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By Root 1186 0

each one telling him to do a different thing now and to hurry up, and there was so much noise and so many hot things and loud people that it was hard to focus and he made mistakes, and pretty soon he would make too many of those mistakes. Also, he was too honest. At McDonald’s, when one of the managers, Mitchell, a skinny African American man who wore big square glasses, was reprimanding Otis for causing a big grease spill and asked him, in a nice voice, “Do you think you can give me one hundred percent effort from now on?” Otis, instead of saying yes right away, as he later realized he was expected to do, thought about it. He thought about the job and how boring and demeaning it was, especially compared to what he’d be doing when he was a famous scientist. “No,” he told Mitchell. “I can give you sixty percent.”

Mitchell shook his head and sighed, but then to Otis’s surprise, Mitchell began to giggle, helplessly, and Otis laughed, too. When he left Mitchell’s office he assumed everything was okay, but as soon as he came into work the next day he was fired by an unsmiling Mitchell.

Wilson was staring out the window at the front yard, the way Parson Brown did when she wanted to go out but wasn’t yet making a fuss about it.

“My friend Rusty says that Mrs. Archer is evil,” Otis offered, pleased to drop the phrase “my friend” into the conversation.

Wilson gave the hollow-sounding guffaw he’d taken to emitting so often that even Otis noticed it. “Well, she sure is angry about something,” Wilson said. “She thinks I’m responsible for all the unhappiness in the world. She never lets up. ‘Do you know what you did, Dr. Spriggs?’ Over and over. I don’t know what the hell she’s talking about.”

“That lady’s bonkers,” Otis said. “She murders people and buries their body parts. We’re going to do something about Mrs. Archer, Granddad. Don’t worry. We’ll stop her from bugging you. Okay?”

Wilson turned and looked at Otis as if surprised to see him sitting there. “Stop who?” he said.

“Mrs. Archer.”

“Oh, yeah.” He nodded, but it seemed like he’d already forgotten who Mrs. Archer was. Pretty soon he’d forget who Otis was! “I’ve got to get out there and mulch those beds,” Granddad said again.

“Granddad. I need some thorium for my breeder reactor. Any ideas?” Otis had, a few months ago, given up the pretense that the breeder reactor was hypothetical, after he’d figured out that his grandfather didn’t remember what they’d talked about from one conversation to the next.

“I believe,” said his grandfather, “that propane lanterns, the kind you get at camping stores, would be a good place to start. Course, you’d have to get a whole lot of them.”

Propane lanterns. Check.

“Let’s play checkers,” Otis suggested to his granddad, who agreed, seeming glad for the diversion. Granddad was always up for a rousing game of checkers.

* * *

Otis and Rusty went looking for propane lanterns in Otis’s Pontiac—the car Rusty referred to as his serial killer car. At Walmart, Sears, and Target, the propane lanterns were pretty much the same price, and all expensive—from thirty to eighty dollars. And they didn’t really need the whole lantern. At Sears they bought two, but all they wanted were the mantles that came with the lantern. Most lanterns came with two, and Otis wasn’t sure how many he’d need. At Target they discovered boxes of replacement mantles, two to a box, but they were fifteen bucks a box.

After a whispered discussion, they decided to steal them.

Rusty went a few aisles away, where the fancy granola and gourmet food was, and he could hear her pretend to collapse, knocking some jars off the shelf. When he heard that Rusty was being fussed over by a couple of old lady customers and the lurking pimple-faced store clerk, Otis slipped six boxes of mantles into a battered canvas messenger bag adorned with a hammer and sickle, which used to belong to Royce.

In order to pay Rusty back, Otis had to agree to make some night raids on Mrs. Archer. Rusty instructed him to dress all in black and paint his face and hands with some black kiddie face paint she