Forty years later, Ricky still remembered how small Jimmy Steadwin’s body was beside that dumpster. The kid had always been small but backed between the dumpsters away from the three of them, he looked like a newborn mouse cornered by hungry cats.
Henry reached for him first, called Ricky for help when the runt kicked at his hands, but eventually they got him. Pulled him feet first, dragged through a puddle thick with grease that stunk to high heaven, left him laying with a fat skid along his back and a torn badge dangling from his shirt. Before Jimmy could crawl away Henry gave him a couple kicks to the gut, one to the face. Blood wheezed out his nose, made Ricky think of Christmas against the green dumpster.
They stood over him in their Junior Eagle uniforms, shadows heavy in the summer sun. They’d sold birdhouses and dreamcatchers at the yearly Tomahawk Valley Trade-Up, fundraising uniforms and camping trips. The buzz from the event in the school’s gym echoed around the building and just remembering the smell of roasted almonds from inside still made Ricky’s mouth water.
Years before they had Jimmy cornered, Ash brought in a plastic baggy containing a hunk of rancid meat that had grown and housed a community of larvae. The next year, a porno mag and a pistol from a shoebox dad kept in his closet. Another year he brought what he claimed to be a shrunken head, but Ricky and Henry couldn’t decide whether it was legitimate, or an old apple someone had carved a face into. Ash had a knack for dealing in the interesting, always bringing around things the boys wanted to see, and that made him cool.
“Really think it’ll do anything to him?” Ricky asked.
“Only one way to find out,” Ash said, pulling the Mason jar from his backpack. The gold lid pierced in spots, a sharp ray of sunlight shining through, lighting Jimmy up as he lay there. “You’re gonna hafta hold him.”
“No,” Jimmy screamed as Henry and Ricky pinned their weigh on him, each holding an arm and kneeing a leg into the gravel. “Ricky, no!”
Ricky could still hear the kid scream his name like it was yesterday. As if Jimmy thought they were friends, like it would get them to stop. Hell, in the moment he knew it was wrong, but there was no taking it back, and he had learned to live with that.
Ash knelt and unscrewed the jar, dumping a thick slug into his palm. He’d found it crawling over a dead dog in an alley downtown, none of them had ever seen anything like it before. Its brown body was a mass of small limbs that swam in the air as it pulsed from one end to the other, making Ricky think it was stretching out, happily freed from the prison jar.
Ash pinched the slug and pushed it against Jimmy’s nose. The creature was soft and pliable as it forced its way in, but there was simply too much to its body, and Ricky could only watch it crawl in so far before the crunching sound of cartilage made him look away.
Jimmy made a short choking sound like he was hocking a loogie, then furiously attempted snorting it out. He stopped, made a gulping sound from his nasal cavity that reverberated so strongly that Ricky could feel it in the held arm. And that was that. Jimmy went back to breathing as normal as someone with a busted nose could, and Ricky, Henry, and Ash were left disappointed.
They never spoke to Jimmy again. Ricky expected fallout, but it never came, not one of them was punished. He guessed Jimmy was too afraid to say anything, too afraid everyone – parents included – would think of him as some sort of freak who got bullied into snorting a slug. Ricky never saw Jimmy at another Junior Eagle meeting or another Trade-Up.
Ricky wondered, sitting there reading Jimmy’s obituary all those years later, if the slug had finally crawled its way through him. He could picture it, sliding its way through whatever was left of the man he once bullied, wearing a hole in the casket, worming through the dirt. The hairs on his arm stood up, living in a world with a creature like that, living in a world where he would never escape.