week." He closedhis eyes. "It's orange! Pretty. We should come back and find it once ithatches."
Alan hunkered down next to him. "There's a bug in here?"
"Yeah. It's like a white worm, but in a week it will turn into an orangebug and chew its way out."
He was about three then, which made Alan seven. "What if I chopped downthe plant?" he said. "Would the bug still hatch next week?"
"You won't," Billy said.
"I could, though."
"Nope," Brad said.
Alan reached for the plant. Took it in his hand. The warm skin of theplant and the woody bole of the pod would be so easy to uproot.
He didn't do it.
That night, as he lay himself down to sleep, he couldn't remember why hehadn't. He couldn't sleep. He got up and looked out the front of thecave, at the countryside unrolling in the moonlight and the far lightsof the town.
He went back inside and looked in on Benji. He was sleeping, his facesmooth and his lips pouted. He rolled over and opened his eyes,regarding Alan without surprise.
"Told you so," he said.
#
Alan had an awkward relationship with the people in town. Unaccompaniedlittle boys in the grocery store, at the Gap, in the library and in toysection of the Canadian Tire were suspect. Alan never "horsed around" --whatever that meant -- but nevertheless, he got more than his share ofthe hairy eyeball from the shopkeepers, even though he had money in hispocket and had been known to spend it on occasion.
A lone boy of five or six or seven was suspicious, but let him show upwith the tiny hand of his dark little brother clasped in his, quietlyexplaining each item on the shelf to the solemn child, and everyone gotan immediate attitude adjustment. Shopkeepers smiled and nodded,shoppers mouthed, "So cute," to each other. Moms with babies in snuglisbent to chuckle them under their chins. Store owners spontaneously gavethem candy, and laughed aloud at Bryan's cries of "Chocolate!"
When Brian started school, he foresaw and avoided all trouble, anddelighted his teachers with his precociousness. Alan ate lunch with himonce he reached the first grade and started eating in the cafeteria withthe rest of the non-kindergartners.
Brad loved to play with Craig after he was born, patiently mounding soiland pebbles on his shore, watering him and patting him smooth, plantingwild grasses on his slopes as he crept toward the mouth of thecave. Those days -- before Darcy's arrival -- were a long idyll of goodfood and play in the hot sun or the white snow and brotherhood.
Danny couldn't sneak up on Brad and kick him in the back of the head. Hecouldn't hide a rat in his pillow or piss on his toothbrush. Billy wasnever one to stand pat and eat shit just because Davey was handing itout. Sometimes he'd just wind up and take a swing at Davey, seeminglyout of the blue, knocking him down, then prying open his mouth to revealthe chocolate bar he'd nicked from under Brad's pillow, or a comic bookfrom under his shirt. He was only two years younger than Brad, but bythe time they were both walking, Brad hulked over him and could lay himout with one wild haymaker of a punch.
#
Billy came down from his high perch when Alan returned from buryingMarci, holding out his hands wordlessly. He hugged Alan hard, crushingthe breath out of him.
The arms felt good around his neck, so he stopped letting himself feelthem. He pulled back stiffly and looked at Brian.
"You could have told me," he said.
Bram's face went expressionless and hard and cold. Telling people wasn'twhat he did, not for years. It hurt others -- and it hurt him. It wasthe reason for his long, long silences. Alan knew that sometimes hecouldn't tell what it was that he knew that others didn't. But he didn'tcare, then.
"You should have told me," he said.
Bob took a step back and squared up his shoulders and his feet, leaningforward a little as into a wind.
"You *knew* and you didn't *tell me* and you didn't *do anything* and asfar as I'm concerned, you killed her and cut her up and buried her alongwith Darryl, you coward." Adam knew he was crossing a line, and hedidn't care. Brian leaned forward and jutted his chin out.
Avram's hands were clawed with cold and caked with mud and still echoingthe feeling of frozen skin and frozen dirt, and balled up into fists,they felt like stones.
He didn't hit Barry. Instead, he retreated to his niche and retrievedthe triangular piece of flint that he'd been cherting into an arrowheadfor school and a hammer stone and set to work on it in the light of aflashlight.
#
He sharpened a knife for Davey, there in his room in the cave, as theboys ran feral in the woods, as the mountain made its slow and ponderousprotests.
He sharpened a knife, a hunting knife with a rusty blade and a crackedhandle that he'd found on one of the woodland trails, beside a hunter'ssnare, not lost but pitched away in disgust one winter and notdiscovered until the following spring.
But the nicked blade took an edge as he whetted it with the round stone,and the handle regained its grippiness as he wound a cord tight aroundit, making tiny, precise knots with each turn, until the handle nolonger pinched his hand, until the blade caught the available light fromthe cave mouth and glinted dully.
The boys brought him roots and fruits they'd gathered, sweets and breadthey'd stolen, small animals they'd caught. Ed-Fred-George were anunbeatable team when it came to catching and killing an animal, thoughthey were only small, barely out of the second grade. They were fast,and they could coordinate their actions without speaking, so that thebunny or the squirrel could never duck or feint in any direction withoutencountering the thick, neck-wringing outstretched hands of the pudgyboys. Once, they brought him a cat. It went in the night's stew.
Billy sat at his side and talked. The silence he'd folded himself inunwrapped and flapped in the wind of his beating gums. He talked aboutthe lessons he'd had in school and the lessons he'd had from his bigbrother, when it was just the two of them on the hillside and Alan wouldteach him every thing he knew, the names of and salient facts regardingevery thing in their father's domain. He talked about the truths he'dgleaned from reading chocolate-bar wrappers. He talked about the thingsthat he'd see Davey doing when no one else could see it.
One day, George came to him, the lima-bean baby grown to toddling abouton two sturdy legs, fat and crispy red from his unaccustomed timeout-of-doors and in the sun. "You know, he *worships* you," Glenn said,gesturing at the spot in his straw bedding where Brad habitually sat andgazed at him and chattered.
Alan stared at his shoelaces. "It doesn't matter," he said. He'd dreamtthat night of Davey stealing into the cave and squatting beside him,watching him the way that he had before, and of Alan knowing, *knowing*that Davey was there, ready to rend and tear, knowing that his knifewith its coiled handle was just under his pillow, but not being able tomove his arms or legs. Paralyzed, he'd watched Davey grin and reachbehind him with agonizing slowness for a rock that he'd lifted highabove his head and Andrew had seen that the rock had been cherted to arazor edge that hovered a few feet over his breastbone, Davey's armstrembling with the effort of holding it aloft. A single drop of sweathad fallen off of Davey's chin and landed on Alan's nose, and thenanother, and finally he'd been able to open his eyes and wake himself,angry and scared. The spring rains had begun, and the condensation wasthick on the cave walls, dripping onto his face and arms and legs as heslept, leaving behind chalky lime residue as it evaporated.
"He didn't kill her," Greg said.
Albert hadn't told the younger brothers about the body buried in Craig,which meant that Brad had been talking to them, had told them what he'dseen. Alan felt an irrational streak of anger at Brad -- he'd beenblabbing Alan's secrets. He'd been exposing the young ones to thingsthey didn't need to know. To the nightmares.
"He didn't stop her from being killed," Alan said. He had the knife inhis hand and hunted through his pile of belongings for the whetstone tohone its edge.
Greg looked at the knife, and Andy followed his gaze to his own whiteknuckles on the hilt. Greg took a frightened step back
, and Alan, whohad often worried that the smallest brother was too delicate for thereal world, felt ashamed of himself.
He set the knife down and stood, stretching his limbs and leaving thecave for the first time in weeks.
#
Brad found him standing on the slopes of the gentle, soggy hump ofCharlie's slope, a few feet closer to the seaway than it had been thatwinter when Alan had dug up and reburied Marci's body there.
"You forgot this," Brad said, handing him the knife.
Alan took it from him. It was sharp and dirty and the handle was grimedwith sweat and lime.
"Thanks, kid," he said. He reached down and took Billy's hand, the wayhe'd done