The Poison Eaters and Other Stories
Page 7

He knocked on the door of the trailer around noon. Today, he wore a red double-breasted suit with a black shirt and tie. He carried a gnarled cane in a glossy brown, like polished walnut.
Seeing her looking at it, he smiled. “Bull penis. Not too many of these."
"You dress like a pimp,” Nikki said before she thought better of it.
His smile just broadened.
” So are you a devil or the devil?” Nikki held the screen door open for him.
"I'm a devil to some.” He winked as he walked past her. “But I'm the devil to you."
She shuddered. Suddenly, the idea of him being supernatural seemed entirely too real. “My brother's in the back waiting for us."
Nikki had set up on the picnic table in the common area of the trailer park. She walked onto the hot concrete and the devil followed her. Doug looked up from where he carefully counted out portions of sour gummy frogs onto paper plates. He looked like a giant, holding each tiny candy between two thick fingers.
Nikki brushed an earwig and some sour-cherry splatter off a bench and sat down. “Doug's going to explain the rules."
The devil sat down across from her and leaned his cane against the table. “Good. I'm starving."
Doug stood up, wiping sweaty palms on his jeans. “This is what we're going to do. We have a bag of one hundred and sixty-six sour gummy frogs. That's all we could get. I divided them into sixteen plates of ten and two plates of three, so you each have a maximum of eighty-three frogs. If you both eat the same number of frogs, whoever finishes their frogs first wins. If you have a . . . er? . . . reversal of fortune, then you lose, period."
"He means if you puke,” Nikki said.
Doug gave her a stern look but didn't say anything.
"We need not be limited by your supply,” said the devil. A huge tarnished silver platter appeared on the table. It scuttled over to Nikki on chicken feet and she saw that it was heaped with sugar-studded frogs.
The candy on the paper plates looked dull in comparison with what glimmered on the table. Nikki picked up an orange-and-black-colored candy poison-dart frog and put it regretfully down. It just seemed dumb to let the devil supply food. “You have to use ours."
The devil shrugged. With a wave of his hand, the dish of frogs disappeared, leaving nothing behind but a burnt-sugar smell. “Very well."
Doug put a plastic pitcher of water and two glasses between them. “Okay,” he said, lifting up a stopwatch. “Go!"
Nikki started eating. The salty sweet flavor flooded her mouth as she crammed in candy.
Across the table, the devil lifted up his first paper plate, rolling it up and using the tube to pour frogs into a mouth that seemed to expand. His jaw unhinged like a snake. He picked up a second plate.
Nikki swallowed frog after frog, sugar scraping her throat, racing to catch up.
Doug slid a new pile in front of Nikki and she started eating. She was in the zone. One frog, then another, then a sip of water. The cloying sweetness scraped her throat raw, but she kept eating.
The devil poured a third plate of candy down his throat, then a fourth. At the seventh plate, the devil paused with a groan. He untucked his shirt and undid the button on his dress pants to pat his engorged belly. He looked full.
Nikki stuffed candy in her mouth, suddenly filled with hope.
The devil chuckled and unsheathed a knife from the top of his cane.
"What are you doing?” Doug shouted.
"Just making room,” the devil said. Pressing the blade to his belly, he slit a line in his stomach. Dozens upon dozens of gooey half-chewed frogs tumbled into the dirt.
Nikki stared at him, paralyzed with dread. Her fingers still held a frog, but she didn't bring it to her lips. She had no hope of winning.
Doug looked away from the mess of partially digested candy. “That's cheating!"
The devil tipped up the seventh plate into his widening mouth and swallowed ten frogs at once. “Nothing in the rules against it."
Nikki wondered what it would be like have no soul. Would she barely miss it? Could she still dream? Without one, would she have no more guilt or fear or fun? Maybe without a soul she wouldn't even care that Boo was dead.
The devil cheated. If she wanted to win, she had to cheat, too.
On her sixth plate, Nikki started sweating, but she knew she could finish. She just couldn't finish before he did.
She had to beat him in quantity. She had to eat more sour gummy frogs than he did.
"I feel sick,” Nikki said.
” Don't you know.” Doug shook his head vigorously. “Fight it."
Nikki bent over, holding her stomach. While hidden by the table, she picked up one of the slimy, chewed up frogs that had been in the devil's stomach and popped it in her mouth. The frog tasted like sweetness and dirt and something rotten.
The nausea was real this time. She choked and forced herself to swallow around the sour taste of her own gorge.
Sitting up, she saw that the devil had finished all his frogs. She still had two more plates to go.
"I win,” the devil said. “No need to keep eating."
Doug sunk fingers into his hair and tugged. “He's right."
"No way.” Nikki gulped down another mouthful of candy. “I'm finishing my plates."
She ate and ate, ignoring how the rubbery frogs stuck in her throat. She kept eating. Swallowed the last sour-gummy frog, she stood up. “Are you finished?"
"I've been finished for ages,” said the devil.
” Then I win."
The devil yawned. “Impossible."
"I ate one more frog than you did,” she said. “So I win."
He pointed his cane at Doug. “If you cheated and gave her another frog, we'll be doing this contest over and you'll be joining us."
Doug shook his head. “It took me an hour to count out those frogs. They were exactly even."
"I ate one of the frogs from your gut,” Nikki said. “I picked it up off the ground and I ate it."
"That's disgusting!” Doug said.
"Five-second rule,” Nikki said. “If it's in the devil for less than five seconds, it's still good."
” That's cheating,” said the devil. He sounded half-admiring and half-appalled, reminding her of her boss's son at The Sweet Tooth.
She shook her head. “Nothing in the rules against it."
The devil scowled for a moment, then bowed shallowly. “Well done, Nicole. Count on seeing me again soon.” With those words, he ambled toward the bus station. He paused in front of Trevor's trailer, pulled out a handful of envelopes from the mailbox, and kept going.
Nikki's mother's car pulled into the lot, Boo's head visible in the passenger-side window. His tongue lolled despite the absurd cone-shaped collar around his neck.
Nikki hopped up on top of the picnic table and shrieked with joy, leaping around, the sugar and adrenaline and relief making her giddy.
She stopped jumping. “You know what?"
Doug looked up at her. “What?"
"I think my summer is starting not to suck so much."
He sat down on a bench so hard that she heard the wood strain. The look he gave her was pure disbelief.
"So,” Nikki asked, “you want to get some lunch?"
The Boy Who Cried Wolf
There's a certain kind of boy who likes to read only about things that have really happened. Like Alex. He read about the Titanic and memorized how many people died (1,523) and the name of the boat that picked up the survivors (RMS Carpathia). He read about ghosts and werewolves, too, sometimes, but only when he was certain he was being presented with facts. (The vulnerability to silver bullets, for example, was made up by modern fiction writers—probably any bullet would do.)
In one of the books Alex took out of the library, there was a story about a white flower, the scent of which turned people into wolves. He worried about the flower. It seemed to have no proper name for him to memorize.
In the summers, Alex's parents took he and his younger sister, Anna, sailing. For two weeks, they slept on scratchy cushions in a tiny room in the prow of the boat. Alex mostly sat on deck, his skin tightening with sunburn even though it was slathered with coconut-smelling lotion and his hair stiffening with salt as he read. Sometimes the glow of the sun on the paper was almost blinding.
Anna swung around one of the fasts. She'd been running around the deck all day in a red bathing suit and a floppy hat, dancing up to him and trying to get him to play games with her. Meanwhile, Dad fished off the back and Mom steered lazily. There was barely any wind and the swells were small. Alex was bored but comfortable.
"Want a plum?” Mom called, reaching into a cooler.
"Nah,” Dad said. “Alex just wants to sit there with his nose in a book. All this beautiful nature around and he doesn't want to experience any of it."
Alex ducked under the mast and took the fruit, frowning at his dad. He bit into it as he resettled into the cockpit. The plum was mealy and less sweet than he thought it would be. The juice ran over his hand.
The book on Alex's lap was about sharks. He imagined them, darting beneath the boat, sleek and hungry. Mako sharks were the fastest—but pelagic, meaning they liked deep water. They seldom surfaced. According to what he had read, the great white shark could swim anywhere. In any kind of water. He kept his eyes on the water, looking for thin, angular fins.
Sharks would eat anything. He considered dropping his plum over the side. He bet that so long as it was moving, a shark would eat it. It was the movement that enticed them.
If one did come, then Alex would tell them what to do. Alex would be a hero. Even his dad would think so.
” Mom,” Anna said. “When can we swim?"
"When we anchor,” Mom said.
"When will we anchor?” Anna asked, the whine in her voice more pronounced.
"Depends on the wind,” Dad said. “But it won't be more than a hour."
"You said that an hour ago,” said Alex, but he didn't mind. He liked reading about sharks with all that deep water underneath him.