innocent.
I walked on. I passed the jazz drummer; I passed Shirley Sayles, the golfer, sleeping with a tanned arm thrown over her eyes. As I continued on, I noticed that many of the beds had photographs taped to the headboards. One woman had a picture of a puppy sleeping on a windowsill. Another had a photograph of a little boy with a balloon tied to his wrist by a ribbon. Some of the women had belongings or charms beside their beds, on shelves built into the walls: a stuffed giraffe, a library book, a snow globe with a miniature tropical resort inside.
Then I saw her. Rose Deach was sleeping on a bottom bunk near the window. I could tell it was her by her hair, white against the dark pillow.
I was careful to be quiet as I made my way over. There were no pictures taped to her headboard. No toys or trinkets or books on her shelf. There was just Rose, lying alone in the narrow bed.
I bent down over her, examining her face, which was raked across with deep wrinkles. Her expression was stern. Her lips were pressed tightly together and her brow was creased, like she was thinking hard about something. She had black scabs growing on her scalp, visible through her thinning hair. Her breath came in slow rasps.
“Rose,” I whispered, excited now. “Rose.” But her eyes stayed closed.
I reached down and opened her hand. Then I placed the machete in her palm and closed her fingers around the handle.
Her eyes fluttered opened. I felt my throat seize. Even through the darkness I could see how yellow her eyes were.
“Rose,” I said.
I thought she might start, or even scream, but she just stared at me, blinking away sleep.
She turned her head and glanced at the machete, her thin fingers wrapped around its handle, and then she looked back at me. Slowly, she pushed herself up to a sitting position.
I pointed to my chest. “What do you see?” I whispered. “Here.”
She was looking straight at me, but she said nothing.
“Please,” I said. I opened my shirt so she could see the space over my heart.
“What do you see?”
Rose just stared.
“I’m begging you, Rose. Tell me.” I felt tears forming in my eyes. My voice was cracking. I needed to know.
“Jacob,” came a woman’s voice. Laura’s voice. I spun around, but the hall was dark and silent.
“Jacob. Where are you?”
She sounded close and far away at the same time, like someone shouting through the wind.
“Jacob?”
I realized her voice was coming from the walkie-talkie still clipped to my belt. The red light on the top had come on.
“Jake, I can’t find you.”
Rose Deach was looking at me, dead-on. I took her hand and placed it over my bare chest. Her palm was cool and rough and sent a chill through my ribs, but I held it against my skin. I stared into her eyes, crying now.
“Jacob, where are you?” said Laura.
I held Rose Deach’s hand against my chest. “Here,” I said, pressing her palm hard over my heart. “Here.”
IN THE SUMMER, I SIT UP IN MY HUNTING STAND AND WATCH THE children get thin. There’s a camp for obese youth just down the road from my house—a fat farm—and from the stand, perched high up in a basswood tree, I have a clear view of the whole facility. I can see the different buildings scattered around the grounds: the cafeteria, the gymnasium, the rows of cabins. I can see the playing fields. I can even see the campers themselves, lumbering about, half-nude and shameful.
The place is called a camp, but to watch the campers is to know that it’s a farm. There are all kinds of camp activities: the children go swimming, barging around in a small pond; they play soccer and tennis, even basketball. But they do everything dressed in uniforms, shorts and T-shirts made of a black, rubbery material. The uniforms are designed to absorb the sunlight, to suck it right up and make the kids run with sweat. They have strips of mesh around the belly and down the thighs to let things funnel, and with my rifleman’s binoculars, complete with adjustable crosshairs, I can see the sweat draining down the children’s stomachs and thick legs, leaving shiny, slug-like trails across the playing courts.
All summer I watch the children run and jump and heave under that fat, watch them struggle to shake it off. Occasionally, they manage it, too. They peel off their uniforms and emerge pale and slender, looking slightly bewildered, blinking into the bright August sunshine. But more often than not they simply achieve weird, uneven forms of fat. One girl last summer lost only the rings of lard around her neck, and another, just the turkey flaps beneath her arms. I once saw a boy who was bony from the waist up, but mammoth around the ass and legs, like his guts had been stuffed down to make room for something that had never arrived. Always, though, before I’m ready for it, winter charges in from the east, hammering everything flat with cold, and the children scatter, having emptied all they could of themselves into the ground.
Now and then one gets loose. Sometimes a boy, but usually a girl. I’ll be outside with my metal detector, sweeping it through the woods by the road, and she’ll barrel through in a flurry of snapping twigs. Once, a black boy, about eleven years old, got into my house. When I came home from work I found him standing in my kitchen, cooking popcorn in a pan. He was tremendous, probably twice my weight even though I stood at least a foot taller. He could have carried the stove out on one shoulder.
He didn’t see me at first. My cat was crouched beside the refrigerator, trembling. The boy had flung off the top of his uniform and his titanic, black breasts were slick with sweat. A veil of cobwebs clung to his hair. I was amazed and terrified by him, by his need; I could have watched him for hours. He mumbled frantically at the kernels to pop. He talked right into that furious, sizzling pan.
“Come on and pop, motherfuckers!” he said to the kernels, rattling them over the flame. Sparks of butter shot from the pan. “Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop!”
But they wouldn’t; he’d doused them with too much salt. At the camp, the children weren’t allowed to have salty foods because salt made them retain water. So this boy had poured salt all along the floor of the pan, smothering the kernels in it, cooking salt into them until they looked like tiny white baby-teeth burning on the stove.
“Pop!” he yelled again. “Pop up!”
Then he saw me.
I suddenly realized I was caked in salt—dried sweat from being out all day in the July heat.
He stared at me, his mouth hanging open.
“Easy there,” I said.
He put down the pan and raised his hands toward me.
“Let’s just calm it down, okay? Calm.
He trudged around from beside the stove. My cat hissed hysterically. I backed into the wall, knocking off a pilot’s medal I’d dug up the day before.
He kept coming, those horrible breasts of his swinging from side to side.
“Wait a second!” I said, huddled in the corner. “Stop!” But then he moved past me, out the door, and was gone.
Certain nights, even now, I have nightmares about him, nightmares that instead of leaving the house, he descends on me, clamping down with his hands and mouth. Before I can stop him, he’s licking the salt off my body with his giant, monstrous tongue, licking it off my face and my chest; he’s sucking it off my arms, off my fingers; and then he’s biting at me, eating me; he’s tearing strips of flesh from my back with his teeth as I scream and struggle to escape, he’s ripping chunks out of my thighs. He eats and eats and eats, in a wild effort to get back the
