Matt Hlinak - DoG

When they’d arrived, country music had blared out of two large speakers set up on either side of the tent. Now only static came out. Worner tried to fix it, but he proved to be as skilled a repairman as he was a paramedic. Someone brought out another radio, but it too got only static. McGillicuddy surmised a power outage in Fairbanks which shut down all of the radio stations. The celebration continued without the benefit of music, and no one seemed to mind.

Culann spent the evening under the beer tent, casting periodic glances towards Gus’s daughter. Frank spent his night keeping Culann away from her and Gus away from Culann. As Culann drank, he grew bolder. Gus stood firmly at his daughter’s side, never once taking his eyes off of the greenhorn.

“Come on,” Frank said with exasperation. “Let’s take a walk.”

Culann had gotten drunk. He stumbled as they passed out of the picnic grounds and on to a trail into the woods, but Frank caught him. Frank swallowed his beer in one draught and tossed his cup aside.

“Just a peck on the top of the head, huh?” Frank said.

“What?”

“What really happened with Kat DeLuca?”

“It happened just like I said it did,” he replied before pausing to take a drink. “I just left out part of the story.”

“Well, you better tell me the whole story before Gus stabs you.”

“Okay. After I left DeLuca’s, Vic DeLuca called the police. They came by and asked me some questions, but at this point I hadn’t really done anything wrong. There’s no law against kissing a girl on top of the head. They just told me to stay away from Kat and Vic, which was fine with me, and they left me alone.

“So legally speaking, I had nothing to worry about. But after calling the police, Vic called my principal. What I had done was not illegal, but it was definitely unprofessional. The school has to be very careful about these kinds of things. So within about two hours of leaving DeLuca’s, I received a call from the principal telling me I was suspended pending an investigation. I wasn’t too concerned since I really hadn’t done anything, and they were still paying me while I was suspended.

“So basically it was just an extension of spring break. I obviously couldn’t go to DeLuca’s and thought it best to lay low while this thing blew over, so I stayed home and drank alone. I know there are more constructive things to do with my time, but I figured that under the circumstances, getting drunk by myself would at least keep me out of trouble. So that’s what I did for the next three days. Everything would have been fine, except…”

“Except what?”

“Kat DeLuca stopped by. She said she felt bad about what had happened. She said she told the principal that I hadn’t done anything wrong, but her dad was still pressuring the district to fire me.”

“You let her into her house?”

“Yes. In hindsight it was pretty stupid, but it was raining, and it seemed silly to stand out in the rain for appearance’s sake when there was no one watching. Plus I was drunk.”

“So what happened?”

“She kissed me.”

“You sure you didn’t kiss her?”

“Honestly, I didn’t. She initiated. But I didn’t stop her and I…”

“You what?”

“I had sex with her.”

Before he’d said this, Culann hadn’t realized how guilty he’d felt for hiding the truth from Frank. Even though it was alcohol that loosened his tongue, a surge of relief flooded through Culann. He was foolish to have thought he could achieve absolution without confession.

“Jesus, Culann. You can go to jail for that, you know.”

“It was a moment of weakness. I told her we couldn’t ever do that again, and we didn’t.”

“Did she tell on you?”

“No, she didn’t. But her dad had hired a private investigator to watch me. He got video footage of her coming into my house and then leaving half-an-hour later. Kat found out about it and called me. I left town before the police came back, which was only a matter of time.”

“So all of this ‘I’m-not-a-pervert-stuff’ has been bullshit.”

“You can think what you want, Frank, but it was an isolated incident.”

“Oh, yeah? Then how come I have to just about tackle you to keep you away from Gus’s daughter?”

“I’m not going to do anything to her. Is there something wrong with striking up a conversation with the only person here who’s not a smelly old fisherman?”

“You are so full of shit, Culann. I thought this whole thing was supposed to be some sort of therapy for you. You were talking about doing ‘something big’ so you could put all this behind you. But the minute we get to shore, you’re drunk off your ass and chasing after the only underage girl within a hundred miles. You haven’t changed at all.

This has all been bullshit.”

Culann didn’t respond. Frank was right. Culann had proved something to himself by surviving the voyage and wresting the orb away from the Captain. He’d proved that he was tougher than he’d thought and that he was not just bright, but clever. But so what?

Toughness and cleverness had not been his problems. It was all meaningless if his trials didn’t lead him to a different sort of life. The two walked silently in the murkily-sunlit night. Frank stopped.

“Where are the mosquitoes?” Frank asked.

“What?”

“The mosquitoes. This time of year we should be walking through a shit-ton of mosquitoes. I haven’t gotten bit once.”

It was true. Culann didn’t have a bite on him. The day before they embarked, Culann had learned to be careful talking outside to prevent bugs from flying into his mouth. Now there were none.

“Holy shit,” Frank said. “Look down.”

Culann couldn’t tell at first, because they blended in with the brown dirt road, but there were thousands, maybe millions, of dead mosquitoes lying in the road. The cousins crouched down. Every square inch of the road was covered with miniscule corpses.

“Did they spray for bugs?” Culann asked.

“Up here it doesn’t make any sense to. If you sprayed enough to put a dent in the mosquito population, we’d all be dead.”

“Weird,” Culann said before draining the last of his cup. “I’m empty. Let’s go back.”

“Okay, but stay away from Gus’s daughter. He keeps a knife in his boot, you know. A big one.”

Frank led the way back to the party. McGillicuddy was shooting off bottle rockets. As they approached the tent, a bird dropped from the sky and landed at their feet.

“Did that crazy son of a bitch hit a bird?” Frank asked.

Culann bent down and examined the bird, a gray- and white-striped sparrow. Its feathers weren’t singed and it showed no signs of injury, but it was surely dead.

“I don’t think so,” Culann said. “I guess its time was just up.”

They walked farther and found another dead bird on the walkway. On the path ahead, two dogs were fighting over something, something that shed feathers each time they shook their heads. Beyond them, in the clearing ahead, dozens of dogs ran around with birds in their mouths, shaking them savagely and tossing the carcasses around. By now the other revelers had caught sight of what was happening. They lined the edge of the tent and stared out at the field littered with dead birds.

Theories were of course posited.

“Maybe they got poisoned somehow,” McGillicuddy wondered.

“It’s all those oil wells up here,” his wife replied. “Alaska is being raped by those greedy bastards. Who knows what they’re dumping into the atmosphere? The birds could only take so much. This is probably just the tip of iceberg.”

“It’s not pollution,” Alistair replied, his eyes, unblinking, focused off in the distance. “At least not in the physical sense. This is caused by spiritual pollution. This is the hand of God. He is visiting plague and pestilence upon us to punish us for our wicked ways. If His vengeance is reaching all the way up here, the rest of the world must already be gone.”