The Tent: A Novella by Kealan Patrick Burke Page B

about making coffee for himself and his girlfriend, Karen, a girl who is ten years his junior, a revelation in the sack, and the third girl he has brought up here in the past ten months. With no one to answer to up here but his own ego, he permits himself a satisfied grin, and, as he sets up the camp stove, replays the memory of Karen’s nubile body, and the various creative ways in which she let him use it.
    When he realizes there is a kid standing less than two feet away from him, he starts, almost burns himself on the camp stove and curses, then, as he takes in the face of his visitor , immediately wishes he hadn’t.
    The kid looks like something from a documentary about the Serbian war. His clothes are caked in mud and soaking wet, as if he spent the night in the woods, in the rain. He is shivering violently, his teeth making audible clicking sounds. In the oval of his dirty face, his eyes are wide, the pupils amid the blue shrunken down to pinpoints. The kid has his arms down by his sides, the index fingers of both hands tapping against his palms, as if he thinks he’s playing a videogame.
    “Hey,” Greg sa ys, and rises. “You okay, kid?”
    It’s a ridiculous question, because clearly the kid isn’t, but he’s not sure what else to say. Greg swallows, tries to think, something that’s never easy for him in the pre-coffee stages of his mornings, and especially with the hangover that’s pounding against the walls of his skull like a lunatic inmate. But something is wrong here. The kid before him looks the very definition of haunted, so he knows he has to do something, become the conscientious, helpful adult, even though he’d rather just crawl back inside the tent and curl up beside the lovely Karen Wilkes.
    “What’s your name?” he asks, because that seems a s good a place to start as any.
    The kid just stands there, lips dry and cracked and se aled like a scar, watching him.
    “Did something happen?” Another dumb question, but Greg is at a loss. So he raises a finger, as if he has lost his voice too, or as if he thinks the child might respond better to non-verbalized communication, indicating that the kid should wait, and he ducks back inside the tent. It reeks of sex, stale perfume, and alcohol. Karen, little more than a tangle of blonde hair on her inflatable pillow, moans and rolls over, squints up at him, her mascara smudged around her eyes, making her look significantly less attractive than he found her last night. Her sleeping bag is wrapped tightly around her, but there’s no missing the half-moons of her large, surgically enhanced breasts over the material. It’s the first time he’s been with someone who has fake breasts, and he does not consider himself a fan. Wild horses could not drag that admission out of him, however, for Greg is a man who is thankful for the women his charm and money and position of authority affords him, particularly in light of his ugly, and ongoing, marital dissolution.
    “What’s going on?” she mumbl es, throwing a hand with French-manicured fingernails over her eyes.
    “I need a blanket,” Greg tell s her. “Some kid’s in trouble.”
    “Trouble?”
    “Yeah. Go back to sleep. I’ll take care of it.”
    “And then me?” She smiles sleepily, another hint of the neediness she has been displaying on and off since they violated the teacher-student rule and became an item.
    “Yeah, and you,” he promises, and y anks the spare blanket off her.
    “Boo. So co ld,” she says, and rolls over.
    Ever the humanitarian , Greg thinks, and exits the tent.
    The kid is right where he left him, still standing there shivering and looking shell-shocked. Greg can’t help wondering about the nature of his ordeal. Was he in a car crash? Get lost in the woods? See something terrible? Or is he just some local yokel’s kid, wandered down out of the mountains to bug the regular folk for money or food. The theme song to Deliverance twangs through his head and he has to