boy wouldn’t go down without a fight. I’d bet everything I own on that.”
32
KENT WAS a beast. He could kill at will.
For a while there, he’d thought differently. When the other boys had left him in the cellar—abandoned him like a whipped dog—he’d been scared. So, so scared.