brain and a rat for a heart. The sound was that of the animals chewing for their freedom. Some had already escaped and, fat with marrow, slugged their bodies up the center aisle. She did not scream. She met her audience head-on. Maybe I mentioned it before, but Celeste Carpenter was a pro.
My revenge on Gottschalk did not have the tawdry exuberance of my other efforts, but in its relative subtlety it was my favorite. His desk, from behind which he had unfairly butchered my A and beside which he had whipped me with his wand, had been cleared. Upon it sat a tombstone. Chipped into it was his name and the date. Gottschalk was not dumb. He knew right away it was over. There was a fucking tombstone in his fucking classroom. The clinging sod and clay proved it as the genuine article. After registering the sound of the door locking behind him, he squeezed himself into one of the student desks and speculated on what other horrors laid hidden in his school and what kinds of disgrace they would herald. When he heard the faint reverberations of a young man’s screams from the direction of the gymnasium, he began to cry. Against his sobbing gut the chair hurt and so he stretched out on the floor, right under his tombstone. Even that close, he probably didn’t recognize how much it smelled like the student he had tormented for months. He bawled until his body ached. Eventually he felt like a medical school cadaver, or even one of those pictures in his textbook, flayed open to show his undersized heart and oversized lungs and stringy intestines. He felt eviscerated, dissected, and alone. Finally he knew how it felt.
He didn’t have to wait long. I had already called the cops. It had been a risk, but Harnett had said it the first time he buried my homework in the backyard: Time is always against you. He was right and I wanted it no other way, because for me that was how it had always been. I hitched a ride from the highway, took a bus west—that was the direction the most recent Polaroids had suggested—and began to ask questions of the homeless people who hung out near bus stations. Over the next few days, I moved from town to town, reading local papers and, when the trail felt hot, following Harnett’s old advice of getting a trim from a local barber. There had been incidents, I learned, just a couple of towns over. I investigated those cemeteries in person. As I boarded another bus and crossed the Missouri River on the state’s western border, I could feel him like knives in my gut.
As I approached the highway underpass, I thought of my mother. I told her that I was sorry I had left Harnett, I was sorry her plans for me had failed, but at least she would be avenged. Up ahead, I saw a shabby lean-to lit by a paltry fire. My veins pained me with each heartbeat. My muscles convulsed in expectation. I had taken care of Woody, Celeste, and Gottschalk, but I was not done.
I stood at the edge of the fire. I felt as if I were standing at its center. A man used his fingers to scoop baked beans out of a can, sucked them clean, and then motioned his head at another can.
“There’s beans,” Boggs said. “Just don’t eat too many.”
26.
STALACTITES BIT DOWN FROM the overpass above us like teeth, salivating when semis thundered overhead. The clammy corners seemed to squirm toward the fire like slugs, craving the heat of the wan and ribboned flames. Boggs passed another finger across his lips. The tongue that licked at the gloppy residue was red and suppurating.
“I don’t mind sharing.” He shrugged. “You look hungry.”
He leaned and his half-grin tipped from shadow. Something was horribly wrong. His face, merely ruddy when I had met him back at the diner in West Virginia, had progressed through some calamitous change. Patches were eaten away as if by acid, revealing layers of abraded flesh that winked wetly in the changing light. His thin hair had receded unevenly in all directions, leaving isolated crests of orange silk that flapped with every breath of wind. His nostrils and lips were crusted over and pulled so tight at the surrounding skin that it looked as if he were inhaling his own face. Worst of all were his eyes. The left was still a