"She... she pushed me ..."
I glared up at her. She hadn't moved. The bright sunlight always made her eyes go oddly transparent. Now it was like staring into two bright cubes of ice.
"You want to tell me about it?"
"No."
"What the fuck is this about, Casey?"
Kim came running back with my T-shirt. I helped her wrap it around his hand and showed her how to press it down.
"Hard," I told her. Then I looked back at Casey.
"I asked you something."
I saw her shoulder relax slightly. Her voice was low, contemptuous.
Scary.
"You can go to hell."
She stepped back away from us.
"You both can."
I watched her disappear down the far face of the rock. I covered Kim's hand and helped her press down on Steven's wound. I glanced at Kim.
She was totally concentrated on him.
It was only then that I realized I was shaking.
I never did find out what caused it, though I was pretty sure he'd made some moves on her. His mood was just silly enough for him to try.
Nobody talked about it.
We drove home with the girls in the backseat wrapped in towels and the two of us in front. Same as before. Only this time I was driving and Steve was clutching his hand, squeezing my bloody T-shirt to a wound that would take seven stitches once we got back to town.
All the way home nobody said a word. The freeze between Casey and Kim was a palpable thing. You could hardly blame Kim. I was damned mad at her myself. No matter what had gone on up there, it was clear she'd overreacted, to say the very least. And then I kept seeing that cold unconcern on her face while she stared at us. It could have been a concussion. Yet all we got was anger.
You had to wonder. How well did I even know her?
And despite our weekend together, that kept coming up again. I kept wondering how many more surprises there would be like the one today, and whether I really wanted to be around to see them.
I dropped the women off at their respective houses. Then I got a spare pair of pants from my apartment, helped him on with them and took him to Doc Richardson over on Cedar Street. I stood there watching through the injection, the bandaging, the stitching, the swabbing and patching of the head wound while the Doc complained good-naturedly that the times had not been good since Hoover.
By the time we drove back through town Steve was feeling better. I dropped him at his parents' summer house and watched him move slowly up the field stone walk, through the white colonial doors.
I didn't see him again for nearly a week.
The next I saw of Kim she was still angry. But you could tell that the bitterness was wearing off some, eroded by understanding. We
sat in a booth at Harmon's together drinking Cokes. She, too, suspected Steve had made a move on Casey.
She thought he had reasons, though.
"We're alike, Casey and I. The both of us wear a kind of sign, like one of those sandwich boards. The sign says Sex. Now, I don't figure that's so bad. A lot of women wear it. And plenty of us aren't after anything particular except some fun, some pleasure, a little give-and-take. I figure that all things being equal, we're just about the best kind of woman there is. A whole lot better than some dried-up and sad-assed type like Steve's sister. Because we can switch it over to love at the drop of a hat.
"But sometimes I think that Casey uses it, you know? Like it's some kind of dynamite she has so she can blow loose whatever she wants out of life. And I think that's not so good. Dangerous, even. I know that Steve's wanted her since they were kids, even though he wants me too. But I think I'm good for him, basically. And she isn't.
"Maybe she's good for you I don't know about that. But not Steve. Not ever. Though every now and then, he keeps trying.
"And I can't help but thinking that it's not good for her, either, to be that way. What's it for, anyway? Pleasure. Pleasure and affection. But for Casey I think it's something else, something it shouldn't be. Like conquest.
"Or hunger."
EMT
"What do you want, Case?"
We were lying in bed at my apartment.
"What's worth having?"
Her face was only inches from mine. Her eyes let me down into the depths of her. I slid there gratefully.
"Pleasure.
"Knowledge. Security. I want to own good things, I guess. Success, eventually. And something astonishing, something that surprises me. Or me, surprising myself."
I didn't question her. I just watched her eyes narrow. She sat up suddenly, catlike, in the moonlight.
"Will is worth having. Power."
^Ah
"How goes it among the rich, stud?"
Rafferty was in his usual corner place at the bar, near the wall with the old crooked print by Frederic Remington overhead. You could see everybody enter and leave from there and you had a clear view all the way back to the jukebox. The clock on the wall said five-fifteen.
"Air's a little thin at the moment."
I told him about Steven and Casey pushing him. He shook his head and grinned at me.
"Line from some Warren Dates movie. I always remembered it. "If they didn't have cunts, there'd be a bounty on 'em.""
"Pretty deep, I guess."
"Too bad you can't just switch tracks. That little blond looks sweet and easy."
"I think she probably is."
"But no banana, huh?"
"Nope."
I ordered as hot of scotch with a beer back from Hank McCarty, the bartender, and he brought it over. My hands were still dusted with a fine brown powder from the saw at the yard. It turned a muddy mahogany when I picked up the frosted glass.
"You got to think about what you're doing, here, Danny boy. What the fuck are you doing? You gonna up and marry the girl? Maybe chase her back to Boston or wherever that school of hers is come September? Work a lathe while she picks up her degree? What are you getting all worried about? Screw her, have fun with her and let it ride."
"Sure."
"I mean it."
"Look, George. I haven't gotten it all mapped out. Things just happen. You know that."
He looked annoyed. "Yeah, well they can just un happen too."
I didn't want to argue. Besides, he was probably right. In a lot of ways I was walking around with blinders on when it came to Casey no past, no future and a very narrow focus on the present. About the length of one summer. That was okay so long as I knew it was a temporary thing by nature, so long as I was prepared to lose it and then go on.
I wasn't. There was a basic mistake operating and I knew it. I was already half-committed to the girl and I didn't know a thing about her except physical things and what you could deduce in the space of a couple weeks, some of which wasn't very good. So what was I getting involved in? She was rich, for god's sake. I was her summer playmate.
It wouldn't be hard to get pretty annoyed with me myself.
It seemed like a good time to tie one on. I ordered another round for us.
"That's right, get a little sloppy. You'll feel better."
"Do me a favor, George."
"Sure."
"If she ever pushes me off a cliff somewhere, kick the shit out of her?"
"Be glad to."
We drank our beers and watched the Caribou fill up steadily with the after-work crowd. I was always interested to see the mix. Jeans, dirty T-shirts, overalls, business suits from Sears. We got salesmen, fishermen, laborers. A smattering of women. All kinds of people.
Bars up here don't cater to a single type of crowd the way they do in
the cities. There's not enough clientele for that. Bar life is about as democratic as we get.
"Jim Palmer was in yesterday. We were talking about you."
"Me? I hardly know the guy."
"Well, not about you exactly. I mentioned that your friend had seen lights over at the Crouch place. Jimmie did all the contracting on the place, remem
ber? Anyhow, he says there's nobody there now. So it must have been kids."
"I guess."
"Found out a few things, though."
"Like what?"
He settled back in the high-back chair and sipped the head off a fresh-poured beer.
"Well, for one thing, that doctor left scared."
"Scared?"
"According to Palmer. Says he was up there maybe a month before the old guy left the place, because there was some patch-up that needed doing on the front porch, but the doc wouldn't let him bother with it.
Had to go down into the basement instead to seal up a hole in the wall.
Big hole. Said it looked as though somebody'd been whacking away at it with a sledgehammer. He couldn't figure it. Said the doc was a pretty weird guy. But he could understand him wanting it patched up again.
The draft was fierce."
"In the basement?"
"Sure. Palmer says that in a couple of places the foundation's sitting right beside some open spaces in the seawall. Tunnels. Erosion or whatever. Said that whole stretch of coast is honeycombed with 'em. So you open up one of those spaces and the wind runs right in from the sea. Anyway, he closed it up. I told him about our little excursion out that way when we were kids."
"I still don't get it. The draft was what scared him? What was he, afraid of summer colds?"
"Jimmie says he doesn't really know what it was. Maybe he was afraid the whole house was going to slide down into those tunnels someday. You know, the way they go out in California. But that cellar is sunk in solid rock. He had no problem there. No, hecouldn'tfigure what it was."
"Ben and Mary's ghosts."
"Could be."
"You sound like you've got more."
"I do. Did you know they were imbeciles?"
"You mean crazy?"
"No. Imbeciles. It's a pretty ugly story, actually. It seems that when the bank called in that mortgage money they had a town meeting about it. See, all Ben knew was farming, and he was pretty bad at that. But there was no possibility of either of them doing anything else for a living. So somebody came up with the bright idea of having the town pay off the mortgage. It was only a little over a thousand.
And they figured it would cost them a whole lot more than that just in bookkeeping and whatnot to keep them on the dole for thirty, maybe forty, years than it would to pay off and let them keep the place.
"But the upshot was that somebody got cheap about it, I guess, so the proposal was turned down. And it looked like Dead River was going into the social welfare business for a while. Very exciting. But then, of course, Ben and Mary disappeared and saved everybody the trouble."
"Imbeciles, huh?"
"Total morons. Ben couldn't read and couldn't write. He could handle a plow and Mary could wring a chicken's neck and that was about the whole of it. Now, where do you go if you're that stupid? That's the next question. How do you manage disappearing?"
"You could die."
"That would be the easy way, yes."
"Or just wander off. A county or two down the line."
"Or you could do what my boss did and open a garage."
"You could do that."
He pushed the empty glass away from him and his smile was sly, a little boozy. His hands waved apparitions in the space around us.
"Or maybe you just go back into the caves," he said. "And forget about us entirely. Maybe you live off fish and weeds and spend your days listening to the gulls and the wind off the sea, and you don't come out, not ever."
"Jesus, Rafferty."
I felt a slight prickling at the base of my neck. He looked at me and the smile grew even more cagey and ironic, like a cop in a morgue uncovering a cadaver.
"That doctor. I wonder if he ever heard dogs barking."
I decided a few days later that Rafferty's sense of humor was
Maybe it was the tourists turning up so early this year because of the good weather-they could breed a bitter irony in you made up of easy money and bad manners, privilege and your own unquestionable need. One day I saw a fat man in sunglasses and fishing tackle and drinking eggnog right out of the carton.
It was pretty sickening.
Then that same day Rafferty tells me this story about some woman over in Portland who was suing an Italian spaghetti-sauce company for mental anguish because she opened a can of marinara and found a woman's finger inside a rubber glove pointing fingernail-up at her.
The next day he had another one.
I I j I 'j. He d read it in the paper.
The body of a night watchman had been found in a hog pen at a meat-packing firm on the South Side of Chicago. It had been partly eaten by the hogs. There were hundreds of them in the pen, and the guy's face and abdomen were in pretty bad shape. But here's the kicker.
His clothes were hanging neatly on a nearby fence.
Rafferty made some nasty obvious comments about going after pigs in the dark.
So I thought he was getting strange lately.
But maybe it wasn't him entirely.
Sometimes I think there's something just hanging in the air, and a I most everybody reacts to it. Don't ask me why. Sometimes it's real and vital, like when JFK was shot. And sometimes it's completely unimportant, like pennant fever. Sometimes, like the recession, it goes on and on, and you get so you hardly even notice it. Maybe Dead River was getting a touch of that.
And I'll tell you why I think it wasn't just Rafferty.
There was us.
The stealing. All the dumb, reckless things we were doing. The business with Steven. The stolen car. There was my own blind, self-destructive urgetofollowalong, no matter what kind of ridiculous thing they were into doing.
There was a statue of a mounted revolutionary soldier in the town square. One night we painted the horse's balls bright red. Two nights later we painted them blue.
We were sitting on the beach one afternoon, and Casey was in the water-it had grown warmer by then, though it was still too cold for me. Steve was still nursing his torn hand, so he'd stayed home that day, so there was just me and Kim sitting there alone together, watching her, and we got to talking about Steve's accident-we called it an accident now-in a boring sort of way. The stitches, when they were due out, to what degree he could flex the damn thing. We were remembering how it had been that day without ever once coming close to the heart of the thing, which was why she'd done it. We skirted that.
But I guess it made her think of this other story, which I'm mentioning here because it bears upon what I was saying about something being in the air by then, something made of god knows what and disgorging itself on Dead River.
Kim was only a little girl at the time, she said.
There was a family living next door to her who had a teenage daughter.
An only child. Not a pretty girl or terribly smart either. Sort of ordinary. A little unfriendly and sullen.
Anyway, for her birthday-her seventeenth-her parents gave her two presents, a car and a Doberman puppy. Probably, Kim said, she was unpopular at school, and the one gift-the car-was to
make her more popular, while the other gift was to console her if it
di~ glitllove,hepupp,
Both her parents had jobs, so the dog was home alone most of the time during the day, and Kim remembered the girl's car roaring into the driveway each afternoon at three-thirty and the girl racing up the steps while the dog barked loudly and scratched at the screen door.
Then there would be a lot of jumping and squealing and hugging, which even as a kid Kim found pretty disgusting. And finally there would be a very big puppy tearing crazily around their own and
This happened every day.
Then one day there was none of it. The girl came home and there was no barking and no scratching at the door. Just silence. Kim was playing in the yard as usual and noticed that something was wrong. They'd gotten pretty used to the dog by then. So she watched. The girl went inside.
A few minutes later the girl came ou
t holding the puppy and raced for the car. She put the dog inside and quickly drove away. That was all Kim saw. The rest she heard about later.
When the girl got home the puppy was in the kitchen, choking. There was something caught in the throat. So she bundled it up and drove to the vet. The vet took a look at the dog and told her to wait outside.