He wasn’t going to climb back up the same way he’d come down, so he walked far along the dimming bank of the river to where the woods came down to the shore and blocked his path. The rowers had all gone in by then, and high above him the loony bin glowed over the tangled trees. He clawed his way through the chaotic density, ankles torn by thorns, his hands on fire, freezing, and sorry now that he hadn’t taken the gloves Fat John had told him he was going to need, sorry now that he mostly knew what was right but he always did the wrong thing anyway, sorry that he’d been kicked out of two schools, that his mother didn’t like him enough to live on this continent or talk to him, that even Ellen was gone, gone, gone. Oh, he missed her; he didn’t understand why she’d left him too. He was crying, being a seventeen-year-old pussy, he scolded himself, but he couldn’t help it. Everything hurt. Sometimes—sometimes, he felt like nothing more than someone’s careless exhale. He jammed his hands into the earth to stop his idiot tears.
His fingers found warmer purchase, something faintly textured, almost silky, and he dug further, still sniffling at his sorry-ass self, and pulled out a bone. His eyes stuttered and he dropped it. The thing was about eighteen inches long, knobbed at both ends, a silvery, porous white. This was no chicken bone, no bird bone—but maybe a dog bone, or a coyote’s? The loony bin campus was full of them, he’d been warned, animals that howled through the grounds performing their nightly soundtrack. He catalogued the possibilities to quiet his mind, but he knew this was a human bone. Not because he knew what it was called or which part of the body it came from, but because it lay there with the certainty of something wicked and secretive. He considered taking a picture of it for his friends, but he was too spooked. The whole place creeped him out enough already—and always had.
He picked up the bone with his sweatshirt and made his way back to the grounds. In the long shed of the maintenance building, Fat John was at his desk, his chair surrounded by soft flesh, as if the furniture had sunk into his quicksand body and not the other way around. A few of the maintenance guys were getting ready to go home, banging lockers, swinging lunchboxes, calling Gordon mijo and smacking him too hard on the back.
Fat John smirked at him, the pink lower lids of his eyes pulled down by the weight of his florid cheeks. “Ah, the little artist returns,” he said, “the little felon. What’s up?”
“I have to show you something,” Gordon said breathlessly when the others had finally cleared out. He unswaddled the bone on the desk and took a step back. His pulse thundered in his ears.
Fat John shot up and the bone fell to the floor. “Jesus Christ. Where the hell did you find this?” The man’s face had gone gray-white.
“On the slope,” Gordon said, and added, to bolster his minor untruth: “Where you sent me to clear those brambles.”
“On the slope,” the man repeated.
“Weird, right?” Salt flooded Gordon’s mouth. He wondered why he hadn’t just left the bone where he’d found it. “Do you think maybe someone was murdered?”
Fat John didn’t respond but wheezed as he bent over to hastily reswaddle the bone. He threw it in a locker, which he secured with a padlock.
“Hey, what about my sweatshirt?” Gordon said.
“Forget your fucking sweatshirt. And forget this.” Fat John gripped the padlock and wouldn’t look at Gordon. “It’s a deer bone. We’ve found them before. Now go home.”
“Are you serious? I think it could be human.”
“Do I seem like I’m joking? Get the hell out of here and keep your mouth shut.”
The man was usually playful, always in a slightly menacing way, but now something rank rose off him, the contagious musk of fucking up, of being afraid. Gordon was both assured and alarmed by how familiar the smell was; it was his own too often. He felt robbed of some information he wasn’t sure he really wanted to know in the first place. He was sorry he’d found the bone at all because he wouldn’t be able to forget about it now, especially after Fat John’s evasion, his mind drawn to everything that was trouble and troubling.
And his sweatshirt was a total loss—he wasn’t going to get that back. He biked home through the hospital’s vast and winding campus designed by someone famous and dreamy—a man who’d ended up in a loony bin himself, he’d heard—past heavy strokes of black winter green and low, badly lit brick buildings, the wood houses with their frenzied details like torn nightgowns, the clapboard barn, the stone walls like a million knuckles. He’d known kids who had ended up here for a stay, parents too, teachers. Every neighborhood should have a nuthouse down the street, like a 7-Eleven, for emergencies. If he were ever put in here, he knew that all he’d want would be to sleep for a long time, for days or maybe years. He’d give in to giving up for a bit. He’d force his mind to be a room where the windows didn’t open. He swerved around a dead squirrel fallen from a wire, its tail bristling in the wind.
Out on Blackstone Boulevard amid the roaring buses, and then up the hill to his house, his lungs froze with the cold, but his ears burned with Fat John’s weird warning. As usual, his father wasn’t home, but there was a supermarket roast chicken in the fridge for his dinner (the second time that week), a note reminding him to work on his college applications and to feed the half-dead dog his mother had left them a decade ago. He didn’t like the pooch with its dirty white fur and its trails of pink tears. He ate cereal from the box, sipped some of his father’s scotch, did not touch the chicken in its plastic coffin, or his homework, or his applications, his father’s delusion of his future fanned out on the dining room table. He fell asleep on the couch.