The inside of the tall triple-wide smelled of lemons and cordite and rot. It was some strange approximation of a man cave: big-screen TV occupied by a pair of chicks with dicks, a half-deflated sex doll with a mouth open in permanent surprise, a long berber couch. Shelves full of football trophies lined the walls, scented candles burning amid the cheap metal like shrines assembled at a strip mall.
The walls, just like the wall Jamal had passed outside on the porch, were papered with Polaroids of boys: boys laughing under the white Christmas lights outside, naked boys drinking, boys wrestling in the dirt.
Mr. Lott’s body lay near the open window through which he’d fired at Kimbra, just past the couch, the barrel of the rifle now jutting through what remained of his head. Jamal stared. It took real commitment to shoot yourself with a rifle that big.
Coach Parter, standing across the couch from Jamal, raised one hand again when Jamal brought up the revolver. He pressed the other hand against a wound in his arm.
“The fuck is wrong with you people?” Jamal said.
“That’s a very good question, son,” Parter replied. He took a little step to one side and revealed a long hallway that stretched into the back of the trailer behind him. “You’ve made mistakes yourself, though, haven’t you?”
Jamal hardly heard him—something had grabbed hold of his mind. His feet seemed to move on their own. He stumbled forward until he stood at the threshold of the hall, staring at an open bedroom a few yards away, a room whose walls were paneled with mirrors. In the center of the room there was a hole in the floor.
A pit.
“I thought so,” Parter said, very close by.
A strange hissing noise rose from the pit like steam escaping an overwrought radiator.
“That creature—it found us a long time ago, back when we was boys and we made our first mistake. It’s slept down there ever since. I think it’s even helped keep us concealed out here, I really do.” Parter chuckled. “Who knew all this time it was just waiting for someone to spill a little more blood?”
shamefulboy, whispered the voice in Jamal’s mind. He lowered the revolver and let it dangle loosely at his side. His arms prickled like they’d died in his sleep. yourfault
The thing was right. It was his fault. All of this—Dylan dying, KT dying, Kimbra dying—he could have stopped all of it months ago, could have made Dylan talk, could have stopped everything if he’d only asked—
He blinked and the pit had grown wider, was spreading, the walls of the trailer dangling where their floors had fallen away, the Polaroids fluttering. Without realizing it, Jamal had taken a step closer.
A new voice came from the pit. A younger, brighter voice, but Jamal recognized it all the same. It was Coach Parter, years ago, speaking to him now. “But don’t you like it, Cor? We made all this for us.”
“Christ, Parter, for us?” Another young man spoke, one Jamal didn’t know. He sounded appalled. “What do you think I am?”
“You’re a man like us,” said another boy, pompous and scared.
“There’s nothing wrong with this,” said quieter, younger Mr. Lott.
But the boy Parter called Cor was having none of it. “Y’all queers got the wrong end of things. Don’t you got any fucking dignity? Don’t you—”
A gunshot rose from the pit. A heavy thud of a body falling. A gasp of pain.
The pit had come right to Jamal’s toes. He couldn’t move as the wooden floors began to buckle under his sneakers. He didn’t want to move. Maybe it was best if he let things end here. He wasn’t sure he could bear to live in a world that could ache with a shame like this.
“Alshoth Bosheth Toloth.” Parter spoke with a deep voice that wasn’t quite his own.
It was over, Jamal thought. And just as well: he’d fucked everything royally.
But as Jamal watched the boards under his toes disappear, he saw a sudden small flare of light glint at him from deep in the dark.
It was an eye.
Horror brought his mind roaring back. He pushed himself out of the hallway a moment before the floor on which he had just been standing collapsed.
He turned in time to see Coach Parter reaching for the rifle in Mr. Lott’s hands.
“Hey, Coach,” Jamal shouted.
Parter glanced over his shoulder, hesitated.
Jamal didn’t. He lobbed the cocked revolver across the couch. The gun spun gently through the air, end over end, and landed at Parter’s feet.
It worked better than Jamal could have hoped. When the revolver struck the floor its hammer sprang into the chambered round and the spark of the bullet’s detonation ignited the gasoline that had soaked the gun’s other chambers. Five bullets fired at once, and because only one bullet had anywhere to travel the other four could only explode with a furious burst of shrapnel. The gun had become a hand grenade.
Jamal had only been hoping to distract Parter. Instead the small explosion tore most of the skin from the coach’s legs. Parter collapsed against the wall, knocking a scented candle from a shelf of trophies and into the lap of Toby Lott’s Bisonette singlet. The singlet ignited in a whoosh of crackling polyester, the fire leaped from the uniform to the Polaroids that papered the wall and in a second four decades’ worth of boys were alight.
Parter tried to escape. Jamal was too fast for him. He pushed the couch against Parter and pinned him to the burning wall. He felt Parter struggle, heard the big man scream for him to stop, stop please stop, but Jamal closed his eyes. He had no doubt that the man would kill him if their places were reversed.
The room filled with smoke and whispers and the shit stench of decay. Jamal held his breath.
A cluster of dull pops that sounded like firecrackers came from Parter’s jacket a few feet away and Jamal felt the couch first convulse and then go as still as a line when a fish slips free. Jamal rose, panting, and saw that the fire had reached Parter’s open, unblinking eyes.
“You still say I got no strength in my legs?” Jamal said, mostly to himself.
He looked toward the hallway and saw, somehow without surprise, that the hole was gone, the floor restored. Jesus.
He didn’t linger. The fire was real enough, and he smelled gasoline in his hair.
Outside, hurrying down the triple-wide’s steps, Jamal heard a strange chugging noise. He saw that the wall of the trailer was alight, burning just a few feet away from the generator.
That generator. Hadn’t it been leaking—
“Get down!” Bethany screamed from the door of the Water House, but it was too late. The shock wave of the explosion caught Jamal as he reached the ground and sent him flying through the night.