Sparrow Rock

by Nate Kenyon

  “Could something have made the decay move along faster, after we killed it?” Dan asked. “Like maybe the radiation or something?”

  Jay shook his head. “I don’t see how, and anyway, there’s no way it could have rotted to this point in the past twenty minutes, while we were in the other room.”

  “You think they were all dead, out there? What about Grandpa?”

  We all turned to look at Big Sue, who stood in the doorway. She was shivering, and her eyes were wet. “He moved,” she said again. “I know he did.”

  I thought about what it must have felt like to her to see her grandfather lying there in that condition, and it made me think of my own mother, alone and scared as the bombs came down. Helpless to get away, a prisoner of that wheelchair, screaming for her boy to save her as the shock wave washed over our little house, imploding the windows and cracking walls, heat melting plastic bowls stacked in kitchen cabinets and turning my mother’s flesh to ash.

  Everyone was looking at me now. “Sorry,” I muttered, wiping my own eyes, realizing that I must have made some kind of sound. “Sorry.” There was a hiccup in my voice that I couldn’t control and didn’t like. I’d suffered from panic attacks for a while after my father died, and I always knew they were coming by the way my breath caught in my chest and everything felt tight and strange. Then my heart would start to flutter and my palms would sweat and I would know for certain I was about to die.

  The only thing that would help was a quiet, dark room, away from other people, and time. I hadn’t had one in a while (pretty much since Tessa showed up on the scene, actually), but if there ever was a reason for them to come back, it was now.

  As if in answer I felt Tessa’s warm hand sneak into mine, and the warmth spread through me until I was able to breathe again.

  “Thanks,” I whispered. She squeezed my hand.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  When I was a boy of about seven, my father took me hunting for the first, and last, time. Even in my short time on earth I hadn’t known him as much of a family guy, as I guess you know; the most warmth I tended to get out of him was a grunt when I’d bring him one of my drawings or a misshapen ashtray made out of Play-Doh from school. He wasn’t the read-aloud type, or much of a sports guy either. I never saw him watch a Red Sox game like the other dads I knew, or go fishing on a sunny summer day with his friends and a cooler full of cold ones.

  But one thing my father did like to do, other than his woodworking projects in the basement, was shoot things. He’d go out back and aim at beer bottles he propped in the crook of an apple tree down by the fence line, enjoying the cracking sound and the tinkle of glass, the shattering.

  But if the things he shot at were alive, all the better. I remember being afraid when he’d pick up his rifle that he might just decide to turn it on me sometime. That was the thing about my father; you never could tell what he might do, which kept everyone around him on edge.

  That day he decided, for a reason that’s escaped me, to bring his son into the woods with him. Maybe he thought it would be a teaching moment, or maybe he thought it would be amusing to see what his sissy boy Peter would do when faced with a little blood. Or maybe he was just drunk. If that last were true, he hid it well, because his face never got beyond deadly serious, and I think I knew early on that this was not a trip I was going to like.

  We walked for a while into the woods beyond our home, crossing a little stream and continuing on through a meadow with grass that came up near my waist and burrs that stuck to my clothes. We followed a faint path that seemed to disappear completely for stretches, but my father never wavered.

  Eventually we came to a platform and wall built into the arms of a large pine tree, looking out over a clearing with a stump in the middle and a deer-food plot nailed to the top of it. The grass in the clearing was all trampled down, like a lot of animals had been there already. My father helped me into the blind, and then climbed up himself.

  “Look right here,” he said, and he pushed my face against a slot in the wood wall, mashing it just a little too hard so I could feel the roughness biting into my cheek. I could see the clearing from here and the stump with the deer bait. “Watch for anything that moves. You see something, you tell me. Quietly, understand?”

  I nodded, and he proceeded to pull a silver flask from his pocket and sit down against the tree trunk, where he took a long pull. I turned back to watch through the slot, knowing better than to disobey him.

  It seemed like hours before I saw something. A flash of white at the edge of the clearing, then nothing for a minute, and the deer materialized like a ghost from emptiness, head up and sniffing the air, black eyes wide, nostrils flared. She was beautiful, long-legged, coltish, with a white belly and brown spotted back. I turned to motion to my dad and then turned back excitedly, wanting to see more. I caught a glimpse of her fawn stepping knock-kneed and timidly out into the clearing behind her before my father pulled me away from the wall and peered out himself, the smell of the alcohol on his breath bathing me with its sour sweetness.

  He grunted softly. There was an energy to him now, an excitement that mirrored my own. But his was for a different reason. I watched him raise the rifle and poke the barrel out the slot.

  “Cover your ears,” he said, and that was all.

  The rifle barked twice, and then he took me by the arm and half carried, half dragged me down the ladder to the ground again. When he set me on my feet and I looked across the clearing I could see the beautiful doe down on her side near the stump, her mouth and nose bubbling with blood. Two dark holes bled on her side, and her chest heaved once, twice, and she kicked hard. She was bleating low in her throat.

  That was when I learned that death was ugly. I smelled oil and gunpowder and the coppery smell of blood. The doe shivered, kicked again, and was still.

  My father didn’t stop there. The fawn was running in circles, calling like his mother. My father took the rifle and kneeled in the dirt beside me, placed my hands on the stock and wrapped my finger around the trigger.

  “This one’s yours,” he said, and his voice was deep and rough with something dark and vicious that had gotten hold of him. I knew it well enough by then to understand that to disobey or even to hesitate meant a beating with a sapling branch. Other boys might have just gotten to work. Some might have even learned to enjoy it. That wasn’t me, and as I stared at the dead doe lying in the grass and her baby running around and around her the scene seemed to shatter into a million brilliant, broken pieces, a prism of wavering light.

  Still, as my father bent my head to the sight, and directed my hand to aim, I did pull that trigger.

  I’d like to say the fawn died quickly. But that would be a lie. The first shot went wide by five feet, but the second hit him in the hindquarters. He went down, writhing and bucking.

  My father dragged me over, pointed the rifle at his head and instructed me to finish him. I shook my head. Disgusted, he took the rifle from me and put a bullet between the creature’s eyes. Then he came back to where I’d curled up in a ball, and crouched down next to me.

  “That there’s a mercy killing,” he said. “Without a mother, it would have been dead by nightfall. Understand? It’s one hell of a stretch better getting a bullet in the brain than ripped apart by coyotes.” He scratched his cheek where a tiny fleck of blood had settled. “Life ain’t civilized. That’s a human creation, rules and order and compassion. Nature doesn’t care about any of that. Things kill, they eat or they die. You think a wolf worries about how his dinner feels? It’s survival. You don’t learn that in school, and your mother won’t teach it to you. That’s a father’s job. It’s why we’re out here today.”

  I wiped away my tears and tried to look strong. It wasn’t because I wanted him to think better of me, it was out of fear. I knew what he was capable of, and I wanted to avoid the pain. That was all.

  I think he took it differently though. He nodded at me, as if we’d shared an understanding. “There�
�s hope for you yet,” he said. “You tell your mother I shot the both of them. This is man’s work, out here. You did good. We’ll eat well this week.”

  Then he tousled my hair and stood up. I remember feeling the touch of his hand long after he’d turned away, a burning that slowly faded like a bulb that’s been flicked off into blackness.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The next few days passed in a blur. Jimmie recovered enough to limp around the shelter without much assistance, and he kept his distance from all of us, Dan in particular. Dan didn’t threaten him again, but he didn’t get all warm and fuzzy either.

  To tell the truth, for a while Jimmie simply ceased talking entirely, and had the look of someone holding his emotions in only through a supreme effort of will. It was the beginning of his break with reality. We avoided him as much as possible, but it wasn’t easy, and maybe we did him no favors by ignoring the problem. Maybe what he really needed was a punching bag, the way I’d been for Tessa that first night, but none of us was in any kind of shape, mentally or physically, to oblige.

  I never thought I’d miss him talking at me, the annoying way he ended every few sentences with “eh” like a goddamned Canadian, even though he was from southern Maine, the way he rambled on when he got excited about anything until we told him to shut up. But I did now.

  On the third day after the attack he developed a fever. The bite had swollen and infection had probably set in, but he hadn’t let Tessa look at it, just changed the bandages himself. The only way I knew for sure that it was ugly was because I caught a glimpse of the old bandages before he threw them in the trash compactor that third day, and they were soaked with pus and blood.

  Even then, I didn’t force him to let us help. Looking back now, I wonder what kind of friend I’d turned out to be. Whatever he’d done, he was still a human being, still the same Jimmie I’d known since kindergarten, and yet I refused to do anything about it. Maybe more of my father had rubbed off on me that I realized.

  When the fever hit, Tessa argued with me to force him to let her dress the wound again, and this time I agreed. Jimmie was in bed, moaning to himself and not entirely lucid. We tried to look at his leg, but he kicked and thrashed. I went to go get Dan and Jay.

  “Jay, hold his legs,” Dan said. “I’ll get his shoulders. Pete, you get that bandage off fast.”

  I made way for Tessa, the expert, and Sue held back and watched. I felt pretty helpless, I have to admit. But Tessa was good; she worked quickly enough.

  The wound made us all gasp. The flesh around it had puckered up and turned purple, it was weeping whitish fluid, and an ugly red line traced its way under his skin up his thigh.

  “Infection,” Tessa said. “Heading for his heart.”

  “What can we do?” Sue asked.

  “He needs antibiotics. If this infection gets worse, it could lead to gangrene. If that happens we might have to amputate his leg.”

  Jimmie stopped struggling, seemingly passed out, and we all stood there, taking in the implications of the situation. There was no hospital down here, no doctors, no real medical supplies. If the infection got that bad, there was really nothing we could do. We all knew we couldn’t take off a limb. It just wasn’t possible.

  “Okay,” Dan said. “There’s antibiotics in the first-aid kit. We should have given some to him in the first place.”

  “There’s only one bottle,” Jay said.

  Nobody spoke for a moment. “How many treatments?” Dan asked.

  “I don’t know,” Tessa said. “It looked pretty full. Maybe two or three people could get enough to help them, if they were sick.”

  “We can’t just let him die,” I said. “Not when we have the pills that could do the trick. We don’t know when we all might need this stuff. Could be never.”

  “Fat chance of that,” Jay muttered. He’d been on edge the past couple of days, preoccupied by something, and I’d assumed it was from the thing about the rat and the lack of pot. We’d run out over a week ago. But I thought again about what Sue had said when she sat on my bed that night; something about his medication.

  I wondered now exactly what she’d meant.

  “Pete’s right,” Dan said. “We can’t let him die. Sue, go grab the kit, and get a cup of water.”

  Nobody said anything about the fact that just a few days ago he’d been this close to throwing Jimmie out to the rats. Sue hurried off and returned moments later with a cup and the bottle of antibiotics, and Dan and Jay helped prop Jimmie up in bed. His head lolled on his neck and for just a moment I flashed back to a dark basement and a childhood nightmare and I shivered. But then he opened his eyes slightly and took the pills we offered before falling back into a fitful sleep.

  A couple of minutes later Tessa pulled me out into the kitchen. I stared at the spot on the tile where the rat’s body had been crushed. Even though we’d cleaned up the mess and disposed of the remains in the compactor, I felt like I could still see the outline of that pool of black fluid. It made me think of those deer and my father, and I shook my head as if to clear it.

  “Take it easy,” Tessa said. She knew about the deer story, and a lot more too. Tessa knew just about everything about me. Sometimes I forgot that.

  “If we have to cut off his leg—”

  “We won’t.” She moved closer and put her arms around me. “He’s going to be okay.” She squeezed gently and then released me, holding my elbows and looking up into my eyes. “When that thing attacked him, right after…you had one of your panic attacks, didn’t you?”

  I shrugged. “I might have, if you weren’t there. But you were.”

  “I’m worried about you, Pete,” she said. “I know what kind of pressure you put on yourself, believe me. But you’re not your father, and you can’t keep blaming yourself either.”

  “What about our families, Tessa? My mother? If we could just find a way out of here—”

  “She’s gone,” Tessa said. “You know that. She couldn’t have survived.”

  “She could have,” I said, warming to the subject. “Maybe if there was enough warning, maybe she could have gotten to a shelter or something, the basement of the high school, I don’t know. She was pretty good about her emergency rules, she had people she could call. Or even if that didn’t work, our own basement…”

  “Don’t think about the basement,” Tessa said. Her hands were still on my arms, and she squeezed. “Just don’t.”

  “Sorry,” I whispered, tears flooding my eyes. “You’re right. I don’t want to go there, do I?”

  “Hey, Pete,” Dan said. He was standing just outside the doorway to the kitchen, staring at me, and I knuckled the tears away. I had no idea how long he’d been there. “You okay?”

  “Sure.”

  “Can I talk to you a minute?”

  I glanced down at Tessa, who nodded and released me, and I followed Dan back into the bedroom, where Jay stood somberly at the foot of Jimmie’s bunk. Sue was lying on one of the other top bunks, sleeping.

  “We need to show you something,” Dan whispered. “Stay quiet, okay? Don’t wake Sue. She doesn’t need to see this.”

  For some reason the hairs on the back of my neck raised up, and I felt too cold. Suddenly I didn’t want anything to do with what they were about to show me.

  Jay nodded at Dan. Without another word, Dan went to Jimmie’s side and lifted his shirt.

  Bright red hives had broken out all over his torso. They were about the size of quarters, swollen and with irregular edges like port-wine stains.

  “What the hell are those?”

  “Shhh,” Jay said. “I don’t know. Some kind of rash. We figure it has something to do with the infection, but they’re not like anything I’ve ever seen before. We thought maybe you’d have a better idea.”

  Me? Why me? But I didn’t ask them any more questions, just stepped closer, drawn as if hypnotized to the marks on Jimmie’s body and unable to help myself. Thin red lines ran like thread from one to the next, mak
ing him look like some bizarre human version of connect the dots. The centers of the worst of them looked slightly white and puffy as if they were filled with pus.

  There were more on his legs too. As I stared in horror, I saw one of the largest hives on his thigh pulse and bulge slightly outward and then grow still again.

  Jimmie turned and muttered in his sleep. He raised a hand to his stomach and pressed his fingers against the hive, and his eyes opened into slits. “Itches,” he said, his voice hoarse and thick. Then he closed his eyes again and went back to sleep.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “Jay’s claustrophobic,” Sue said.

  We were sitting at the big wooden table. It was early in the morning, and the others were still asleep. Sue had come to get me from my dreams, finger to her lips, and the look in her eyes made me get up immediately and follow her without a second thought.

  I sat now in my boxers and T-shirt, the chair too cold against my back and buttocks, and considered how to respond to that.

  “You’re kidding.”

  She shook her head. “He’s always been embarrassed by it, but it’s true. He’s terrified of small spaces. Says it used to be impossible for him to ride in trains, even cars. Sometimes if a building he entered was too dark, the roof seemed to close in on him, and he’d panic. I think it was the pressure his parents put on him, and he put on himself. Remember when he got sick with the flu last year?”

  I nodded. “He was out of school for a week.”

  “It wasn’t the flu, Pete. He had a nervous breakdown. It was pretty serious, he was in the hospital under observation.”

  “I had no idea.”

  “Not many people did. His parents got him on medication and it helped. But now…”

  “He’s run out.”

  She nodded again.

  I shifted in my seat. “Forgive me for asking, but why are you telling me this?”