long, crooked spout. Written in thick black script across a flame shape, bright yellow with a blue center and a white dot in the center of the blue, there was a scratched logo: CAUTION.
I wanna get him, I said to my friends. Watch him burn. They were also staring at the can. They knew what it was about.
Cappy picked a splinter off the broken door and stabbed the ground with it. Zack chewed a piece of grass. I looked at Angus. He was always hungry. I told him I’d brought sandwiches and fished the bag out of my pack to divide them up.
First, we unstuck the bread slices carefully from the peanut butter. Next we tucked in my mother’s famous little crunchy pickles. Last, we closed the sandwiches back up. The pickle juice salted the peanut butter, cut the stickiness so you could swallow each bite, and added just the right hot, sour bite to the nuts. After the sandwiches were gone, Angus drank most of the pickle brine and put the hot red pepper in his mouth. Cappy took the dill and chewed the end of the stalk. Zack looked away—sometimes he was fastidious, and then he would surprise you.
We passed around the water jar and then I told them I had thought of how the attack had happened. Here’s how it went, I said without blinking. He did it here. I tipped my head back to the round house. He did it, then he wanted to burn her inside the place. But his matches got wet. He went over the hill and down toward the lake for dry matches. I told them exactly how my mother had escaped. I said I’d thought that the attacker must have kept some of his stuff in the woods, and that I’d followed the fence posts to the lake and then out into the lake to where he’d sunk the can. I said that he was probably a smoker because he’d gone after the extra matches, or maybe he’d had a lighter. He had to have left something in the woods. If he’d left a pack of stuff out there, he’d maybe even slept out there. He could have smoked, dropped a butt. Or field-stripped the cigarette the way Whitey did, rolling away the threads of the filter, forming the end of the paper into a tiny ball. What we’d look for would be threads, tracks, any foreign material, anything at all.
We all nodded. Looked at the ground. Cappy raised his head, stared at me evenly.
Make it so, he said. Starboy?
Okay, said Angus, whose nickname that was, let’s see what we get.
What we got was wood ticks. Our reservation is notorious for them. We made a grid of the woods, crisscrossed the area from the fence going south along the lake about thirty feet. In the spring, when you hit a tick hole, which is where a huge bunch have hatched, they swarm you. But they swarm slow. You can shake some off but you can’t really crawl them off. We were crawling through tick hole after tick hole.
Zack yelled once, panic in his voice. He jumped up and I could see a few flung off him onto Angus and into Cappy’s shiny hair.
Shut up, you baby! said Angus. Fleas are a hell of a lot worse.
Yeah, fleas, said Zack. Remember when your mom flea-bombed your place and forgot you were inside?
Oh man, they shut the whole place up and flea-bombed the hell out of it, said Angus, squinting at what looked like a bit of plastic wrap, then tossing it. Forgot I was asleep in the corner and left me there overnight. All the fleas jumped onto me for safety and I was only four. They had one last drink of blood and died in my clothes. It was lucky they didn’t suck me dry.
They sucked your brain dry, said Zack. Look what you threw at me. He pinched a matted condom by the edge and swung it back and forth. It had obviously been there through the winter. Older kids made fires on the beach.
I held out the bread bag and Zack dropped in the petrified condom. And then we found dozens more and so many beer cans that Angus brought them to a rock and started crushing them to take back and redeem. What looked from a distance like leafy new undergrowth actually hid a dump. There were countless cigarette butts. The bread bag quickly filled with condoms and