Chris Adrian - The Great Night

The boys took a collective step away when they saw the acorn. “They don’t let nothing go,” said a boy with long blond hair. “How’d he get that ?”

“Time for questions later,” said Mike. He plucked the acorn from Henry’s hand and put it in his pocket, then took off his shirt before he picked Henry up and dropped him into the hot tub. The water was cold and very dirty, covered with leaves and a thick layer of brown scum. It stank like moss and mildew. When Henry stood up, Mike grabbed him with his big hairy hands. “Welcome to the real world!” he said, while Henry gasped at the cold. Ryan was holding up a hefty bar of white soap, which Mike seemed to pray over a moment before Ryan threw it in the water. Then Mike held Henry still while the boys, now all shirtless as well, leaned over and started to soap him up. “Don’t miss an inch, boys!” Mike said, and they didn’t. They stuck soapy fingers in his ears to wash there, and turned him on his head to wash his bottom, and they paid special attention to the spaces between his toes. They washed him four times before Mike pronounced him sufficiently clean.

Mike dipped a finger in the water and tasted it. “Oh, that’s spicy!” he said. “How long were you under that hill, anyway?” Henry only stared at him. The bath had made him feel very strange, nervous and sleepy and hungry and nauseated, and the fact of his name weighed on him very heavily all of a sudden.

“My name is Henry,” he said, as if saying it might lighten the load of it, and he started to cry.

“Michael is my name,” said Mike, smiling but making no move to comfort him.

“Ryan,” said Ryan.

“Peaches,” said the boy with the long blond hair, and then the others said their names, striking their chests and smiling warmly, though still no one moved to touch him where he was shivering amid the piles of brown foam heaped up on the surface of the water. “Greg,” “Jeff,” “Miles,” “Jim,” “Mateo,” “Alan,” “Eric,” “Niall,” “Mark.”

“Peaches?” Henry said, because somehow that funny name was the only thing that seemed curious or out of place just then. Peaches scowled. “Can we drink the water now?” he asked, pulling out a ladle from his pants.

“Carefully, Bubba,” Mike said. “He’s made a potent brew.”

“Wait!” said Ryan. “I have an idea.” He leaned over to Mike and whispered something to him that made him throw back his head and laugh. When Mike shared the idea with the rest of them, and they passed the acorn around from hand to hand, everyone but Peaches voted to do it.

“But I want a drink,” Peaches said. “I want to get drunk. I want to fly!”

“Then be a bird,” Mike said, flipping the acorn off his thumb and catching it in his mouth. He spat it into his palm. “But you can still have the dregs.” Some of the boys ran off to fetch buckets, while the others ran to the middle of the garden, where they fell on their knees and began to turn up the earth with their hands. Ryan cupped some water in his two hands, and Mike dropped the acorn into the water Ryan held, and then Ryan ran madly to the hole in the ground, launching himself the last few feet to reach it before the water ran out from between his fingers. He dropped the acorn in the hole, and they all cheered. The boys with the buckets started dipping water out of the tub and taking it to the hole, which shortly was covered over. Mike kicked off his shoes and stamped down on it.

Still naked and shivering, Henry watched as they took the water, by bucket and glass, from the tub to the middle of the garden, which was getting to be more and more of a muddy mess. Only when the water had fallen below Henry’s ankles did Mike seem to remember him. He lifted Henry out and wrapped him in a thick, dirty towel that smelled worse than the water had and gave him a long hug. “It’s worse than you think, Bubba,” he said, wiping at Henry’s tears with the edge of the towel. Peaches slipped past them to get into the tub and started to lap and suck at the shallow remnant of water that was left. All the other boys were wrestling in the mud and laughing raucously.

“Everyone falls asleep after their bath,” Mike said. “Why are you still awake? Is there something different about you, Bubba? Is that why they gave you a souvenir, while the rest of us only ever got dirty feet and a handful of dust?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Henry said, but the words brought an image to his head, the black puppy trotting up to him with the acorn held carefully between his oversize, unpuppyish teeth.

“We’re going to have a party!” Mike said. “We always do, whenever my elbow itches in a special way and a new boy comes out from under the hill. Pity he can never attend, what with the sleepiness and all. But we lay him down, and dance around him, and wish him well, and we don’t talk about the bad news. The abundance of bad news! The bushels and bushels of bad news! That can wait till tomorrow. Are you feeling sleepy, Bubba?”

“No,” Henry said, but really his lids felt very heavy. He didn’t want to close them — he was sure he was going to miss something terribly important if he did — but he couldn’t help it. Just before he did close his eyes he thought he saw Peaches float feet-first out of the hot tub. “Boss!” he said. “Look at me!” And Mike replied, “Flying like that is vulgar !” Henry fell forward into Mike’s arms. Turning his head as he fell, he was sure he saw muddy animals sporting where the boys had been before, dogs and cats and raccoons and a beaver and possibly an alligator. Then his face was pressed against Mike’s hairy chest, and Mike’s arms had closed around him, and all Henry could think about was how nice it was to get a hug.

“It’s all right, Bubba,” Mike said. “Go to sleep now. You’re home.”

“I have served my Lord one thousand years tonight,” the dog said, “and he has made me a gift of you. Come away with me.” It sounded like both a question and a command; Henry found himself sitting up in bed without quite having wanted to. Suddenly he knew he wasn’t dreaming, and he wasn’t scared, though he thought that he should be. He looked over at his parents, sound asleep on the other bed in their hotel room. They’ d come up from Carmel for a visit in the city.

“Never mind them,” said the dog. “Already I love you more than they love you, and I will only love you more and more as the hours and days and weeks and months and years and decades and centuries pass and pass until I stop them.” He slapped his paw on the ground but smiled very gently. “Come away, my new friend. Come away.”

“I’ ll get in trouble,” Henry said. His parents were both snoring soundly.

“Come away with me, my puppy,” the dog said. “What’s here for you but trouble and grief? I’ll make you king of those. Come on. Take my collar. Come away.”

Henry looked at his parents again. “Just for a little while,” he said.

“Forever,” the dog said, but Henry went with him anyway.

“You are a changeling,” Mike said to Henry. “They stole you from your parents, and kept you as a toy, and thrust you out when they tired of you. You’re supposed to forget about it. That’s what passes for mercy with them; they put you back into a world where you don’t belong anymore, because of what they did to you, because of what they showed you, and then they make it so you can’t remember why you don’t belong. Ha!”

They were standing in the garden, on either side of the tiny silver sapling that had sprung up where the acorn had been planted the night before. Henry had woken in a giant bed full of muddy boys, some curled like dogs, others stretched out in any direction with their head or feet resting on or against Mike’s gigantic bulk. Henry had been the first to wake, but he stayed where he was, listening to Mike’s rumbling snores, until the boys began to stir, all at once, as if they were sharing the same troubling dream. Together they began to wake, one of them opening an eye on one side of the bed and then another opening one on the other side of the bed, until, eyes wide open, they all sat up at once and stared at Henry.