Shallow Graves

cubes of crystal candy into his hand. He held his palm out to Sam, who looked at the tiny bits cautiously. Ned laughed at his wariness and put a candy in his own mouth. “Come on, don’t be a wuss.”
    “I don’t really—”
    Ned frowned. “You’re not a pussy, are you?”
    Sam suddenly grabbed most of the candies and slipped them into his mouth, chewing them down.
    “No!” Ned shouted in horror. “You stupid shit! You weren’t supposed to eat ’em all! They’re ten dollars each!”
    “I didn’t mean . . .” Sam backed away in fear. His mouth was filled with a powerful, numbing sweetness. “I didn’t know. You didn’t tell me . . .” He suddenly felt warm and giddy and dizzy. In his mouth was a funnyaftertaste, reminded him of the chewable vitamins he took in the morning.
    Ned stepped close to him, reaching for Sam’s collar; the young boy cowered away, feeling the heat and the dizziness flow over his body.
    “Sam!” It was his mother’s voice and from not very far away.
    Then he was being lifted up. Ned had him by the shirt. “You dumb little prick! You tell anybody about this, I’ll find you. I’ll come get you and I’ll beat the living shit out of you, you got that?”
    Sam thought he should be afraid but he felt so good. He laughed.
    “You hear me?”
    Laughing again.
    He felt himself falling into the leaves, which seemed suddenly like the ground in the Candyland game he played with his babysitter until he outgrew it. Cotton candy grass, marshmallow rocks. Candyland. Hey, just like the candy he’d eaten, he thought. That thought made him laugh too. He felt like laughing forever, he felt so good.
    Strange thumping noises. He looked up. Ned was running, running fast, deep into the forest. Sam thought he saw the boy turn into a tree. He stared at the spot for a long time.
    He tried to stand.
    Laughing.
    Fireworks, black sparklers, cascades, and Roman candles, pouring their fire all over him. A huge roaring hum in his ears.
    Warmth and humming music.
    “Sam?” His mother’s voice was both magnified a thousand times and very distant, like she was trapped in an airlock on the Starship Enterprise.
    Then the fun started to leave. He felt he was going to sleep, only it was a funny kind of sleep, like the way he felt when he’d had his tonsils out and woke up in terrible pain and so thirsty he thought he’d die. He’d been lonely when he awoke in the hospital and he cried for what seemed like forever, until he saw his mother, asleep, across the room.
    That’s who he wanted now. “Mommy,” he called.
    Sam managed to struggle to his feet. He walked forward a few steps. “Mommy, help me!”
    A man’s voice called, “Sam!” Mr. Pellam’s. And that reminded him of the football. He turned back into the black explosions, the heat, the cracking fireworks, the hum, and stumbled into the clearing, where he bent down to pick up the football. He was certain he had it but as he reached forward his hand came up with nothing more than leaves. He fell to the ground.
    Then he saw nothing more; a huge wave of black filled his vision. But he kept patting the ground around him for the football. He had to find it.
    He’d won it for Mr. Pellam.

Chapter 14
    HER FACE SCARED him.
    It wasn’t just that she’d been crying, which changed the density and texture of her skin and gave her the contours of a battered wife; it was more the fluttering of the irises of her eyes, unable to alight.
    What Pellam saw in Meg Torrens’s face was panic.
    He just stood there, beside her, not knowing what to say or whether he should touch her in a brotherly way. Thinking he should be taking charge but with no idea of what needed to be done.
    Meg sat with her legs spread outward, boot tips pointed at an oblique angle, her body forward, elbows resting on her thighs, her hands washing each other absently in invisible water. Occasionally she’d glance up and Pellam would smile in a way that screenwriters would describe as sympathetically concerned.
    They’d waited for twenty minutes.
    Keith arrived and as soon as he did, Pellam felt himself relax; he realized he’d been standing hunched forward, jaw tight. He watched the couple embrace. Keith nodded to him.
    “What the hell happened?” husband asked wife.
    Meg brushed aside her hair, which had comeundone from the ponytail and was strewn across her face.
    “We found him,” she said and started sobbing again.
    Pellam said, “Sam passed out and we couldn’t