GROUT WAITED IN his Outback at the construction site, listening to CHOM FM out of Montreal and eating a fresh Clear Brook Farm cider donut. If there was one thing about fall he looked forward to, it was these donuts. That, and good sleeping weather. Every August he put AC units in the bedroom windows. The AC put Jen into a catatonic state, but the meat-locker clamminess kept Grout awake. The AC was a wash when it came to the kids; with the AC off, they swam in their own sweat. With the AC on, they were comfortable but kept awake by the AC’s racket. And sleepless children were demonic children. Autumn always came just as it seemed the family would implode into mutual homicide against one another. Now, with the cold nights, and the windows cracked a hair the family slept like victims of a carbon-monoxide leak.
Grout had awoken this morning invigorated instead of feeling like a slab of leftover meat loaf. He and Jen had fallen asleep in bed while watching a Columbo DVD. Jen liked Columbo for the seventies’ fashion. Grout watched it for the classic cars and the banter. The investigations themselves were ridiculous. The episode the previous night had starred Robert Culp as a blackmailing and murdering private eye. It seemed Robert Culp was in half the episodes. Grout liked him. Jen had fallen asleep a half-hour into the show. So tonight, as usual, they’d rewind to where she’d drifted off. It usually took three nights to watch an episode.
Grout pulled a second cider donut from the paper bag, the donut warm and smelling pleasantly of yeasty dough and warm sugar. The donuts were the only junk food in which he indulged; otherwise, sweets had no grip on him as they did the kids, who could stand to lose a few pounds by playing outside. Liam’s basketball and Jill’s gymnastics did not make up for running your brains out in the yard, something he and his brother had done growing up but which was apparently stripped from today’s kids’ genes. Grout and his brother had fought like cats dragged to water to stay outside. Summers, they’d roamed the woods behind the house until the mosquitoes drove them inside; winters, they’d sledded until they couldn’t feel their fingers. The whole world was weakening. He wondered if in two hundred years, humans would be reduced to gelatinous blobs hooked up to feeding tubes.
Grout ate his second donut. They were made from scratch at dawn, September through November only. This morning, he’d arrived at six A.M., the farm shrouded in fog, to watch the girl roll and cut the dough, then drop it in hot, foaming oil. She’d scooped each donut out, rolled them in sugar then tonged five into his bag, handing him the sixth. When he took that first bite, sugar clung to his lips and melted, and the donut’s crisp golden skin gave way to a hot, doughy inside. He was lucky Clear Brook only made donuts in the fall. He’d weigh three hundred pounds and have arteries as clogged as old sewer pipes if they had them year-round. Shit. He’d be dead by now.
He tore a third donut in two; the sugar melted to a sweet film, and popped half in his mouth. He licked his fingers as he watched through the windshield.
A clunker Chevy Suburban out of a Starsky & Hutch episode rattled into the site, the radio blasting death metal. George Waters.
Waters stepped from the truck wearing painter’s overalls and carrying a canvas tool bag. From fifty feet away, the eruptions of pustules on his cheeks were plainly visible. Greasy black hair like rotted kelp pasted to his ugly mug.
Grout opened his car door slowly and got out.
Waters dropped his bag and bolted across the lot toward the fields behind the site.
Grout stood frozen for a moment. Then he took pursuit.
The kid sprang across the lot, weaved between parked dozers and bucket loaders, then leapt a barbed-wire fence and broke across a cow pasture. He had two hundred feet on Grout when Grout had to stop at the fence, unable to hurdle it. As he swung a leg over the fence, his pant cuff tore as he fell over the fence onto his face. He jumped up and started across the field, pushing hard. He was in reasonable shape, but the pale and sickly-looking kid had two things going for him: youth and fear.
Grout kept pace across a knobby field that tortured his ankles. His lungs burned as the kid leapt another fence, putting more distance between them.
Grout trudged on, climbed the next fence. When he looked up, the field was empty. The kid was gone. Then, Grout saw him. The kid popped up from the grass. He’d fallen and now hobbled lamely. Grout took off. Slowly, he closed, shouting, “Stop! Police!” like an imbecile. As if a fleeing criminal had ever stopped because a cop had yelled after him. Grout sucked breath between his teeth, a stitch in his side slowing him. But he was gaining. The kid was hurt.
Grout was nearly within reach. He lunged at the kid’s legs and found only air, then frozen mud. The kid kicked Grout’s hand, and Grout felt the knuckles of two fingers pop and break. He gritted his teeth. Motherfucker. He scrambled after the limping kid and dove again, wrapping the kid’s ankles in his arms as the kid hit the ground hard.
“Fucker,” the kid shouted, kicking. But Grout was too strong for the scrawny youth. He cranked the kid’s foot, and Waters wailed in pain. Grout cranked some more.
Then reefed the kids hands behind his back, cuffed him, and slammed his face into the frozen ground, growling as adrenaline raged in him, “You piece of shit!”