“You should have told me,” he said.
Bob took a step back and squared up his shoulders and his feet, leaning forward a little as into a wind.
“You knew and you didn’t tell me and you didn’t do anything and as far as I’m concerned, you killed her and cut her up and buried her along with Darryl, you coward.” Adam knew he was crossing a line, and he didn’t care. Brian leaned forward and jutted his chin out.
Avram’s hands were clawed with cold and caked with mud and still echoing the feeling of frozen skin and frozen dirt, and balled up into fists, they felt like stones.
He didn’t hit Barry. Instead, he retreated to his niche and retrieved the triangular piece of flint that he’d been cherting into an arrowhead for school and a hammer stone and set to work on it in the light of a flashlight.
He sharpened a knife for Davey, there in his room in the cave, as the boys ran feral in the woods, as the mountain made its slow and ponderous protests.
He sharpened a knife, a hunting knife with a rusty blade and a cracked handle that he’d found on one of the woodland trails, beside a hunter’s snare, not lost but pitched away in disgust one winter and not discovered until the following spring.
But the nicked blade took an edge as he whetted it with the round stone, and the handle regained its grippiness as he wound a cord tight around it, making tiny, precise knots with each turn, until the handle no longer pinched his hand, until the blade caught the available light from the cave mouth and glinted dully.
The boys brought him roots and fruits they’d gathered, sweets and bread they’d stolen, small animals they’d caught. Ed-Fred-George were an unbeatable team when it came to catching and killing an animal, though they were only small, barely out of the second grade. They were fast, and they could coordinate their actions without speaking, so that the bunny or the squirrel could never duck or feint in any direction without encountering the thick, neck-wringing outstretched hands of the pudgy boys. Once, they brought him a cat. It went in the night’s stew.