Eleven-year-old Seymour is walking home from the library on the last Monday of August when he spies something brown on the shoulder of Cross Road just before the turn onto Arcady Lane. Twice before he has found roadkilled raccoons here. Once a smashed coyote.
It’s a wing. The severed wing of a great grey owl, with downy coverts and brown-and-white primary flight feathers. A piece of clavicle still clings to the joint, a few sinews trailing out.
A Honda roars past. He scans the road, searches the weeds along the shoulder for the rest of the bird. In the ditch he finds an empty can that says Übermonster Energy Brew. Nothing else.
He walks the rest of the way home and stands in the driveway with his backpack on and the wing clamped against his chest. In the lots of Eden’s Gate, a model townhome is nearly complete and four more are going up. A truss dangles from a crane while two carpenters move back and forth beneath. Clouds blow in and lightning flashes and for an instant he sees Earth from a million miles away, a mote hurtling through a barren and crushing vacuum, and then he’s in the driveway again and there are no clouds, no lightning: it’s a bright blue day, the carpenters are fixing the truss into place, their nail guns going pop-pop-pop.
Bunny is at work but has left the television on. On-screen an elderly couple pulls suitcases on wheels toward a cruise ship. They clink champagne glasses, play a slot machine. Ha ha ha, they say. Ha ha ha ha ha ha. Their smiles are excessively white.
The wing smells like an old pillow. The complexity of the brown, tan, and cream striping on the flight feathers is outrageous. For every 27,027 Americans, one great grey. For every 27,027 Seymours, one Trustyfriend.
The owl must have been hunting from one of the Douglas firs along the edge of Cross Road. Some prey, a mouse probably, crept to the edge of the pavement below, sniffing, twitching, its heartbeat flashing in Trustyfriend’s preterhuman hearing like a buoy light.
The mouse started across the river of asphalt; the owl spread his wings and dropped. Meanwhile a car barreled west down the road, headlights cleaving the night, moving faster than any natural thing should move.
Trustyfriend: Who listened. Who had a pure bright beautiful voice. Who always came back.
On the Magnavox the cruise ship explodes.
Well after dark Seymour hears the Grand Am, hears Bunny’s keys at the door. She comes into his room smelling of equal parts bleach and maple syrup. He watches her pick up the wing. “Oh, Possum. I’m sorry.”
He says, “Somebody needs to pay.”
She reaches to touch his forehead but he rolls against the wall.
“Somebody needs to go to jail.”
She sets a hand on his back and his whole body stiffens. Through the closed window, through the walls, he can hear cars moving along Cross Road, the whole terrible unceasing human machine roaring on.
“Do you want me to stay home tomorrow? I could call in sick. We could make waffles?”
He hides his face in his pillow. Five months ago the hillside beyond the wire was home to red squirrels black finches pygmy shrews garter snakes downy woodpeckers swallowtail butterflies wolf lichen monkey flowers ten thousand voles five million ants. Now what is it?
“Seymour?”
She said there were twenty places north of here that Trustyfriend could fly to. Bigger forests. Better forests. Tons of voles, she said. More voles than there were hairs on Seymour’s head. But that was just a story. Without raising his head, he reaches for his ear defenders and puts them on.
In the morning Bunny goes to work. Seymour buries the wing beside the egg-shaped boulder in the backyard and decorates the grave with pebbles.
Beneath the bench in Pawpaw’s toolshed, beneath three crates of motor oil and a piece of plywood, is a tarp-lined recess Seymour found several years before. Inside are thirty yellowing flyers that say IDAHO FREEDOM MILITIA, two boxes of ammunition, one black Beretta pistol, and one rope-handled crate with DELAY M67 25 GRENADE HAND FRAG stenciled on the lid.
With his feet braced on either side of the hole, reaching down between his legs, he grasps one of the handles and heaves the crate up and out. He pops open the hasp with the blade of a screwdriver. Nestled inside, in a five-by-five grid, each in its own little cubby, are twenty-five olive-green hand grenades with their handles down and their pins in.
On a library computer a grizzled old-timer with a frighteningly inflamed nose explains the basics of the M67. Six-point-five ounces of high explosive. A four-to-five-second fuse. Lethal radius of five meters. “Once launched,” the man says, “the internal spring pops the spoon and releases a striker, which strikes the primer. The primer will then initiate detonation…”
Marian walks past and smiles; Seymour hides the browser tab until she’s out of sight.
The man stands behind a barricade, depresses the handle, pulls the pin, throws. On the far side of the barricade, dirt erupts into the sky.
Seymour hits replay. Watches again.
On Wednesdays Bunny works a double shift at the Pig N’ Pancake and doesn’t get home until after eleven. She leaves a tub of macaroni in the refrigerator. The note on top says, It’s all going to be okay. All afternoon Seymour sits at the kitchen table with a forty-year-old fragmentation grenade in his lap.
The last truck leaves Eden’s Gate around seven. Seymour puts on his ear defenders, crosses the backyard, slips through the new ranch-rail fence, and walks the empty lots with the grenade in his pocket. Sod, freshly laid in the backyard of the model townhome, glows a dark, malignant green. In the two framed units on either side of it, the front door has been installed, but there are only holes where the doorknob and deadbolt should go.
In front of each home stands a realty sign with its translucent box of flyers. Live the Lakeport lifestyle that you’ve always wanted. Seymour chooses the townhome on the left.
In what will become the kitchen, the shells of cabinets stand empty. From an upstairs window, still covered with stickers and plastic film, he can see out through the branches of a few remaining firs to the clearing where Trustyfriend’s tree once stood.
No trucks anywhere. No voices, no music. In the darkening sky a single airplane contrail cuts past a quarter-moon.
He goes back downstairs and props open the front door with the butt end of a two-by-four and stands on the newly poured sidewalk in his shorts and sweatshirt with his ear defenders around his neck and the grenade in his hand.
It’s not our property. They can do whatever they want with it.
Bigger forests, better forests. He could have his pick.
He keeps the spoon depressed, holds his breath, and loops his index finger through the safety ring. All he has to do is pull. He sees himself underhand the bomb into the house: the front of the structure splinters, the front door blows off its hinges, windows shatter, the concussion travels through Lakeport, over the mountains, until it reaches the ears of Trustyfriend in whatever mystic snag the one-winged ghosts of great grey owls stand in, blinking out at eternity.
Pull the pin.
His knees shake, his heart bellows, but his finger won’t budge. He remembers the video: the whump, the dirt fountaining into the air. Five six seven eight. Pull the pin.
He can’t. He can hardly keep his feet. His finger slides out of the safety ring. The moon is still there in the sky but it might fall at any moment.