A few minutes later we were in the middle of the street in front of Mr. Moore’s house. Mr. Moore was still in his little aluminum boat, over by his front porch, and his neighbors were all standing in their doorways, watching.
I could tell right away what Mr. Moore meant about the smell. As soon as the wind shifted and I caught a whiff of it my stomach seized up and I almost barfed.
“Oh God,” I said.
From the front of the canoe, Jeff coughed, then turned his head my way and nodded.
“Not good,” he said.
I didn’t see my dad.
I was about to call out to Mr. Moore and ask after him when suddenly my dad lurched out of the shrimp boat’s cabin, fumbled his way over to the gunwale, and puked his guts out into the water.
Nobody spoke. We just stood there, watching my dad wipe his lips with the back of his hand.
Finally, Mr. Moore said, “Wes…?”
My dad looked up. I saw him scan the crowd until he locked eyes on me. I swallowed the lump in my throat, expecting him to yell at me for being there.
Instead, he said, “Mark, go back home and get my police radio. Bring it to me right now.”
“What is it, Dad?”
He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and stood up as straight as he could on the slanting deck of the boat.
“Go, Mark. Men are dead in here. Now go.”
I nodded, too freaked out to question him further.
“Hey Jeff, turn us around, okay?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, okay.”
* * *
We paddled back to my place as fast as we could go. Neither of us said anything about what we’d seen. But I think there was a sort of tacit communication that went between us, a vibe if you will, in which we agreed that we’d just started off on some kind of weird adventure. The storm and the flooding had been merely a prelude. But this, this was the meat of the play.
My mom tried to get us to slow down and tell her what was going on, but I just said that Dad needed us to get some things for him and went right back out the door. A few moments later we were slashing into the water with our paddles, going as fast as we could, totally ignoring the metal-on-metal grind of our canoe passing over our neighbors’ cars.
Then we caught the smell again and we both stopped rowing.
I looked up.
The shrimp boat was about thirty feet away. My dad was standing on the gunwale near the stern, steadying himself with one hand on the rigging that had once held the boat’s nets. That rigging was full of twigs and larger branches now. The sides of the boat were spackled with bright green leaves that the water had matted to the hull.
He had collected himself in the few minutes we were gone. He stood tall, and when he stared down at our approach he seemed strong and ready to act. He motioned for us to come closer. I stood up to hand him his radio and he knelt down to take it. In that moment–it lasted only seconds, but that was enough–I caught a glimpse over his shoulder at the open cabin door. I saw the walls there spattered with blood, and more blood pooling on the deck. A pale hand and a bit of wrist held the door ajar, and in the center of all that gore, staring at me with wide-open, terror-stricken eyes, was a severed head.
Bile rose up in my throat. It happened so fast I barely had time to choke it back down. I’d watched more horror movies than any other three kids at my school put together, and never once had I been grossed out to the point of puking. I don’t know, maybe it was the smell. Whatever it was I had to close my eyes and force myself to get my act back under control.
When I opened them my dad was watching me.
“There are three bodies in there,” he said. “At least as far as I can tell.”
That surprised me. I’d expected him to tell me not to look. Instead, he was telling me about it. That had never happened before.
“All that blood from just three people?” I asked.
He nodded. “There’s a lot of blood in the human body, Mark. One small person can bleed enough to cover an entire living room floor up to your shoe laces.”
“Oh,” I said. I stared again at that severed head, looked into its eyes. “Why…why is his head not with his body?”
My dad said nothing for a moment, just looked me in the eye. Finally he said, “It looks like they were eaten.”
“What?”
“You heard me.”
“Why would—an animal did that to them, right? Like an alligator, maybe?”
“I don’t think so, Mark. I’ve seen enough bite marks to know what a human bite mark looks like. Those were made by a man.”
“Oh God.”
“Go home, Mark. Thanks for bringing me my radio. Go home and tell Mom I’m gonna be working for a bit. Tell her I’ll start working on the house as soon as I can.”
A pause.
“Hey, you hear me?”
I nodded. “Okay.” I looked up at him. “What if…what if the man who did this comes back?”
He hesitated a moment before answering. “Rigor has set in. In this weather, in this heat, that means they were probably killed right about the time the storm was coming ashore. Still, I don’t want you in this area until I tell you it’s safe.”
I nodded, but said nothing.
“Hey Mark?”
“Yeah, Dad.”
“I love you, okay? This is bad, but you’re okay. You understand that, don’t you?”
“I…” I realized just then he had my shoulders in his hands, holding me like a little kid he was trying to examine for wounds. “I’m okay, Dad.”
“Alright. You and Jeff go now.”
I nodded again.
I sank down into the canoe and pulled the paddle to my chest.
“Jeff,” my dad said, “you guys go back home.”
I was too stunned to say anything. I just sat there with the paddle clutched to my chest as Jeff used his paddle to push us away from the boat. I had the sense of movement below me, but not of time passing. I just felt numb. And when at last I had enough presence of mind to turn around and look back, I saw my dad standing there, one hand on the rigging, the other half-raised in a mute salutation. I got the sense he was uncertain about what he’d just exposed me to.
I turned around, mechanically gripped my paddle, and started rowing home.
* * *
We stopped in the middle of the street, midway between my house and Jeff’s.
“Hey Mark.”
“Yeah?” I said.
“Dude, do you really want me to drop you off?”
“Huh?” I hadn’t thought of anything else. I’d planned on going inside and hugging on Max while my mom made me breakfast.
“Let’s go over and see if Alan and Eric are out.”
“Jeff, I…”
“Hey.”
I waited for him to say more, but he didn’t. He was waiting for me to speak. “Hey, what?” I said.
“I’m just saying, you know, you don’t have to go home.”
“But I want to.”
“Why? Because of what you saw?”
“Jeff, I saw a severed head. You have no idea how much blood…”
He hesitated for a moment, then he said: “Well, if that’s what you want. But I just got to tell you, we’re never gonna see something like this again.”
“You said that before. We’ve had our fun. It doesn’t feel like fun anymore.”
“What are you gonna do, Mark? You gonna go inside and hang with your dog and your mom.”
“Well, yeah, I guess.”
“That and creep yourself out thinking about those bodies on that boat. Why not come with me? Take your mind off it.”
I thought about that, and he did have a point. If I was going to be honest with myself I’d rather go cruising around with my friends than stay cooped up in the house with nothing but my dog and the memory of that head staring back at me from a pool of blood to keep me company.
“Okay,” I said. “Alright.”
“Now you’re talking!” Jeff said.
* * *
Alan and Eric lived on Dunmoore Street, which was about four blocks north of Clearcrest, where Jeff and I lived. We found them at the neighborhood park. Clear Lake back then was all about NASA. Most of the kids we went to school with had a parent who worked there, like Jeff’s dad for instance, who was an engineer for Grumman. It seemed everything in town, from the dry cleaners to the street names, had something to do with space exploration. Our neighborhood park was no different. The centerpiece of it was a forty-foot-high metal playscape made to look like a Saturn V rocket. It had a circular staircase on the inside and bars for walls so you could see out and a little room up in the nose cone where, three years earlier, I’d shared my first kiss with a girl named Lisa Rodriguez.
When we came up on them, Alan and Eric were in Alan’s canoe watching a long black water moccasin glide through the lower level of the rocket.
Both turned to hail us and Eric said, “Can you believe this? This is totally badass.”
“Yeah, it’s pretty cool,” Jeff said. “We found a dead body.”
“Oh God,” I muttered. Just like Jeff. Always had to steal the show.
It got the results he intended though.
Alan had nodded at us as we pulled up, but he’d gone right back to watching that water moccasin. He hated snakes. They gave him the willies, and I could tell he was watching that one to make sure it didn’t decide to double back on them and try to get into the canoe. It wasn’t a totally unreasonable fear as far as that goes. Water moccasins are mean. They’ll do that to you, even when you’re not doing anything to bother them. But of course as soon as he heard Jeff both he and Eric were staring at us.
“No way,” Eric managed to say. He was still smiling, but the smile was slipping away fast.
“What are you talking about?” Alan asked.
“It was on the shrimp boat,” Jeff said.
“Oh God,” I said again.
Jeff was a master at keeping people on the hook like that. He said, “The storm surge carried a shrimp boat up from Kemah and smashed it into a pecan tree down at the end of our block. Mark’s dad got called over to take a look at it because it smelled so bad and he found a dead body inside it. The guy was all torn up. You should have seen it. Mark’s dad even puked his guts out. Right there in front of everybody. Just barfed over the side of the boat.”
“No way,” Eric said again. He and Alan both looked at me.
“It’s true,” I said. “But it was three bodies, actually. And my dad said it looked like they’d been eaten.”
“What? No way.” That one was from Alan. “Did he really puke?”
I nodded. “It was pretty sick. The smell was really bad.”
“You saw the bodies?”
“I saw a head and a bunch of blood.”
“Your dad let you onboard?” Alan asked. “Isn’t that like a crime scene or something?”
I told them about handing my dad his radio and how I’d caught a glimpse of the scene over his shoulder. “I didn’t touch anything,” I added.
“But you smelled it, right?” Alan asked.
“Yeah.” I looked over at Jeff. “We both did.”
“It was so totally nasty,” Jeff added, and laughed.
“It’s not funny,” Alan said. I thought he meant because somebody had died, but that wasn’t it. “When you smell something,” he explained, “you take a little part of that something inside you. Smells are particles, you know. You guys have got part of those dead men inside you now.”
“Huh?” Jeff said, looking as confused as Alan and Eric had when he told them about the bodies.
Alan nodded. He was taller than the rest of us, with freckles across the bridge of his nose and a slender face that made him look more delicate than someone of his height should look. It didn’t help that he wore clunky, black-framed glasses, either. It made him look like the poster boy for nerd camp. I was on the football team, and every once in a while one of the guys on the team would ask me why I was friends with someone who looked like such a dweeb. I always defended Alan whenever I could, but he didn’t make it easy on me. He just had a knack for saying things that normal people knew better than to say.
Like now.
“The way you smell is your nose picks up small airborne particles of the thing making the scent. Little bits and pieces, if you will. They break off whatever’s giving off the smell and it gets inside your nose, inside you, where your body and mind work together to decide if it’s a good smell or a bad smell. Whether it’s food or danger or whatever. You guys have got part of those dead bodies inside you now.”
Jeff and I looked at each other. Neither of us was smiling now.
Jeff said, “That’s not true, is it?”
Alan shrugged, a why-would-I-lie gesture.
“Oh God,” I muttered. It was already getting hot, up in the high 80s, but I felt a little chill crawl over my skin just the same.
Then Eric slapped Alan in the shoulder. “Dude, way to be Debbie Downer.” He turned to Jeff and me. “Hey, show us the shrimp boat.”
I knew this was coming.
“No way,” I said. “My dad told me to go home. He’d ground me for sure if he knew I didn’t do as he said.”
“I don’t think that’s all that likely,” Alan said. “If he didn’t ground you for stealing his gun, I doubt seriously he’d ground you for wanting to go exploring all this.”
“Nice,” Eric said. “Real nice.”
“What?” Alan asked. “What did I say?”
“He’s right, you know?” Jeff said.
“Who? Alan?” I asked.
“No, Eric. We could park a short ways off, out of the way of the action. Nobody’ll notice us. You know the cops are gonna be bringing lots of boats and crime scene stuff and all that. It’s gonna be a show, man.”
That was true. I’d heard my dad tell stories about working major crime scenes, about how chaotic they could be. I could only imagine what it’d be like trying to do what they had to do from boats.
“Sure,” I said, aware that Jeff had once again talked me out of my common sense and into defying my father, “let’s go.”