"What do you do?"
"For a living?"
"I mean to kill the tedium."
"Oh, this and that. I see the beach a lot."
"I bet you do."
The road was narrow and twisting but I knew it blind by now, sc it was easy to keep an eye on her. There was a small patch of sane on her shoulder. I wanted to brush it off, just for the excuse to toucf her.
She sat very low in the seat. She really was in terrific physical condition. Just one thin line where the flesh had to buckle at the stomach. She smelled lightly of dampness. Sweat and seawater.
"Your car?" I asked her. "It runs pretty good."
"No."
"Your dad's?"
"No."
"Whose, then?"
She shrugged, telling me it didn't matter. "Is this your town? You've lived here all your life and all?"
"Me and my father both."
"You like it?"
"Not much."
"Then why stick around?"
"Inertia, I guess. Nothing ever came along to move me out."
"Would you like to have something come along and move you out?"
"Never thought about it. I don't know."
"So think about it. What if something did? Would you want that?"
"You want me to think about it right now?"
"You going anywhere?"
"No."
So I did. It was a hell of an odd question right off the bat like that but I gave it some thought. And while I was doing that I was wondering why she'd asked.
"I guess I might. Yeah."
"Good."
"Why good?"
"You're cute."
"So?"
"So I couldn't be bothered if you were stupid."
There wasn't much to say to that. The road wound by. I watched her staring out the window. The sun was going down. There were bright streaks of red in her hair. The line of neck to shoulder was very soft and graceful.
We were coming into town. Willoughby was just on the outskirts, the closest thing we could claim to a grouping of "better" houses.
"You'd better pull up here."
"You're not going home?"
She laughed. "Not in this. Pull up here."
I thought she meant the bathingsuit, that her parents were strict about that. It was pretty skimpy. I pulled the car off to the shoulder and cut the engine. I reached for the keys.
"Leave them."
She opened the door and stepped out.
"I don't get it. What are you going to do about the car?"
She was already walking away. I slammed the door and caught up with her.
"I'm going to leave it here."
"With keys in the ignition?"
"Sure."
Suddenly it dawned on me.
"I think you'd better tell me your name. So I know where to send them when they come for me."
She laughed again. "Casey Simpson White. Seven Willoughb, Lane. And it will be my first offense. How about you?"
"Clan Thomas. I've been up against it before, I guess."
"What for?"
"They got me once when I was five. Me and another kid set fin to his backyard with a can of lighter fluid. That was one thing."
"There's more?"
"A little later, yeah. Nothing glamorous as auto theft, though You wouldn't be interested."
I grabbed her arm. I could still feel the adrenaline churning. I couldn't help it. I'd never stolen a car before. It made me nervous.
Her skin was soft and smooth. She didn't pull away.
"Are you crazy?"
She stopped and looked me straight in the eye.
"Buy me a drink and find out for yourself."
It was my turn to laugh then. "You're underage, though, right? You would have to be."
"Just."
"Please remember you never told me that. Come on."
ffm mA^m
HAH
^^^^AH
^^^^^^AH
AH_
So that was the business with the car, and that was the first time she scared me.
The truth was I liked it.
Here was a girl, I thought, who didn't play by our rules-whc hardly seemed to know them. And I guess I'd seen enough of rules in twenty years of Dead River.
It was rules that got you where you were and more rules that kept you there, kids turning into premature adults, adults putting in the hard day's work for wife and more kids and mortgaged house and car, and nobody ever got out from under. That was rule number one. You didn't get out. I'd seen it happen to my parents. The rule said, see, your foot is in the bear trap now and you're the one that put it there, so don't expect to come away alive; we didn't set it up for that. The problem was always money. The slightest twitch in the economy would sluice tidal waves through the whole community. We were always close to oblivion. The price of fish would change in Boston and half the town would be lined up at the bank, begging for money.
It might have made us tougher, but it didn't. All you saw were the stooped shoulders and the slow crawl toward bitterness and old age.
I'd moved out on my parents three years ago, when it became too hard to watch my father come up broke and empty after another season hauling in sardines in Passamaquoddy Bay and to watch my mother's house go slowly down around her. They were good people,
and they were fools, and after a while all I could bring to them was anger.
At the time I didn't even know what I was mad about, but I knew it wasn't working. So I found myself the job at the yard and then a little two-room apartment over Brody's Hardware on Main Street, and I'd stop by the house whenever I could stand it, which wasn't often.
Every now and then I'd wonder why I didn't get out entirely. The answer was the one I gave Casey. Inertia. A tired life breeds tired decisions, sometimes none at all. I was lazy. Demoralized. Always had been.
Then Casey.
And it was wonderful to see her thumb her nose at us; it was a pleasure. I'd always been too much a part of the town to really do it right. You needed to be an outsider for that, or at least you needed one to show you how. Someone with no worries about reputations, someone whose father didn't drink with the mayor and half the cops in town, someone with no stake.
Even if I hadn't wanted her, I might have gone along for the ride.
But I did want her. As I sat in the bar that day, she was just about all I wanted. Everything else looked kind of puny and small. It was only lust, but it had very big teeth.
What I'm trying to say here is that she got me started moving toward a lot of things, things I'd been avoiding for a longtime. And I've never regretted that part of it for a minute. And I've never looked back.
Today, that part's still good.
Some of it, though.
Some of it was horrible.
And I'd better get into that right now, so I can set myself to thinking about it, getting it right. Otherwise the rest will make no sense to anybody, and I know there was a kind of sense to it, almost an inevitability, as though what happened was sure to happen given what we were together and what the town had become. It's a hard connection to make but I've got to make it. And maybe then I can just go on.
4-
The Crouch place.
The subject came up early between us, and then I guess just hung there unnoticed on the borders of her memory like a cobweb in an attic full of old toys.
Wish to god I'd seen the spider.
We were sitting at the soda fountain at Harmon's General Store because Steven had been bothering us for chocolate egg cream all day long, and we finally got tired of his gritting his teeth and hissing at us as though he had to go to the bathroom something awful and nobody would let him, so we went to Harmon's and he explained the drink to Mrs.
Harmon. A hefty squirt of chocolate syrup, a little milk, and lots of seltzer. Mrs. Harmon kept shaking her head. "No egg?"
As usual the conversation got around to bitching about how nothing ever happened here and how
there was nothing to do, so I happened to mention the Crouch place and what happened when we were kids.
You may have read about the end of it if you get the Boston papers. I know the Globe carried a story on it, because Rafferty and I both kept our copies until they got yellow and dog-eared. Dead River gets so little scandal. So we read the story over and over. How the police and the ASPCA broke in, now that Ben and Mary were gone. Testimony from Mr. Harmon and Chief Peters. For a while you'd get these wacky types driving up especially, just to see the place, though there wasn't much to see.
All they did see was an old, ramshackle two-story house on Winslow Homer Avenue-a tiny dirt road on the outskirts of town that ran all the way back to the sea. It sat on a three-acre plot of land, the front yard and the forest beyond long since combined and climbing the broken stairs to the gray, weathered front door. Vines and creepers everywhere. Out back, a narrow slip of land sloped to the edge of a cliff, below which was the ocean.
Never once did I see them as a boy. Ben and Mary Crouch had disappeared into the dank interior of that house long before my time. I heard rumors, though. We all did. Talk among our parents that led us to think there was something "not right" about Ben and Mary. Beyond that good parents wouldn't go, not with the kids around. But
it was enough. Because later there were more rumors, which we ourselves created.
How they ate children and lived inside huge cocoons spun from the flesh of babies. How they were really living corpses, vampires, witches, zombies.
The usual thing.
Once, when I was ten, three of us got up the nerve to run around to the back of the house and peer into their garbage.
They lived completely out of cans.
There was not a piece of paper wrap or frozen-food box or ash red of lettuce anywhere. Just cans. Canned fruit, canned peas, carrots, onions. Canned meats and tuna from S. S. Pierce. And every can had been wiped or washed so that it was spotless. I can't tell you why that odd bit of cleanliness upset us so. But it did.
There was dog food-also canned-and lots of it. We counted five separate bagfuls.
Everybody knew they kept dogs, though how many dogs was a matter of conjecture. But it wasn't just two or three. The place had an unmistakably doggy smell to it. The stink of unwashed fur and dog shit. You could smell it yards away. But there were no neighbors around to complain. Not for miles. Just a forest of scrub pine and brambles out of which the house seemed to rise as though out of a tangled green cloud, moving densely back to the sea.
We looked into the garbage and peeked through the basement window. It was much too dark to see in there. But Jimmy Beard swore he saw something sway and move in the darkness.
We did not argue. We ran. As though the stories we'd made up were true. As though hell itself could come pouring out of there.
And I can feel my hackles rise as I write this, remembering how it felt that day.
Because maybe, in a way, we were right.
Here's what made the papers:
I was thirteen I think when the police came and opened up the place.
It was a delivery boy from Harmon's who had called them after a month went by with all the cans piling up unopened, untouched, on the porch and no slip in the mailbox with his payment.
,
the delivery boy, and one of the cops came very close to losing his hand. Because behind the door there were twenty-three dogs. And all of them were starving.
They sealed the house up again and called in troops. The next day half the town was out there, me and Rafferty included. It was quite as how Six policemen and Jack Gardener, the sad old drunk who was our dog warden, and six or seven guys in white lab jackets from the ASPCA in Machias dumping whole sackfuls of dog food into the house through a punched-in hole in the front kitchen window, then settling back, waiting, while the snapping sounds and the growling and howling and eating sounds wore away at everybody's nerves.
Then when it was quiet again they moved in with nets and stun-pistols.
And I had my first look inside the place.
I couldn't see how they'd lived there. Once the house had been somebody's pride. I remember being told it was a hundred years old or more. There were hand-hewn beams in the ceiling, and the wood on the doors and moldings where it wasn't stained and smeared with god knows what was still good high-quality cedar and oak. But the rest was incredible. Filthy. Foul. Floors caked with dog shit, reeking of urine. Old newspapers stacked everywhere, almost reaching the ceiling in some places, damp and yellow. A couch and an overstuffed chair torn to shreds, pieces of them scattered everywhere. The refrigerator door hung open, empty. Cabinets and doors were chewed and clawed to splinters.
A few of us kids stood at the front door, making twisted faces at the stink. We watched them as they brought out the dogs one by one and locked them into the ASPCA van. Many had to be carried out, they were so weak. And all. of them were pretty docile after the feeding. I wondered if they'd dropped some drugs in there too. I remember a lot of them looked sort of bewildered, dazed. They were pathetically thin.
I stopped looking when they found the bodies.
There were four of them. One was just a puppy. One was a Doberman.
The other two had been medium-sized mutts.
Obviously the other dogs had eaten them.
pretty angry. He pulled me into the car and then just sat torting, shaking his head, his face getting redder and redder. I knew he wanted to hit me, and I knew how hard it was for him not to.
1 guessed I'd disappointed him again.
So I told them all this over two rounds of egg creams. I had them wide-eyed.
"Ben and Mary they never found, by the way."
"Never?" Steven had this habit of pointing his index finger at you when he asked a question as though he were accusing you of lying. He would also dip his head a little and look at you up from under those dark eyebrows. I think he was practicing for the law. It was very astute-looking.
"Never. We got some clues, though, about a week later. At least you could figure why they'd disappeared. All of a sudden the big word around town was that the bank had evicted them the month before for nonpayment of their mortgage. So it looked like they just ignored the notices for a while, and then, when Ben Murphy went out there to tell them face-to-face that they'd have to leave, they just listened and nodded and then when he was gone, they just cleared out."
"Awful thing to do to all those dogs, though." Kimberley slurped the bottom of her glass through the long striped straw. "So cruel. How could you care for all those animals and then be so rotten to them?"
"People do it all the time," said Steven.
Casey leaned toward me. "Did they look for them? Ben and whatsername, Mary, I mean?"
"Sure they did. I don't know how hard, though. The eviction business seemed to explain things well enough, so I don't know how hard anybody worried about it, really.
"About the dogs, though. See, there was a lot of talk after that. My mom and dad, for one thing, were a lot more free about discussing it in front of me. And I remember being shocked at the time to hear a friend of my mother's say that Ben and Mary were brother and sister, and only in their thirties. We'd always pictured them as
withered ancients, you know and married. The evil old man and his witchy wife. Not so.
"But here's the important part. They'd been raised, b< them, in the bughouse. Literally. At Augusta Mental. Till they w< in their teens.
The schizo son and daughter of a crazy Boston combat-zone stripper, alky too I guess. So you have to wonder what kind of shape they were in to worry about a pack of dogs, you know
"Geez."
"Good story," said Casey.
And it was. Good enough, certainly, to wile away an hour o sodas at Harmon's. But it still left us with nothing to do. Workt had stripped the Crouch place and refinished it, and for a coupl< years a retired doctor and his wife had lived there, civilize presumably, tamed it. So that now, even though the old man was longer there
and the house lay empty, it was just another house the woods. Nothing you'd want to visit.
It had amused us, though, back then when we were kids, the next few years Dead River had its very own haunted hoi Somewhere to go to scare yourself on Halloween. That was befc the doctor came in.