The Great American Novel Experiment

SYNOPSIS

"FAMILY SECRETS is the story of a family traumatized by the present and haunted by the past. Jim Perkins is fifteen, living in a small town with a loving family, dreaming of girls, when his mother dies. His world is turned upside down, but before he can even begin to grieve, her death draws him into an old family mystery that began with murder and may well end the same way -- unless he can solve it in time. FAMILY SECRETS is a tale of family frictions, family loyalties, family history, and, of course, all those skeletons in the family closet."

AUTHOR BIO/STATEMENT

"David Hall is a native Texan who now lives in Colorado. He has written stories and poems that have appeared in a variety of literary journals, as well as a number of award-winning plays that have been produced in theatres around the country. FAMILY SECRETS, his first novel, is set in that half-remembered, half-imagined childhood of memory, a painful and magical time and place as far away as a small Texas town and as close as the family picture album."

FAMILY SECRETS

a novel by David Hall

CHAPTER ONE

Mr. Bunsen was shot less than a week after my mother died, and I was the only one besides my brother who knew the connection. Or thought I did. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me start at the beginning.

I was fifteen when my mother died of cancer.

The day they came to take her to the hospital, they strapped her onto one of those scary-looking metal beds on wheels and trundled her into the back of an ambulance. As I stood on the curb, waving like a cheap wind-up toy, Dad put his arm around me and gave me a squeeze I hardly felt. He didn't have much strength left. None of us did.

It took her three weeks to die. The last time I saw her, she looked older than my grandmother. Bony and pale, with deep lines cut down each side of her nose and purple sacks under her eyes. She had no voice, so I had to lean way down and put my ear to her mouth.

"Be good and keep up your schoolwork," she whispered. "And help Frank and your dad. They're going to be a little crazy for a while. I know they're older, but in some ways you're stronger, especially now."

She tried to smile, but something deep inside her ripped or stabbed, and she shut her eyes and mouth tight and grabbed my hand. She shook from head to toe, vibrating like a violin string, till it passed. Then she opened her eyes again and patted my hand.

"We'll meet again in heaven, sweetie. I'll be waiting for you."

I was sucking down tears when the nurse came to pry my fingers loose and tell me gently that it was time to go home, that Mom had to sleep. She had a big needle half-hidden behind her.

The next morning Mom died. Early. Before Dad or Frank or me had even opened our eyes, much less started our daily bedside vigil at the hospital. The doctor said she went peacefully, which I think meant that she died doped up, which is pobably a better way to go than most.

Grandpa was the only one talking on the way to the cemetery.

"Why her? Why not Pearl or me? We're old. Christ Almighty, she wasn't even forty!"

Eyes glistening but on fire, giving off steam, he glanced around like a gamecock, spoiling for a fight. But nobody took him up on it. Grandma sobbed quietly into a handkerchief under her veil. Dad was crying, too, I think, but kept his face turned to the window, watching the brittle fall leaves break off and sprial down like little helicopters in trouble.

In the back seat of the limousine my brother Frank sat silent, face hewn from granite. So far as I knew, he hadn't cried yet. In fact, in the two days since Mom had died, he hadn't said a word.

Of course no one had said much. It was such a shock. A couple of months before, with no warning, she'd called us all into the living room and, while Dad blinked back tears, had announced that she might not be with us much longer. It seemed that one minute we had among us the happiest, kindest lady God ever shaped from the dust, and the next minute we were huddled on hard chairs outside a hospital room, waiting for the red-eyed doctor to come out shaking his head, sending Dad into convulsive sobs and me to the nearest restroom, where I would be found later, howling into the mirror like an orphaned cub.

After the funeral, Grandma and Grandpa took it upon themselves to come to our house and help greet mourners. We were all headed up the walk, eyes on the bricks like a bunch of prisoners, when Frank caught Dad's arm and took him aside.

"I don't feel like talking to all these people. Do you mind?"

Dad put a hand on Frank's shoulder.

"They loved your mother, son, just like we did. They want to see you, and Jim, too, because it lets them know something's left of her. But do what you think best."

Frank stood a long time just staring down at the dead leaves piling up on his shiny black loafers, then he sort of whistled low and, not looking at Dad, said, "Good. I think I'll go down to the lake for a while."

Dad frowned. "I wish you wouldn't."

"I know," Frank said. "But it's what I think best."

I followed him into the house and watched him unlock the gun cabinet and take out the thirty-thirty Grandpa Frazier, Mom's dad, had given him on his sixteenth birthday. He also got a box of shells from the top shelf and put it in his shirt pocket. Then he turned and saw me.

"What?"

"Nothing," I said. "Can I come?"

"No."

And he was out the door.

Mourners just coming up the walk parted to let him through, this angry-looking young man with hard eyes and greasy black hair falling in his face, and a rifle in his hand.

Dad stepped aside, too.

"I wish you wouldn't take the gun," he said, low so nobody else would hear. As Frank shoved past him, he called out, "Try to be home for supper!" But there was no authority in his voice.

Frank didn't even look back.

Standing at the front screen door, I pretended not to see Dad waving at me, trying to get me to come out and help old Mrs. Springer up the front steps. Instead, I went through the house and out the back door, across the yard and over the fence. By the time I'd circled the block and come out on Apple Street, I saw Frank turning the corner, heading down the dirt road that ran past Kester's farm.

I took off after him.

Trotting along behind, trying to keep out of sight, I followed my long-legged brother down the road to Kester's fence, where the town ended in tangled bushes and waist-high Johnson grass, where prickly vines hung like snakes from big dark trees. Panting, more than once stumbling, I just managed to keep him in sight, all the while marveling, as I had so many times before, at the graceful way he slipped through the undergrowth, quietly, surely, like an indigenous animal.

Finally we got to where the ground was more of less bare beneath towering white cottonwoods, making it easier to walk. And to breathe. Suddenly I became aware of a familiar aroma, a complex perfume of water and weed, fish and garbage, things growing and rotting together.

The lake lay just ahead.

Woodsen Lake.

Named for one of the more notorious pioneers of the county, Abe Woodsen, a trapper who legend had it got burned up in his cabin by Indians angry that he'd taken over their lake and was bent on defending it by force. One night, so the story went, after he'd taken shots at one of their hunting parties during the day, they rolled a boulder against his front door and set the cabin on fire, lighting around the windows first so that he wouldn't have any way out.

The Indians lost anyway, though, because the next day the army came and ran them out of the county. As I stood there watching the swallows wheel two-by-two over the still lake, I thought of Abe in the cabin that night, screaming himself hoarse, throwing his body against the blocked door, his clothes starting to smoke. If Mom's dying was horrible, what was Abe's?

A hand grabbed my arm and shook me like a doll.

"Are you crying, you little sissy?"

I wiped my eyes and shook my head.

"Then go find me a bottle."

He knew I'd been following him and let me do it because he needed someone to gather targets for him to shoot. I pawed at the layers of dead leaves, finally coming up with five muddy whiskey bottle and a rust beer can. Cradling the load in my arms, I staggered to the edge of the lake and dumped it all at Frank's feet.

"Throw!" he commanded.

I picked up a bottle and hurled it as far as I could. Frank aimed and fired. The bobbing bottle exploded with a faint tinkling.

"Another one!"

The rifle shot still echoing in my ears, I threw the next, not even looking because I couldn't have seen where it landed anyway. My eyes had gone blurry as I thought of Mom and how she'd never again tell me to put my dirty clothes in the laundry basket or eat my broccoli or stop using bad words. Nobody would. I'd wear filthy shirts forever and die young of scurvy, cursing like a sailor.

"You better wipe your damned eyes," Frank said. "You nearly threw that last one in the weeds."

Watching him nail bottle after bottle, seeing each one vanish in a shower of glinting fragments that sank immediately, I was struck to think that he was polluting the lake he'd always loved. Then I realized that, in fact, he'd been doing it ever since Mom got sick. Like he was punishing the lake.

It didn't make much sense, just enough that it wouldn't leave me alone. Woodsen Lake, after all, wasn't just a quiet place for the people of Cherokee to relax and fish; for years it had belonged to our family, Mom's side anyway. If fact, it was sort of an obsession, a demanding legacy more imposed than just passed down from her mother and, before that, her grandfather.

From the time Mom was a child, she'd been taught to revere the lake as if it were a spiritual place, a holy ground, which it was for the Indians, but mother's family were white as Wonder Bread. And the lake wasn't even pretty to look at any more. Once its clear waters had sparkled in the sunlight, brimming with tasty bass, while tall white cranes patrolled the shore on stilts, snapping up perch. Young couples used to steer canoes in and out of the many small coves canopied by willows. But now the lake was clouded and, like its shores, filled with debris -- bottles, cans, old car parts, bald tires -- until the whole area looked less like a romantic getaway than a flooded county dump. And that's the way it had looked for years, as long as I could remember.

Mom and her family obviously remembered it a different way, or they wouldn't have talked about it in such hushed, reverent tones. And they had proof, photo albums full of proof. Those albums were proof, too, of how hard Mom tried to pass on that reverence for to lake to Frank, her first-born, who was photographed early and often being exposed to the wonders of Woodsen Lake: toddling barefoot into the water to throw a stone; learning to fish or paddle a canoe; later, as a teenager, swimming all the way across, emerging for the camera like a monster in a cheap horror flick, goggles mud-smeared, dripping seaweed, grinning.

And here he was littering the lake bottom with broken glass.

Suddenly the brush behind me came aloud with a loud thrashing, and I jumped behind Frank. At fifteen I didn't have much distance yet from childhood fantasies of missing links roaming the forest, wild men in the woods, even leftover Indians bent on vengeance.

My heart slowed down, though, when I saw, romping out of the trees, Warhorse, the Kesters' old hound. He'd evidently seen Frank passing his house, and it had taken him this long to catch up. Decrepit and half-blind, he bounded around Frank's legs like a puppy, his bark a foghorn echoing through the bottomland. He was in love with Frank and always had been. In fact, Mr. Kester had been heard to complain about it, half-jokingly.

"I swear Frank is all that keeps him alive," he'd said more than once. "I'll be glad when that boy graduates school and moves away so I can have that old mutt done away with."

But this time Frank didn't reach down to scratch the dog's bony head or ruffle the loose skin hanging in folds about its sad-eyed face. He didn't even look down. He just kept staring across the lake. And although he still had on his funeral suit, something about him -- maybe the way the sun flashed off his dark hair or the way he stood straight as a cottonwood, and as quiet -- make me think of an Indian. Not the Indians in Cherokee -- one family, poor and pitiful, living in a shack down by the tracks, not far from the dump -- but the braves I'd read about in books and seen in movies: tall and proud, strung tight as bowstrings, one with nature, dignified.

Suddenly Frank raised his rifle and aimed it across the lake.

"See that house, Jimboy? The big white one up on the hill?"

The Bunsen house. Mr. Bunsen was Cherokee's biggest land-owner. Water-owner, too: Woodsen Lake was his. Dad had sold it to him when Mom was so sick and we were nearly broke. She'd begged him not to, but it was in his name by then, just like our house, and he sold it to help pay the huge medical bills insurance didn't cover. And although I heard him apologizing for two days straight, what I recall most are Mom's eyes filling with tears, and how she turned her face to the wall and wouldn't talk to him.

"What about it?" I said.

Eye pressed against the sight, Frank muttered a little monologue: "Here's old man Bunsen sitting out in his backyard on Saturday morning, just like always, reading the newspaper, sipping his coffee, never once suspecting a thing, and then all of a sudden, out of nowhere . . . bang!"

I jumped.

Frank lowered the rifle but not his eyes.

"So easy . . . so damned easy . . ."

I was getting nervous, so I grabbed up the last bottle and threw it into the lake as far as I could. Suddenly somthing bolted by me, nearly knocking me down. Warhorse hit the water on a dead run and swam for the bottle like it was a shot duck and he was a young bird-dog. I felt like cheering him on.

Then a chill went through me, like an unexpected cool breeze. I looked over at Frank. He had the rifle at his shoulder and was squinting into the sight. I wanted to say something, or do something, yell at him or reach over and grab the barrel, but I couldn't.

He shot once.

Warhorse yelped and turned over in the water and sank without so much as a splash.

When I looked at Frank again, he was aiming at the big house on the hill, and I heard him whisper, "Bang."

Then he was gone, stalking off through the woods for home.

I sat on the rotting trunk of a fallen cottonwood for a long time, waiting for my heart and my brain to slow down. After a while I began noticing the mournful willows drooping over me and heard the first owl of the evening start to moan.

It was time to go.

As I made my slow way through the tangled thickets of vines and tall grasses and sticky weeds that ranged from the merely irritating, like Johnson grass, whose sharp-edged blades give you a million little paper cuts, to the downright ominous, like bloodweed, so named because when you break the stem a thick red sap oozes out, I thought I heard hornets high in a hackberry tree and remembered Frank telling me how he and Eustace McBee had once shot at a huge nest and how the hornets had poured down on them, chasing them into the lake, where they had held their breaths until they nearly drowned.

I tried to walk faster, but the vines kept wrapping around my legs, the weeds tugged at me, and the trees seemed to let down their black limbs to block my way. The sun had long since gone down, and the heavy dark sky settled lower and lower about my head, as if trying to smother me.

I got seriously scared. A hard mile from home and easy prey for the hornets and owls and snakes and God-knew-what-else. Who would hear my screams as I was stung and bitten and ripped slowly apart? I was nearly crying when I dove finally through Kester's barbed wire fence into the gravel road, where I sat panting and shaking.

The moon was hardly a sliver, and as I looked back the way I'd come, I couldn't make out a single tree or vine or weed. An owl called, but it wasn't calling to me. Something rustled in the grass of a ditch just off the road, and before it could rustle again, I was gone.

The air was cool as I ran, and I was thankful to feel the hard nuggets of gravel bite into the soles of my sneakers. I knew gravel. Where it came from, how it got there, what it was for. Running though the woods wasn't like that. There I was a stranger, an intruder, even an enemy, and every living thing sensed it and clutched at me, trying to haul me down, to bury me under the dead leaves and the bugs and the awful smell of decay.

I thought of my mother cool and still under six feet of that teeming dirt, and it was all I could do to stumble into my front yard and collapse on the porch steps, where I sat collecting myself for a good fifteen minutes before I went in.

CHAPTER TWO

I didn't expect Dad to have anything fixed for supper -- food was the last thing on my mind -- so imagine my shock when I finally trudged into the kitchen, mud-caked and scratched and stinking of the woods, only to find spread out on the table a banquet fit for a Viking war party.

I'd never seen so much food in one place at one time.

Platters of fried chicken, at least three potato dishes, a roast, a whole ham glazed in pineapple syrup, green beans and mushrooms, sweet corn in every conceivable incarnation, from baked in a casserole with cheese and onions to on-the-cob, dripping butter, plate after plate of home-baked rolls, an assortment of cakes and pies, jars of fresh jelly: dewberry, plum, peach, grape, and on and on.

"The kind ladies of the church," a voice behind me said. "I guess funerals make 'em hungry."

Still in his black suit, as rumpled and soiled as my own, Frank walked around the table, picking up and inspecting first a chicken leg, then a slice of ham, finally a juicy hunk of roast.

"Lot of dead things on that table," he said. "Yum yum."

To my surprise, I was hungry, and as soon as Frank went out, never taking so much as a bite of anything, I dug in. Guilt stabbed my chest as I stood by the table plunging a fork into Mrs. Ramsey's famous Swedish meatball-and-macaroni casserole. I had a right to be starved, since all I'd eaten in the past two days was a bowl of Cheerios, half a peanut butter sandwich, and part of an orange.

Still, it didn't seem right. In fact, I felt so bad about my gorging, and so nervous about being caught, that when Dad came up behind and put a hand on my arm, I jumped, snapping the fork skyward, launching a greasy meatball splat against the ceiling, then back down onto the table. Dad and I both stared at it lying there in the mashed potatoes, half-embedded, like a dud cannonball.

"Sorry," he said. "I just wanted to say you shouldn't feel guilty about eating. We all need to keep up our strength."

"What about you?" I said. "I haven't seen you eating anything."

The fork in my hand felt more and more like a weapon, like I'd been caught committing a crime. My stomach rippled.

Dad leaned against the doorway, sagged really, looking so old that it scared me a little. "Maybe later," he said. "My stomach's kind of sour."

That's when the aroma hit my nostrils, sweet but rotten, too. I knew what it was. I'd smelled it on the breath of my uncle, Dad's brother, years before when he'd hugged me too hard and belched.

"I smell whiskey," I said.

Dad straightened up and pushed away from the wall.

"I had a little toddy," he said. "Not much. Just something to take the edge off things."

"I didn't know we had any," I said. Mom had been as deadset against alcohol as a Baptist preacher. In fact, she'd stopped talking to Uncle Jack once she knew he was a drinker. (For the record, he didn't stop drinking but stopped coming to family reunions.)

Dad cleared his throat. "I have a little something in the office. A gift from a client. No big deal." He lurched toward the table. "My, my, those church ladies do know how to lay out a week's menu, don't they? I don't know about you, but I suddenly got my appetite back."

For an awkward few minutes we stood there, father and son, side by side, shoveling in food we couldn't taste. Dad gave up first, stepping back from the table, rubbing his stomach.

"I'm stuffed," he said. "Think I'll lie down a minute, then go and sit on the porch a while, get some fresh air."

He carried his plate and fork to the sink and went out, talking all the time, more to himself than to me, his voice trailing off as he made his way down the hall, stopping only when he disappeared into the bathroom. A minute or so later, I could hear his heaves, then the toilet flushing. I looked at the piece of meat on the end of my fork and took it to kitchen and dropped it into the trash.

When he finally came out of the bathroom, watery-eyed, red-cheeked, I was waiting my turn.

On the way to my room, I passed Dad's office and noticed that he'd left the door open, which he almost never did since all his insurance stuff was in there and Mom had trained him to keep that part of his life separate from time with the family. A quick glance through the front screen door told me that he was still on the porch, sitting hunched on the top step, smoking, staring into the night, so I pushed his office door open and went in.

I was stunned.

Dad had always been a picky office-keeper (Mom had trained that into him, too) but now there were forms and folders scattered all over the desk, some balanced on the edge only because others were piled on top, the whole mess threatening to topple at any second onto the floor, which was already cluttered with balls of wadded-up paper and halves of pencils that had obviously been snapped in anger or frustration. Ashes speckled the carpet, and the air smelled smoky, as if there had recently been a minor fire in the room.

It smelled of something else, too.

The whiskey bottle was in the first file drawer I opened. Old Crow. In a fancy decanter with a glass stopper. I recognized it as a Christmas gift to Dad from Mr. Markham, a liquor store owner who always insisted that "whiskey's the perfect gift for any occasion". Mom had thrown a fit, and Dad had said he'd get rid of it but that he thought he should keep it around a while --out of sight, of course -- so as not to hurt the giver's feelings. That had been three years ago.

I picked up the bottle. It was half-empty. I put the stopper back and was about to go when something on the desk caught my eye.

It was a picture album, open.

I bent over to look closer, and in that instant a shudder ran through me, like a mild electric shock. It was Mom's family -- The Old Hard Ones, Dad called them -- and one glance at the stern faces and solemn eyes peering up from the browning pages reminded me again of all the times Mom had tried to get me to look at the album with her, so she could explain who each face belonged to, and of all the times I'd squirmed off her lap or, later, when I was older, claimed the guys were waiting for me at the ballfield.

They were a scary bunch, people with no sense of humor, mouths shut so firmly that they had no lips, eyes focused straight ahead, drilling gazes through the intervening years, like accusations: Why haven't you lived up to our standards? Could that old codger perched still as a statue on a straight-backeded stair really be my great grandfather, as the caption claimed? It was hard to imagine him bouncing his granddaughter, my mother, on his knee. And was that sour old woman behind him, hair tight as a cap on her head, my great grandmother? Did she coo babytalk to Mom? Were any of them ever actually alive?

I tip-toed out, leaving the book and door open just as I'd found them.

I slipped quietly onto the front porch, making sure the screen door didn't slam behind me. Frank was on the steps with Dad, each leaning against a pillar, both smoking -- another of Dad's lectures that hadn't taken. I took a spot close to the door, back in the shadows.

After a while, Dad said, "You boys feel like going to school tomorrow?"

We hadn't been in nearly a week. I was ready to go back. "Sure," I said. Then, thinking I'd sounded too eager, I added, "I guess."

"Not me," Frank said.

Dad took in a long breath and let it out. "I think Jim has the right attitude," he said. "The sooner we get started back on a routine, the sooner we'll start to feel better."

Frank took a last drag and flicked the butt away in a high glowing arc, like a comet or maybe a kamikaze firefly. It smoldered on the brick walk a few seconds and went out.

Dad put his own cigarette out on the step, then he began the tedious process of separating the filter into hundreds of tiny filaments which he dropped off the porch one by one to be picked up and scattered on the next good breeze. The army had taught him that. Field-stripping, they called it. Kill without mercy, but don't litter.

"Your mother would want you to get on with your life," he said.

Without looking at him, Frank said, "With all due respect, you're the last person on earth to speak for what Mom might want."

Dad seemed to sag a little lower, as if a vertebra had collapsed. When at last he spoke, his voice seemed to leak out with no force, dead air from a punctured tire.

"Son, I've explained all this before. I thought you understood. We needed the money."

"We didn't need it that bad," Frank said.

"Your mother had to have tests, and drugs, and -- "

"She asked you not to sell the lake. I heard her. So did Jim."

"I was trying to save her!"

"Bullshit!" Frank stood up and loomed over Dad. "The doctors said there wasn't anything anyone could do. She knew she was going to die, and she said she didn't want the lake sold when it wasn't going to help anyway."

Dad's jaw was clenched so that his words sounded labored, as if each one had to be quarried from stone and dragged out. "I did what I thought was best."

Frank stomped by him and jerked open the screen door, then looked back. "You know what Old Man Bunsen's going to do with it, don't you?"

Dad lit another cigarette. His voice was gravel now. "I can imagine. He's a developer. I know what developers do."

"So do I," Frank said. "They fence it all off and put up fancy apartments only rich people can afford. Mom's family always kept that lake open so everybody would be able to use it. A hundred years of thinking about other people, and you put an end to it just like that! Thanks, Dad. On behalf of all the fine citizens of Cherokee, thanks a whole hell of a lot!"

He slammed the door on Dad's reply: "She was in pain, damn it! I couldn't watch her suffer any more!"

I waited until I heard Frank stomp up the stairs, slamming that door, too. Then I carefully took his place beside Dad on the top step.

"Don't worry about Frank," I said. "He's just mad because Mom died." As soon as I'd said it, I had to clamp my mouth shut because a heavy dark bubble began filling my throat.

Dad was having trouble with his own throat. He had to clear it several times before he trusted his voice. "There were property taxes," he said. "And other expenses Frank never thought about. You know what else he doesn't think about? What a cesspool that lake is. His mother wouldn't admit it, either, even though she saw it get worse in her lifetime. The whole idea of opening it to everybody may sound noble and generous, but in they end they just spoiled it. There was a time it could have been sold to the state, made into a park, but by the time I started asking around, it was such a dump that nobody wanted it."

"Except Mr. Bunsen," I said.

Dad nodded. "That's right. And he'll turn it into something nice. He's got the money to clean up the shore and haul out the trash -- "

"-- and put up fences to keep people out."

I was surprised I'd said it, and a deep silence descended between Dad and me. I was carrying on Frank's argument, even though I didn't know if I believed it.

"You sound like your brother," Dad said finally. He sounded hurt.

"Mom, actually," I said in Frank's voice. Where was this coming from? I didn't care a damn about the lake. But I kept on. "She was worried right up till the end that you'd sell it."

Dad gave me a disappointed look and flicked his cigarette onto the sidewalk and stood up. "We all have to make choices, Jim. You'll have plenty of opportunities to make yours. So will Frank. And when the time comes, I hope your children will be a little more understanding."

After he'd gone in, I sat for a long time staring out at the stars, wondering if what the preacher had said at Mom's funeral could really be right, that her soul was at that moment winging its way toward heaven, maybe was already there. I crossed my fingers, but it didn't help much. All I could see was deep black nothingness, punctuated by mysterious pinpoints of light.

I never heard the screen door open and didn't know Frank had come out until one of his shiny black shoes nudged my arm.

"You're not bawling again, are you?"

I wiped my eyes. "Of course not."

He lit a cigarette. "Good."

Watching him exhale over my head, I thought: what if souls don't really go anywhere but just vanish on the air like smoke? I looked at his shoes again. I could almost see my face in the shine.

"Going out?" I said.

"Yeah."

"Can I come?"

He laughed. "Not likely. I got a date."

"With Janie?"

"Who else?"

I don't know what made me say what I said next. "Want me to wait up for you?"

Frank tapped my head on his way down the steps. "Sorry, but you don't qualify as my mom."

I watched the tail lights of his old convertible shrink into tiny red dots, like imploding distant stars. Then I went inside.

Lying on my bed with my clothes on and the lights off, blinking at the blackness, making out only vague shapes -- a poster of the Yankees on a wall, an airplane mobile twirling from the ceiling, my dresser with drawers halfway open, socks dangling everywhere -- I heard Dad turn on the record player in the living room and play an album so old and scratchy that it must have been one of the first he and Mom had bought, back before I was not even a thought.

Later, when all was quiet, I heard Frank come in and clomp up the stairs, his footsteps banging so hard that they shook my mobile. I waited for his door to slam, and when it did, high up in the house, just off the attic, the sound was small and insignificant, a clap of thunder in another county.

I prayed that night for God to take my mother directly up to heaven in a golden chariot and not make her lie too long under all that dirt and all those rotting leaves.

CHAPTER THREE

I was glad to stay home from school the next day. It would save me, for a while anyway, from the nervous smiles and averted eyes of all the people who knew what had happened but not what to say to me about it.

By nine, though, with Dad and Frank still asleep, I was bored.

I lay on the couch in the living room, squinting up at a cobweb high in the corner of the ceiling -- cobwebs we hadn't had when Mom was alive -- and started making a mental list of girls I'd kissed. It was disturbingly short. I was re-counting to be sure I hadn't left anybody out when the phone rang.

The lady on the other end was mad. "Let me speak to your father. Right now!"

I lied and said he was out. I didn't want him up yet. Did she want to leave a message?

"This is Martha Waterman," she said. Janie's mother. "When your father gets home, please tell him for me that, shocked and saddened as I am by your dear mother's passing, I am shocked and saddened all over again by his son's behavior toward my daughter last night."

"Frank? What did he do?"

"You'd better ask him yourself."

Click.

I went back to the couch and tried re-checking my list, but I couldn't concentrate. Besides, I had to admit that of the half-dozen girls listed so far, three I'd only kissed on the cheek, two more I'd pecked so quickly I wasn't sure it counted, and number six was my cousin, a loud fat girl who'd sat on me three years earlier and licked my face like a dog; at least that's what it felt like. To be honest, I hadn't really kissed anybody.

So what had Frank done to sweet Janie Waterman last night?

He'd gone with her since junior high, and everybody -- including her mother and probably Dad, too -- assumed they'd get married someday. She was pretty and nice and crazy about Frank. If there was one stroke against her, it was that she didn't share his passion for Woodsen Lake. But no girl in Cherokee was ever going to think Woodsen was anything but an overgrown mosquito resort, and besides, what he liked best was going down there by himself anyway.

So what horrible thing had he done to her?

"Morning, sport."

Frank yawned, buttoning his jeans on his way down the stairs. He was barefoot and shirtless. His usually slicked-back hair was in his face. "Big day off from school, huh?"

"Yeah," I said. I watched him go to the refrigerator and pour a glass of orange juice, gulp it down and pour another. I waited until he'd come over to flop down in Dad's chair before I told him about the phone call.

He listened with no expression, sipping his juice, then yawned again.

"Mrs. Waterman's a bitch."

A little tingle went up my spine. Of course I knew the word, had used it myself lots of times, but to hear my brother apply it to a grown-up lady I knew gave it a different weight, real shock value.

"So what should I tell Dad?" I said.

Frank held his glass up to the sunlight beaming in through the living room window, swirling the juice, squinting at it with one eye closed. "Nada," he said. "You took the lady's message and you passed it on to me, right? So that's it. It stops here."

"She said to tell Dad."

He stopped swirling and looked at me. "I thought she was Janie's mom. She yours, too?"

I cleared my throat. "What was it you did?"

Frank drained his glass and set it on the floor. "I left her standing in the middle of the road out by Chambers' farm," he said. "About midnight."

A new spark shot up my spine. "Why?"

He shrugged. "I told her I didn't want to see her anymore, and she got out. I asked her if she wanted a ride, and she said no. That's about it."

"Why?"

"Why what?"

"Why don't you want to see her anymore?"

Frank lit a cigarette, sucked hard and held his breath a long time. He finally blew, and the smoke engulfed me. My nostrils twitched. I sneezed.

"I'm tired of her," he said. "Now how about if I ask you a question?"

"Okay," I said, though I didn't think it would be. Something wasn't right about Frank.

He dropped his cigarette into the orange juice glass. It fizzed and sputtered and then floated there, like Warhorse for a few seconds out on Woodsen Lake. He tilted his head to look at me.

"What do you think of Dad selling the lake?"

That was a tough one because I didn't care like he did, but as soon as I said it, I'd be his enemy, like Dad already was. Or I could lie.

"Too bad," I said. There were lots of ways I could have meant it, so I wasn't exactly lying.

Frank wouldn't let me off that easy, though. He leaned forward, hands on his knees like he was about to stand and maybe jerk me out off the couch. I sank into the cushions.

"That's it?" he said. "Too bad? It's too bad when you get a B in school when you thought you were getting an A. It's too bad when your football team loses a game. It's not too bad when your own father sells the family property. It's a goddamned crime! What do you think of that?"

I got up. "I think I have to go to the bathroom."

Frank looked for a second like he wanted to hit me, but just then what sounded like a sick moose bellowed out front.

"That's Slick," I said. "I better go see what he wants before he wakes Dad."

I hit the door on the run and didn't look back.

By the time I got to the curb, Slick had stopped honking, but his jalopy was clattering away like a cheap lawnmower. "Shut it off, would you?" I said.

"She's off," he said. "Just takes her a while to wind down." He winked at me. "Like a good woman, if you know what I mean."

"You don't even know what you mean."

"Hey, I can dream, can't I?" He reached over and opened the door on my side. "Get in. We'll cruise."

"I don't know," I said. "I stayed home from school, so I don't think I ought to be out. What are you doing on the loose?"

"Lunch break." He stuck a Marlboro between his lips and plugged in the lighter. "We can cruise a while, get some fresh air. Then I'll drop you off here and go back to school. The master plan in a nutshell."

I wasn't sure I was up for Slick right then, but what would I have if I stayed home? Dad and his whiskey bottle? Frank and his bad temper? A kitchen full of tasty food that disgusted me?

I opened the door and got in.

"All right!" Slick slapped my knee. "The healing process has begun! Uh oh. I didn't mean to make a joke or anything."

"Don't worry about it," I said. "Just drive."

Slick's lighter never popped out again, so he lit his cigarette with a match and started the engine. Then he looked at me, kind of sideways.

"Hey, I know you don't feel so hot. I been in your shoes, remember? When my old man ate the last supper in Korea? Shoot, we weren't but kids, and you came over and we played catch and climbed trees all day." He flicked an ash out the window. "So there I was in algebra this morning with my head full of all those weird little x's and o's, and I said to myself, I bet Jim could stand some company about now. So it got to be lunch break and here I am! Ta da!"

"Thanks," I said. "I appreciate it. Really. But do me a favor, okay? Could we not talk for a while?"

"Hey, you got it." He zipped his lips, leaving just an opening at the corner of his mouth for the cigarette.

We were passing the Andrews' house, and I watched as Mr. Andrews, who had had a heart attack a year before, made his snail's way out to the driveway to retrieve the morning paper. A curtain fluttered in a front window; Mrs. Andrews was watching. My head felt strange, clogged and light at the same time, like the air pressure was changing. I imagined clouds gathering behind my eyeballs and a weather report: "A storm system is developing inside Jimmy Perkins, carrying with it heavy rain and possible tornadoes. Stay tuned for further information."

Slick kept quiet almost a minute. "What say we cruise Leroy's?"

I nodded. I was watching all the moms going about their business. With most of the kids in school and husbands at work, they scurried around, pushing babies in strollers down the block to each other's houses, checking the mailbox more often than they needed to, putting on gloves to work in the yard, sweeping and re-sweeping walks and curbs, or just standing on porches, staring out at nothing, one hand on the railing, as if for support.

Slick turned on the radio. It crackled and buzzed. He slapped it, and suddenly Ral Donner was crooning in his best Elvis voice, "You don't know what you've got until you lose it." Over and over until I swallowed hard and turned away, blinking out the window.

The Jiffy Dog Stand was deserted.

"So where is everybody?" I said. "I thought it was lunch break."

Slick had lit another Marlboro and was trying to blow smoke rings. "Well, it's a little early," he said. "I wanted to get a jump on the traffic."

"You mean you cut class."

"Just P.E. So I miss a few games of dodgeball. Big deal."

"They'll call your mom."

He shrugged. "She won't care. She lets me do what I want. You know that." He blew a lopsided ellipse of smoke out his window; it broke apart instantly. "Her present to me for not having a daddy, I guess."

The first customers began to arrive. Not students, but secretaries and mechanics from nearby offices and garages, a couple of housewives in a stationwagon crawling with babies, a real businessman in a pin-striped suit, a cop in his squal car, and a Greyhound busload from somewhere who spilled out into the parking lot squinting and yawning, digging into pockets and purses for lunch money.

Suddenly Slick elbowed me hard. "Action at ten o'clock! Action at ten o'clock!"

The action was a new sky-blue two-door Pontiac LeMans wheeling into the space next to us, spraying gravel all along the side of Slick's junker. I knew who it was without looking.

Gina Bunsen.

The daughter of the new owner of Woodsen Lake.

She'd obviously excused herself from school early, like Slick. She didn't look at us, just got out and strolled to the window. Slick whistled low and slid under the wheel to rub his crotch in agony.

"Jesus, Perk, look at that ass!"

Gina was spectacular-looking, and she knew it. She always walked like she was modeling whatever she had on. It was all surface, though. Down inside, she was mean as a snake. Some of it I'd seen; most I'd just heard about. Famous incidents like slugging a teacher over an "F" or getting a store clerk fired for taking too long to ring up some nail polish or vomiting beer down the front of her date's tux at the junior prom -- and getting away with it all because her daddy was rich. Spoiled to the core, a shiny rotten apple.

She placed her order and started back across the lot. She glanced at us and then away, like you might from a dead animal by the road, but then all of a sudden she looked again -- right at me. She smiled and waved. Then she got in her car and turned on her fadio and started fixing her hair in the rearview mirror.

Slick swallowed a cloud of smoke and his voice came out in gasps. "What the hell was that all about?"

"I don't know," I said. I was in shock myself. "I guess she thought I was somebody else. Let's get out of here -- fast!"

"Whoa," Slick said. "What's the hurry? If the girl likes you, I mean, hey, maybe she'd get in with us."

"Look," I said, "I don't know what she's up to, but the last thing I need is to have Henry Belew drive by and think I'm coming on to his girl. He'd beat hell out of me -- and you, too!" Henry played fullback for the Cherokee Warriors and was about the size of Slick and me combined.

Slick thought about it a second and nodded. He wasn't a total idiot.

"Tell you what, though," he said, starting up. "I think I'll just wave at our new friend on the way out. I mean, she might have been smiling at me."

Just before he pulled out, he raced the engine, which sounded like an explosion brewing in the school's boiler room, and when Gina looked over at us, he waved. She gave him the finger.

He stamped the gas pedal to the floor, trying to spin gravel. Instead the car died. His face was burning hot pink, like Gina's tight skirt. I looked over at her. She saw me looking and smiled again. I smiled back. Slick saw me.

"You think this is funny, Perkins? Well, fuck you!"

We finally got going again, chugging out of the parking lot just as the first cars from high school started arriving, all sizes and shapes and colors, like wild animals converging on a watering hole. Once on Virginia Street, Slick drove fast, the jalopy gathering speed, and pounded his fist on the steering wheel.

"What a bitch! Some day she'll get hers, and I hope I'm there to see it." He recovered quickly, as he always did, and slapped my knee. "So, sport, where you want to go?"

"I don't care," I said. And I didn't.

"I better head back to the jailhouse," he said. He meant school. "We cut up frogs in old man Wilson's class today, and I don't want to miss it. Want me to drop you home?"

I thought about Dad and Frank, grumbling through the house like two wounded bears. "I"ll go with you," I said.

He looked at me funny. "No shit?"

Out my window a young mother was helping up a crying little girl whose tricycle had tipped over.

"No shit," I said.

CHAPTER FOUR

Lunch period was over by the time we pulled into the east parking lot, out behind the band hall. Slick parked as close to the exit as he could to get a jump on traffic at the end of the day. Which meant we had a long walk to the front door, where Mr. Marshall, the principal, took roll under the guise of greeting everybody coming back from Leroy's or the DQ.

"Why Jim," he said, "what a pleasant surprise. We didn't expect to see you today."

"I didn't want to get too far behind," I muttered, trying to get past. But he wasn't finished, and he wasn't moving.

"That's an excellent attitude, son," he said. "Life goes on, and fortune favors the prepared." He came up with three or four more of his favorite sayings, all meant to boost my spirits -- and all depressing me even more -- before he finally stepped aside and let me go in. He detained Slick, though, and told him to move his car, that he was blocking the fire lane.

I heard Slick complaining as I darted inside. "I always park there!"

"I know," said Mr. Marshall. "You always wear your shirt collars up, too, despite school policy. But first things first. Move the car."

Inside, I stood in front of my locker, trying to remember what class I had right after lunch. Biology? That's what Slick had said, and we were in the same class. Suddenly I felt dizzy and leaned my head against the metal door. From behind, a hand patted my shoulder, and a voice followed, expressing sympathy. I didn't turn around, just nodded and mumbled thanks as more voices followed, clucking and murmuring at me, more hands patting my shoulders, my back.

Then the bell rang, and everyone was gone.

I had just turned around when two hands hit my shoulders, driving me back against the locker with a metallic clang. The hands were large and red. I followed them up past the thick wrists to muscular forearms and on up over biceps bulging from under the rolled-up sleeves of a plaid cotton shirt undone two buttons at the collar to accommodate a neck as wide and heavy as a piano leg, above which leered the huge pocked face of Henry Belew. He stood so close that he sucked up the air between us until I was gasping. All I could think was, He knows what happened at Leroy's, and now I'm going to die.

But what he said caught me by surprise.

"You're Frank Perkins' brother, right?"

I nodded.

He did the impossible: he got even closer. His breath was like a dragon's, hot and foul. I felt sick.

"You tell that scummy bastard he better watch his ass, you dig?"

I nodded again, though the motion nearly made me faint.

"I'm no chump," Henry said, "and he better not play me for one. You tell him that." He pulled away and let me go, even straightened my shirt collar where he'd crumpled it. "I ain't a bad guy," he said, "but I don't let nobody fuck with me. You got that?"

I leaned against my locker and chanced one more nod. I'm blacking out, I thought. But I didn't.

"Good," he said, and started off. Over his shoulder he threw back, "Sorry about your Mom."

After he'd lumbered away, I tried to open my locker but couldn't. My hand had no strength, like it had gone to sleep and was numb. It jerked around on the door handle like an animal caught in a trap. I mustered all my willpower and, using both hands, pulled as hard as I could.

The door opened. As I reached inside, a folded note, lodged in the door crack, fluttered to the floor.

"Dear Jim,

In case you come back to school tomorrow, I probably won't be there, but I'll be thinking of you. I'm so sorry about your mother. I know how you feel -- really.

Your friend always,
Sherry"

I stuck the note in my pocket, closed my locker, and was headed down the empty hall for class when I remembered what Slick had said: "We cut up frogs in old man Wilson's class today."

Just outside the classroom door the pickled odor of formaldehyde hit my nostrils, and I had to turn away. In fact, I kept on walking, leaning against lockers to keep my balance, and suddenly I was outside, in the parking lot, bent over, hands on my knees, heaving for breath as if I'd just run a race I wasn't in shape for.

I heard another bell ring. Class was starting. The frogs would be splayed on trays, gray and reeking, awaiting the scalpel. Ladies and gentlemen, start your dissection! I took a deep breath and headed out of the parking lot, on foot, at full speed.

CHAPTER FIVE

It was a fine fall afternoon, a thousand birds whistling cheerfully, the first neat piles of red and orange leaves beginning to sprout on newly mowed lawns of Bermuda and St. Augustine grasses. There was no sadness in the air; that was all in my head. A squirrel flashed down a tree-trunk and scrambled onto the walk in front of me, his mouth full of something. I stopped to give him the right-of-way. He sat there a moment on quivering haunches, his head jerking this way and that like a periscope, a compact little package of pure energy, then he dropped again to all-fours and darted up another tree. He was getting ready for winter.

I was trying to survive the fall.

By the time I reached Apple Street, I knew I was facing a dilemma. If the prospect of picking apart frog livers sickened me, so did the thought of going home. Suddenly I found myself lost between the only worlds I'd ever known, home and school, stranded on the corner like an orphan with no place to go.

But I wasn't a real orphan, like Sherry, whose crumpled note bulged in my pants pocket, reminding me that she wasn't in school today, that she was at home. My feet had already made a decision and were heading down Howell Street, away from Apple, before my brain woke up and took over navigation duties.

Sherry's apartment was on the other side of town, so to keep from being spotted by the cops -- or whoever else in a small town watches for truant boys -- I decided to keep to the back streets and alleys, following a zigzag route through the poorer parts of Cherokee.

I'd been driven through those neighborhoods in the family car, Dad always commenting that he "wouldn't insure one of those firetraps for love or money," Mom shaking her head and saying "how said it must be to make your children grow up that way." I'd ridden my bike, too, before the chain broke and Mom got sick and nothing around our house got fixed, dodging huge potholes at every turn, pedaling like a racer past dismal shacks, head tucked into my shoulders, half-expecting a hailstorm of beer bottles at any minute.

I'd been driven there, and I'd ridden a bike, but I'd never walked, and when I stopped off the smooth pavement of College Avenue that afternoon and onto the first ragged un-named street, I entered a different world.

From all sides came the cries of babies too hot or too cold or just hungry, the angry slamming of doors, the rhythmical moans of engines laboring in vain to convert that last feeble spark from a worn-out rusted plug into one more trip to Woodsen Lake for a catfish or squirrel dinner. I watched my feet and tried to tune it all out, and when I finally looked up, I was surprised to find myself out of the Negro section.

You wouldn't know it by looking: the houses here were no less rickety, the lawns no bigger or more lush, the ditch beside the road just as smelly and overgrown. The only difference was that the squealing kids I saw darting barefoot between shacks were white: a little girl with blond pigtails chased by a boy about the same age, waving a lasso over his bald head, shaved most likely for ringworm.

This was Milltown.

Like some of the Negroes, those lucky enough to find jobs at all, these people mainly worked for the textile mill, a big dirty squat building on the edge of town dwarfed by a towering smokestack, smudged dark gray from bottom to top, that coughed black clouds day and night. The people who worked at the mill coughed, too, not just from smoke but from breathing in the chemicals and the tiny wisps of fabric that caught first in their machines and then in their lungs. They made a few cents more an hour than their black counterparts, but in most ways their lives were carbon copies: working until they dropped, doing something they didn't want to do for somebody they didn't even know.

Mom always she felt even sorrier for the whites at the mill than for the Negroes because the whites knew they were supposed to be doing better. The Negroes knew it was it the best they could do and accepted it with a kind of stoicism. The whites, who thought they were superior, just couldn't figure out how to do better. And after a shift at the mill, they had no energy left for figuring. There was always energy for fighting, though, and when you heard a police siren on a Saturday night, you could put money down where it was headed and not get any takers.

As if on cue, somebody yelled something, and I didn't wait to see if it was directed at me. I took off running.

I'm no athlete, and it wasn't long before my side started to hurt and I had to stop. As I stood gasping against a telephone pole, it occurred to me that if Mom had been there, she would have warned me about the oily creosote from the pole soaking the back of my shirt. But she wasn't there.

She wasn't anywhere.

And I didn't know where I was, either.

I seemed to have run right out of the town. The railroad tracks were behind me; I didn't even remember crossing them. Ahead lay nothing but brown fields, a scattering of tiny farmhouses, a horizon full of gray clouds. I stood a moment trying to get my bearings; I had to squint up at the sun to know which direction was which.

Suddenly the notion hit me that I could just keep on walking, away from town, across the fields. Where would I end up? I'd read books about boys no older than me running away from home to join the army or sign up on whaling ships and then coming home all grown up, money in their pockets, a swagger in their steps.

Why not me?

I knew why not, and the idea petered out as quickly as it had come, a pretty firefly blinking out. I could try to tell myself it was because I had obligations -- to Dad, to Frank, to my grandparents, to my teachers, to anybody and everybody -- but I knew the real reason I couldn't just up and leave was that I was too chicken. I'd been spoiled by having a mother who loved me and who made home my favorite place to be. It had never occurred to me to run away, and now that I might have a good reason, now that she was gone and home wasn't such a refuge anymore, I didn't have any clue how to do it.

I steopped onto the railroad and began walking along the ties. I knew the tracks curved around the outskirts of town and would sooner of later deliver me to my destination, which I took to be a mile or so away. The ties were spaced just short of my stride, so I had to keep my eyes down all the time, which occupied my brain on a very low level -- basic visual perception -- and that I welcomed. I'd walked only a few minutes when somebody called to me.

"Hi."

She was sitting on the porch steps of a house worse than any I'd seen so far, its shingles so eroded as to expose gaping holes through which the rain must have fallen in buckets, the boards on the sides not only unpainted but actually falling off, the windows mostly broken and taped back together. If I hadn't seen her sitting there, elbows on knees, looking at me, I would have thought the house abandoned. Pretty and dark-skinned, wearing a bright red dress, shiny black hair pulled back and fastened with colorful shell combs, she looked like some exotic bird landed by mistake in a dump.

"I've never seen you down here before," she said. "Are you lost?"

I knew her, or thought I did, but I couldn't place her face or come up with her name. "I'm looking for Hillview Apartments," I said. "I guess I've got a way to go, huh?"

"Not too far," she said. "Your name's Jim, isn't it? Jim Perkins?"

"That's right," I said. Then I remembered hers. "And you're Angel."

She looked surprised. "Most guys think my name's Pocahontas. At least that's what they call me."

"Most guys are idiots," I said.

What I didn't say was that I'd almost called her Pocahontas, too, and had caught myself just in time. I knew her real name because I'd heard teachers call it often when she didn't show up for school. She and her dad, the only Indians left in a town named after her tribe, were so poor that she had to work in the garden out back of her house just to have something to eat, or even accompany her father to Woodsen to lay rabbit traps or fish all day.

"Why do you want to Hillview? You know somebody there?"

"Yeah," I said.

She stood up and came down the steps. She stopped a little way off and leaned against a hackberry tree. "We were supposed to move there this fall, but my dad said no. I kind of wanted to. I mean, anything would be better than -- " She gestured toward the eyesore behind her.

"Too bad," I said. "There's kids our age there. You might have made some new friends."

She cocked her head. "Who's there?"

"Well, Sherry Fountain for one."

"She the one whose parents died?"

"Yeah."

"She your girlfriend?"

I looked away, past the broken-down house to the garden behind, with its tall green cornstalks and huge bowing sunflowers.

"She's a friend," I managed.

"That who you're going to see?"

"Yeah."

Suddenly from behind her came a commanding voice.

"Angel! Come in here! Now!"

I looked. On the porch, hands on hips, stood her father. I'd seen him only a few times before. He looked smaller in person, older, more stooped. And even more exotic than Angel, with his graying hair pulled back in long braids, his white cotton shirt full-cut with billowing sleeves, like a pirate's. His eyes almost shone, even at that distance.

"You have work to do!"

"I'll be right in, Daddy," she said. "I'm just talking to someone from school."

"I know who you're talking to," he said, fixing me with those glowing eyes. "And I want you to come in the house now!" He turned and went in, banging the screen door behind him.

"I guess I better go on," I said. "Nice talking to you."

Angel started backing toward the house. "Hillview is right around the next bend in the tracks. Look for the sign that says Pearsall Street."

"Thanks," I said. "See you in school?"

"Maybe."

"Angel!"

"Coming!"

She waved and disappeared into the dark little house.

Through the torn screen I saw her father's face appear, like a ghost seen dimly through smoked glass. He stood staring at me until I turned and headed down the tracks, his eyes like knives in my back.

CHAPTER SIX

Hillview, which wasn't on a hill and had no view, consisted of rows of one-story red brick barracks, each divided into unfurnished apartments. Sherry had come to Hillview a year earlier with her older brother when both her parents were killed in a car wreck. For a while, they'd been shuffled among relatives, but that hadn't worked well. The aunts and uncles were too spread out, and most of them were poor and had more mouths than they could feed as it was, so Sherry and Mike never felt really welcomed anywhere and more than once came back to town to stay with friends. Finally it was decided that, since he was a senior in high school, and an honor student, they might be better off staying in Cherokee, where at least they could be checked on regularly by the authorities. In another year, when Mike would go off to college somewhere, everybody concerned could sit down again and discuss Sherry's future, but for now, Hillview seemed the most humane solution.

In the meantime, Mike had gone off to college, leaving Sherry, age fifteen, alone in the apartment at Hillview, looking after herself.

Sherry wasn't just a friend, like I'd told Angel; she was my first real love. I'd met her a year before at the Ritz, Cherokee's only movie theater. Sitting behind her, not knowing she was the same girl our class had taken up contributions for a few weeks earlier, I'd spent the first hour or so making smart-ass remarks designed the impress the sweet-smelling bubble of hair in front of me. Finally she'd half-turned in her seat and whispered, "Listen, whoever-you-are, I paid my money to listen to them talk, not you. You just ruined the movie for me. You owe me a ticket."

So I did the boldest thing I'd done up till then: I asked her to the movies with me the next Saturday. My treat. She said, "Okay, if I don't have to sit with you." But she did sit with me, that Saturday and every Saturday from then on. About the third time, I dared to drape an arm over the back of her seat. Once in the drugstore, after the movie -- no, twice! -- I held her hand under the booth table. And outside the Ritz one night, after we'd known each other a while, I forced a kiss on her. It wasn't a very good one, and I'm not sure which of us was more disappointed.

Mainly we talked. On the phone, in person, in notes. About what? At fourteen, what do a boy and a girl talk about for hours? Nothing in particular. They talk, as we talked, just to hear the other's voice.

Now we were both fifteen, and I was standing outside her apartment, knowing only that I hadn't seen her for weeks, that I wanted to more than anything, but at the same time wondering what I was going to say to her, why I was even here.

"Hey you!"

The voice, male and nasty, maybe drunk, came from behind.

I knocked on her door quickly, and hard.

"Sherry don't need no teenie-weenie hot dogs," the voice sneered. "Not when she's got prime round steak right across the walk!"

I waited. And waited. Sherry, please!

A short, hard laugh. "Maybe I oughta call the copes. Tell 'em there's a juvenile delinquent out here skippin' school."

I pounded on the door. Open up, damn it!

"Hey, I'm talkin' to you, boy! You with the greasy hair and the puke-green sweater! You hear me?"

One, two, three, and then I'm gone. One . . . two . . .

The door opened. Sherry was in her bathrobe, her hair in curlers.

"Jim! What are you doing here? Is school out early?"

The voice: "Shut the goddamned door, Sherry! Let me get my pants on and I'll come out there and kick his bony ass all the way back home to his mama!"

I closed my eyes. "Sherry, let me in . . . please?"

She grabbed my arm and pulled me inside, closing the door and then locking it. She put a finger to her lips. When the heavy knock came, I half-expected to hear: "Little pig, little pig, let me come in!"

Sherry stood back from the door, with me behind her.

"Go away, Gerald," she said. "It's all right. He's just a friend from school."

The pounding intensified. I thought the door might actually break. I thought of battering rams at the gates. "Get the fuck away from the door, Sherry. I'm comin' in!"

"Gerald, no! He's just filling me in on what I missed in school! Honest!" A pause. "Okay?"

A longer pause, during which my life passed before my eyes. It was boring. Then the ogre at the door snickered.

"Okay, baby, just don't let the squirt in your pants. Don't let the squirt squirt in your pants. Get it?"

Sherry leaned against the door, her eyes closed. "I get it, Gerald. I'll talk to you later, okay?"

One last violent fist against the door. Sherry and I both jumped.

When finally she could be sure he was gone, Sherry turned around, lifting one of the quilted lapels of her robe to dab at her eyes. When I made a move toward her -- to do what? -- she waved at me with the other hand.

"Sit down, Jim. Please."

I sat on the sofa, holding to one arm to keep from sinking into the hole in the middle. "I guess I picked a bad time," I said.

She sniffled and cleared her throat. "It's all right. I'm glad to see you. Want some Coke?"

"Sure."

She went into the kitchen, patting at my arm on the way without actually looking at me.

While I waited, I looked around the apartment. I'd been here before, so I wasn't surprised to see the family portrait on the table: the two smiling kids and their smiling parents, all looking like the last thing on their minds was someday not being together, not being a family. The furniture I'd seen, too: the sway-backed sofa I sat on, the coffee table with its wood-colored vynl top peeling up in strips like tape from a poorly sealed package, the upholstered chairs so broken-down that they reminded me of old men sprawled on their butts on the thin carpet, arms lifted pitifully for help. Without looking, I knew what was in the dark tiny kitchen: an ancient refrigerator the size of an up-turned footlocker, counter space for maybe two cups and saucers, a stove you could put in the trunk of your car and take on a camping trip, a tiny rickety chrome table and two wobbly chairs. The whole apartment was just one big collection of things that nobody wanted anymore. It looked like a window display at the Salvation Army store.

Sherry came back in, carrying two glasses of Coke. No ice. She set them down on the coffee table and sat on the end of the sofa, tilting toward the middle but not seeming to notice. She was used to it.

"The freezer's broken," she said, keeping her eyes away from me, toward the small aluminum-framed front window with its see-through woven curtains. "But the Coke's been in the fridge, so it ought to be cold."

I took a drink. "Perfect."

Sherry peered into her glass without drinking. "I'm sorry about your mother," she said.

I took another drink, fast, to have an excuse to swallow. "Thanks. And thanks for the note. It helped."

"I would have gone to funeral," she said, "but I didn't think I could sit through another one."

"Sure," I said. "It wasn't much fun."

She smiled a little, then looked up at the ceiling, took a deep breath and let it out, slow. "I'm sorry about Gerald, too."

She looked up for so long that I finally did, too. Her ceiling was dirty, like ours now that Mom was gone, harboring the same kinds of cobwebs in the corners.

"Sometimes he can be very sweet," she said, "although I'm sure that's hard to believe. Once he loaned us money for groceries." She swirled her Coke with her finger. "Another time I had to call the police when he tried to break the door down."

"Like just now," I said.

"He was drunk just now. He's on the night shift at the mill, and he works up a lot of steam in he afternoon before he has to go back on."

"He's pretty gross," I said. "Steam or no steam."

Sherry's jaw tightened, as did her hand around her Coke. "So are a lot of other people," she said. "Your friend Slick, for instance."

"Maybe I should just leave," I said. Thinking of the maniac across the walk, who no doubt was watching the door, I was relieved when Sherry shook her head.

"No. Tell me what happened at school."

She setttled back into the couch and closed her eyes, ready to hear some gossip that might take her mind, for a while, off her own troubles.

I wracked my brain. No luck.

She opened her eyes. "Jim?"

I swallowed the rest of my warm Coke and shrugged. "Well, to be honest, I wasn't at school very long this morning. I mean, I went, and I was planning to stay all day, but -- uh -- oh boy."

My voice was crumbling, and I blinked hot tears.

A hand crept down the sofa, in and out of the sinkhole in the middle, and found mine. "It's all right," she said. "I felt the same way. Still do sometimes."

"Want to go see a movie?" I said, out of nowhere. I hadn't known I was going to say it.

Sherry looked surprised, too. "Yeah. Sure. Why not?"

What I really felt like doing was being alone with her in the dark theater, holding her hand, but that was harder to say.

"What's on this weekend?" I said instead.

She made a face. "Tarantula, which I don't want to see again."

I looked at her. "Again? You've already seen it?"

She nodded, not looking up.

"When? It just started Monday, right?"

She frowned. "Yeah, I guess. I saw it sometime this week. Maybe Tuesday."

"Tuesday night, you mean?"

"Yeah, Tuesday night. What's wrong with Tuesday night?"

What was wrong was that kids our age in Cherokee didn't get to go to movies on week nights. We went on weekends, mostly Saturday afternoons. You had to be at least sixteen to prowl the night. Parents were pretty united on that policy. It took a wild kid to flaunt it.

Or an orphan.

I could see that Sherry knew what I was thinking.

She said, "You might be thinking that being on your own is great, that you get to do whatever you want, whenever you want. But there's a bad side, too." She kept her eyes away from mine, on the far window, which looked out on a drainage ditch. "I get lonely at night, Jim. And scared. Mike stays at the library all the time, studying for college entrance exams. So when somebody asks me to go out, sometimes I go."

"Somebody?" I said. "Like who?"

She shrugged. "Whoever."

I couldn'tlook at her. I joined her in staring at the window. "You mean girls, right?"

"Usually."

"But not always?"

"Let's talk about something else, okay?"

"Do you go out with Godzilla?"

"What?"

"That guy next door. Do you go see movies with him?"

"No!"

"I bet he'd like Tarantula. Remind him of his family."

She looked at me and her eyes were shining. Her voice shook. "Why don't you come back when you're in a better mood?" And she went into the bedroom and shut the door.

I left.

Outside, the voice was waiting for me: "Hey! Hey you! Yeah, you wiht the teenie weenie! You put that weenie in Sherry's bun? Did you? If you did, I'll kill you! In fact, I'll you anyway! Wait there!"

I was halfway to town before he got his pants on.

CHAPTER SEVEN

I ran all the way down Pine to Main and then up Main, my heart banging so loud in my ears that I didn't even hear Slick's jalopy rumble and cough up beside me. He had to honk to get my attention. He leaned across the seat with a goofy grin.

"Hey man, if you're in a race, you won! Ain't nobody for a mile in back of you!" He threw open the door. "Get in. I'll take you home. No questions asked. Scout's honor."

For once he was true to his word, asking me nothing, just filling me in about school and how I hadn't missed anything, or been missed, except by Mr. Ross in Chemistry, who took roll like he was checking off elements on the periodic table, and by Mrs. Preston, who taught Civics and who was so nice she hadn't made a big deal out of it but had just reminded the class that I was going through a hard time and needed to find my own way for a while. I closed my eyes and rested my head on the greasy back of the seat, letting the familiar aroma of mildew and cigarette smoke lull me, comfort me.

When I felt the car come to a stop, sliding in gravel, and opened my eyes again, I was surprised to see that I wasn't home. I blinked a few times, and the Jiffy Dog Stand came into focus. I looked at Slick.

"Hey, the heap's got a mind of its own." He slapped my knee. "What you want? I'll buy."

"I don't care," I said, and I didn't. "A Coke, I guess. Thanks."

While he took his place in the order line, I leaned back and watched, through half-closed eyes, the hypnotic stream of cars circling and circling through the lot like the film of a boring small-town parade played over and over, the same cars following the same tired route, the same familiar faces framed by the same open windows. Jack Diamond, looking pissed because he hadn't gotten to park his purple Corvette and let envious guys and car-struck girls run their hands over its glittering paint job; Ackie Smith with his big hairy arm around Jill Bergstrom, the cheerleader, showing off his new prize; Barry Manford in his hotrod fifty Ford, jacked up in back and blowing dark smoke, drawing the hoots and coughs he'd hoped for; the country club girls of the junior class, Linda and Julie and Susan, sliding through in somebody's daddy's Buick, not even bothering to look out their windows, chattering among themselves; and on and on.

Slick came back with the Cokes and shoved a basket of hot greasy fries under my nose. "Try some of these, too. I already doused 'em."

Doused 'em with ketchup, he meant. Half a bottle at least. I wasn't hungry -- would I ever be again? -- but I fished out a couple anyway and tilted my head back to drop them into my mouth, like a baby bird taking worms.

Slick elbowed me. "Enemy at two o'clock. Mayday, mayday!"

Two o'clock. My side. I turned my head, and all I could see was a huge expanse of white T-shirt stretched tight over a bulging stomach and chest. Two large hairy forearms and a massive red face dropped down, almost filling my window.

Henry Belew grinned at me. "I hope you gave your asshole brother the message," he said. "He shows his skinny butt around here today, it's mine." He laughed and walked away to join a few of his over-sized buddies leaning against a car. Football practice had evidently been canceled or ended early.

"What message, man?" Slick said, lighting a cigarette while one still burned in the ashtray.

In a breathless squeak that made me glad no girls were close by, I told him about my run-in with Henry at school.

"So why's he after your brother?"

"I don't know."

"You didn't ask?"

"I was too busy trying not to pass out."

"Oh man," Slick moaned, licking his lips. He loved it, the bastard. "Did you tell Frank that Belew was after him?"

Shit. I hadn't.

I mumbled something and folded my arms across my chest to muffle my pounding heart. Okay, so I hadn't told him, but he wouldn't be here today. Why would he? He never came here. He hated places like this. In fact, you couldn't love the quiet of the woods like he did and not be a little disgusted by the human carnival at Leroy's.

In my side mirror, one of the football boys was pouring something into Henry's Coke from a brown paper sack. They were all getting louder, laughing more, smashing each other's shoulders more often and harder.

Slick elbowed me again. I was just about to elbow him back when he said, "You won't believe what just arrived at ten o'clock."

It was Gina Bunsen's new LeMans, and Frank was behind the wheel. She sat so close that they looked like a two-headed monster taught to drive.

Slick whistled low. "Wow. Why didn't you tell me your brother was punching Gina Bunsen?"

I hadn't told him because I didn't know. Who could have even imagined it? Actually, though, it made a certain sense. Gina had had a crush on Frank for years, ever since he was voted Most Handsome as a freshman (although he'd passed up the ceremony, saying it was phony, choosing instead to camp out alone at Woodsen). Still, he'd never paid any attention to her. What was going on?

I thought -- hoped -- they would just drive on through, since there weren't any open parking places, but Henry and his goons had other plans. They formed a chain, a defensive line, across the exit and stood, hands on hips, defiant, drunk, menacing.

The LeMans stopped, and Henry's crew descended on it like a swarm of ants -- big brawny ants -- on a legless grasshopper, banging fists on the hood and top and windows, bouncing up and down on the bumpers, yelling and laughing, daring Frank to get out. Gina leaned her head out and told Henry to get his fat ass away from her car. He shot her the finger and bounded harder.

"He oughta gun it," Slick said. "Leave 'em all in the gravel."

But Frank showed no sign of trying to escape. He sat with both hands on the wheel, staring straight ahead. What was he thinking? Now Henry was off the car and standing in front of it, eyes bleary but aimed generally at the windshield.

"That's my girl in there, Frank!" he yelled. "Nobody takes my girl! Nobody!"

Gina got out, slamming the door, shoving her way through the crowd that was forming around the car. She pushed right up into Henry's face, her eyes almost glowing.

"I'm not anybody's damn girl, Henry Belew! Least of all yours! Now you and your apes get the hell away from my car!"

At first Henry didn't know what to say, witty comebacks not being his strong suit. He just grinned a little uneasily. Then, without warning, he bent down and, just like hitting the a scrawny halfback with the ball, planted a shoulder in Gina's stomach and straightened up, lifting her high in the air. He began turning around and around, and the more she kicked and spit and cursed, the faster he turned.

The crowd loved it.

Munching corn dogs and fries, slurping Cokes, they clapped and cheered. In a little town like Cherokee, you took your entertainment where you could find it. Besides, most people in the lot thought Gina was a stuck-up bitch who deserved a little humiliation.

By the time Frank made up his mind to get out, Henry's turns were slowing down, his feet were getting in the way of each other, and just as the car door shut, he suddenly stooped and dumped Gina off. They both went staggering in different directions, Henry into the midst of his football buddies, Gina into Frank's arms.

"You sonofabitch!" she screamed. "You goddamn sonofabitch!"

Slick and I traded quick glances. As I said, Cherokee was a small town. Girls didn't talk that way, at least not in public. It was just one more sign that Gina Bunsen wasn't like most girls.

She pushed away from Frank and stood, wobbly, facing Henry. "You fat-ass bastard! I've wanted to dump you for a long time! I don't know why I waited so long! Now get out of my way! I want a Coke!"

She started for the order window, but Frank caught her arm. "I'll get it. Why don't you go sit in the car and cool off, okay?"

Not used to being ordered around by boys, Gina started to puff up, but Frank said something to her real low, so only she could hear, and smiled at her, and all of a sudden the fight went right out of her. She nodded and, shooting Henry a dirty look, got into the LeMans on the passenger side and sat there, arms folded, silently steaming.

Henry stepped in front of Frank halfway to the order window.

"That's my girl," he said.

Slick was elbowing me so hard I had to press myself against my door to get out of his reach. Anyway I didn't need him to tell me what was about to hit the fan. Even more red-faced than before, and puffying, Henry swayed as he stood there, and his shirt was hanging out in front. He blinked like he couldn't keep Frank in focus. He saw him well enough, though, to stick a finger in his face.

"You know what's good for you, you'll butt out!"

I tried to read Frank's face. Was he afraid? I thought about riding home from the cemetery and how the strain showed in all our faces in one way or another: Grandma weeping quietly, Grandpa ranting, Dad staring out the window to hide his grief, me sniffling and blinking back tears. All our faces except Frank's, that is. The wooden Indian, Grandpa called him sometimes. Or as sweet Janie Waterman, his ex-girlfriend, had written in his yearbook: "I hope someday to get to know the man behind the mask." Not likely, it seemed. But I didn't know him either, and neither did anyone else, except maybe Mom, and she was gone from us.

For sure Henry didn't know him, though they'd grown up together. Same Boy Scout troop. Same Little League baseball teams. But in the past few years, they'd parted ways. Henry had bulked up and dumbed down; Frank had slimmed down and gotten more serious, even moody. Henry thought Frank had gotten weird and had said so publicly, and often; what Frank thought of Henry was anyone's guess.

"You stole my girl, Frank," Henry said. "Nobody does that."

Gina was halfway out her window, screaming at Henry. "Nobody stole me from nobody! I do what I please!"

Henry didn't even look at her. His eyes saw only Frank, tall and lean and seeming to be half-smiling, as if to say, "She's mine now, you loser, and you don't even know why." I'd never seen Frank in a fight, but I'd heard he'd had one years before, when he was in junior high, and the other guy went home with a bloody nose. Frank was like a forest animal, some kind of cat, looking all sleepy but suddenly full of force, all fangs and claws. I'd always been afraid of him and thought Henry should be, too. I could see his fists clenching and unclenching at his sides. It was only a matter of time.

But Frank only said, "I don't think she wants to be your girlfriend anymore, Henry."

I flinched. So did Slick, who now had three cigarettes going, one in his hand, one in his mouth, and another one in the ashtray. "Shit!" he said. "He blew it!" Slick wasn't often right, but this time he was.

It happened fast. Gina yelled something from the LeMans. Frank turned his head. Henry lurched forward with a grunt and windmilled a fist right into Frank's nose. Frank went down to his knees and then onto all fours, dripping blood into the gravel.

Slick grabbed my knee and hung on, like a drowning man clinging to anything dry floating by. "Oh shit! What now? What the fuck now?" His ashes drifted over us like fall-out from a volcano. "Stay down," he said to Frank. "Stay down, man. Don't let him hit you again."

But Frank got up, blood all over his face, and said, "Okay, Henry, you had your shot. Do I get mine now?"

Henry looked confused and then alarmed. "Sorry, Frank, but I had to defend my claim, didn't I?"

His strong-arm buddies backed him up, standing behind him like the team they were.

Frank wiped at the blood on his face with his arm. "You took a cheap at me, Henry. Do I get to take one at you?"

But then Gina was out of the car and between them. She shoved Henry so hard that he fell back a few steps and had to brace himself on a car behind him to keep his balance.

"Fine," she said to Henry. "You had your fun. Now get the fuck back to your cage, King Kong."

She shoved him again, and he let himself be shoved, back and back until he was in the arms of his buddies, who looked puzzled and embarrassed and, not knowing what else to do, shouted some stuff at Gina and then hustled Henry into a car and spun gravel out of the lot.

Most of the crowd in the parking lot went back to what they were doing before -- flirting, getting into each other's cars, eating corn dogs and drinking Cokes, spiked with whatever liquor a teen could get someone older to buy -- and soon the lot was just as it had been before. When Gina's LeMans left the lot, there was a lull in conversations, like a hearse was passing, but it didn't last long. The Great Fight they'd anticipated had been like a brief comet flitting through the great void of their small-town existence, a blip on the screen: exciting for a moment, gone and forgotten the next.

In Slick's car, things were different. We were both, in our own ways, shocked. My way was to sit silent as a statue, hoping my heart would slow down, my normal breathing would start again. Slick's way was to sit behind the wheel engulfed in smoke, shaking his head and muttering, "Oh shit, did you see what I saw?" over and over.

"I want to go home," I said finally.

If I'd expected a protest from Slick, I was mistaken. "Me, too," he said.

By the time we pulled up to the curb in front of my house, Slick had recovered. He took a last drag from his cigarette and flipped the butt into my yard. "Want to cruise tonight?"

I opened the door. "I don't know. Call me, okay?"

"Hey, no sweat." He slapped my knee. "Check you later."

I stepped outside and banged the door closed. Then I leaned back in. "Hey, I appreciate you picking me up today. I was sort of out of it."

He grinned and started the jalopy. "Yeah, I thought you looked like somebody in a hurry to go nowhere." He gave me a thumbs-up, revved the engine, and said, "Better stand back. Launch time." He floored it. It died. The second try worked, and he rumbled off, belching fumes and black oil clouds.

Frank's car, an old Chevy that needed a paint job, wasn't in the driveway, but Dad's was, so I dawdled outside a few minutes. I didn't feel like talking right then, especially about the incident at LeRoy's. That was Frank's problem. Let him deal with it when he came home.

I sat a while on the front steps, leaning back against a wooden pillar, gazing up at the autumn-drowsy wasps buzzing around their intricate paper nest in a corner of the porch ceiling, patrolling for enemies. Once that would have been me, with a stick, but these days I had no heart for the battle. It wasn't that I'd grown more afraid of being stung; I just didn't want to kill anything.

I looked down at Mom's flowerbeds, where a few sturdy-looking tumblebugs were rolling marble-sized balls of dog doo, pushing and pushing, then sprawling backwardly with each strenuous effot, but always scrambling right back up to resume the task at hand, heading God-knew-where with their nasty booty. I sensed a lesson there but chose not to figure it out. Later, maybe. Much later.

The sun dipped into the roof across the street, and I decided I had to go in.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Dad was in the easy chair in the living room, his back to the door, the floor lamp on beside him. He didn't hear me come in, which gave me hope that I could sneak past all the way to my room, where I could spend some time re-grouping before having to talk to him. I tiptoed across the room until I was directly behind him. Two more steps and I'd be through the door, which, luckily, was open.

But my next step brought a loud creaking from the old floorboards, and I stopped, holding my breath. He didn' even turn his head. Maybe he was asleep. He look like it, though. He wasn't snoring, and his head wasn't on his chest. I stood a moment staring down at the spot on the back of his head, up near the top, where the hair had stopped growing, allowing a small circle of flesh to emerge, like a pool in the forest, smooth and shining, as if his scalp were trying to return to a more natural state. On the table to his left sat a glass half-filled with something light-brown. No ice cubes. I leaned over him to see what he was looking at.

The family album.

In fact, the earliest version, featuring just him and Mom (and, toward the end, baby Frank). He had it open to pictures of their wedding day. I decided it was time to make my move.

Slowly, carefully, I backed up a couple of steps and then proceeded forward, noisily, almost stamping my feet. Dad turned around.

"Well, hi, Jim. I didn't hear you come in."

"Hi," I said. "I saw you were reading, so I tried to close the door real quiet."

"I wasn't reading exactly," he said. "Just looking at old pictures. Have you ever seen your mother on her wedding day?"

"Yeah, I think so." I squinted at the album he was holding up. "Oh yeah. Reall pretty."

"More than pretty," he said. "Radiant."

"Yeah, that too." I yawned. "Well, I'm on my to my room, if that's okay. I wouldn't mind a little nap."

"Wait a sec," he said, closing the album. "Can we talk?"

I groaned, at least inside. "Sure," I said. I yawned again. "But I really am tired."

"Me, too," he said. His eyes were red and bleary, and not just from lack of sleep. He reached for the drink but caught himself in time and folded his hands in his lap. He forced himself to smile at me, but it was a smile molded from warm clay, drooping at the corners.

"How was school?"

My first thought was: he knows I skipped out. But then I realized he didn't, that he was doing just what I'd known he would do: pretend to be interested because that what Mom would have done. How was school? Tell me one thing you learned. Are you hungry?

I shrugged. "It was okay."

"Are you hungry?" he said. "We've still got lots of food in the kitchen. I could heat up something."

I shook my head and made a face. "No thanks. My stomach's been a little queasy all day, actually." I congratulated myself on that one: it would come in handy if he found out I'd skipped school.

Our silence ballooned until it filled the room, making it hard to breathe. It had been Mom who had made us a real family. Now that she was gone, Dad and Frank and I had become just three guys sharing a house. Roommates with nothing to say to each other.

I was about to make my escape when Dad said, "I haven't seen Frank all day. I wonder if he went back to school."

"Beats me," I said. I started backing away. "I need to go. Can we talk some more later?"

He waved at me. "Sure, sure. You've probably got homework."

I was almost to my room when he said, "Oh, by the way, if you see Frank before I do, tell him that Janie Waterman's been calling all day. She sounded upset. Did they have a fight?"

I let the door close on my answer: "Better ask him yourself."

In my room, I sat on the edge of the bed and took off my shoes and socks. I tossed the first sock into a basket in the corner. Mom had put it there years before and trained (or tricked) me into using it, encouraging me to shoot socks at it from a distance, and keep score. From a cheap gold metal frame on my desk she smiled at me, proud that I hadn't turned out to be a slob. Proud, too, that I studied hard and made good grades. I felt her arm around my shoulders, her lips against my cheek, her voice in my ear.

The second sock didn't come anywhere near the basket.

Lying back on my bed, I gazed up at a plastic mobile Dad had bought me when I turned twelve, a carousel of airplanes depicting the history of aviation. In the cool autumn breeze filtering through my window screen, they circled slowly, bouncing along at different levels, as if kept on their correct flight paths by some unseen controller, all in the same endless orbits around the same empty space, around and around, the double-wingers and the prop transports and the modern fighter jets and swollen airliners, all bobbing in and out of unseen air pockets, going nowhere.

I closed my eyes, but the darkness brought no relief. It was too crowded. Dad was there, drinking on the sly, staggering through a fog of grief; Frank grinned out of a parody of a family picture, his arm around Gina Bunsen; Sherry huddled in her rundown government apartment, trying to ignore the howling wolf next door; Slick, pimply-faced and posturing, puffed bad advice at me through a cloud of smoke; Janie surfaced, too, as a pair of deep dark irises that wept continually. I tried to locate my mother in the black void but couldn't; even her voice was so far away that it didn't seem real.

I must have drifted off to sleep, because at some point my eyelids popped open. At first I couldn't see -- all was fluid -- but gradually the airplanes slowly spun into view, jolting clumsily around and around in the gathering dusk. I was so tired I couldn't even move my fingers. I lay for a while imagining I was paralyzed, like in a car wreck. Who would take care of me? Dad? Frank? Not Mom, for sure. Sherry? Ha! She probably hated my guts. No, I would most likely just lie there and die of starvation, and then rot. The boy with no mother. The boy with nothing.

After a while, I got bored feeling sorry for myself and sat up and swung my legs over the edge of the bed. I was thirsty. What time was it? The room was almost dark. I switched on my lamp. Seven-thirty. I'd been out of commission for almost three hours.

I walked barefoot out into the living room. Dad wasn't there.

Good.

As I made my way through the dark dining room, an overpowering smell enveloped me, so deep and strong as to be part of the air itself. There was no mistaking what it was. I knew even before I turned on the light what I would see. I held my breath and hit the switch.

Food. A table full. A room full. Going bad.

Everything the church ladies and neighbors had brought was still where it had been set. No one had put anything away for two whole days. It looked the same, except for the flies gathered for the feast, some circling slowly, looking for a tasty landing pot, others already slogging over the mashed potato mountains, poking their heads into caves of roast turkey, lining the edges of soup and gravy bowls, silently slurping. Some of the food could probably be saved -- the rolls, the pickled beets, maybe an uncut pie or two -- but the meal loaf looked deader than dead, and the aroma of the once-delicious casseroles was drifting closer and closer to an outright odor. A stench.

I should do something, I thought, and even got so far as picking up a tray of limp vegetables -- celery and carrot sticks and broccoli -- along with a small container of some kind of white cheesy muck to dip them into, before something in me rebelled. Why should I have to clean up all this? What about Dad? Frank?

To hell with it, I decided. I could wait as long as they could.

I set the tray back down, got a Coke from the refrigerator and went out, turning the light off in the dining room. I closed the door, too. God help the next person who opened it.

Dad was working in his office, and as I was tiptoeing by, trying to get out front and into the fresh air, he heard me and called out.

"Frank?"

I stuck my head in his door. "Just me, Dad."

He was at his desk, with all sorts of papers spread out. It didn't look like was working, though; more like was surveying the ruins, maybe wondering, like me, whether he'd ever have the energy to do anything again. A fresh glass of brown stuff was making a ring on one of the stacks of papers. His eyes were glazed, and he slurred a little when he talked.

"I thought it might be Frank. Any idea what's keeping him?"

Gina Bunsen, I didn't say, though I was tempted to. "Who knows?" I said instead. "Out cruising around, I guess."

"Janie hasn't called back. Maybe they got together."

"Yeah, maybe so." I wanted to escape. "I think I'll go outside and talk a walk."

"Just a minute," he said. He tried to look sincere, fatherly, but his eyes were having trouble focusing. "Do we need to talk, Jim?"

God no, I thought, but I said, "I don't think so."

"We can talk if you want. About anything. I want you to always feel like you can come to me. No problem too big, no problem too small. Understand?"

The way he said it -- "unnerstand" -- sent a shiver through me, but all I said was, "Sure. And thanks."

He nodded, looking relieved. "Good, good." He sat there a moment, blinking, like he was trying to figure out if there was something else he was supposed to say.

It was now or never. I started edging toward the door. "Well, I'll be out walking. Then I've got some homework to do. If I don't see you before bedtime, goodnight."

As I was leaving, I heard him say, "Oh Jim, one more thing --" but I was gone.

I didn't go for a walk, though I'd meant to. I sat down on the top porch step to tighten one of my shoelaces and then just didn't get back up. The night was clear, but the air was heavy and moist with impending rain, so that the stars looked smeared, and the sky was like a huge photo of a swarm of fireflies, caught in mid-flight. Somewhere far off thunder rumbled. There was no wind. Everything, even the last stiff leaves on the trees, lay still. Waiting. Like me.

I didn't have to wait long.

Headlights rounded the corner and slowly approached. I didn't pay any attention until the car pulled up out front and stopped. For a while it sat there, the engine running, lights on. It looked familiar, a Studebaker, its grille puckered in that popular surprised look, but although I squinted hard, I couldn't quite make out who was behind the wheel. The engine went off, and the driver's door opened.

She was halfway up the walk before I recognized her. Oh Jesus.

Janie Waterman.

"Hi Jim," she said. "Is Frank home?"

She was trying to act cheerful, but her eyes gave her away. Red and swollen. Like Dad's, but no whiskey on her breath.

"Sorry," I said. "He's not."

She looked past me at the house, through the screen door and into the living room, like she didn't believe me. "Do you know when he'll be back?"

"No. Sorry."

She mulled that over a while and then said, "Do you know where he's gone?" I could tell from the way she said it -- slow, hesitant, timid -- that she wanted to know and didn't want to know.

"Not really," I said. I didn't. The last time I'd seen him, he was leaving Leroy's. I looked up, and Janie was watching me, staring hard, like she was trying to see inside my head, see my thoughts, the things I wasn't telling her.

"He's with Gina, isn't he?"

I looked away, past her out to the street where her car sat, gleaming in the blurry starlight. "I don't know."

She came closer and stood on the bottom step. She was eye to eye with me. "You're lying."

I jumped up. "Hey!"

"You're lying to protect him!"

"I'm not! I don't know where he is or who he's with! And that's the truth!"

She tried holding her glare, but when it broke down her whole face seemed to relax, to collapse. She blinked and gave a little gasp like a hiccup and turned around quick. I could hear her taking deep breaths.

"I'm really sorry," I said. And I was. I liked Janie. She was nice to me, even before she was Frank's girlfriend. In fact, she was nice to everybody. When I thought of her and Gina together, it was like a mental snapshot of the sisters in an old fairy tale I can't quite recall, one adorably good, the other impossibly bad. What the hell was Frank thinking?

Janie nodded, her dark hair lifting and falling. "It's not your fault," she said, in little more than a whisper. Then she held something out to me. "Jim, I want you to do something for me. Give this to Frank. Will you do that?"

I took the paper, neatly folded into a two-inch square and sealed on all four sides with Scotch tape. "Sure," I said.

"I wanted to talk to him, but this will have to do for now. And please don't read it."

I tried to look offended. "It never crossed my mind."

"Thanks." She managed half a smile and turned to go, then stopped. "Can I ask you something?"

"Shoot," I said. I was trying to sound cool but was pretty sure I sounded like a moron. Still, with those beautiful sad eyes looking into mine, it was a wonder I could make any sound at all.

"Why did Frank do this?" she said, and there was no anger in her voice, only hurt. Confusion. Bewilderment. "Why?"

"I don't know," I said. And then, noticing the way her chest heaved under her white sweater when she said it, I blurted out what I was thinking. "If you ask me, he's a damned idiot!"

Janie looked like she was going to cry again, and suddenly she came back and kissed me on the cheek. "Thank you, Jim. That's so sweet of you."

Then she turned and ran to her car, running, I thought, to try to beat the deluge of tears. She made it, but barely. She was wiping at her face as she drove away.

I waited until she was around the corner before I read the note.

The handwriting was small but neat, the style of someone who thought things out carefully before acting. I figured she'd say how upset she was and how she hoped he'd think it over and decide they should get back together blah blah blah. That's not what she said.

Dear Frank,

You're a fool to forsake me for someone like Gina Bunsen. If I don't hear from you by midnight, I'll know that it's really over and that I can stop this charade called life. Please call.

Love always, Janie

I sat for a long time on the steps re-reading the note. Did it really mean what it sounded like it meant? My first impulse was to go inside and show the note to Dad and ask him what he thought it meant. My second inpulse was to tape it back up and go put it on Frank's bed and pretend I'd never seen it. My third impulse was the one I acted on.

I sat in the dark living room and dialed and then waited. I kept an eye on the partly open door to Dad's office. He was still there but still not working. I could hear his radio playing, some station for people who thought rock-and-roll was a fad. Perry Como was crooning about putting a falling star in his pocket. (The first time Slick heard that song, he said, "Wouldn't that burn his balls?")

"Hello?"

It was a woman's voice. Janie's mother.

"Hello?"

What did I think I was going to say? Hi, Mrs. Waterman. This is Jim Perkins. I think your daughter is about to kill herself because my brother dumped her.

The voice was getting angry. "Hello? Who is this?"

I hung up. My heart beat faster. My mouth was dry. Perry Como had finished and Doris Day was warming up. I dialed another number. "Que sera, sera," Doris sang, like it didn't much matter what happened, and we had no control over anything anyway, "whatever will be will be."

"Hey buddy, what's up?"

Slick was eating, and his words were muffled. Behind him I could hear the TV blaring, as usual. His mother yelled at him to turn it down, but he ignored her.

"Can you come pick me up?" I said.

"When?"

"Now."

"Whoa. I got homework, man."

"Yeah," I said, "and I got an audience with the Pope."

"Well, I guess I can let it slide. But only if it's important. Is it?"

"Yeah."

"I'll be there."

Before he hung up, I heard his mother tell him he couldn't go out, that he needed to do his homework, that if his father was alive -- click.

CHAPTER NINE

When he pulled up to the curb, Slick's radio was on so loud that it drowned out the dying strains of Guy Mitchell bemoaning love lost on Dad's record player, and I ran and jumped in just as he appeared at the screen door, hands beside his eyes, peering out.

"I'll be back in an hour!" I yelled. "I've got some homework to get from Slick! Bye!"

As we roared up Apple, the windows down and Elvis booming out "Heartbreak Hotel," Slick lit a cigarette.

"Okay, man, what's the scoop?"

"I've got to find Frank."

"Why?"

I thought. How much did I want to tell Slick? More important, how much did I have to tell? It's not that I kept big secrets from him, but I knew that telling him anything was like putting it in the school paper. If he'd spent as much time honing his writing skills as he did cruising in his car, Slick could have had a career as a gossip columnist on some trashy tabloid.

Still, I didn't feel good about lying to him, so I decided on a middle ground. "Janie Waterman's looking for him."

He looked at me funny. "That's all?"

"She wants to see him real bad," I said. "She came to the house. She was pretty upset."

Slick thought this over as he sucked in and blew out great clouds of smoke. "Let me get this straight," he said. "Big bubba's got a new girlfriend, and you want me to ride all over town looking for him to tell him his old girlfriend's looking for him. Is that about it?"

Plus I think she might kill herself, I didn't say. "Yeah, that's about it."

We drove a while longer, then Slick said, "What's in it for you?"

"Nothing. She's a nice girl, so I'm doing her a favor. I'll buy the gas, okay?" I dug in my pocket. "Here's a dollar. It's all I've got."

"Keep it," he said. Then he changed his mind. He took the bill and stuffed it in his shirt pocket. "That'll pay for the extra weeds I'll have to smoke that I wouldn't if I was home because Mom raises holy hell." He stopped at a light. We were on the square, passing the courthouse and the stone statue of the governor poking his beer can finger eternally toward heaven. "Where to?" he said.

I shrugged. "I don't know. Where do guys usually take girls?"

We looked at each other and both nodded.

Slick stopped beside the lit-up sign outside the drive-in that said, "The Blob Starring Steve McQueen."

"No offense," he said, "but I already saw this flick, and I don't want to pay another buck to see it again. You saw it too. Plus you don't have any money."

"Pull up anyway," I said. "Maybe they'll let us in if we promise to come right back out."

The girl at the window shook her head. "Two dollars, please."

"Hey look," Slick said to her. "We've got to find his brother. It's an emergency. A medical emergency."

I knew the girl from school, not well but enough to say hi in the hall. She leaned down and looked across the seat at me. "Sorry, I can't. If you want to go call the owner at home, you can ask him."

"Thanks for nothing," Slick said and put the heap in reverse.

"Wait," I said. I leaned over. "Sharon?"

She was shaking her head. "I really can't, Jim. They'd fire me."

"I know it," I said. "Can you tell me one thing? Is my brother in there?"

She nodded.

"Thanks." I thumped Slick's knee. "Back up. Let's try the back way."

We were almost to the EXIT gate when Slick slammed on the brakes.

"Shit! Look!"

For a long time the drive-in owner had been threatening to install spikes, and now he'd done it. Long and made of heavy metal, they were aimed at the tires of cars trying to sneak in; for cars leaving, they simply folded down. They looked like giant sharks' teeth.

"So much for Plan A and Plan B," Slick said. "What's Plan C?"

I thought. "Back out onto the road. I'll climb over."

The fence around the parking area of the drive-in was only about four feet high, and I got over without attracting any attention. Looking back, I tried to make out Slick's car parked on the shoulder of the road just across a vacant field. His lights were off, but the tiny red firefly glow of a cigarette butt let me know he was there, waiting.

I felt my way through the parking lot by grabbing onto one speaker stand after another, moving between tinny voices saying the same thing, one picking up where another left off. Occasionally I glanced back at the lighted snack bar so I could keep my bearings or up at the screen, where Steve McQueen had just seen the blob for the first time and seemed a lot cooler about it than I would have been.

Suddenly I bumped against a fender, and a guy yelled at me. "Lay off the paint job, asshole!"

I moved on until I bumped into another one. This time a friendlier voice, a girl's: "Have you lost your car?"

"I lost my brother," I said.

"Who is he?"

"Frank Perkins."

A guy's voice this time, from the same car. "Front row. But I bet he don't want to be disturbed, if you get my drift."

I cupped my hands around my eyes and squinted into the black sea of asphalt, trying to pick out the island that would be Gina's LeMans.

Three rows to go. I plunged in.

I stopped at Gina's rear fender, figuring out what to do next.

"Get your damn head down!" somebody shouted.

I squatted and duck-waddled up to the front window on the driver's side. What now? If I lifted myself until my eyes were just above the door and I could see into the front seat, I might find myself staring into Frank's eyes. Or, worse, Gina's. I was still hunched down, feeling stupid, like some kind of cement lawn ornament, a frog maybe, when I heard Frank mutter something inside and then Gina say, "No, Frank, I can't."

Frank muttered again, and again Gina, louder: "I can't! Don't ask me why! I just can't!"

Then she was crying.

I was so stunned -- Gina Bunsen saying no? Gina crying? -- that I didn't even realize I was leaning against the car door until it started to open. I scrambled fast to the front, knowing I coul never make it around the door and back the way I'd come without being seen. I was sitting in front of the car, my back to the bumper, right under the huge screen, my hands on fire from the gravel, when I heard Frank.

"I'll be right back."

Now it was Gina muttering low.

"Don't worry about it," Frank said. "You want a Dr. Pepper, right?"

I waited until I heard his footsteps crunching away, then waddled down a few cars before getting up and making a run for the snack bar.

I was inside when he got there. He looked surprised to see me.

"What the hell are you doing here?"

"Same thing as you," I said. "Watching the blob."

He ordered the drinks and a bucket of popcorn. When he turned to go, I was right there.

"Janie came by looking for you," I said.

He looked at me with no expression. "So?"

I dug the note out of my pocket. "She wanted you to have this."

He looked at the folded-up note and said, "Keep it." He pushed by me and started across the lot.

"Wait!"

When he turned around, he was mad. "Listen, you little shit, where do you get off tracking me down on a date? Who do you think you are? My mom? My old man?"

The hair on the back of my neck prickled. Frank had never talked to me that way. "She wanted me to give you this. Just take it, okay?"

He glared at me another second and then said, "Put it in my shirt pocket, and then stay the hell away from me for the rest of the night."

I dropped the note in his pocket and backed away. "Don't forget to read it! Okay? Tonight!"

We were just behing the first row of cars, and somebody stuck his head out the window of car. "Would you please shut the fuck up?"

Frank shot me an angry look and was gone.

I skittered between the speaker stands, awkward as a dinosaur in a modern city, banging an elbow here, a knee there, aiming myself toward the entrance, where I would wave at the ticket taker on my way out.

The ticket booth was dark, though, so I kept running, right out into the road, where I stood a moment, bent over, catching my breath. To hell with Frank, I thought, and to hell with Janie Waterman. I'd done my best. To hell, too, with Slick, whose jalopy was nowhere to be seen.

I walked down the dark road to the highway. On the other side was town. I waited for a semi to roar past and then ran across.

So jumbled were my thoughts as I walked along College Avenue that I didn't realize I was passing Leroy's until I heard my name called. It was Slick, standing by his car in the parking lot.

"Jim! Over here!"

I thought of just walking, but he came out and apologized up and down for leaving. "The cops came, man. They told me they'd give me a ticket for loitering. What could I do?"

"No sweat," I said, "but I gotta go on home. Dad'll be worried."

"Hey, come in for a Coke."

"I can't. Really."

"Your girlfriend's here," he said.

We sat in his car drinking the Cokes. Sherry was in the backseat of Beverly Smith's car, a beat-up old Pontiac with rust spots on the front fender. She hadn't seen me yet. She was talking to Beverly and to Judy Baxter, who was half-turned around in the front seat.

"Look at that Baxter babe," Slick said. "I'd like to get a hand in her pocket."

"Why don't you ask her out?"

He just kept looking out the window. He reached the bottom of his cup and slurped noisily. "Ah, I don't know. That's easier to think about than to do, if you know what I mean. I got this old clunker and -- "

"She's not exactly sitting in a Cadillac right now," I said.

He dropped his cut out the window -- everybody did it at Leroy's -- and lit a Marlboro. "I'll think about it." He slapped my leg. "Hey, did you find big bubba?"

"Yeah."

"And?"

"And he wasn't interested."

Slick clicked his tongue. "Tough. But hey, you tried, right?"

"Yeah." I had tried. But I couldn't force Frank to be worried about Janie, could I? And it wasn't my job to try to save her, was it? Besides, weren't girls always talking that way when they got dumped by guys? And how many ever went through with it? None, right?

I was starting to feel better. Hungry, even. "Hey," I said to Slick, "if you'll spot me a dollar, I think I'd like a Frito chili pie."

"No sweat," he said. "I'll even go get it for you, make up for makin' you walk."

While Slick was at the window, I watched Sherry. Once I thought I caught her sneaking a look at me, but I couldn't be sure. She was mad at me and had a right to be. Here she was, an orphan and poor, not to mention having to put up with wild animals like the guy across the walk, and here I come, only half an orphan, not poor -- food rotting in my house, as a matter of fact -- and what do I do? Make her feel worse. Great boyfriend, huh? I felt like one of those beetles that rolls dung.

Slick got back in and handed me the Frito bag, cut open on one side, filledwith chili and onions and cheese, a white plastic spoon sticking out. "Don't spill it on the upholstery," he said, sounding serious.

I looked at him. Then we both laughed. The car seat on my side was mostly tufts of cotton batting poking up through crisscrossed of black electrical tape. I consumed the chili pie in less than a minute. I'd been starving without knowing it. When was the last time I'd eaten?

Slick watched, amused and amazed. "Don't your mama feed you, boy?" A sick look came over his face. "Hey, man, I didn't mean --"

"Forget it," I said. I rubbed my stomach. "Boy, I needed that."

"Want another one? I'll buy."

"No thanks. I better let this one settle."

"Takes about a week," he said. "I'll check with you next Tuesday."

We sat in silence for a while. I tried to keep my eyes off Beverly's car, but trying not at something is as hard as trying not to think about something. Slick caught me looking and grinned.

"Well? You gonna wait all night?"

"For what?"

"You know what. To go say hello to the orphan."

"I'm not in the mood," I said. "And don't call her that."

"Better not wait too long," he said, flowing a smoke ring out the window, no doubt hoping the girls would see it. "A couple of guys already stuck their heads in the backseat."

I felt a rock drop into my stomach but tried to act cool. "Like who?"

He gave me a smug little smile. "One was Freddy Harper."

I grunted. "Freddy Harper's a lardbutt. Dumb, too. Who else?"

He thought. "Let's see. Oh yeah. Bobby Nugent."

I looked at him. "The football player?"

He grinned big, smoke seeping out like from a dragon's mouth. "Left tackle. Two hundred twenty pounds. No lard."

I looked out my own window, watching Leroy flip burgers, sweat dripping down his face. "She's a big girl," I said. "She can talk to whoever she wants to."

"She seems to attract the football types," Slick said.

"Fine with me."

"Good," he said, "because Belew's about to make his move."

Henry was leaning against Beverly's car, sipping a Coke. The girls inside were laughing at something he'd said. I tried to see if Sherry was laughing but couldn't tell. I hoped she wasn't. Then, all of a sudden, Henry opened the back door and got in. Just like that.

Slick voiced my sentiments for me. "Shit," he said.

"I better be getting on home," I said.

On the way out of the lot, I looked at Sherry but didn't get a look back. I took what little comfort I could from the fact that Henry was still on his side of the back seat. But I was glad I wouldn't be around to see how long it took him to scoot over.

All the way home, Slick talked about what an asshole Henry Belew was and how if he hadn't been a football player he couldn't get a girl if he paid her and that if Sherry wanted to hang around guys like him I was better off without her anyway. He punctuated it all by flipping his butt out in front of my house.

"There's other fish in the lagoon, Jimbo," he said.

I got out and said thanks and that I wasn't sure if I'd go to school the next day or not. I was taking it one day at a time, and this hadn't been a good day.

"That's cool," Slick said. "You decide to skip, I will, too. We can go fish at Woodsen. Pretend we're Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Hound."

"Finn," I said. "I didn't know you read books. I'm impressed."

"Hey, I'm no dummy," he said. "Stand back now, or you might die from the vacuum my acceleration creates." He winked. "Science."

He revved up, then popped the clutch. The heap lurched forward about five feet and died, like a big sick toad taking its last leap.

"Shit," he said. He started up and took off slower this time, like a wounded animal slinking off into the night. He was about halfway down the street when he stuck his head out the window and yelled back, "I didn't read the book! I saw the movie!"

CHAPTER TEN

I'd no sooner set foot in the house than Dad called out, "Frank, is that you?"

I set my sights on my bedroom door and walked fast. "No, Dad, it's just me. I'm going to bed, oka?" The last thing I wanted was to talk to Dad. The very last thing.

But he was already coming out of his office, pushing a whiskey cloud ahead of him. His eyes were bloodshot.

"Jim, do you know where Frank is?"

I shook my head and kept walking. "Nope. Sorry. 'Night now."

He stepped in front of me. "Son, this is important."

"Look, Dad, I'm really tired and-- "

"If you know where he is, you need to tell me."

"I don't know!" I hadn't meant to yell, but it just exploded from me.

Dad stared, blinking, trying to bring me into focus. "You don't have to take my head off," he said. "It's just that something's happened, and --"

"I don't want to hear about it." My voice was shaky. "I want to go to bed. I've got school tomorrow. I'm behind and I'm trying to catch up. I need rest. Do you mind?"

Dad frowned and stepped out of my way. "I'm sorry, Jim. I'm glad you want to go to school. And I appreciate you being so, well, good about everything. It helps. Really."

"You don't have to be sorry," I said. "And you don't have to thank me. But just stop wishing I was Frank every time I walk in the door, okay? Is that too much to ask?"

"No. No, it's not. It's just that -- "

Suddenly my mouth was as dry as the dustballs under my bed, so I headed for the kitchen to get a glass of water, calling over my shoulder, "It's always just this or just that. And it's always about Frank. Well, maybe I have problems, too. And feelings! What about me?"

I didn't wait for an answer, of course. I stormed into the kitchen and slammed the door. It was dark. I reached behind me and turned on the light and started for the sink.

I froze.

The kitchen was alive.

Roaches. All over everything. Someone had moved all the food into the kitchen. It was piled and scattered all over the counters, along with the dirty dishes. And roaches were over it all.

There was a fraction of a second before they realized that their picnic had been discovered, then it was chaos as they bolted in all directions, disappearing under appliances, into cracks and shadows and all other invisible hiding places they'd come out of. I reached for a glass in the cabinet, trying not to look at the plates of reeking food. It didn't help. Out of the corner of my eye I could see how the flies hadn't scattered like the roaches but were buzzing around the heaps of potatoes and meats and desserts, winging low, almost leisurely, like gulls over a dump, or vultures over a kill. I took down a glass and was on my way to the sink, which was filled with food-encrusted dished that let off their own stench, when a roach that had been perched on the lip of my glass suddenly skittered over my hand and up my arm.

I jumped back, dropping the glass with a crash, shaking my arm till the roach flew against a far wall, fell to the floor and was gone.

Dad came up behind me. "Jim, are you all right?"

"Yeah," I said. "A roach got on me."

"A roach? Really?" He acted surprised. Maybe he was. "We've let things get out of hand, I guess." He looked around the kitchen. "I moved everything in here, so we could deal with it. What say we clean it up?"

"Fine with me," I said. "As soon as Frank gets home." I wasn't about to do his work on top of mine. I had rights, too, even in a lawless household like this one, a Wild West of families where the top gun, the biggest mouth, got his way.

Dad nodded in sad agreement and frowned at his watch. "I wish I knew when he was coming home."

I didn't say anything and was at the door to my room when Dad called to me again. I stopped, holding the door open, not turning around. "Yeah?"

"I feel like I have to explain something to you," he said.

I took a deep breath and looked around. He was sitting in his big over-stuffed chair, staring at the blank TV screen.

"I don't mean to be favoring Frank over you," he said, "but it's just been coming out that way lately. He's having a hard time with things since -- since -- "

I looked athim, at the way he hunched over, seeming to sink into the big chair like a little kid who'd been whipped and scolded, maybe even abused, and I felt sorry for him.

"You don't have to explain anything to me," I said. "And I'm sorry I yelled at you. I'm just tired, like I aid. we'll all feel better in a few days."

Dad nodded again, mechanically, still staring at the dead TV, as if hoping some secret magical message might appear there to ease his suffering.

I was about to go into my room when I stopped and said, "What was it that happened?"

He looked at me like I was speaking Arabic. "Happened?"

"Tonight. You said you wanted to know where Frank was because something happened.*

He waved a hand. "Nothing. Nothing that concerns you. Go on and forget I said anything."

I took him at his word and went into my room and shut the door.

The room didn't smell good. Musty, sweaty, like a combination of a closet that stayed shut too much and a locker room where nobody had picked up the wet towels and used jock straps for a while. The problem, of course, was that I hadn't made my bed in a month or swept the floor or taken my dirty socks to the washer.

The problem was that Mom was dead.

I didn't have any homework since I hadn't stayed in school long enough to get any, so I lay on my bed and tried to think about something that had nothing to do with my fractured family.

I started with baseball, but it didn't seem real. I could prop myself up at the plate and conjure a pitcher, but the balls sailed past me into the catcher's glove before I even detected a wind-up or
else thunked off my bat like rocks and dropped into the dirt, and all I could do was stand staring at them, my hands stinging.

I tried mentally sorting through my collection of bubblegum cards, but the bright faces of the ballplayers quickly faded into monotonous tones of gray, and soon I was looking at photos of my ancestors in the heavy, depressing faily album, their eyes formal and blank, accusing.

I tried other avenues, from kinds of cars to states and capitals, but all were dead ends, like my attention span. It must have been when I was on monster movies, compaing the relative strengths and weaknesses of Rodan, Godzilla, and King Kong, that I drifted into sleep, because the dream that woke me was of The Creature from the Black Lagoon, stumbling up out of the water, slimy and menacing, dripping seaweed, a demon of the subconscious. This wasn't a movie creature, though: this one had a human face.

Whose?

At first I couldn't tell. It was familiar; I thought of the photo of Frank after swimming across the lake. But no, while this was definitely someone I'd seen before, it wasn't anyone I knew. Somebody famous? Abe Lincoln?

Then it hit me.

It was Abe all right, but not Lincoln.

It was Abe Woodsen.

I sat up in bed, sweating. How did I know that? I'd never seen a picture of Abe Woodsen . . . had I? I decided it was a typical weird dream, in which you know things whether or not you should, and whether or not they're true. It could just as well have been Dad's face on the creature. Or mine. Or -- I stopped that train of thought abruptly. I didn't want to imagine my mother rising from the swamp to hug me.

Gradually I became aware of voices somewhere in the house. Angry voices. Shouting. I got up and went to my door and opened it a crack.

"Forget it!" Frank was yelling in the living room. "I won't do it!"

"Son, you have to!" Dad yelled back.

"I don't have to do anything!"

I slipped down the hall and into the dining room, where I stood in the dark, seeing into the living room without being seen.

They were both pacing, Dad seeming to chase Frank.

"You could save her life, Frank!"

"It's not my problem!"

"Talk to her! Can't you just talk to her?"

"I don't have anything to say!"

"Tell her she's got a lot to live for! Tell her anything!"

"No! Leave me alone!"

Frank ducked out, and I could hear him stomping up the stairs, with Dad calling: "Just a word, for Christ's sake! Can't you even do that?"

I was about to slip back to my room when Dad saw me.

"Jim, I thought you were asleep."

"I almost was," I said. "Then I heard you and Frank. I'm going back to bed now."

"Wait."

"I'm really tired," I said, yawning to prove it.

Dad glanced up the stairs and then lowered his voice. "Do you know what we were yelling about?"

"Not really. Janie, I guess."

He looked surprised. "What makes you say that?"

I shrugged. "I told you -- I'm guessing. Can I go?"

"First tell me what you know about Janie."

I slumped against the doorframe, acting bored and put upon. "She's upset because Frank dumped her, and she says she wants to kill herself." I shouldn't have said that last part, because it made it clear I'd read Frank's note, but it was too late to take it back.

Dad blinked in amazement. "How did you know all that?"

There was only one possible answer, a lie, and I took it. "Frank told me. Look, Dad, the important thing is it doesn't matter."

"What do you mean?"

"I don't think it's any big deal," I said. "Girls say that kind of stuff all the time, whenever they get dumped. They don't ever actually try it."

Dad looked pained, like he had a headache. "Janie did."

I watched him turn and go sit in his chair, slumping, looking older. As I listened to him tell me about how Janie had taken a bottle of sleeping pills and had been rushed to the hospital to have her stomach pumped, my own insides began to churn. But the time he was saying how she had been drifting in and out of consciousness, asking for Frank, it was all I could do to keep from running for the bathroom. The Frito chili pie was working its way up, and the foul odor from the kitchen didn't slow down the process. I took a deep breath and swallowed hard.

"Is she going to live?" I said.

Dad threw up his hands. "Who knows?" He looked up at me, and his eyes were red. "Why is he doing this, Jim? Why now? Just when I need him to be strong! To be sane, damn it! Why?"

"I don't know," I said. "Why don't you ask him?"

Dad shook his head. "He won't talk to me. I've tried. He won't do it. He's shut himself up like --" he shook his fist "-- like a fist! Like he's about to hit somebody."

"I better go on the bed," I said.

As I turned to go, Dad called to me.

I stopped but didn't turn around. I knew what was coming and tried to brace for it. "What?"

"Would you talk to him?"

I looked back, determined to say not just no but hell no, but the look on his face made me clamp my mouth shut on the words. He didn't just look tired, or sad. He looked wounded. Like he couldn't get up if he wanted. And his eyes were a victim's eyes. Get me a doctor, they said. Please. Or just shoot me and get it over with.

"I'll try," I said.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

I'd only been in Frank's room twice. Once I'd been invited, just for a few minutes to help him kill a couple of wasps that had gotten in and were buzzing around the room. Every time Frank went after one, with a rolled-up newspaper, the other one got behind him and headed right for his neck. He'd already been stung once when he yelled down the stairs for me.

I was doing my homework at the kitchen table but dropped it and headed up the stairs. Frank handed me the newspaper when I walked in his door, and he rolled another one. We dueled those wasps for a good ten minutes before I finally stunned mine, and it dropped to the floor. Frank got the other one a few seconds later.

Then he did a funny thing. He picked both of them up, a leg each between his fingers, and laid them on a sheet of notebook paper and handed it to me and told me to put them outside.

I didn't want any part of it. "They'll sting me!"

He laughed. "Do they look like they want to sting you?"

They didn't. They looked like they wanted to go somewhere and be alone for a while. Watch some TV. Sleep.

"On the porch is okay," he said, gently but firmly shoving me toward the door. "But up high. Not down where the ants'll get them. Good boy."

I did as I was told, sliding them off the sheet of paper onto the porch railing. They weren't completely dead: their bodies vibrated as they lay on their backs. But their wings were pretty much crushed, and you could sense their tiny nerve centers going haywire, sending impulses that weren't obeyed, issuing commands to fly that barely caused a leg to quiver. They made me think of Troy Spelman, our star running back who got cold-cocked during the game against Mount Pleasant and just lay on the field for the longest time, his legs doing a little dance of their own. Troy recovered in time. I doubted that the wasps would.

By the next morning, the wind had blown them into the yard, where nature would take over.

The second times I'd gone into Frank's room I hadn't been invited. He was spending the night camping at the lake, and Dad had taken Mom out to a movie. She had just started to feel bad then, not pain yet but weariness, so that she had to lie down several times a day. We all assumed she worked too hard around the house. Dad decided a movie would do her good, so off they went to see some comedy. As he said on their way out the door, "If Doris Day can't perk you up, you need to see a doctor." And Mom had laughed and said, "It makes me tired just watching her!"

For a while after they were gone, I watched TV. There wasn't much on -- literally in those days -- just news and cartoons and wrestling and some game shows. I had no interest in the news and was beginning to get bored with cartoons and wrestling, which seemed to be a lot alike: plenty of action but nobody ever really getting hurt.

That left the game shows (which, of course, turned out to be fake, too, but I didn't find that out until much later, when I was grown and it didn't matter). On that night, the game show that was on was particularly exasperating, since the couple didn't win the new car but ended up with a bunch of bedroom furniture, which seemed to please them but just about put me to sleep. I had gotten up to turn the TV when it went off by itself.

Along with everything else electrical in the house.

No lights, no TV, no refrigerator hum, no nothing.

Just absolute black stillness.

I stumbled to the window and saw the porchlights were gone, too. And the streetlights. All up and down the street it looked like the blackouts I'd heard about in England during the World War. I tried to think where in the house we had a flashlight. There lots of likely places -- the kitchen, the garage, the laundry room -- but only one I knew for sure: hanging by a string from a nail right outside Frank's room, so he could find his way downstairs in case something like this happened (which it had once before, which is why he had the flashlight hanging by his door).

But that was all the way upstairs.

In the dark.

I'd always had a good imagination, which is a terrible burden for a child. Grown-ups think it's a blessing, but in one very real way it's a curse: imaginative kids scare hell of themselves. Monsters I knew didn't really exist filled every black shadow in our attic, along with ax murderes and ghosts and giant scorpions. I could wait, of course, but Dad and Mom might not come back for hours, and who knew how long the electricity might be off?

No, I had to go upstairs and get the flashlight, which I did the only way I could: I ran up at full speed, yelling all the way. I knew my way around up there, so I was able to get from the top of the stairs to Frank's room with no problem, and there was the flashlight, right where it was supposed to be. My plan from there was to get back downstairs as fast as possible, but when I flicked on the flashlight, its beam came to rest on Frank's door.

It was open.

Just an inch or so, but that was an inch or so more than usual. I was about to close it when I thought: I'm the only one home. And when will I ever get another chance like this?

Like all younger brothers, I considered my big brother a mystery. We were alike in some ways but different in more. Not to mention the fact that he was, and always would be, ahead of me. Whereas he had always been part of my life, I hadn't always been part of his. For more than three years he'd been out here without me, without even a thought of me. Learning to walk, to talk, to size up the world around him. In other words, Frank was already Frank when I came along. Which meant that he had a say-so, whether he wanted it or not, in who I would become; I had no such influence on him. It also meant that he would always know me better than I knew him.

So I spent a good bit of time searching for clues about him. And his room was a treasure trove of clues. Whatever about himself he chose not to share with the family would be found in there, or so my theory went. If I wanted to understand Frank, I needed to understand his room.

And then, as if a sign from above, the electricity came back on.

I hung the flashlight on its nail and went in.

The furniture didn't reveal much. It was a hodge-podge of leftover items from around the house: whenever Mom got tired of a chair, or Dad was about to throw out a wobbly bookcase he'd nailed back together one too many times, it would go instead to Frank's room. So I'd seen most all of his furniture before.

The walls were another story.

Two stories, actually.

The room was rectangular, shoe-box shaped, so the end walls were small and pretty much taken up, respectively, by a window on one end and a door on the other. It was the other walls, the long ones along the sides, that said it all. And in different languages.

On one were the pictures typical of a male his age: sports photos cut from magazines, showing quarterbacks passing, baseball players throwing and hitting, basketball giants dribbling, along with plenty of cars, from hot rods and racers to colorful custom jobs. But in the middle of all the athletes and vehicles was the centerpiece: a folded-out picture of a blond actress, Marilyn Monroe, from the first issue of a magazine called Playboy.

Stark naked.

I'd seen it before, tucked away at the bottom of a dad's drawer at a friend's house, but it looked much more wicken in my own house, right there on my big brother's wall. No wonder he'd kept his door locked.

On the facing wall were nature pictures, but instead of being cut from magazines, they were real photographs, like those in our album downstairs.

As I inspected each one, in fact, I realized they were the ones from the album. Copies anyway. Reprints from the same negatives. But while in the album they appeared helter-skelter -- wherever and whenever it occured to Mom to paste them in -- on Frank's wall they lined up in chronological order, a sort of time-lapse photography.

And they were all of Woodsen Lake.

Beginning at the upper left was the first photo of the lake, dating (I'd been told) from the 1800s.
The picture was small, hardly bigger than wallet size, and shot in black and white, of course. Still, if you used a little imagination, it wasn't hard to see the attraction people had felt, from the start,
for this dark oval of water speckled with sunlight, encircled by tall cottonwoods and willows, looking serene and beautiful. A virgin lake in virgin woods, a pristine natural wonder prized by the Indians as a holy place. Ripe for enjoyment.

Or exploiting.

Looking across from left to right, and then skipping down and doing it again, like reading a book, I could watch the modern history of the lake unfold here on the wall: from the first blurred square of raft emerging from a shady cove, piloted by someone too small and faded to make out (maybe Abe Woodsen ferrying beaver pelts to market) through the gradual appearance of stylish canoes occupied by handsome young men in white pants spooning pretty girls in tall bonnets, their bright parasols dotting the lake's surface like lily pads, and finally, in the last photos down in the lower right corner, the invasion of the common people in their battered rowboats, out not to enjoy the sweet breeze in their lined faces but to catch something for supper.

And at some point my ancestors started to appear, solemn men and women in dark suits and stiff dresses, looking less like a fun-loving party on a Sunday outing than a group of mourners at at a funeral. As time went on, though, they loosened up; in one picture, my great grandfather was even barefoot, and his wife's hair was down from its usual bun, hanging around her shoulders in a way that would have shocked her mother's generation. By the time Mom showed up, as a baby on her dad's knee in a bonnet so big it made her little red face look like the middle of a big white flower, the people seemed to know better how to relax, to smile and take off their coats and shawls and relish the sunshine.

Real fashion progress came with the appearance of baby Frank, though the swimming trunks the men wore came to their knees, and the women's bathing suits covered more flesh than they left bare. Still, they were a younger, happier-looking bunch: Dad splashing water on one or another uncle; Mom smiling on a blanket, her face turned up to catch the golden sun; Grandpa and Grandma at a wooden table in the shade, sipping cold lemonade. A fairy tale picture.

Almost.

Even as the people were changing, so was the lake, As it became more and more a poor person's fish market, it lost more and more of its glamor. Sunlight began to glint less off tiny waves rippling out from the lazy sweep of oars than off beer bottles thrown from boats, bobbing toward the shore, which itself sported far fewer sleek roadsters parked under the trees and many more rusty stationwagons and old pick-up trucks.

Still, our family's outings continued to be documented, though in the last few, taken when I was little, Dad seemed to frown more, and Grandpa was nearly always absent, having made up some excuse, from lumbago to a baseball game on the radio, to beg off. The last photo of the family at Woodsen was just Mom and Grandma and Frank, and they'd had to get a stranger to take it since even I had weaseled out that time, saying I had to study for a history test. ("The Woodsen," Grandma had told me, "is history." " I mean real history," I'd retorted.)

In the photo, Frank stood between the two women --three generations of Woodsen lovers -- forcing smiles, while in the background whole families, black and brown and white, sat on car hoods and picnic tables or just in the grass, on blankets, trailing lines in the water. And though they were too far away to be sure, I'd bet not many of them were smiling.

On this night, I stood outside his door a long time before I knocked. Lightly. His light was on, but way he was asleeep. With any luck.

"Come on in," he said.

I took a deep breath and stepped into the room.

It was transformed. All the pictures of the cars and athletetes, and even Marilyn, were gone, not taken down carefully but ripped, the tacks still on the wall, some with small pieces of paper wedged underneath. The other wall still held the Woodsen pictures, and it seemed there were now more than ever.

The room looked odd, not right.

Un-balanced.

Frank lay on his bed, all his clothes on, hands folded on his stomach, eyes closed. He looked dead. Like Mom in her casket.

"Frank?"

I moved closer. Was he asleep? Had I just imagined hearing him invite me in? I reached down to touch him.

He sat up.

I jumped back.

His eyes were wide and on fire. Blood red. He looked like he was about to get up and strangle me. "What do you want?"

I backed toward the door.

"I, uh, Dad wanted me to ask you --" What to say? How to say it? "He's worried about, uh --"

"Janie?"

I nodded. Thank you.

Frank swung his legs off the bed and sat for a moment staring at his shoes on the floor. When he finally spoke, it was to the shoes.

"I made a promise to Mom."

"What did you promise?"

"To get the lake back."

He got up and went to the window and looked out at the big cedar tree and, beyond, the sky full of stars. A breeze came in and ruffled his thick dark hair, the hair I wished I had. This time he talked to the night.

"She was about gone," he said. "I could hardly stand to look at her. Pisser of a thing to say, huh?"

I didn't answer, but I'd felt the same. The last few days Mom was alive, when we were going to the hospital every day, it was all I could do to bend down and kiss her cheek when we got there and when we left. Her skin was bluish and cool to the touch, like she was already dead, and stretched tight over the bones on her face, making her eyes, which were red and watery, too big, almost scary. Her hair had turned gray (though Dad told me later it was because she couldn't dye it anymore) and was un-combed. When she finally died, it was a shock but not a surprise. Anyway, when I kissed her, I closed my eyes every time and felt guilty about it later.

"She didn't smell good, either," Frank said to the stars. "I tried to remember how she'd smelled back when I was a kid and her and Dad would get dressed up to go out somewhere. You remember that perfume she used to put on?"

I nodded. I never knew what the perfume was called, but it always made me think of some exotic place far away and too grown-up for me to comprehend. It also made me look at her in a different way, like she wasn't just my mom but was instead a woman, a woman that my father, a man, had one time had the hots for, big-time. And still did, I bet, when she wore that perfume.

"I wish that's the smell I still thought of when I think of her," Frank said, "but it's not. You know what she smelled like those last few days?"

"Medicine," I said. I hadn't just closed my eyes when I'd kissed her. I'd held my breath, too.

"Like someone had spilled a whole medicine cabinet on her," Frank said. "Like she'd had a bath in it. Whew!" He turned around and leaned against the windowsill. "And she barely had a voice. I had to lean way down to hear. You know what she said?"

I shook my head.

"She said, Do this one thing for me and I won't ask anything else. I said, sure, what? She said, Get Woodsen Lake back. It belongs in our family. Your father had no right to sell it."

"He was paying her bills," I said. Somebody had to take Dad's side. "He was trying to keep her alive."

"Then he's a stupid bastard," Frank said.

"Hey!"

"Hey what?"

"Don't call Dad names," I said. "He's not stupid."

"Sure he is," Frank said. "The doctors told him she wouldn't pull through no mater what. He could have sold the damned Great Lakes and it wouldn't have saved her."

"He loved her," I said, like that explained it.

Frank lit a cigarette and flipped the burnt match across the room. "Yeah, we all did, and look what good it did her. Or us."

My eyes got hot and red, and I turned away, blinking hard.

"Don't start that," Frank said. "You want to bawl, get the hell out of my room."

"I don't want to bawl," I lied. "I got something in my eye." And my throat, too. I cleared it the best I could and croaked, "Don't you ever feel like crying?"

He thought a minute and then said, "I don't have time to cry. I've got work to do. I'll cry later."

"What do you have to do?"

He looked as me like I was thick-headed. 'What do you think I have to do? Get Woodsen Lake back."

"Why?"

Now he looked at me downright mad. "I told you. Mom asked me to, that's why. You don't think that's a good enough reason?"

"I don't know."

"What if she'd asked you? What if her last words to you were, Jim, you've got to get the lake back. What would you do?"

I thought a long time and then said, "I guess I'd try to get it back."

"Yeah," he said. He was staring at the wall full of pictures. Then he said it again, in a whisper, almost like a breath he was letting out.

After a moment, I said, "How?"

"How what?"

"How are you going to get the lake back?"

"I have a plan."

"What is it?"

He smiled, just with his mouth, not his eyes. "How would you like to have Gina Bunsen for a sister-in-law?"

"That's not funny," I said, picturing her shooting Slick the finger.

"It's not supposed to be."

My stomach churned. A sour taste rose in my mouth. "You'd really do that?"

"I'd do what I have to do," he said. Suddenly he looked tired, like just thinking about it wore him out. He went over to the bed and lay down and put his arms under his head and stared up at the ceiling. "Vamoose, would you?" he said. "I need to get some rest."

At the door, I said, "What about Janie?"

He had his eyes closed. "What about her?"

"What if she dies?"

A long silence, then, "I'll go to her funeral." He yawned. "Close the door on your way out."

I held to the railing on my way down the stairs. Who was this guy posing as my brother? Frank had always been somebody to look up to. Then Mom got sick, and he started to change. And as she got worse, so did he. Moody. Irritable. Silent. By the time she died, almost everything about him was different.

He usually had at least a few friends hanging around, but now nobody called; when they tried, he wouldn't talk to them. He'd had the same steady girlfriend since junior high, a sweet, smart girl I liked a lot; now he had a mean, loud girl hardly anyone liked, including me. He never used to say anything bad about anybody; now he was calling Dad stupid and worse. He loved animals, so why had he shot Warhorse? He never drank or smoked before; now he did both, though he didn't seemt to enjoy either one all that much. It was like he was in training, making himself into somebody else, somebody harder, somebody who didn't care.

I decided I had to talk to Dad.

He wasn't in his office. The light was off, but I could see he'd left everything a mess. He wasn't in the living room, but as I passed through, I noticed an odd clicking sound coming from along one wall. The record player. The record was done, and the needle was bumping, over and over, against the label. I turned it off and put the record back in its jacket: Dinah Shore, my mother's favorite, dusky blond, beautiful, smiling from the album cover at all the lovers who loved her like they loved each other, who all thought they'd be alive and in love forever.

Dad must have gone to bed, I decided, and for a long moment I stood outside his door, trying to make up my mind whether to knock.. Maybe I should just go to bed myself, pull the blanket over my head and pretend none of this was happening. But the longer I stood there, the madder I found myself getting: Dad was supposed to be in charge, the parent on duty, and he was acting less like a grown-up than me!

I knocked. Hard.

A faint flat voice said, "Come in."

The room was dark, like Mom's sickroom, and it took a few seconds for my eyes to adjust and spot Dad lying on top of the covers; he hadn't even bothered to pull them down and actually get into bed since the funeral.

"Dad?"

"Hi Jim. I'm not asleep. I'm just . . . lying here."

I stepped into the room. It was hot and muggy, again like when Mom was here and couldn't tolerate changes in the temperature. But it wasn't that Dad liked it that way; he just didn't have the will to open a window. Or turn on a light.

"Can I turn on the light?" I said.

"I'd rather you didn't."

As the room came more and more into focus, chairs and lamps emerging from the blackness as if from a heavy night fog, I found my way to the bed and stood at the end, looking down at the dim shaped of my father. He wasn't stretched out on his back the way people usually are when they aren't trying to go to sleep but just to rest, maybe think about things; he was lying on his side, his knees drawn up. I wouldn't have been surprised to make out his thumb in his mouth.

"I talked to Frank," I said.

He never moved. "Good," came the wooden voice.

"I'm worried about him," I said. "The way he talks. What he might do." Again I waited. "Dad? Are you listening?"

"I'm listening. Go ahead."

I told him about how Frank had taken down all the pictures of cars and ballplayers in his room -- I didn't mention Marilyn Monroe -- how he said he didn't care about Janie Waterman or school or anything else, and I finished with, "And he wants to marry Gina Bunsen."

That ought to get his attention, I thought. But it didn't. I leaned over and was about to jiggle his toe or something when he let out a huge snore.

In any other situation -- or on a TV show -- it would have been funny. But here in this house on this night, it was a last straw, a breaking point. I stomped to the door and jerked it open. In the light that flooded the room, I could see over my shoulder the nearly empty whiskey bottle on the floor beside the bed, cap off, not even a glass beside it.

"Pleasant dreams, Dad!" I shouted and slammed the door. I headed for the kitchen. I needed a Coke. Bad. The smell hit me halfway through the living room, since the kitchen had no door, but I kept doing, holding my breath as I stepped inside and flipped on the light, ignoring the silent scrambling of roaches, the swarms of flies taking off from casseroles like fighter jets from carriers. I got my Coke and staggered out into the living room, gulping air like a drowning man.

On my way to the porch, not knowing where I was going but knowing I had to get out of that haunted house that seemed to be self-destructing like the mansion in "Fall of the House of Usher," I passed Dad's door and, on an impulse, jerked it open and yelled into the darkness: "And if somebody doesn't get off his lazy butt pretty soon and clean up that kitchen, the neighbors will start complaining, and then the city will come and fumigate the whole damned place, with us in it!"

I thought I heard Dad moving, maybe trying to get up, maybe calling to me, weakly, but I didn't wait to see. I slammed his door one more time and hit the porch on a run.

CHAPTER TWELVE

I was halfway down the block before I stopped to catch my breath and see if I was being chased. I wasn't. I took a long drink of the Coke. It burned going down and made me gasp. I turned it up and drained it, and when I was done, my eyes were watering. I set the bottle on a mail box, jammed my hands in my pockets, and started walking.

Cherokee at night was turned over to the dogs and the cars.

As I passed a house, a dog would bark. As I reached a corner and started across a street, a hot rod would whine up from nowhere, and I'd have to scramble back onto the curb. I knew them all, the drivers, but that didn't mean they were my friends. Slick was about the only guy my age with a car, and he was home most school nights, and always by now.

I looked at my watch: ten p.m. The late-night cruisers, the night owls, were all older guys who didn't stay home to study on week nights, or any other nights, who were only in school in the first place because it was the law, who could hardly wait until graduation so they could get real jobs that didn't require any brain work and that would pay them the kind of money they needed to take their drinking and drag racing and general carousing to a higher level, to make it a way of life. Or they were out of school and already had those jobs and were feeling full of themselves. Their fun was driving around a sleeping town guzzling beer and scaring kids like me who were out way too late for their own good.

One yelled at me as he roared by. "Hey, buttface, it's past your bedtime!"

I started to run, faster and faster, my shoes slapping at the sidewalk in the dark. Dogs set up a howl all around, and more than one porchlight went on behind me. My breath came in gasps, and my heart pounded, but I kept going, turning corners and cutting across vacant lots, following my feet through the dead town. I ran until my side hurt and then ran some more. I wanted to stop, but my legs wouldn't let me, even though they were on fire.

When they finally burned out and collapsed, I bounced off a heavy metal mailbox and landed on the grass by the sidewalk in somebody's yard. I lay on my back, feeling as close to death as I ever have, sure I'd gone a step too far, that I really was dying, that my breath would never return to normal but would just, after one particularly desperate gasp, stop for good. I would expire right there in the grass, under the billions of stars winking above me in the endless black sky.

Suddenly, as if on cue, a siren wailed up out of the night, growing so loud so fast that I literally did stop breathing. I'd heard ambulances before but almost always at a distance, or maybe tearing down Main Street, always going away from me, out to the highway or some lonely country road, where wrecks happen. This one, though, seemed to be coming right at me, like it really was coming to pick me up. I lay still and waited.

It wasn't coming for me, of course, but just as it passed, it did an amazing thing: it turned into the driveway not ten feet from me. I got up on one elbow and watched, seeing, for the first time, where I was.

At the hospital.

The lawn I'd collapsed on was the hospital grounds, just outside the emergency room. I watched the ambulance driver and his helper get out and fling open the back doors. A chill went up my back like an electric current: I half-expected to see them take my mother out.

Instead, it was an old guy with an oxygen mask covering his face. I was about to go-- somewhere, anywhere, just to keep moving -- when I thought of something. I stopped and looked up at the hospital, at the rows of lighted windows.

In one of those rooms was Janie Waterman.

I broke off a few tulips from the flowerbed just outside the main entrance and went in.

"I'm sorry," the nurse at the desk said. "Only family members are allowed inside. I'm sure you understand."

I said I did, then I went around the corner to the elevator and took it up to the third floor,where most of the rooms were. It was late, so there were only a couple of nurses prowling the halls, and I was able to stay out of their way.

It didn't take much looking to find Janie's room. The hospital wasn't all that big, and there weren't that many patients at any given time. I only had to poke my head into a dozen or so rooms before I spotted Janie's mother sitting at the foot of a bed, bent over a Bible in the dim light coming from a little lamp on the other side of the room.

Janie was in the bed, eyes closed, a tuble running into her arm from an upside-down bottle of something clear, hung on a metal stand. As I watched, a bubble rose into the bottle from the tube and popped silently.

I hadn't thought until that moment exactly why I was here or what I intended to say to Janie. Now I had to think of what to say to her mother. The last time I'd talked to her, she'd yelled at me on the phone about Frank. It wasn't likely she'd be glad to see me now. When, after a minute or so, she seemed to sense me standing there and look up, I knew I was right.

"What do you want?" she hissed. "Go away!"

"I brought these for Janie." I held out the tulips. "To cheer her up."

As Mrs. Waterman stared at the flowers, already starting to droop, her own hard face drooped, too, and her voice quivered.

"How could he do it? She worshipped him."

"He's crazy," I said. And I meant it.

She looked up at me, blinking back tears. "Is it because of your poor mother? I mean, did that do something to him?"

"Yes, ma'am," I said. "It sure did." I glanced over her head at Janie. "Is she going to be okay?"

Mrs. Waterman shook her head. "Who knows? Oh, they got all the drugs out of her stomach, thank God, but what happens when she wakes up? I know she'll ask about him right away. Did he come to see her? What am I supposed to say?"

I didn't have an answer, and then a ghostly voice arose from the bed.

"Mom?"

Mrs. Waterman was up immediately, her Bible clunking to the floor.

"I'm right here, honey. You're going to be just fine."

I could see Janie trying to lift herself. "Is Frank here?"

"No, not yet," her mother said, looking over at me and frowning, as if to say, "See?"

"I heard you talking to somebody."

"That wasn't Frank. Now you lie down and try to rest."

"Who was it?" Janie's eyes scanned the room and came to rest on me. "Who's there?"

I cleared my throat and croaked, "It's me. Jim."

"Jim who?"

"Jim Perkins."

"He was just leaving," Janie's mother said, shooing at me.

"No!" Janie tried to blink me into focus but finally gave up and held out her hand. "Come over here, Jim. Please."

Her mother didn't like it. "Janie, I don't think -- "

"It's okay, Mom, really. Jim?"

I went over and stood by the bed. Janie didn't look good. It wasn't only the tube and needle sticking in her arm; her face was pale, except for dark half-circles under her eyes, which were glazed over, frosted, and her hair was plastered to her skull on one side and flew out on the other like she'd been shocked. It was all I could do to keep from bolting for the door.

"I want you to tell Frank something for me," she said. Her voice was somewhere between a whisper and a grunt. I'd heard that when you get your stomach pumped, they shove a tube down your throat that can damage your vocal chords. Janie made a face with every word. It must have hurt a lot.

Again her mother tried to intervene. "Janie, this isn't the time -- "

"Yes it is," Janie rasped. "And please don't make me talk more than I have to." Her mother shut up after and that and just sat holding her daughter's hand, patting and sighing. Janie blinked at me, and for a second the fog seemed to lift from her eyes.

"Tell him that he no business throwing my love away."

"Janie -- " her mother said.

"Shhh! Tell him he ought to be ashamed."

I waited. "Is that all?"

She nodded, and a teardrop ran down her cheek. Her mother quickly dabbed at it, but Janie pushed her hand away.

"Okay," I said, and as I turned to go, I stopped. "I forgot. These are for you." I held out the tulips.

Janie took them and clutched them to her chest in both hands and closed her eyes. Now she really did look dead, and I knew I had to get out fast. I was at the door when she called to me in that grunt-whisper. I turned around.

"Thank you," she managed. "And tell Frank something else for me, okay?"

"Sure."

"Tell him that I hope he and Gina burn in hell."

I was out the door before her mother's gasp had even left her mouth.

It some some serious walking to get rid of the numbness that had crept into my body in the hospital, and I was downtown when the feeling came back to my feet. I walked around the square trying to recover.

It was an unsettling place at night, with all the stores shut down and unnaturally dark, deserted, like aliens had come down and plucked everyone up, whisking them off to a far corner of the galaxy.

Leaving only me.

I leapfrogged a couple of parking meters and jumped up to touch a few signs, like I had as a kid, but my heart wasn't in it, so that halfway around, over by Woolworth's, I was just slogging on, head down, hands in my pockets, eyes on the cracked sidewalk.

I was about to head home -- had even started down Virginia, which led to College, which dead-ended into Howell, from which Apple branched -- when I stopped. Or something stopped me.

My feet wouldn't lift from the walk, like gravity's force had suddenly increased a millionfold and anchored me there. Like I was magnetic and standing over a pole. What it was, of course, was nothing so mysterious or strange.

I just didn't want to go home.

Between Dad's drunkenness and Frank's craziness, our house had become sort of a torture chamber that I dreaded returning to, a place so depressing that just the thought of it kept me from feeling good, from thinking straight, from being able to concentrate in school.

And it kept me from thinking about Mom.

It hit me just like that, like one of those light bulbs over somebody's head in a cartoon. What did I care what happened to a stupid lake I'd never paid any attention to anyway? What did I care if Frank ditched his girlfriend and took up with a rich whore? And what did I care if the ex-girlfriend over-reacted and tried to kill herself? What did I care about any of it, any of them?

What I cared about was Mom, that she was gone. My mother was gone. Dead. Forever.

And all this crap was keeping me from missing her like I should.

From grieving.

And just like the cartoon character who doesn't start to fall until he realizes he's run off the cliff and looks down, so I went over the edge at that instant. I couldn't get my breath. The stars and the streetlights all swirled around above me. I was so scared I was afraid I'd pee my pants.

I thought I was going to die.

Not knowing what else to do, I ran.

And I knew where I was going.

I just hoped I could get there in one piece.

I stood on the porch knocking for a long time.

What if they're not home? I thought. Or what if they've gone to bed and can't hear me knocking? What if I'm scaring them because it's so late, and they just pretend they don't hear and hope I go away? What then? I didn't have a Plan B. This was the only place I could go. They had to be home. And they had to want to see me.

Oh please answer the door!

It opened, and my grandmother's face, at first uncertain, broke into a wide smile. "Oh my, look who's here! Come right in and let me hug your neck! Uh oh, what's a fine boy like you doing crying? Come in, honey, come in. Granddad! Get up and see who's here!"

It was all a blur after that.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

I woke up in absolute blackness.

But I wasn't scared.

The air smelled cool and vaguely familiar. I lay awake a long time, dozing, just letting my mind go. I let it go a little too far, though, because at one point I found myself back in the woods with Frank, and once again he was aiming his rifle across the lake. Only this time, in the white lawn chair on the Bunsens' backyard patio was Mr. Bunsen, reading his Saturday newspaper. I could see Frank's finger slowly squeezing the trigger, and although I tried to say something, nothing came out, and I couldn't move. I closed my eyes and waited.

I was brought back to consciousness by a soft knock on the door, followed by a crack of light from the hallway, a silhouetted head.

"I'm awake, Grandma," I said.

She came in and closed the door, darkening the room again, feeling her way to the bed and sitting down on the edge, patting the covers until her hand found mine, then patting more.

"How do you feel, honey?"

"Better," I said. "I think I just needed to sleep. Sorry if I sounded like an idiot."

"You weren't sounding any way at all," she said. "What's happened has been a terrible thing for all of us, and we each have to deal with it in our own way. Your father said he'd let you go back to school, and I told him that was a big mistake, that you needed a little more vacation time."

"When did you talk to Dad?"

"Last night," she said. "I told him you were spending the night with us."

"What did he say?"

"He thought that was fine, that maybe you could use some time away from home." She paused. "He said things had been a little tense the past few days."

"Yeah, you could say that."

"I feel guilty we didn't come over to help out," she said, "but your father seemed to want to be left alone and, to tell the truth, I don't think we've felt much like doing any visiting anyway." She patted me again. "But we're fine now, and I promise to come over to your house very soon and see if I can be of some help. I bet you boys could all use a nice home-cooked supper, couldn't you?"

"Yes, ma'am," I said, thinking: If you cook it here and bring it over. I could imagine Grandma's horror if she set foot in our putrifying kitchen.

She stood up, moaning a little as her joints popped. "And speaking of food," she said, "I've got some breakfast about ready for you. I'll bring it in."

I started to get up. "You don't have to do that."

"I want to," she said. "Just lie there and think nice thoughts. I won't be but a minute."

After she'd closed the door, I heard Grandpa say something and her answer, "Wait till he's eaten."

Breakfast was wonderful, and I ate every bite. Biscuits with gravy and sausage patties and home-made strawberry jam and two big glasses of cold milk. And all served to me in bed.

This was living!

By the faint light of an overhead fixture missing half its bulbs -- this bedroom had been Mom's and hadn't been used in years -- I had just tracked down and devoured the last crumbs of biscuit and the last drops of gravy when the door opened and Grandma came in.

"Oh my," she said. "I haven't seen a plate that clean since the dog died. Do you want more?"

"No, ma'am," I said, patting my stomach. "That was just enough. Thank you."

"Here," she said. "I'll trade you." She took my plate and fork and handed me a big book she'd been carrying under her arm. "Something you might want to look at while you rest. Turn on that lamp beside you if you want."

Realizing what the book was, I felt an icy spot forming in the middle of my back and looked for an escape. "Where's Grandpa?"

"He's puttering around outside. He wants to talk to you later."

The book sat like a great stone on my lap. "I could talk with him now."

"I told him to give us a few minutes," she said. She tapped the book with her finger. "Do you know what this is, Jim?"

There was no way out. "Yes, ma'am. It's a picture album."

"Not just any picture album," she said. "Our family history is in here. And not just pictures. There's clippings and letters, the whole shebang." She looked at me, kindly but a little sadly. "You don't care much for that sort of thing, do you, honey?"

"Not much," I said. "Sorry."

She put her hand on the book, like she was taking an oath, and said, "I understand how you feel. I mean, these people are all dead and buried. But they're a part of you, whether you know it or not, and sometimes you can understand yourself, and those you love, better if you understand where you, and they, came from." She paused, like she was thinking whether or not to say just one more thing. She made up her mind and said, "There's a lot about the lake in there, too."

Just the mention of it made my stomach tighten. "To tell you the truth, Grandma," I said, "that's one subject I want to hear the least about, if you don't mind."

"It's an important part of our family's history," she said, adding, "Your mother loved it."

"Yeah, I know."

"Your brother loves it, too."

I laughed, short and bitter. "Tell me about it!"

There was real sadness in her voice when she said, "You're on your father's side in this, aren't you, Jim?"

"I don't know what you mean."

"I mean you're not sorry to see it gone, are you?"

"No, ma'am," I said. "And I wish we could just forget about it. Put it out of our minds and move on."

"It's not that easy," she said. "Woodsen Lake is in our blood."

"Not mine," I said, and though I was immediately sorry because it was sure to hurt her feelings, I was glad, too, because if I hadn't just blurted it out without thinking, I never would have said it. And I meant it. So far as I was concerned, Woodsen was important because it was named for an early settler who had explored it and claimed it. Period. And it was close to town, so everybody knew it and used it.

And it happened to belong to my family once upon a time. So what?

She looked like I'd slapped her. "Jim, you don't know what a price your great grandfather paid for that lake. It cost him everything." She reached over and took the book and opened it. "Let me show you somebody." She carefully turned the brittle pages. "Ah, here we are." She turned it around for me to see, pointing to a yellowed photo. "My father. Wasn't he a handsome man?"

Out of duty, I glanced at the hard-faced man with the dark moustache, eyes struck from flint, confronting the camera rather than posing for it. This was who I came from? Maybe Frank, not me.

"Yeah," I said. "He was handsome." Now what?

Grandma sat studying the picture a long time, running her fingers over it, her eyes misting. "A lot of people mis-understood my father," she said. "They saw him as a ruthless businessman out for himself. After he claimed Woodsen Lake, they spread rumors about him."

"What kind of rumors?"

She frowned. "Too hurtful to talk about. Made up by people who were jealous, who wanted the lake for themselves so they could do just what Mr. Bunsen is going to do now -- shut it off from the common people. Your grandfather, Jim, was a hero. He rescued that lake. He saved it."

I didn't get it and said so. "Grandma, I don't mean any disrespect, but what's your point?"

She nodded and said, "I'm sorry, honey. Old people tend to ramble, don't they?" She turned a few pages and laid a finger on a fading headline. "Have you ever seen this?"

I bent over and peered closely, and what I saw hit me with a force missing from the ancient photographs of long-dead ancestors. This was something real.

"ABE WOODSEN DIES IN CABIN FIRE"

And underneath, in smaller letters, "Indian Revenge Suspected".

"No, ma'am," I said, staring. "I never saw that."

"I didn't think so," Grandma said. "This is my own private scrapbook. I don't keep it hidden or anything like that but I don't show it around either."

"Did you know Abe Woodsen?" I said, like you might ask someone about meeting a celebrity. Which he was, in a way: the first real ghost story of my youth, the first restless spirit with a name.

"I didn't," she said, "but my father did." Her finger thumped another page. "Who is that?"

The same grim man I saw before, but this time wearing a big apron, something dark staining his hands and splashed up his forearms.

"Your dad, right? My great-grandfather."

She nodded again. "And what is that on his hands?"

I squinted. "I don't know. Dirt? Grease?"

"Ink," she said. "Printer's ink. Before Papa had his lumberyard, he ran a newspaper. The first one ever printed in Cherokee."

This was news to me. "You're kidding," I said. "What didn't I ever hear about this before?"

She smiled. "You probably did, but it didn't stay with you. Besides, it only lasted a few years." She flipped back to the headline. "Here's one of his last efforts."

I stared again at the story, while flames licked at the walls of my mind, curling bark off the logs, searching for me like they searched for Abe hunkered inside his cabin all those years ago.

"Why did he give it up?" I said. "The newspaper, I mean."

She looked at me. "Do you really want to know?"

"Sure," I said. "I mean, unless you don't want to tell me."

"It's not that I don't want to tell you," she said. "But I don't want to waste a lot of time telling you things you don't really want to know. Our family is like every other, I imagine. A lot more complicated than what you see in the picture album. Every family takes some explaining. So, are you ready to hear all about us?"

I thought about it. Grandma was sitting on some family secret like it was an egg she'd been incubating for decades. Did I really want to see it hatched? Would it be bloody and smelly and awful to look at and, worst of all, would it then be part mine to take care of?

"Does it have a lot to do with the lake?" I said.

She nodded.

"Maybe I could take a raincheck."

She bent down and kissed the top of my head. "I understand. After all you've been through, you shouldn't have to do anything you don't want to for a while. Someday when you want to know more, you come back and see me." She stopped in the doorway. "I called the school and told them you wouldn't be there today."

"Thanks," I said.

For a while I lay there in the bed, Mom's old bed, staring up at the ceiling just as she must have as a girl, remembering how she used to wake me in the morning for school, coming in and sitting on the edge of the bed, stroking my hair, whispering to me that it was time to get up, and thinking how no one would ever wake me that way again.

When a knock came at the door, I had to wipe my eyes fast on the pillow and then turn over and put it back under my head.

The door opened a little, and Grandpa said, "Anybody in here up for a walk?"

CHAPTER 14

It was a perfect fall morning, the air so crisp and sweet that every breath was like a drink of something cool and intoxicating -- champagne air, somebody once called it --and the sidewalks were blanketed with red and yellow and brown leaves that crunched under your shoes like potato chips. It was almost more than I could take.

Grandpa noticed and put an arm over my shoulders. He almost had to reach up to do it, since I was growing at about the same rate that he was shrinking. His arm felt good, warm and protective.

"You may not believe it," he said, "but things won't always be this bad. I lost my daddy when I was eleven, and for a long time I felt like I couldn't live without him. Didn't even know if I wanted to try. The feeling passed, though, just like it will for you. You ma's memory won't go away, but the pain will. Every day you get through will make you stronger, and one night somewhere down the roada ways, you'll be lying in your bed and you'll realize a whole day just went by and you didn't feel like crying once when you thought about her. It's like a fever breaks, and after that you'll get better and better. Finally there'll come a time you can think of her and smile. You'll want to think about her. Remembering her will be a comfort."

I took some low, deep breathsto steady my voice and said, "What about you? Will you feel better someday, too?"

He took his own deep breath. "Probably not," he said. "I'm too old. I don't have enough time left." He squeezed my shoulder. "Time's the key. You're young. Be glad."

I wasn't glad about much of anything right then, but I tried to act like I was. After all, Grandpa was trying, too.

"How are you dad and Frank doing?" he said. "Holding up okay?"

I thought about lying -- saying, Yeah, sure, they're fine -- but I just couldn't. I didn't want to add to his misery, knowing Mom had been his only child, the center of his universe, but I was tired of hauling everything around on my own back. I was ready to share the load. Besides, he'd asked, right?

"Not so good," I said. We passed the library and turned around the square. I knew we were onour way to the drugstore, where he would buy me a Coke, just like he'd done a hundred times before. I made me feel even more guilty about laying my troubles on him, but I did anyway.

"Dad's started to drink," I said.

Grandpa looked at me. "Drink what?"

"Whiskey."

He stopped, right there on the sidewalk. "Are you sure?"

I'd kept going a couple of steps, so I had to turn around to answer. "Yes sir, I'm sure."

He caught up, and we walked on. "I was afraid of that," he said.

Now it was my turn to stop. "You were?"

He took my arm, and we kept going. "Your dad was a drinker when he was young. Got in some trouble because of it. Fights, wrecks, tickets, a couple of nights in jail. He stopped when he met your mom."

I looked at him as we walked. "Dad was in jail?"

He waved a hand. "Once or twice. No big deal. Drunk in public, that kind of thing. Him and his buddies. Kids that didn't know better."

"And fights?"

"A couple."

Something occurred to me, and I said it before I could stop myself. "I bet you didn't like him."

He looked at me, surprised, and smiled. "Not much." He held the door of the drugstore open for me. "To be honest, we tried to steer your mother away from him." I went through, and he followed. "Lucky for all of us, she didn't listen."

We sat in a booth and both odered Cokes, mine with cherry syrup.

"So how's Frank?" Grandpa said.

I chose my word carefully. "Crazy."

"Tell me about it."

"It might take a while."

He winked. "The one good thing about getting old is that your time's your own."

So I told him all I knew about Frank's personality change, including the latest part, his plan to get the lake back by marrying Gina. By the time I'd finished, I was tired. and Grandpa was frowning mightily.

"That god-damned lake!" he said.

That caught me off-guard. "Pardon?"

He glanced over his shoulder, as if he though Grandma might be lurking down at the other end of the counter, and then leaned toward me, his voice low. "Jim, you know what I felt like doing when I heard your dad sold that lake?"

"If you're like everybody else," I said, "you felt like shooting him."

He slammed a hand down on the table. "Dancing!" His eyes were bright. "Dancing in the street!
Kicking my heels up and howling at the moon! Good riddance, I said, to a family curse!"

I was so relieved I almost got up and came around the booth to hug him. "I'm sure glad to hear to hear you say that," I said, "because that's just how I feel."

"You don't know the half of it," he said. "No a tenth of it. That overblown frog pond has been trouble for this family for a hundred years!" He took a big slurp of his Coke and then told me the story.

"When your grandmother and I were married," he said, "her father wished us luck and kissed the bride and did all the other silly things he was supposed to do, and then he took me aside and said, 'Son, I think you're a fine young man, and I know you'll treat Pearl right, but if you ever let go of that lake after I'm dead, I'll haunt your forever.' I looked real close at him to see if he was joking, but he wasn't. Before the reception was over, her mother came up to me and said pretty much the same thing, only in a nicer way, telling me all about how much the lake meant to them and how long it had been in the family, and on and on. Well, once we were settled in our new house, the same one we're in now, I got to thinking about what they'd said, and I finally decided that your grandmother and me should go down there and camp out one night, sort of a honeymoon on the cheap. Besides, I wanted to see if I could figure out what was so special about that place. Mayybe I could catch whatever disease the rest of the family had."

Grandpa took a drink and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. "So there we here," he said. "A Friday night as I recall, husband and wife, newlyweds, cmaped out on the shores of the lake, flat of our backs in sleeping bags, picking out constellations, talking low about his and that, our plans nd all, whatever young people in love talk about. After a while we got quiet and just watched for falling stars, and I recall thinking how niceitws, with the water slapping at my feet and the wind soft up in the trees and so many stars all over the sky. So perfect. But worth haunting a man over? So I said to your Grandma, "What is it about this lake that makes your family so weird?" And you know what she said to me? Nothing. Not a word."

He stopped to blow his nose into his handkerchief. Then he sucked his glass dry and waved off the waitress when she tried to refill it. "To tell you the truth," he said, "I thought she was dead.
I bent over to see if I could detect any breath coming out of her mouth. All of a sudden, she said, 'Do you hear them?' I lay down real quiet so I wouldn't scare her if she happened to open her eyes and said, 'Them who?' She said, 'The Indians. Coming through the woods. I can feel their footsteps.' Well, I got a little jittery after than and pointed out that a cloud had come up -- not a big one, just a puffball, but probably full of rain -- and said that maybe we should head for home. She didn't put up a fight."

I thought all that sounded pretty weird. "There weren't any Indians, right?"

He shook his head. "Not for fifty years, at least."

"Then what was Grandma hearing?"

"Who knows?" he said. "Figments of her imagination? The power of suggestion? All those stories she'd heard from her old man echoing in her head?"

"What stories?" I was sucked in, and there was no way out.

"Oh, you know. All that stuff about how the Indians tried to chase Abe Woodsen away from the lake because they thought it was theirs and how he wouldn't go and then one night they sneaked up to his cabin, and you know the rest."

"Yeah," I said, blinking away the sudden firestorm in my mind, the crackling and popping of dry wood in flames, the hoarse un-heard screams.

"So anyway," Grandpa said, "me and you grandma didn't talk about it after that. Didn't talk much at all, as a matter of fact. It's like she wanted me to hear those Indians, and when I couldn't, she was kind of mad at me. Something went up between us. I finally confronted her about and said, 'Look, Pearl, I married you, not that damned lake. If your family wants to be weird about it, fine, but it's nothing to me and never will be. You, on the other hand, are everything to me. If that's not enough, tell me right now while I'm still young enough to recover.' Well, she looked at me a minute or so, then she hugged my neck and said she wouldn't talk about that lake anymore. And she didn't."

"Not ever?" I remembered hearing a lot about it as a kid, so I knew somebody was talking about it.

"Not to me," he said. "To your mother when she was born -- well, that's a different story. I swear that little baby was no sooner toddling than Pearl and he daddy had her down at that lake with her feet in the water, trying to catch tadpoles. After a while she got to where she'd cry every time I tried to pick her up to take her home. And the old man, he'd laugh and clap his hands and say, 'Well, Pearlie, looks like we got ourselves another convert!' I'll tell you true, Jimmy, I wouldn't go so far as tosay my father-in-law was crazy. Not selfish, either, since he did make that lake available to any and all. I won't even say he messed up his grand-daughter's life to the point it couldn't be salvaged. After all, she did have two fine sons --" he reached over and tousled my hair (which I immediately re-combed) -- "but I'll say this: he was a haunted man. I don't know who or what was doing the haunting, or why, but I know he passed it on to his little girl, and she passed it on to hers and then to the firstborn son, your big brother."

As if on cue, the front door of the drugstore opened, and in walked Gina, followed by Frank, who had held the door for her.

Grandpa must have seen my eyes widen, because he turned around to see what I was looking at.

"Don't!" I whispered. "It's Frank!"

He leaned over and whispered back, "Why shouldn't I look at my own grandson?"

"It's not you," I said. "I don't want him to see me."

"Why not?"

"I just don't feel like talking to him, okay"?

Grandpa wasn't buying it. "Unfortunately," he said, "I can't hide out here all day. I've got a doctor's appointment at ten." He took out his watch and looked at it. "Which was five minutes ago."

He slid out of the booth and began the slow process of un-folding himself to stand up. "I'm afraid I have to break down and get some arthritis medicine, dang it. Come on, you can hold me up while I try to make it to the door."

I got on his other side and hoped Frank would be too busy wooing Gina to notice us, but Grandpa spoiled that by calling out to him halfway to the door. Frank waved, looking embarrassed. To make matters worse, Grandpa hobbled over to be introduced, while I tried to hide behind him.

"Who's your young lady?"

"Gina Bunsen," Frank said. "Gina, this is my granddad."

Gina smiled. "Hi," she said. She gave me a little wave. "Hi, Jim."

"Hi," I muttered.

Grandpa was leaning over, inspecting Frank's face. "That's quite a nose you've got there. What happened?"

Frank smiled. "I ran into a door."

"Ouch," Grandpa said and turned his attention back to Gina. "I'll bet you're Howard Bunsen's girl, aren't you?"

"Yes sir," she said.

Then he turned to me. "He's the one bought the lake."

I nodded. "I know."

"What's he plan to do with it?"Grandpa said to Gina.

"I'm not sure," she said. "Develop it, I guess."

"Ha!" Frank barked.

Gina patted his knee. "Franks' not sure anybody should do anything to the lake. He likes it the way it is."

"Well," Grandpa said, "it's had it days, but it's fallen on hard times lately. Might not be bad to have someone spruce it up a little."

That roused Frank. "Sprucing up and fencing off aren't the same thing, Grandpa."

Grandpa's bushy gray eyebrows went up. "Somebody fencing it off?"

"Go down there and look," Frank said. "You can't get close. Chain link fence all around it and signs everywhere that say KEEP OUT."

"Well, I'm sure it's just temporary," Gina said. "While construction is going on."

"Construction of what?" Grandpa said.

"Apartments," Frank said, spitting the word out like it was a fly he'd sucked up through his straw. "Condos. Maybe a hotel."

Grandpa put a hand on Frank's shoulder. "You can't stop progress, son. Things change. And the changes can't please everyone."

Frank looked at him. "Why don't you explain it to Mom?"

"That's a little hard to do," Grandpa said softly.

Gina stuck her hand out. "Nice to meet you, sir."

Grandpa shook her hand. "You, too, young lady. Tell your daddy that if he wants advice from an old geezer, it's to keep part of that lake open for people. It's been that way for a hundred years or more, and it would be shame to see it closed off now."

"Yes, sir," she said. "I'll tell him."

I tugged on his arm. "Don't forget your doctor appointment."

On the way out, he stopped and said, "Isn't today a school day?"

Frank was sitting with his back to us and didn't turn around. Gina smiled and said, "We're taking a little holiday."

I pulled Grandpa out the door like a reluctant dog on a leash.

We stopped on the sidewalk outside the doctor's office, and he said, "I wouldn't worry too much about Frank. He's hot-blooded when it comes to the lake, like all his mother's people, but once it's been out of the family hands for a while and gets a facelift and he sees how it's all for the better, he'll come around. He's young and ought to have more on his mind than that stupid lake anyway."

Explain it to Mom, I thought, but I said, "I hope you're right."

"Be sure to stop back by and see your grandmother," he said.

I assured him I would, but when I got to their house, I walked on by with my head down. For better or worse, it was time to go home.

CHAPTER 15

Coming down our street, I was struck by what I learned later was called deja vu, a sense that I'd been exactly here before, doing exactly the same thing. And, of course, I had, since I'd walked down Apple nearly every school day for nine years, plus other days. But this time I was five years old and not in school yet, and Mom and I were coming back from dropping Frank off at his first day in the second grade -- all slicked-down hair and starched new yeans -- and the air was like just now, crisp and cool, fall-scented. Mom was showing me how to adjust my pace so that I didn't step on any cracks in the sidewalk. It took all my concentration, and each time I caught one mid-shoe, she'd groan. I loved it.

I couldn't predict what would come next, but as soon as it had come, I recognized it, remembered it. A dog ran out and woofed at me; I knew his bark instantly and wasn't at all surprised that he ran around my legs twice and then saw a cat and went after it, leaving me spinning like a top. And my mother's laugh tinkled like wind chimes, then as now, now as then, forever in the present in my mind, part of the soundtrack of my life.

I was sad when the mystical mood began to fade away halfway home, and by the time I saw Dad's car sitting, brown and hunched like a giant beetle in front of our house, the mystery was gone.

I took the porch steps two at a time, drew in a deep breath, braced myself, and went in.

To my utter amazement, the smell of rotting food didn't assault my nostrils. The house smelled like -- what? Pine Sol? I walked into the kitchen and opened the door.

The transformation was astonishing. Like elves had been there. The table and counters were clear, the floor swept and mopped. I opened a cabinet and saw nothing but rows of clean cups and glasses, towers of sparkling plates and saucers. The silverware drawer was fill with knives and forks and spoons that looked like they'd never touched food. It wasn't elves, I decided, but aliens from outer space. And they'd probably abducted Dad. I secretly thanked them, but I felt immediately guilty and went looking for him.

I found him in his office, not only working away on some papers but actually whistling. Not sure what to say, I stood in the doorway.

"Dad?"

He seemed postively glad to see me. "Come in, come in! Did you enjoy your stay with your grandparents? How are they?"

"Fine," I said. I nodded toward the kitchen. "What, uh, happened?"

"The kitchen? I cleaned it!"

"You?"

"Yes, me. I know how to clean. Lord, I lived by myself for a long time before I met your mother."
"Wow," I said. "I'm impressed. But why? I mean, why now?"

"Because," he said, "I finally stopped feeling sorry for myself and took a look around."

"Was it because of what I said?"

He nodded. "Probably."

"I didn't mean to make it sound like you had to do all the work," I said. "I mean, I've been feeling pretty weird myself and -- "

He held up a hand. "Stop right there. You don't have to apologize for a thing. You said what you meant, and there was a lot of truth in it. Come in and sit, Jim. Let's talk."

Oh God, I thought, not again. Now now. "I was actually planning on getting my stuff together," I said, "and going on to school. I've only missed a couple of classes this morning, nothing important."

"Fine, fine," he said. "I'm proud of you. You've been handling this a lot better than me. But I still want you to come in. I have something to show you." He pulled up a chair beside his. "It won't take but five minutes, I promise."

A groan swelled up in my throat, but I choked it back down. I sat, arms folded. "What?" I said, daring him to make it worth my while.

He picked up some of the papers. "Any idea what all this is?"

"Nope."

"A bid. An insurance bid. Know what that means?"

A yawn was working its way up my throat. I could feel my eyes widen as I held it in. I shook my head.

"Well," he said, "when there's a big project coming up, sometimes the builder takes bids from insurance companies, or agents, to get the best price to insure what he's putting up. You try to come in low but still make some money off the deal. It's tricky. Real tricky." He waved the papers. "That's what this is."

"That's great, Dad," I said. "Now, if you don't mind --"

"Wait," he said. "Don't you want to know what the project is?"

"Sure, I guess."

He leaned closer and whispered, "Woodsen Estates."

"Never heard of it," I said.

"Nobody has -- yet! They're breaking ground as we speak. A hundred luxury apartments and high-priced condominiums going up by spring!"

He leaned even closer, eyes bloodshot from last night's whiskey but alert, too, almost sparkling. It was the first time I'd seen him interested in anything in so long that I had to pay attention.

"A hundred quality units overlooking the lake!" he said. "Surrounding it! Think of it, Jim!"

I did. And it made me a little queasy. "Wouldn't that sort of shut the lake off?" I said. "I mean, to everybody that didn't live there?"

"Anybody can rent an apartment or buy a condo," Dad said. "There's no law against it. But the point is, Mr. Bunsen has opened up the bidding for insurance coverage. Do you have any idea what an insurance policy on a hundred top-of-the-line residences would be worth? Do you?"

"Not exactly," I said.

"A lot! A whole, pardon the expression, hell of a lot! Enough to get us out of debt and send you and Frank to college!"

I knew he wanted me to get excited with him, but that was a feeling I was having a hard time mstering, like a pilot light had gone out it me. I tried. "That's great. What makes you think you'll get it?"

It was just what he'd been hoping I'd ask. I felt like I'd walked into a trap. For the next half-hour he marched me through the papers like an army recruit through drills. Columns of numbers and calculations I didn't understand and didn't want to understand but that he obviously was proud of, totals and subtotals galore.

"And if I can get him to go for the whole package," Dad said at last, "here's what my commission would be."

He pointed to a figure at the bottom of the page. It was a lot of money. Thousands.

I looked at him again. "Really?"

He nodded, proud as a new parent. "And this would just be a start. A reference like this opens doors, Jim. Important doors." He crossed hin fingers and held them up. "Wish me luck. I'm turning it in today."

He smiled at me, and I smiled back, like we were really a team, a family, on the same side, pulling for the same cause. But all the while, something about the deal made me uneasy, and I wasn't sure what. One thing was running through my head, so I said it.

"Have you told Frank?"

Dad's face clouded. I felt guilty for ruining his mood, blotting out the little bit of sunshine he'd known in a long time, but he shouldn't be kidding himself either.

"No, I haven't," he said. "I tried last night when he came home, but it was late and I'm not sure I was making sense. I was pretty tired."

And drunk, I thought but didn't say.

"Anyway," he said, "I'm still trying to figure a good way to tell him. Maybe you have some suggestions."

"Not me," I said. "I don't even know him anymore."

Dad shook his head. "He's not himself, that's for sure." He looked at me. "Do we need to talk about the lake?"

"No!" I said it so fast, and maybe so loud, that Dad drew back a little, startled. "I don't really feel like it," I said quickly. "Not right now." Not ever, I didn't say.

Dad nodded. "Well, it's a sore point in our family, and it'll have to be dealt with in time. No hurry, though, as long as you're okay with it."

"I'm fine," I said and stood up. "I do think I'll go on to school."

"I'm glad you feel that way," Dad said. "Do you need a ride?"

"No, no," I said. "It's a nice day, and I could use the exercise. Besides, you have work to do."

"One more thing?"

I clenched my jaw shut and sucked air through my teeth. "What?"

"Do you think your brother's serious about the Bunsen girl?"

I shrugged. "Looks like it."

"Maybe she'll do the job for me."

"What job?"

"Convincing him to give up on Woodsen Lake."

"Yeah," I said. "Maybe."

Dad had been abducted by aliens all right, and they'd removed his brain.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

I got to school just as second period was ending, meaning I'd missed Music and History. Dull guys and dead guys, as Slick would say. I was just in time for Civics and then, if I survived, lunch.

The hallway was full of students banging locker doors and gabbing. A few smiled, waved, clapped me on the shoulder and said "Welcome back," "How's it going?" or whatever. Others still didn't want to look at me. I didn't see Slick, which was just as well; I wasn't sure I had the energy to deal with him yet. Let me a get a class or two under my belt. He'd find me at lunch, and maybe I'd be ready by then.

I got my Civics book out of my locker and went in and sat down, saying "hi" to the people on either side of me but then staring straight ahead, nervous and numb at the same time.

Mr. Watson was at the front of the room, and he was smiling big, which meant only one thing: a guest speaker. Mr. Watson loved guest speakers. Not only did it get him out of having to teach for a day, it also made him look like a big shot. He always introduced them by saying, "And now it's my pleasure to introduce my good friend . . ." even though half the time he didn't know the person, had just read something in the newspaper or heard somebody else talking. But because he wasn't shy about asking prominent stranger to come to our class, we were exposed, over the course of a year, to an impressive array of local experts and celebrities, from public officials ("My good friend Fire Chief Marshall") to a historian who talked a whole hour about the town's first settlers, including Abe Woodsen, who she said was "a foul-mouthed pirate of a pioneer who finally met his well-deserved fate at the hands of the natives he had been swindling for years."

When we'd all sat down, Mr. Watson stood before us and raised his hands for quiet. "We are fortunate to have with us this morning a special guest speaker," he said. A few groans, lots of yawns. "As you all know, we've had some interesting speakers this year, but I've saved the best for last. He'll be here any minute. He's a very busy man, and I'm thrilled he could make time for us today." He looked at his watch. "While we're waiting, let me tell you a bit about him."

"Every town has a few real leaders," he said, "people who make a difference. Our speaker this morning is one of those. A man with integrity, a man with guts, a man with vision. A man who has devoted hi life to making Cherokee a dynamic, fun place to live." We all looked at each other. Cherokee fun and dynamic? "And whose latest project is his most ambitious yet."

Suddenly the door opened, and Mr. Watson swung his arm that way with a flourish. "I give you Mr. Cherokee himself -- my good friend Howard Bunsen!" He tried to get a round of applause started, but it only rose to the level of scattered and then as abruptly as lifting needle off a record.

Mr. Bunsen didn't seem to notice, striding confidently to the front of the room, shaking Mr. Watson's hand and waving to all of us like we were voters and he was running for office. He waited until Mr. Watson had taken a seat on a folding chair by the door before he began talking.

"First, I'd like to thank you for inviting me here today, Bob." Mr. Watson beamed. "And second, let me say that after seeing this fine group of young people, I have great confidence in the future of our fine city. Great confidence."

Mr. Cherokee Himself was an imposing figure. Like an ex-athlete going to seed in middle age, he was both strong and slack, a big man equal parts fat and muscle, oozing importance like sweat, with eyes that could pin the most restless of us to our seats like pickled biology specimens. He used smiles and compliments like any good politician: to get his way. But you sensed that if those didn't work, if you still resisted him, opposed him, he had other tools, blunter and more direct, that could bring you around in a hurry.

"I'm here today," he said in that deep, powerful voice that brought to mind a bullfrog broadcasting over the swamp, "to urge each and every one of you to do your duty as citizens and future leaders of Cherokee by becoming more knowledgeable, better informed, about your city's growth and the plans some of us have for it. I want you to leave this room with a clear picture of what it takes to make a city first-rate and a commitment to making Cherokee that kind of city."

He plopped his big butt on the edge of the desk; it sagged and creaked.

"You're all too young to vote," he said, "but you can still play a role in shaping your city's future. How Simple. The city council meets next week. Is it Wednesday, Bob?"

"Thursday," Mr. Watson said, obviously pleased to be consulted.

"Thursday," said Mr. Bunsen. "And their main topic of discussion with be zoning. How many of you know what zoning is?" Not a hand went up. "That's all right," he said. "No need for you to know. Until now, that is. Get ready, because you're about to learn something, and how often can you say that about the time you spend in school?"

A few people giggled, a few more smiled; most of us looked at the clock: still a half hour to go.

Mr. Bunsen spent the next ten minutes explaining zoning, concluding this way: "There's a new development just getting underway in Cherokee that will provide quality housing for our future families -- yours included, I hope. We're calling it Woodsen Lake Estates." He smiled and winked. "I suspect some of you are familiar with Woodsen Lake?"

Lots of giggles this time: Woodsen had long been a favorite parking place for couples.

For the next ten minutes, Mr. Bunsen described in detail the beauty and grandeur of Woodsen: the serene woods, the peaceful shore, the inviting water, etc. Suddenly he stopped. "The only problem with the picture I've been painting," he said, "is that it's a lie. It's a portrait of a lake that doesn't exist anymore. It's the way Woodsen looked fiftey years ago. The Woodsen lake of today is, let's be honest, an eyesore." He raised a finger, the politician making his point, and I couldn't help picturing a beer can stuck on it. "And that's the way it's destined to say, if certain opposition parties get their way."

He stood before us like a general before un-tested troops, arms folded, scowling mightily. "If the city council votes to zone Woodsen Lake anything but a commercial property, everyone will lose. The more land you open up for development, the more land you can guarantee will be well-managed, taken care of, and preserved for the common good." He pointed to Mr. Watson sitting at attention in his chair by the door, like a sergeant-at-arms keeping us from escaping. "Mr. Watson is only one of a number of civic-minded investors who want to see the lake saved for future generations, and who know that the only way to do that is to make it attractive to future home-buyers." He gestured over the room. "Like yourselves in a few years." He smiled broadly at us. "So don't forget: tell your parents to urge the City Council to zone Woodsen commercial, for all our sakes. Thank you for your time. Enjoy the rest of your day."

Mr. Watson hurried across the room, all smiles, clapping. "Let's give Mr. Bunsen a big round of applause for coming to talk with us today. That was terrific. A civics lession and a history lesson and a business class all in one." He glanced at the clock. "We have about four minutes left. Are there any questions for Mr. Bunsen?"

Everyone started stacking up their books and putting stuff in their desk, thankful for a few extra minutes to loiter in the hall before lunch.

Then Mr. Watson said, "Yes, there in the back. A question?"

Groans of disbelief. Angry eyes searching the room. Who --?

I was as astonished as the rest to see that it was my hand in the air. I jerked it back down imediately but not in time.

"What's your question, Jim?" said Mr. Watson.

Ignoring the glares, I kept my eyes on Mr. Bunsen. "You said there was opposition to the zoning. Who is it?"

Groans all around.

Mr. Bunsen nodded. "Good question. The opposition is a bunch of narrow-minded, selfish people who put their own interests before the interests of the community. From those that are used to using the lake free of charge as their own private fishing hole and dumping ground to the historical society that wants to turn it into a park -- at taxpayers' expense, of course -- to a nutty old Indian that liveds here in town and still thinks his people got run out of the Woodsen area unfairly even though they murdered the man it originally belonged to." He looked right at me. "Does that answer your question?"

The eyes on me were burning holes in my shirt. "Yes sir," I said.

The bell rang. The room emptied in seconds. I was the last one out and was just about to the door when Mr. Watson called me back.

"Jim, I want you to meet Mr. Bunsen. Howard, this is Jim Perkins. His daddy sold you the lake."

Mr. Bunsen's eyes lit up, his smile broadened, his grip on my hand tightened. "Well, well, I'm very pleased to meet you. I've been trying to buy that lake for the longest time. I was beginning to think your family was never going to sell it."

I got my hand back and put it in my pocket so he couldn't get at it again. "Dad needed the money," I said.

Mr. Watson said softly, "Mrs. Perkins passed on recently."

"Yes, I heard," Mr. Bunsen said. "Please offer my condolences to your father."

"I will." I edged toward the door. "Nice to meet you."

"Wait a minute," Mr. Bunsen said, looking me up and down. "You're the one who asked the question just now, aren't you?"

"Yes sir."

He nodded. "Now I see the resemblance."

"What resemblance is that?" said Mr. Watson.

"To his brother." Mr. Bunsen winked at me. "I met him yesterday. Not too long after he'd got his nose bashed in by that dumb football player Gina dates." He laughed and clapped Mr. Watson on the back, staggering him. "Gina walks in, leading this good-looking boy with a bloody nose, and she says, 'Daddy, I want you to meet Frank Perkins.' And this boy, this Frank Perkins, with blood coming out of his nose, you know what he says to me? He says, and I swear this is true, 'Nice to meet you, Mr. Bunsen, but you ought to know that I want my family's lake back.' That's what he said! Can you believe it?"

Mr. Watson shook his head and clucked. "Teenagers. They'll say anything, won't they?" He looked at his watch and said it was time to take Mr. Bunsen to the lunch room, where the principal was waiting. I said that was fine and tried to excuse myself, but Mr. Bunsen said I should walk with them since I was headed that way, too, wasn't I?

"Actually no," I said. "I thought I'd skip lunch today." Which wasn't a lie. I had no appetite, though my stomach sounded like a den of bears grumbling. A dull pain had begun, too: the bears had started gnawing.

"Walk with us anyway," Mr. Bunsen said. He laid his arm over my shoulders and, with Mr.Watson trailing behind, frowning, started down the hall, talking all the while about what a fine boy he thought Frank was and how glad he'd been to see Gina bringing home somebody who knew how to say "sir" and who didn't smell like a locker room after a hard practice.

"Nothing against the Belew boy," he said confidentially, "but I'd never be comfortable having somebody that dumb in the family."

"In the family?" I said.

He laughed. "Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself. But fathers can't help looking at boys as potential son-in-laws. We want what's best for our little girls, and that includes the best man we can find."

Frank's plan was working!

At the door to the cafeteria, Mr. Bunsen told Mr. Watson he wanted to talk tome another me another minute or so -- in private.

Mr. Watson looked upset and fidgeted around like he had to go to the bathroom. "I'm afraid we really need to go in. Maybe you could talk to him later? After school?"

Mr. Bunsen shot him a quick, hard look. "What's the hurry, Bob?"

"Mr. Garvey is waiting on us," Mr. Watson said, pointing inside, where the principal sat at table, surrounded by the vice-principal, the head football coach, pluse a couple of hand-picked teachers loyal to his regime. My guess was that they were all committed Woodsen investors.

Mr. Bunsen took his big arm off my shoulders and transferred it to Mr. Watson's. "Well now, why don't you run on in and get a seat warm for me, and I'll be right there. Okay, Bob?"

Mr. Watson could do nothing but nod and do as he was told, calling back weakly, "Don't be long!"

When he was gone, Mr. Bunsen looked around as if for spies and leaned close to me. "Your daddy's in the insurance business, right?"

"Yes sir."

"I want you to tell him something for me. Tell him I'm taking bids for coverage on the Woodsen project. Everything from building materials through the finished structures. Could be a nice piece of business for the right agent."

"He knows," I said. "He's working on a bid."

He looked pleased. "That right? Well, you tell him I'll be watching for it. I'll open it right away and look it over." He got confidential again, leaning so close I could smell the last fading traces of his Old Spice, mixed with the sweat he'd been working up cheerleading our class. I felt woozy and almost had to hold onto him to keep my balance. "Tell him I could use him on my side in this Woodsen thing, the lake being in your family so long and all. If he backs me on this, it just might make things go a littler smoother. You know what I mean?"

"Yes sir," I said, trying to slide away. I needed fresh air.

He caught my arm. "One more thing," he said. "Are you as fanatical about that lake as your brother is?"

"No sir," I said. "I don't feel much one way or the other."

"Good!" he said. "Then maybe you'll be on my side!"

He clapped me on the arm. It stung.

"One thing about me you can take to the bank, Jim: it's a whole lot better to be my friend than to be my enemy. Now I'd better get in there before your teacher wets his pants."

He winked at me and was gone.

Feeling dazed, like I'd been in a whirlwind that had blown up out of nowhere and spun me around, filling my eyes and hair and mouth with dirt so I could barely see and couldn't swallow, I more or less felt my way along the hall to my locker, thinking: get some food down, keep up your energy. I was halfway through the combination on my lock when I remembered that I hadn't brought any lunch.

A hand on my arm, a soft voice: "Jim?"

Leave me alone, I thought. Please. Just go away, okay?

But the hand didn't go away, and the voice came again, and I turned around to find Sherry standing there, smiling at me.

"Why don't we go somewhere and talk?"

"I forgot my lunch," I said, like that was important.

"That's okay," she said. "You can have some of mine."

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

She led me to the parking lot, where we ended up leaning against Slick's car. I warned her not to lean too hard, as something might fall off. She laughed and opened her sack and spread out what she had on the hood.

"Let's see," she said. "It looks like a ham and cheese sandwich, conveniently cut in half, some potato chips, a bunch of grapes, plus a couple of cupcakes. I'll bet your mother couldn't have done a better job." Immediately she reddened. "Oh Jim, I'm sorry. I forgot."

I smiled and picked up half a sandwich. "Hey, sometimes I forget, too," I lied. "Yum!"

We ate in silence, occasionally looking at each other, smiling and then looking away. Once our hands met at the potato chip bag, and we laughed. When I reached for the grapes, she stopped me.

"Wait." She plucked a grape and held it up. "Open," she said. "I saw this once in a movie."

I opened my mouth, and she put the grape in, removing her fingers quickly. "More?"

I nodded, and this time she left her fingers inside a second longer that she needed to and my lips closed on them briefly. I chewed fast, swallowed, and opened up again, like a ravenous baby bird. She laughed but kept feeding me grapes until they were all gone. Then she opened the cupcakes and handed me one. "I'm not about to feed you this," she said. "Too sticky."

When we were done, we sat on Slick's hood and watched the other people in the lot. Some sat in cars, some on them, some just milled around. A couple in the front seat of a Chevvy were arguing. She was plasterered against the passenger door, quietly crying; he was looking out the driver's door, mouth closed tight, steaming. A crap game was going on behind one hot rod: you could hear the occasional cry of "Snake-eyes!" or "Be good to Daddy!" A fight was percolating over by the ball field: two guys facing each other like ruffled-up roosters, scuffing the gravel. It was like a scene at Leroy's, minus the corn dogs.

When the bell rang, students filed back into the school in groups or couples or alone, rested and re-fueled for the long afternoon ahead.

Exceot for Sherry and me.

We didn't make a move. Without saying anything, we both stayed on Slick's care and watched the parking lot empty. Another bell went off, signaling classes were resuming, and still we sat.

"Want to go in?" I said.

She shook her head.

"Then we better get out of sight." I slid down and held a hand up to her. She took it, and we both sat down next to the car, side by side, her back against a door, mine against a tire.

We didn't say anything for a while, just sat and listened to the last shouts and door-closings and assorted noises of school cranking up again for the afternoon. Then all was quiet. Somewhere a car turned a corner. Somewhere else a bird sang in a tree.

"Jim," Sherry said finally, "can I ask you something?"

"Sure."

"Do you miss your mother?"

Wham! A bolt from the blue, a shot to the gut. I cleared my throat and tried to sound cool. "Yeah, sometimes."

"I miss both my parents," she said. "My dad because he did a lot of stuff with me. Took me places, bought what I liked to eat, told me how pretty I was. I miss my mother, too, even though we used to fight a lot."

"What did you fight about?" I couldn't remember ever fighting with Mom. Sure she used to make me slick my hair down and tuck in my shirt and be sure my pants were zipped up before I went out, but I don't think I argued about any of it: I thought of it as maintenance.

"Oh, the usual," she said. "What I wore, who my friends were, what kind of grades I got. Dad was easier, but as I think back, Mom was really trying to do what was right for me, you know?"

I shrugged. "I guess."

After a moment she said, "So what are we going to do about us?"

"Us? You and me?" I didn't know what she meant.

She nodded, not looking at me, staring out over the ball field. "I think we're kind of a doomed couple."

I looked at her, but she wasn't looking at me. "What do you mean?"

"I don't know," she said. "I guess that i wish we could be a real couple, doing stuff together, but I know we can't."

That stung. I thought of her in cars with older guys. "If you mean because I don't have a car," I said, I'll have one next year. Dad says -- "

"That's not what I meant."

"So what did you mean?"

It was a long time before she answered. A sour taste had started gathering in the back on my mouth, and I hoped that didn't mean lunch was on its way back up. I scooped up a handful of gravel and inspected one small stone at a time before flipping them out into the lot, hearing them ping against someone's car, not looking p to see whose.

"We're not much alike," Sherry said. "You come from a normal home, even if you've lost your mother. I mean, you still have a father."

"He's a drunk," I said.

"What?"

"Nothing. I shouldn't have said it."

"You said he's a drunk."

"Not usually. Just since Mom died."

"Oh." After a while she said, "Do you want to talk about us again?"

I didn't get to answer -- thank God -- because just then we heard a sound. We both listened. shoes rattled over the gravel close by. They stopped right in front of me. Black, shiny, official- looking tie-ups, parked about a foot apart under dark blue cuffs. Vice-principal's shoes.

"Didn't either one of you hear the bell?"

We looked up, knowing whose face we'd see frowning down.

"Jim, you should be in History," said Mr. Price. "And Sherry, you should be in English."

He waited for us to mount a defense, to come up with excuses, to wiggle and worm and try to weasel our way out, but we both just sat there, looking up, and he must have seen something in our eyes, something unsettling, because he squatted down so he was at eye-level with us and said, in a kinder voice, "I know things have been tough for both of you at home lately, but you owe it to yourselves to be strong and do what you know is right. If you let school slide, you'll start to let other things slide, too, and pretty soon you won't be able to stop the sliding. Do you understand?"

We nodded in unison, though the words flapped by our ears like so many honking geese, interesting in a way but alien, foreign, on their way to somewhere else.

"Good," he said, and stood up, his knees popping. "I'll expect to see you both in your seats before the period is over." He turned to go but stopped and looked back over his shoulder. "And I want you to feel free to come by and talk any time. I don't bite, and I might even be able to help."

We both kep looking down as his footsteps crunched away toward the school.

Sherrry spoke first. "I gess what I'm trying to say, Jim, is that I'm not the kind of girl you think I am."

"What kind of girl do you think I think you are?"

"Normal."

"You're not normal?"

She shook her head. "I don't feel like I am. I want to be, but I'm not. It's weird not to have parents. Nobody to tell you what can do or not do. You get to where don't think like, well, like a kid any more."

She was throwing bees at me, stinger-first. "Like me, you mean?"

"Don't be mad," she said. "I told you it's me, not you. Be glad you're normal."

But I couldn't be glad. I was losing her, and I'd never really had her, and I didn't know what to do about it. I picked up more gravel and flipped the rocks, harder this time, so that their pings on cars probably left marks.

"I think I saw you last night," I said.

I didn't look up, but her voice sounded surprised. "Where?"

"Riding around."

"Oh."

"With some guy."

I was making it up. I crossed my fingers. Please tell me I'm lying . . .

Silence.

Finally she said, "I'm sorry, Jim, but I told you. I get lonely."

Crap. It was true. "Why didn't you just invite your boyfriend over to keep you company?"

"What boyfriend? What are you talking about?"

"The ape man from across the walk."

"I told you about him. He's just a friend. A neighbor."

I threw the last of the gravel. Ping! Ping! Ping! I stood up. "You told me lots of things, Sherry. And they all up to same thing, don't they? I'm a kid and you're so damned grown up. Well, fine, just leave me alonge. From now on, leave the hell alone!"

My eyes were hot as I headed for the school. Sherry was right behind, calling my name, then beside me, jerking at my arm. I pulled, but she wouldn't let go.

"That's not fair!" she said. "Stop and listen to me, damn it!"

I stopped. Through my blurred tears, I could see tears in her eyes, too.

"I'm sorry, Jim," she was saying. "Look, let's make up, okay? Let's do something together this Saturday. There's a real sick monster movie on downtown, just the kind you like. My treat."

"Why?" I said, still stung. "No real men you like available?"

"Jim, I'm trying," she said, and the tears were pouring down. "I'm trying, and you're fighting me."

"I'd really like to go with you," I said, "but I'd be too embarassed to be seen with such a grown-up women. I mean, people might think I was trying to find somebody to take my mother's place or something. You know, a little lost kid like me?"

She slapped me. So hard that hard yellow dots danced in front of my eyes, and all I could see was her disappearing toward the school. I tried to follow, but I tripped and hit both knees hard on the gravel. It took a long time before I trusted my legs enough to ask them to carry me to class.

American History was already half over, and I wasn't about to walk in and draw attention to myself, so I sat outside in the hall, with my back against the wall, my history book open like I was following along. Mr. Price came by once and stood, giving me another look at his shoes, but decided not to say anything and, after a few seconds, went on.

Inside the classroom, Mrs. Ackerman was talking about the settlers and the Indians. In her high piercing whine, she went on and on about the brutal wars, the treaties, the founding of reservations, the way the government had tried to balance the rights of a native people against the needs of a growing nation. The lecture had a decided slant, with no mention of treaties violated, villages slaughtered or scattered, because, like everyone else in our school, Mrs. Ackerman was white. RIght down to what I imagined to be her cotton underwear from Woolworth.

No one in the class challenged anything she said, partly because she was the teacher and it didn't occur to them to doubt her, and partly because they didn't want to prolong the discussion by sidetracking her, but mostly because they didn't care.

Indians meant nothing to them.

In the whole town there was the one family, and everybody knew, or thought they knew, that the father was crazy, the daughter a whore. The other Indians, the Indians of history, were, at best, characters in a book nobody wanted to read; at worst, they were bad movie actors with angry, warpainted faces, spoiling for white blood, grunting one minute, whooping wildly the next. Nowhere did they come alive, nowhere seem real.

They were real to me, though, and as I sat there in the hall, leaning back with my eyes closed, the Indians of Woodsen Lake trailed single file through my brain, animal-quiet in the hot night, on their way to Abe Woodsen's cabin with clay jars of kerosene and boxes of long wooden matches bought at the trading post, on their way to settle a wrong in the only way they knew how.

The bell rang, sending me to my feet just in time to keep me from being trampled. Faces and bodies hurried by as I plastered myself against the wall, hugging the history book to my chest, feeling like a cowboy trapped without his horse in a stampede. Nobody looked at me, not because they were avoiding me but because they were preoccupied wiht each other and their own thoughts or where they were going. At the moment I was invisible. I wasn't a factor in anybody's life.

Except Slick's.

"Hey, buddy, where you been? Want to cut out early?"

"Better not," I said. "I've got to go to at least one class today."

"See you at three then? At the car?"

"Yeah, sure."

I lucked out in English: we watched a movie based on a Shakespeare play, and with the lights out I was able to half-doze my way through, waking up when I heard people closing notebooks and scraping chairs. Without stopping to talk to anybody, I groped my way into the hall.

I was barely out the front door when I heard honking and looked up to see Slick's jalopy at the curb. He even had the door open for me, like a chauffeur waiting for his rich employer. I waved and was starting out when a whiff of perfume blindsided me and turned my head around.

It was Sherry, and she didn't look at me as she passed. Her friend Beverly did, though. She gave me the kind of disgusted glance you give to a pile of dog crap on the sidewalk, something you're offended you even have to look at. They were on their way to the parking lot and Beverly's heap, a car almost as old and beat-up as Slick's.

"Hey!" I yelled after them.

Beverly looked over her shoulder. "Piss on you!"

I was about to yell something else -- what? -- when Slick blasted his horn again, and I got in and slammed the door.

He lit a cigarette and threw the match out the window. "So what is it with you and the orphan? I detected some hostility back there."

"Just drive," I said.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The ancient mildewy smell of Slick's front seat sifted up as I settled in, like the wet woody air
ound Woodsen Lake, stinking of decay yet familiar, almost comforting. As we rounded the
square and headed down Main, I was starting to relax, to get my breathing and my heartbeat
ack to normal, when suddenly Slick slammed on his brakes.

I barely had time to keep my face outof the windshield by throwing my pams against the dash.

"Jesus," he said. "Who's that crazy bastard?"

Ahead of us, a car had stopped in our lane. A couple of male heads were stuck out on the passenger side, one in front, one in back. They were talking to a girl on the sidewalk. It only took a second to recognize the car and the heads and the girl.

"Belew's gang," Slick said. "They're trying to pick up Pocahontas."

"Her name's Angel," I said.

Slick raised his eyebrows. "She a friend of yours?"

She stood on the curb, hands on hips, black hair tossed back, yelling at the boys in the car. One of them opened a back door, and she kicked it shut. It opened again, and a guy started climbing out.

Without thinking, I reached over and laid a palm on the horn.

Slick shoved my hand away. "Jesus, Perk, do you want to get us killed?"

But the guys in the car ahead didn't get a chance because once I'd honked other cars behind us started honking, too, and the guy getting out of the back seat of Belew's car got back in and they drove away, catcalls and curses pouring from their windows.

Angel yelled back, matching them word for word.

Slick shook his head as we crept down Main, the cigarette in his fingers shaking. "You got more guts than brains,"he said. "And we can scratch Leroy's. They'll be there for sure. So where to?"

I shrugged. "I don't know. Just drive around. See what happens."

"You gonna spring for gas?"

"Sure."

As we rounded the square again, I thought of how Dad said it was a wonder the kids of Cherokee weren't all dizzy from constantly driving in a circle. I mentally checked off the stores, all in their places, neatly lined up: The Townhouse Restaurant, Cherokee Dry Goods, Florence's Flowers, Woolworth, Downtown Drug. Order. I closed my eyes and leaned back. I liked the feeling of the cool air blowing in the open windows, the jerky rattling motion of the car, even the exotic aroma of Slick's cigarette smoke. Maybe I can just stay here, I thought. Pay Slick to drive me around and around the square forever.

Suddenly he was slapping at my leg.

"Hey look, there she is again."

Reluctantly, I opened my eyes and sat up.

Pocahontas -- I mean Angel -- was walking along the side of Main Street, not on the sidewalk but beside it, in the grass of lawns, barefoot, shoes in her hands.

"Pull over," I said.

Slick looked at me. "What?"

"Pull over. Let's see if she wants a ride."

"Are you loony? Pick up a whore in the daytime?"

By now we were beside her, and I leaned out.

"Hi. Need a ride?"

She looked at me, than at Slick's car, huffing at the curb, finally at Slick, hunched down in the front seat, puffing a Marlboro, then back at me.

"You promise to take me right home?"

I put my hand on my heart. "Scout's honor."

From the time I opened the door and let her in, Slick was a mess: unable to speak or even look at her, lighting cigarettes two at a time, running stops signs after only the briefest of pauses, flicking ashes into his lap instead of out the window.

She sat between us -- because the back doors wouldn't open -- straddling the transmission hump, arms folded tight across her chest, smelling of cheap cookie-dough perfume.

Slick blew smoke out the window and said, "Where we headed?"

"We're taking Angel home," I said.

"I know that. Where does she live?"

Angel didn't say anything, so I said, "Take a right at the next corner. Go to the second street and hand a left."

"Third street," she said.

I nodded. "Third. I almost remembered."

For a long time she stayed silent, staring out the windshield at the delapidated buildings we were passing, from whose apartments emerged worn-looking women of all ages and shapes, most in men's shirts three sizes too big, sweeping the small square concrete porches, yelling at children who ran around the yards wild as dogs, or hauling in laundry from thick twine strung from one end of the front porch to the other or even out in the yards, between tree limbs.

Milltown.

Cherokee's official slum.

And Pocahontas -- Angel -- lived on the poor side of here.

We were almost to her street, a dirt road leading through onion fields on the edge of town to a few scattered shacks the mailman rarely visited, when she turned to me and said, "I thought you wanted to talk about the lake."

She caught me off-guard. I'd been thinking about sex. Specifically, sex with her. Not me, but the football players. In the backseat of Mel Jackson's dad's station wagon that fall night a year ago, right after the Mount Pleasant game. Once they'd ditched their girlfriends -- "decent" girls who had to be home early -- they'd all drunk a lot of beer and gone looking for a "wild" girl to have a little fun with.

And, really, they couldn't be blamed totally for thinking Angel was that kind of girl. After all, she fit the profile. She lived in a falling-down shack. She skipped school. She cussed. And she obviously didn't have a steady boyfriend. She looked, to any horny guy in a car, like fair game. And when they offered her a ride, she went with them. What happened after that depends on whose word you took, hers or theirs.

"Well?" she said. "Do you or don't you?"

I blinked. "What?"

"Do you want to talk about the lake or not?"

"Sure," I said. Did I? Why had I said that? What was I thinking?

"Maybe I'll ask you something," she said. "How come your daddy sold it?"

"He had to," I said. "Mom was sick."

"Did it help her get better?"

My throat got thick and started to close up. "No, but he thought it might."

"You been down there lately?"

I shook my head. Just the quickest passing thought of Mom caught me so by surprise that I couldn't trust my voice.

"You ought to," she said. "You and your daddy both."

Instead of answering, she turned to Slick. "Drive to the lake."

He didn't look at her but just puffed a little harder on his Marlboro. "Sorry," he said. "I got to be somewhere else."

"Where?" she demanded.

He frowned and peeled around a corner, acting like he was in a hurry. "Just somewhere. None of your beeswax."

"Your friend wants to go to the lake," she said. She turned to me. "Don't you?"

I cleared my throat. "Sure."

Slick started to say something but changed his mind, instead just shaking his head and putting the gas pedal to the floor.

The car died immediately.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Woodsen Lake was just outside of town, a couple of miles off the highway. Since it had been owned for so many years by Mom's family, the county had never bothered paving the winding, dusty road that led to it, and since the worn-out shocks on Slick's car magnified every bump and pothole, we felt like we'd been in a rodeo by the time we got there.

In fact, we hadn't even gotten all the way there when we first the machines. Loud. Unnatural. Though we couldn't see the lake yet, the sound was overwhelming, like an alien beast from one of my horror movies was loose and having its way with the countryside.

We saw more and more evidence of the beast the closer we got to the lake: twin ruts gouged a foot deep and wider than the road; shrubs flattened; trees snapped and lying at odd angles, leaves still green and rippling in the breeze; here and there a squirrel halfway up a tilted cottonwood, fussing like hell. The real dinosaurs that had roamed this bottomland a million years before -- fat lumbering brontosauruses that ate as much in one day as every kid in the ninth grade ate in a week, terrible twenty-foot-tall tyrannosauruses snorting through the trees in pursuit of something large and slow and warm -- had nothing on whatever had come through here just this week.

The air, usually a hypnotic perfume of whatever was in bloom and whatever was decaying underfoot, spiked with a hint of cedar and pin, now reeked of gasoline.

"What's going on?" I said.

Angel was staring straight ahead, her eyes fixed, her jaw locked. "You'll see." To Slick she said,
"You better park here."

Slick was just stuffing out his thousandth cigarette of the day. He looked at her in disbelief. "Here? You mean in this field?"

She nodded. "They won't let you get any closer."

"Better do what she says," I said.

"I just washed it!" Slick moaned, but he pulled over and parked under some trees. "If it gets sap on it," he said to Angel, "you pay to get it washed again."

When I opened the door, she started pushing at me, telling me to hurry. By the time I was out, she was already past me, heading into the woods, calling over her shoulder without stopping. "Well, come on!"

"Hey Jim," Slick said when he thought she was out of hearing range. "I didn't bring any rubbers, you know."

I looked at him a second before I realized what he meant. "We're not down here for that," I said. "Relax."

And he did. I could tell from the way he blew out a little breath that he was relieved, whether because he'd thought he was actually going to have to do it with a girl or whether it was because the girl was Angel I didn't know, but his mood definitely lightened.

"Too bad," he said, instantly full of bull again. "I could've used a little nookie."

"Yeah, me, too." I ran after Angel, calling over my shoulder, "I'll be right back! Don't leave!"

"Better watch out!" he snickered. "She gets you in there where nobody can see, she might scalp you!"

She was waiting at the edge of the woods, a finger to her lips, as if I might actually say something loud enough to carry over the enormous racket swelling the air all around us. From behind came another, shriller sound: a chorus of birds, drien from the woods around the lake, taking refuge in the trees further back, toward the road, complaining noisily about the alien fores that had so disrupted their quiet world. Angel and I stood a little back n the woods, out of sight, staring silently at the amazing scene exploding in front of us.

The machines were like blown-up versions of what you'd find in a boy's first set of construction machinery -- back hoe, bulldozer, grader, dump truck -- except that these machines weren't helping build anything: they were all set on destruction. The north shore of Woodsen Lake was gone already, all the long grasses, the cattails, even the drooping willows, replaced by a wide mudflat being flattened even more by a large roller going back and forth, like some monstrous delinquent kid had hold of it and was determined to smuch every feature down to nothing.

"That's where they'll dump the sand," Angel whispered.

I looked at her. "Sand?"

She nodded. "That's what they told my dad. They're going to make a beach."

"A beach? In Cherokee?"

She laughed, short and bitter. "Not for you and me. For the people in the condos." She pointed. "Right there where those cottonwoods are."

I squinted in the sun that had just broken through the clouds. You didn't have to be a nature lover like Frank to feel a twinge deep inside at the thought of those silent giants, a hundred years old, towering two hundred feet high, being shoved down by a grunting bulldozer operated by a sweaty high school dropout, somebody I knew, or at least his big brother, a cigarette dangling from his lip.

A sidelong glance at Angel le me know that to her t was not just infuriating but also insulting. I even thought I knew what she was thinking: those trees had been here when Indians ruled the woods. Abe Woodsen's initials were allegedly carved in one. X-ed out in deep gashes by someone long ago, most likely one of Angel's offended ancestors.

"Wasn't there supposed to be some kind of meeting about this?" I said. "The city council or somebody? I mean, can they do this before they have a zoning meeting?"

She laughed. "You know that man. He can do anything he wants. He's not putting up any buildings yet. He's just clearing the land. Improving his property, as he calls it. By the time they have a meeting, he'll have it all ready to build on."

As we stood watching the lake being changed forever right before our eyes, it was easy to imagine big "No Fishing" and "No Trespassing" signs sprouting like mushrooms after a good rain.

Already a six-foot-high chainlink fence stretched halfway around one side and would surround the whole lake in a few days.

Suddenly she took hold of my arm, hard. "They see us."

"Ouch! Who?"

"Over there. Look."

I followed her finger to a group of men about halfway around one side of the lake. They all had on work clothes except a guy in the middle, in a suit. One of the workers was pointing at us. The man in the suit had his hand up to his brow. He said something to the other men, and they took off, in a jog, toward us.

"Uh oh," I said. "What now?"

"What do you think? Run!"

We turned and ran into the woods, hearing the shouts of the men, tiny chirps under the roar of the machines. They must not have followed us far, though, because soon I heard nothing but the thumping of our feet and the swish of our bodies through the brush. After a while we stopped, gasping, and leaned against trees. Just this far from the lake, a hundred yards or so, the wildlife reappeared. Rabbits skittered in the bushes, birds rustled and called unseen high in the cottonwoods, and a green snake slithered through the grass right in front of us.

When I jumped, Angel laughed. "Kind of a city boy, aren't you?"

"It surprised me," I said.

"Sure."

Neither one of us spoke again until we were walking back to the car, single file. She stopped and pointed into the woods off to one side. "Want to see where the devil's cabin was?"

I knew without asking who she meant. "Not much to see, is there ?"

"There is if you know how to look."

Nothing was left of Abe Woodsen's cabin but a few blackened bricks from the chimney and the faint remains of charred logs barely visible in the tall grass, lying at right angles to each other, possibly a corner. For years after the fire, souvenir hunters had combed the lot, picking up or digging up old coins nad bullets and fish hooks and knife blades, but nobody much came here any more. For a while the historical society had tried to keep a marker up, but every time they stuck one in the ground or nailed one to a tree, it disappeared, and they finally decided to spend their limited funds on safer sites closer to town and easier to keep an eye on.

A big rock, maybe four feet in diameter, rested against a tall pine.

"You think that's the rock they rolled against the door?" I said.

"Who?"

"You know."

She looked at me. "My people didn't kill him."

I looked back at her. Did she really believe it? Or had her crazy father just filled her with stories over the years, brainwashed her?

She saw in my eyes what I was thinking, and it struck fire in hers. Her voice threw off sparks, like a grinding wheel sharpening a blade. Or an arrowhead. "You don't believe me, do you?"

"I know what I've heard," I said.

"You pig!"

Suddenly she was in my face, pushing me in the chest, catching me off-balance, sending me stumbling through the bushes, banging off trees.

"Your grandmother filled you up with lies, didn't she? Didn't she?"

I got behind a tree and kept it between us. "I don't know what you're talking about," I said. "And leave my grandmother out of this. She's a great person."

"She's a liar!" Angel spat at me.

"You don't even know what she told me!"

"Yes I do! She told you that the rotten stinking Indians burned down that old bastard's cabin with him in it -- and it's a lie!"

I tried not to think about what Slick had said might happen to me when she got me in the woods alone. I tried to keep cool. "Prove it," I said.

She was breathing hard, and sweat dribbled down her dark cheeks in twin rivulets toward the corners of her mouth.

"You think I can't?" She crooked her finger. "Come over here."

I stayed behind the tree. "Thanks anyway, but I don't feel like getting attacked again."

"I won't attack you," she said. "I want to show you something."

I followed her, at a distance, a little ways into the woods, stopping when she did, standing over a patch of grass in a clearing that looked no different from the rest of the woods.

"Right there," she said, pointing.

I moved up beside her and looked down. Three rocks lay side by side, about a yard apart. "What am I looking at?"

Tombstones."

I looked again. The rocks were just that: rocks. Gray-brown, flat, about the size of dinner plates. No inscriptions. The could have been picked up any time anywhere around the lake and put there.

"Whose?" I said.

She looked at me with the eyes of the real Pocahontas, or some other wronged Indian maiden, dark and deep, flashing like starlight off Woodsen Lake on a clear night.

"Ask your grandmother," she said.

And then she was gone. Like a forest animal, a deer or a rabbit or maybe a bobcat, she disappeared into the forest without leaving a trace, not an echo or a quivering leaf or even a scent.

"Wait!" I called as I ran after her.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Slick drove hunched up against his door, blowing smoke out the window, but I hardly noticed him. I was in sort of a state of shock after what I'd seen. Angel knew it and was glad. Now I would have to feel guilty about what Dad had done. She was half-smiling as she sat between us.
"Where to?" Slick said as we came back into town.
"We're taking Angel home," I said.
"Finally," he muttered.
I gave him directions again, and Angel didn't correct me. We hit the square and then headed down Kentucky Street past the used comic book store where Mr. Wilcox dozed in his chair behind the counter while kids rifled through his tottering stacks of old comics, pulling out a few to buy for a dime; past the barber shop with its candy-stripe pole that was supposed to turn but never did; past the big brownstone post office and then over the railroad tracks where long wooden wharves were piled high with fifty-pound sacks of onions. And on into Milltown.
And then beyond.
I tried not to look at the shabby homes and apartment buildings as we bumped along the pitted street. Two men in their twenties were throwing a football across the street from one side to the other and didn't stop when they saw us coming. In fact, as we drove through, one of them threw the ball in a high arc, and it landed square on the roof of Slick's car and then bounced into the arms of the other man. They yelped with delight and called out something we couldn't hear as Slick sped up.
"Watch out for the kids," Angel said. It was the first time she'd said anything since we'd left the lake.
Just then a little boy with a dirty face and wearing only his torn underwear suddenly toddled from between two junk cars into the street right in front of us. Slick cursed and slammed on his brakes. The boy looked up and started to cry. Only then did a girl appear, no older than five or six, yanking him back into his yard, paddling his behind with her hand and yelling at him. A young woman in an apron came out onto the concrete slab that served as a porch and yelled at the girl. Then she yelled at us. That started the guys throwing the football to begin yelling, too. Then the dogs started barking.
"Jesus," Slick said. "How does anybody live like this?"
I glanced at Angel, but her face was stone. Her jaw was working, though, like Frank's, like she was chewing marbles.
We pulled up to a stop sign, and Slick whistled low. "Don't look now, Jimbo, but I think you've been nailed."
A girl stood in the parking lot of a Seven-Eleven across the street, a carton of milk in one hand, a loaf of bread of bread in the other. Staring at us.
Sherry.
"Friend of yours?" Angel said.
"Girlfriend," Slick said.
I slumped down in the car. "Shut up and drive, okay?"
Suddenly Angel leaned forward and waved at Sherry.
"Go!" I yelled at Slick.
"I'm tryin'," he said. "I'm tryin'."
As we sputtered away, I turned to Angel, my face hot. "Why did you do that?"
She sat back, arms folded defiantly. "Why shouldn't I? She's a girl in my class. I can wave at her if I want."
"You don't even know her."
"Sure I do."
"What's her name?" Angel hadn't been at school in so long she didn't know anyone's name.
She looked out the window. "I forget."
We drove in silence until the last turn, when she said to Slick, "Let me out here. I'll walk the rest of the way."
"Keep going," I said to Slick.
Angel glared at me. "I want to get out here."
"Sorry," I said. "My friend and I want to show you what gentlemen we are. Right, Slick?"
Slick didn't know what game I was playing. He rolled his eyes and shook his head. "Whatever you say, Jimbo. I'm just the getaway driver."
Angel was getting more and more agitated. "I don't want you to drive me all the way! My father will be home!"
"Great!" I said. "You can introduce us to him. Why wouldn't he want to meet a couple of your classmates?"
"Let me out!"
She turned and shoved me hard with both hands, but I was already jammed against the door, which I knew woudn't open without just the right combination of kicking, lifting, and handle-jiggling. Like it or not, Angel was getting a ride home.
Behind the wheel, Slick was puffing mightily, and his mouth was twitching. "Hey, Jim, if she wants out --"
"I want out!" she said. "Now!" Then she added, like it was something she'd just coughed up and wanted to get out of her mouth, "Please."
I has no mercy, though. Since Mom had died, I'd been through so many emotions, I'd run out. Except for anger. And right now it was all aimed at Angel. Pocahontas. A mean-spirited Indian whore. (Who cared what she said? The whole football team said otherwise.) And it wasn't just that she'd blamed me, when I couldn't care less what happened down there a hundred years ago, or last week. To hell with Woodsen Lake! And to hell with her! And Frank, too!
"Last house on the right," I said as we turned the corner.
Angel didn't say anything, just sat stiffly between us, hugging her knees on the transmission hump, staring straight ahead. And what she was staring at was maybe the most dismal block in all of Cherokee.
Here, on the edge of town, just before the open fields full of rabbits and prairie dogs and tall native grasses cut by twin dirt roads leading, respectively, to the municipal dump and the sewage plant, Cherokee's outcasts squatted in shacks the fire department had condemned years before but that nobody had gotten around to tearing down.
No one was quite sure who lived in most of the houses on Lincoln Street, but everyone knew who owned the one at the end, a weathered jumble of planks and plywood that looked like something temporary someone had pieced together after a tornado.
Angel's house.
(I thought of the Bunsen mansion on the other side of town, on a hill overlooking Woodsen Lake. It must have seemed to Angel like a castle in a fairy tale.)
We pulled up in front of her house and stopped. I maneuvered the door open and stepped out onto the gravel where a curb should be, holding to the door handle so I didn't slip backward down the slope into the ditch that dropped away behind me like a cliff. A narrow wooden foot-bridge, just parallel four-by-fours, had been laid across it leading to the over-grown yard and the house itself.
"There you go," I said. "Home safe and sound."
Angel slammed the door, which didn't catch but just bounced and then hung there half-open. She gave me an icepick of a look and didn't say anything. She'd just stepped onto the bridge when I called after her.
"Hey! Aren't you forgetting something?"
She turned and glared. "What?"
"Like 'thank you'?"
From inside the car I heard, "Jesus, Perk, would please get your ass back in so we can get the hell out of here?"
Angel started toward me, fire in her eyes, but fate intervened at that moment, as a commanding voice behind her barked her to a stop, just steps from me. She kept staring at me, her breath coming in short, hot spurts, not turning around to look at her father standing on the porch, hands on hips, adding his icy glare to hers.
Slick, making choking sounds, gunned the engine, but I couldn't move, even when I saw the old man coming down the steps.
I'd never seen Harold Red Cloud up close before, had only watched him making his slow but deliberate way around town, eyes always fixed straight ahead, back always held stiff, never speaking unless spoken to, and then only offering short, clipped answers you had to be listening for to catch. He had no job, insisting on survival the old Indian way: hunting -- with traps, not a gun-- fishing, growing corn and beans out back of his shack, picking berries in the woods. He and Angel ate what he killed or grew or gathered. There was no money, never had been.
Angel's clothes came from the Sisters of Mercy or from anonymous donations left on their sagging porch from time to time. At first the old man had rejected them, setting the boxes in the road. But I heard later how he'd come home one night from fishing Woodsen to discover his daughter on her knees in the road, going through a box by moonlight, salvaging a dress here, a pair of socks there, and how after that he'd ignored the boxes, leaving them to Angel to dispose of as she saw fit.
His wife, Angel's mother, had run away years before (with a white man, it was said) in search of money or fun, leaving Angel, at the age of eight, to scrap out a life there on the edge of town with her father.
He stopped in the middle of the foot bridge, one worn work boot on each four-by-four. He had on faded, patched jeans and a checked flannel shirt worn through at the elbows. His hair, still mainly black but streaked with silver, was pulled back and knotted behind his head. He was the only male in Cherokee with a ponytail. His face was dark, copper-colored, cut across the brow and beside his nose by deep wrinkles like dry riverbeds gouged in the flesh by years of hard living. His eyes shone, though, reflecting the sunlight into mine, making me blink. And his mouth was strong, like a straight line drawn with a ruler and a soft-lead pencil.
When he spoke, it surprised me, because I couldn't understand what he said. Then I realized he wan't talking to me. He was talking to angel, who still stood glaring at me, her back to him.
And he wasn't talking English.
Without taking her eyes off me, she shot an answer over her shoulder, in the same language.
"Go inside," the old man said in English. "I need to talk to the boy."
Angel didn't move for a moment, but when he repeated the order, she turned to go, looking back at me and, in a voice too low for him to hear, said, "He's got a bad heart. Don't get him upset, or I'll kill you."
She leaed the ditch and went into the shack, slamming the door.
Inside the car, Slick cleared his throat. "We better be going, Jim. We got all that homework to do, remember?"
But the old man was headed right at me, and I felt his coming like a force of nature, a flood maybe, or a lava flow. I could have jerked the door open and escaped -- Slick had the engine revved to a high mournful whine -- but something held me there, rooted, waiting. Sooner or later my problems with Woodsen Lake were bound to lead me here to this old man. I might as well get it over with now.
I motioned for Slick to shut off the engine. He did, with a groan, then slumped down in the seat and blew smoke signals out the window, as if they were his final melodramatic message to the world.
Angel's father stopped directly in front of me, his breathing so heavy, so labored after the ten steps he'd taken from thefootbridge that I thought he might have a heart attack right there. Would Angel then kill me? I was about to ask him if he wanted to sit down in the car -- which would have give Slick a heart attack -- when he raised his hand, took a deep breath, and spoke.
"The blame is not on your hands," he said.
That caught me totally by surprise. I had to lean back against the car. I didn't know what I'd expected him to say, but it wasn't that.
He saw it and laid a weathered brown hand on my shoulder. It felt light, like a bird had landed there. His eyes, up close, still shone but with more of a sheen than a sparkle; they seemed to be coated with a dull glaze, like a floor waxed but not yet buffed, and didn't focus right. He wasn't looking at me or evne past me but around me, his gaze spreding out like the wide soft beam of foglights on a car. I looked closer, completely forgetting all Mom had told me about not staring at people, and saw that his eyes were milky.
I hit me with a shock: he was going blind.
I'd seen it my great-uncle Wilbur, Grandma's big brother, who'd been dead a long time now but who, toward the end, had refused to admit that he had cataracts and couldn't see, even insisting on driving his car -- right into the creek, where it turned over and pinned him inside. It was three days before somebody spotted the upside-down carin the water. "Pride goeth before a fall," people had murmured to each other at the funeral, outside of Grandma's hearing. And Mr. Red Cloud was as proud as Great Uncle Wilbur any day.
I glanced toward the house. Angel stook just inside, behind the screen, watching. I was sure that at the first hint of trouble, she would come flying out, blood in her eyes, butcher knife in hand, screaming curses in that exotic language she shared with her father.
"The blame is not on your hands," the old man said again. "But it is in your blood. You carry a curse you can't name. I'm sorry for you."
"I don't know what you're talking about," I said. "I don't have any curse on me."
It was a lie, of course. Woodsen Lake hung around my neck like the albatross in a long poem I'd suffered through in English class. I couldn't get rid of it, couldn't un-think it, and even though it was out of my family for good, it was far from out of my life. Or Frank's. Especially Frank's.
Mr. Red Cloud knew that, too. He took his hand away and shook his head. "But the real curse is on your brother."
That surprised me. "You know my brother?"
He smiled. "Like one of my own. Like the son I never had."
I stared at him. What was he talking about?
He started to speak again, but a cough came out instead, a hoarse liquid explosion from deep inside that rocked him forward into me, so that i had to grad fast to keep from falling. Instantly, the front door of the shack banged open and, behind me, Slick cursed under his breath and tried in vain to get the car started. The old man was heavier than he looked, and I didn't have time to get a good grip. He began slipping down, his face mashed against my shirt, his worn shoes spraying gravel behind him as he tried to get traction. We were just about to collapse together when Angel's arms appeared from nowhere and locked around him, jerking him up and away from me.
"What did you do to him, you bastard?"
"I didn't do anything!" I sputtered. "He fell on me!"
Before she could yell at me again, her father caught his breath and told her to leave me alone. "He is not to blame," he gasped, and though his voice, so strong before, was weak now, hardly a whisper, Angel shut up and had to be content just to glare at me.
When he'd managed to straighten up, he shook her off and said to me, "I know you suffer because your mother has passed over, and I have no wish to dd to your pain. But there is something you must know -- about your brother." He stopped, trying to stabilize his breathing by taking short, quick gulps of air. Angel put a hand on his arm, but he brushed it away.
"How do you know Frank?" I said
"We have talked many times," he said.
My head felt light. Was he making this up? I'd never heard Frank mention this old Indian man. "Where? When?"
He smiled. "The woods, of course. The lake. I fish there. He comes to sit and think. Sometimes he brings a gun, but he doesn't kill anything."
I thought of Warhorse, yelping and splashing furiously for only a few seconds before sinking under a dirty bouquet of pink bubbles.
Mr. Red Cloud leaned close to me, so that I could see my reflection in the opaque mirrors of his eyes. "Your brother," he said, "is in danger."
"What kind of danger?" I said. "Is somebody after him?" I thought of Henry Belew, but how would he know about that? And how big a danger was Henry anyway?
"The danger is not from outside," the old man said. He thumped his chest. "The danger is from inside. Have you been to the lake?"
"Sure," I said. "Lots of times."
"When was the last time?"
Angel's eyes caught mine over his shoulder. She shook her head.
"I don't know," I said. "It's been a while, I guess."
His head fell to his chest, and his whole body sagged, as if hsi bones had gone soft. His breath rattled. His very life seemed to be oozing out like sweat. "A spirit is loose down there," he said. "I felt it today."
"You were at the lake today?" I said.
Again Angel traded glances with me. I could tell she was worried: had he seen us? I frowned and shook my head, as if to say, "Are kidding?" Through eyes like those, glazed over like ice on milk, he'd be lucky to see the lake itself.
"I was there," he said. "But I couldn't get close. There are fences." His voice began to shake. "Those men down there, they have no way of knowing the harm they do. To them it's a job. But their machines have done more than tear up the woods and the shore. They have stirred a spirit from a troubled sleep." His body shook, too, as if from a cold wind. "A spirit of vengeance."
I felt behind me for the car door handle. This was too spooky. "Listen," I said, "I have to go. My dad will be expecting me for supper and -- "
But suddenly he was against me, bending me back over the hood of the car, his shoes scuffing mine. "The spirit is in your brother!" he said loudly. "It has entered his heart! It controls him!"
My mouth was open, but no words came out. His breathing got jerky, and just as I thought I would have to catch him again, Angel grabbed as before and this time pulled him away.
"You have to come in and lie down," she said sternly.
He tried to escape, but she was too strong. As he half-walked, half-dragged him over the footbridge toward the shack, he wrenched his head around and called back, "You have to warn your brother! The spirit is death!"
Those were his last words before the screen door slammed shut.
"That was weird as shit," Slick said as we slid through a stop sign at the corner and headed, as fast as the jalopy would take us, back to town. He'd gone through all his cigarettes and was fishing around in the ashtray for a smokeable butt.
"Tell me about it," I said. I was shaking, and so was my voice.
Slick finished un-crumpling an inch-long butt and managed to get it lit. "You want to know what I think they ought to do with that lake?"
"What?"
He took a long drag and blew it out the window. "Fill it up with dirt and cover it over with a million tons of asphalt." He flipped the butt out. "Turn it into a fucking parking lot."
"Amen," I muttered.
We stopped at a red light on the square.
"So where you want to go?" Slick said.
I hadn't given it any thought. "I don't know. Where you headed?"
"Home. I gotta take my mom out to eat tonight."
I looked at him. I"d never heard of him doing anything like that. "Why? I mean, what's the occasion?"
He frowned like he was embarrassed and mumbled something. All I heard was "birthday".
"That's great," I said. "Tell her happy birthday for me."
"It's not her birthday," he said. "It's my old man's."
His father had been killed by a mortar round in Korea.
Slick took a deep breath. "He'd be thirty-nine today. She cries a lot on his birthday."
"Sorry," I said.
He said it was no big deal, just something he had to do, and we rode in silence for a while. It wasn't until we were about to turn onto Apple that I said, "Would you mind taking me somewhere else?"
I told him where I wanted to go and gave him the address, then settled down again in the pocket of the seat, like a young kangaroo in its mother's pouch. Slick's front seat. My own private womb. I was going to be sorry to leave it.
CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
It was soon apparent that nobody was coming to the door, which was wide open. I leaned into the screen, cupping my hands around my eyes, peering in.
"Grandma? Grandpa?"
I walked off the porch and over to the garage, which was set apart from the house, two parallel concrete tracks running out to the street, with grass between. The door had a glass panel in the top, and I looked inside.
No car. They weren't home.
I went back onto the porch. The screen door, as I'd suspected, was un-latched. Like most people in Cherokee, my grandparents saw no reason to lock their doors, even their screens, especially if they were just going on an errand or to visit somebody. There were no criminals in our town. Crime was a city thing.
Sitting on the porch swing, a rickety contraption Grandpa had been meaning to fix for years, rocking slowly, watching some kids play chase in a vacant lot across the street, I realized that I was at the same time disappointed and relieved to find no one home. I'd planned to bite my lip and ask Grandma to tell me what she knew about the lake and the Indians and my ancestors, to explain to me what she'd wanted to explain before and that I hadn't been ready to hear. There was something I didn't know, something important, a big piece of the puzzle, and she knew what it was. So did Angel's father. Maybe Angel, too.
But at the same time, I didn't really want to hear, didn't want to know. Because whatever I found out I knew I would have to pass on to my brother. I mean, if the old Indian was right, if Frank was about to do something crazy because of Woodsen Lake, and what he thought was his obligation to it, and to my mother and her haunted family, didn't I have at least as strong an obligation to try to save him from it? But what if the information I found out, the secret, wasn't something that would save him? What if it was something that would make him feel even more driven to get the lake back? Should I still tell him?
I was down the steps and headed for the street, hearing behind me the mournful dying moans of the porch swing, when suddenly I turned around and, cursing under my breath, marched back onto the porch, flung open the screen door, and went inside.
My grandparents' house was cool and dark, slightly musty the way old peoples' houses often are, but even more comfortable to me than Slick's hollowed-out front seat. I'd spent many slow-paced, pleasant summer days and nights there. In fact, some of my first memories are of Grandma trying to show me how to play the two or three songs she knew by heart on the piano, while out back Grandpa was hammering on something -- a birdhouse, a broken porch step -- and the big attic fan was whumping overhead like the steady roar of distant thunderclouds.
But now as I stood in that familiar living room, something seemed different. Glancing around at the framed family photos on the walls, the dusty elegant cut glass in the open-front cabinet, the faded fake Persian rug under the coffee table, I couldn't shake the feeling that all had not been as it seemed lo those many years in this household: someone was keeping a secret.
And though I dreaded finding it -- opening a Pandora's box -- I knew I had to look.
And I knew where.
The old album, Grandma's album, was under the bed on her side, behind her sewing and her big stack of un-read Good Housekeeping magazines. It felt heavy as I carried it into the kitchen and set it on the table; heavy not just with photos and clippings but with history. Part of my brain, the rational part, advised me to put it back and just wait until Grandma would show it to me again. After all, it was hers, and I had no business poking into it. But another part of my brain said, If you wait for her to guide you through it, you'll see what she wants you to see, with her commmentary. This may be your only chance to look for yourself, to see if anything jumps out at you. If there's something you don't understand, you can ask her later.
This would be my sneak preview.
I opened the album and was turning the brittle pages, looking for the place Grandma had taken me, when I noticed a yellow ribbon hanging out. I knew before I'd even gotten there that it marked where we'd left off, like she knew she'd be coming back, and maybe bringing me with her.
I saw again the photos of my great-grandfather, the one a formal portrait, looking stern and serious, the second more casual, though still not quite smiling, posing in his printer's clothes, ink on his hands and his apron, a big black oily-looking printing press behind him. But there was something else she'd shown me. What was it?
I turned another page, and there it was: the brown-edged clipping about Abe Woodsen's death. I looked closer and saw the byline: John W. Carpenter. My great-grandfather. So not only had he published the account in his newspaper, he'd written it himself.
"The colorful life of Abraham Woodsen, one of Mason County's first settlers, came to a violent end two nights ago when savages from the Cherokee tribe set fire to the famous trapper's cabin, burning him alive. The incident is believed to be the culmination of a long-running feud between Mr. Woodsen and the Indians over trapping rights on the lake and in the surrounding woods. Efforts are being made to round up and apprehend the perpetrators."
The article went on to condemn the Indians, to call for their expulsion from the county, and to ask all citizens of Cherokee to "remember the fallen pioneer in their prayers".
I noticed another article tucked under the first, dated about a month later. It had no byline. The headline read: "LAKE BOUGHT BY LOCAL NEWSPAPERMAN".
"Lake Minnehota, the only body of fresh water within the limits of Cherokee, has recently been purchased by Mr. John Carpenter from the state, which took possession of said property after its owner, Mr. Abraham ("Abe") Woodsen, was slain by Indian marauders, leaving no will and no living relatives. The Indians have since fled, and efforts are being made to track them."
Another story, a week later: "LAKE TO BE NAMED FOR SLAIN TRAPPER".
"The new owner of Lake Minnehota, Mr. John Carpenter, has proposed re-naming it in honor of the late Abe Woodsen, the first white man to fish its waters. 'It's a way to honor his memory,' Mr. Carpenter said, 'to pay tribute to that pioneer spirit that tamed this land and made possible cities like Cherokee.' Mr. Carpenter made it clear that he intended the lake to be open to 'all citizens of our fair city to share in its bounty'. Plans are underway to build boat docks and fishing piers."
Nothing I'd read so far hinted at the old Indian man's warning of vengeful spirits. What would the Indians have to be vengeful about? Did they think they could murder a white man and not pay for it? There wasn't anything, either, to explain my mother's family's obsession with the lake. Her grandfather had bought it -- fair and square, it looked like -- and then he'd turned right around and named it Woodsen Lake. And opened it to the public, too.
So where was the big mystery?
I was about to shut the book, literally, on the whole matter when another piece of paper slipped out and drifted into my lap. It wasn't a clipping but a letter, hand-written, obviously very old, although it had no date. It was crisscrossed with lines like a spider web or a shattered windshield, as if it had been wadded up and then smoothed out again. It started not "Dear John" or "Dear Daughter" but "Dear Editor".
"Dear Editor,
Your recent stories about the death of Abe Woodsen and the subsequent sale of the lake to John Carpenter made no mention of the fact that Mr. Carpenter and Mr. Woodsen had been engaged in a bitter personal quarrel over the ownership of the lake. Add to this the fact that no eyewitness ever linked the Indians to the fire, and it makes one wonder if maybe there is more to this dark story than meets the eye. It makes this writer wonder.
Sincerely yours,
Joshua Lott
P.S. I dare you to print this!"
Flipping through the rest of the album, I found no evidence that the letter had ever appeared in the newspaper. There were only more family photos and clippings about the lake's grand opening to the public, with the brightly painted boat dock and fishing pier, the ladies in their best dresses, with parasols and bonnets, the men looking unintentionally comical in suits and hip-waders, brandishing fishing gear and fat cigars. Only toward the end, after the pictures of Mom as a baby had begun to appear, did I come across anything that made me pause. It was a short clipping with this headline:
"NEWSPAPER SOLD!
The Cherokee Star Gazette was sold on Monday by long-time owner John Carpenter to a consortium of local businessmen. Mr. Carpenter will go back to his lumber business full-time. The informed citizenry of Cherokee will miss him."
Someone had scrawled a date on the clipping: September 4, 1885.
Less than a year after the deadly fire in the woods.
What did it mean?
I had no time to figure it out because suddenly I heard a car door slam out front. I grabbed up the album and ran into the bedroom and shoved it as far as I could under the bed. The second car door shut just as I was charging through the kitchen, headed for the back door. My shoe hit something, sent it skidding across the floor. I looked down. Photos. They had obviously fallen out of the album. As I reached down for them, I noticed, under the table, something else, a folded piece of paper. I snatched everything up and put them in my shirt pocket. I was closing the back door behind me when I heard the front screen open, followed by voices.
"He's up to no good," Grandpa said.
"It makes me furious," said Grandma. "Just furious."
The voices got louder as they came through the living room into the kitchen. "He wants to get Jack to help him," Grandpa was saying, "so he can say the family approves of what he's doing. That's pretty clear. A public relations thing. The man's not stupid."
Then Grandma: "Well, the family doesn't approve, and that's that."
Grandpa: "Did you leave the light on in here?"
"I don't think so. Oh my, look."
"What?"
"That chair. It's pulled out. You know I always push the chairs under the table."
"Well, I'll be . . ."
"Do you think someone's been here?"
I didn't wait to hear Grandpa's answer.
Walking down Apple toward home, I told myself over and over, like a sensible parent might tell a child, that none of this Woodsen business was worth another minute of my time and that if Frank was dead set on doing something stupid that would mess up the rest of his life, then so be it. It was time for me to start thinking about myself for a change. "I am not my brother's keeper," a voice said, sounding like it was from the Bible. But before I could be comforted by it, I heard Grandma saying, "Even the devil can quote scripture for his purpose."
I was so intent on the voices in my head that I didn't notice I was walking in the street until a car bore down on me, horn blaring. I jumped up onto the curb just as Henry Belew's hot rod roared by. What was he doing on my street?
I watched as he slowed down at my house, gunning his big engine. At the end of the street, he turned around and headed back, laying on his horn. I stayed on the curb this time, but he stopped right by me, tires squealing, on the other side of the street, and motioned for me to come over. I could smell the beer long before I reached the car.
"Hey, little Perkins," he said, waving a bottle and grinning. "I got somebody here wants to say hi to you."
He leaned back, ans Sherry's face appeared. Her lipstick was smeared, and her eyes looked glazed. A beer bottle stuck up between her legs. She slurred her words. "I can't believe you picked up that girl, Jim. I just want you to know that I'll never forgive you. Never!"
Henry yanked the car into gear and, his foot on the clutch, raced the engine. It was like a jet had landed on Apple. He winked at me. "The way I see it," he said, "me and your brother and you made us a little trade. He got my girl, and I got yours!" He reached out and poked me, hard, in the stomach. "And you got the Injun whore!"
Bent over in the middle of the street, I watched him fish-tail away, leaving behind long wavy parralel scorch marks on the pavement. At the corner, he slid sideways through the stop sign and burned onto Howell.
If there were any people watching from their porches, I was sure their eyes were on me, accusing me of bringing this plague into their neighborhood.
I straightened up the best I could and made my way toward home.
CHAPTER TWENTY TWO
I made it the rest of the way on automatic pilot, not registering the familiar houses or yards or the voices or even the dog barks, just planting one foot in front of the other, homing in on home. I felt like I was sleepwalking, and all I wanted to do was go into my room and lie down and think or maybe not think. And put a big sign on the door: DO NOT DISTURB.
The Cadillace parked our curb woke me up.
I'd seen such a car, up lose, only a few times, at the state fair in Dallas, in the Automobile Building, guarded by pretty firls in skimpy sequined outfits who circled constantly to discourage over-eager kids like me from getting our sticky hands on a fender, offering us a toothy smile and a Cadillac balloon instead. Dads got a wink and a brochure.
I stood back and stared, awed by its hugeness: big shiny fins rose out of its read as if nature knew such a massive creature would need help navigating. Beside this beautiful monster, Henry's roadster was a snarling little shark, all teeth and no class.

Looking up and seeing no one, I tested the driver's door. Unlocked. I opened it and poked my head in. The light that came on illuminated a miniature world of plush velvet and mahogany, with seats like sofas in the living rooms of my country club friends, rooms no children were allowed to invade; saved for company, and not just any company. The polished wood dash was inlaid with enough gauges to launch a rocket ship. I closed my eyes and breathed in the aroma of money.
Then I detected a different smell, familiar but disturbing, fragrant and dangerous. I reached under the front seat on the driver's side and took out a brown sack, whose top had been rolled down around the neck of a bottle. I pulled it out. It was half-empty. Scotch. Twelve years old, the label said. The price sticker was still on, and I blinked at it. I'd have to mow five lawns, including trimming, to buy a bottle like that. I put it under the seat again and backed out, shutting the door as quietly as I could. Then I stood in the street, staring at the car.
Who in the world did it belong to?
A light was on in the living room, and as I stood on the porch, trying to decide whether to go in or sneak around to the back door and avoid Dad, I heard a man's voice from inside that wasn't his. One I'd heard before. Deep. Authoritative. I leaned closer and listened.
"They're a loonly bunch, Jack. Niggers and white trash and nature freaks, plus that crazy old Indian."
I stood back a little and to one side so that I could squint through the screen without being seen. It was Gina Bunsen's father, arms spread out along the back of our old worn sofa, making himself at home right there in our shabby living room. Dad sat opposite, a glass in his hand, smiling and nodding as Mr. Bunsen said something I couldn't hear. Dad laughed then, leaning forward and sloshing his drink onto his pants.
"Mr. Bunsen --" he said.
Mr. Bunsen's had went up, like a traffic cop's. "Howard to you." He smiled broadly. "After all, if we're going to be business partners, we can't be fumbling around with a lot of formalities, can we?" He sat back and looked around the room. "You've got a nice house here. Might stand a little fixing up -- I mean, I know your finances have been strained lately -- but nothing a hefty insurance commission couldn't handle." He sipped his drink. "Now what were you saying, Jack?"
I turned away from the screen and stood with my back to the wall, in the full glare of the porchlight, like an innocent citizen caught in a police line-up, the overlapping white boards behind me marking my height for witnesses in four-inch increments. How could I possibly get all the way to my room without being seen?
Suddenly something bounced off the screen beside me and landed at my feet. I looked down: a brown beetle lay on its back, legs waving. Candle bugs, we called them, suicidal -- or at least clumsy -- hard-shelled insects who plunge into the nearest light, landing gear up or down as the mood strikes, sometimes lifting their clawed feet in time to attach themselves to an inviting screen, other times ricocheting off like pingpong balls.
"Just a minute, Howard," Dad said, grunting as he stood up. "Once those bugs start on the screen, there's no relief till you turn off the porchlight."
I plastered myself against the front of the house and held my breath as the light went off.
"The long and the short of it," Mr. Bunsen said from inside, "is that your bid wasn't the lowest, and it wasn't even the most attractive. But it's the one I like the best."
Dad mumbled something. Mr. Bunsen said, "No need to thank me. I know you'll do a good job. But I need something from you in return."
I got close to the screen, more secure no with the light off -- at least a cop going by wouldn't wonder what I was doing -- and tried to catch what Dad said.
". . . not sure what you need."
"That lake's been in your family for a hundred years," Mr. Bunsen explained. "People associate it with you. I want them to hear that you think what we've got planned for it is good for them, good for the town of Cherokee. What I want is for you to stand up before the city council next week and tell them that Woodsen Lake Estates has your family's backing. The vote is going to be close, Jack, and I need all the support I can get. Can you give me that support?"
My ear was waffled into the screen by now. This was the moment of truth for Dad. Under the watchful eyes of the most powerful man in town, he was struggling to balance what he knew would be best for his family -- getting money to pay off debts, to set aside enough for college tuition for his sons -- against having to endure the anger and resentment of Frank and Grandma and, even worse, Mom's ghost. The toughest decision of his life, tougher even than deciding to sell the lake in the first place, and he was being asked to make it . . . drunk.
I made a decision of my own: to buy him a little more time.
I backed up to the porch steps and clomped across like I was just coming hom, and opened the screen door.
"Jim! You're home!"
In Dad's voice was surprise and the relief I'd intended. Instantly he was on his feet, not too steadily. Mr. Bunsen got up, too.
"Come in. I want you to meet somebody."
"We've met already," Mr. Bunsen said, sticking out his hand.
Dad was surprised. "Really?"
"I gave a talk at your boy's school. Bill, was it?"
"Jim," said, retrieving my hand, which he'd nearly crushed: another not-so-subtle reminder, I thought, of who was boss.
"Sotty," he said to Dad. "That's why I never got into politics. Can't remember names worth a damn."
Dad seemed impressed thta I knew this important man. "Well, well," he said, "then I guess I don't have to tell you that Mr. Bunsen has big plans for Woodsen Lake."
"No sir," I said. "I know all about it."
Mr. Bunsen smiled that big meaningless smile of his. "I don't think your younger son has the same hostile feelings toward our project that your older one does."
Dad frowned. "I have to apologize again for Frank. He's -- "
"Not necessary," said Mr. Bunsen. "He's just voicing his opinion. An opinion I can see now that he inherited from his grandmother."
I was wondering how he knew Grandma when Dad said, "Your grandparents were here when Mr. Bunsen came over."
"They were? Why?"
"To help clean up, see if we needed anything. Grandma brought a cherry pie. It's over there on the mantel. She knew it was Frank's favorite."
Actually, it was my favorite, but I didn't say anything. I was just glad that Grandma apparently hadn't gone into the kitchen.
"Your grandmother let me know what she thought of me and my Woodsen development," Mr. Bunsen said. "In no uncertain terms."
Dad frowned. "You know how she can be when it comes to that lake."
"Yes sir," I said. "I know." I started backing out of the room. Dad obviously didn't want the time I was trying to buy him. "If nobody minds," I lied, "I need to get started on homework."
"Go right ahead," Dad said. "We're almost done here."
"I admire a student who does his homework without being told," Mr. Bunsen said. "I can't get Gina to pick up a pencil these days." He winked at Dad. "Of course, Frank may be at the root of that particular problem."
Before Dad could even open his mouth to try to come up with a lame replay, a car stopped out front, and all three of us recognized it at the same time from the distinctive low grumble of its faulty muffler.
Dad and I froze. Mr. Bunsen's eyebrows went up.
"Well, well," he said, "speak of the devil."
We waited in silence, the three of us, as a car door slammed, then another. I looked at Mr. Bunsen to see if he knew what that meant. He did. His smiled wavered a little. It was the first time I'd seen him look anything but supremely confident. Dad looked like a man on the gallows waiting for the trap door to spring open under his feet.
The footsteps hit the porch, and then the screen opened, and Gina came in, followed by Frank. Neither one was smiling. They stood in the doorway, Gina in front, Frank behind with his hand on her shoulder, as if posed for a formal portrait, something out of Grandma's picture album. It was, of course, Mr. Bunsen, the professional take-charge guy, who broke the silence.
"Well, isn't this a nice surprise?" he said in a booming voice that was supposed to convey good will but that instead echoed through the boom like a cannon shot. "We were just talking about you two."
I saw Gina's elbow almost imperceptibly nudge Frank's ribs, and he blurted, "Mr. Bunsen, I want to marry your daughter."
If Mr. Bunsen's phony greeting had been a cannon shot, Frank's words were a dropped bomb, creating a vacuum that sucked all the air out of the room, leaving Dad and me gasping. Mr. Bunsen blinked but otherwise kept his composure. It was obvious he'd lived through bombs before and had no doubt dropped a few himself.
"I think that's something we ought to discuss. Don't you, Jack?"
I was afraid Dad would hyperventilate and was about to go help him into his chair when he sat down on the arm of it and, in a choked voice, managed, "Yes, I suppose it is."
I was probably the only one to Gina's elbow dig into Frank's ribs again. He took a deep breath. "There's no time to talk. We want to get married now. Right away."
A second vacuum engulfed the room, dwarfing the first. This time even Mr. Bunsen had to brace himself on a chair. I tried to read the look on his face. Anger? Yes, but something else, something more, worse, deeper. He was looking not at Frank but at Gina, who kept her eyes on the floor.
"Look at me, Gina," he said, and when she didn't, louder, "Look at me!"
Dad turned to me, "Jim, I think you said you had to get started on some homework."
I ignored him, keeping my eyes on the doomed couple at the front door.
"I'm going to ask you a question," Mr. Bunsen said to his daughter, and I want an honest answer."
She was looking at him now, licking her lips like they were chapped. I'd never seen her look nervous before. It was amazing -- and a little scary -- to think of what it must take to reduce a wildcat like her to a trembling little girl. None of the teachers could do it, and neither could a parade of boyfriends, including hulks like Henry Belew. But Daddy could.
When he spoke, his voice was level, hard. "Are you pregnant?"
She looked shocked. "No! Of course not!"
He turned to Frank. "Is that true?"
Frank nodded.
With that, Mr. Bunsen seemed instantly to relax, letting go his grip on the back of the chair, his body un-tensing, his smile re-forming, bigger than ever. He clapped Dad on the shoulder, nearly knocking him off the arm of his chair.
"Well, Jack," he said, "it looks like we be more than business partners somewhere down the line."
"Somewhere down the line," Dad repeated in a sort of mumble.
"Why don't you two come sit down," Mr. Bunses said, "and let's get to know each other a little better, talk about these long-range plans."
They didn't move. Gina looked like she'd taken root. Frank stood straight as a cottonwood. "They're not long-range plans," he said. "We want to get married, and the sooner the better."
"Frank -- "Dad started, but Mr. Bunsen cut him off.
"Let me handle this, Jack." He approached the two of them, and Gina slid around in back of Frank, like a child retreating from a smling stranger. "I want to make something clear from the start," he said. "Very clear." He clapped a big hand onto Frank's shoulder. "You're an exceptional boy, and I'll say right here and now that I'd be proud to have you as a son-in-law. Your family is respected in this town, and I know you've been raised with the right values. I have no doubt whatsoever that you would make my little girl a fine husband. But --" and here he dropped his smile, replacing it with a look meant to be solemn and wise but that was a phony as the smile "-- but you're both much too young to be married. And I think your dad will back me up on this. Right, Jack?"
Dad nodded dumbly. He was still on the arm of his chair, holding on with both hands like he thought he might be bucked off any second.
"So," said Mr. Bunsen grandly, "I think we ought to just sleep on this and maybe all get together and talk about it some more. What say I treat everybody to dinner at the Country Club tomorrow night? Me and my family and you and yours. What say, Jack?"
"That's mighty kind of you," Dad croaked.
"I can't go," I blurted. And when they all looked at me, I swallowed hard and said, "I've got some stuff at school." The vision I had of sitting in a big dining room with that group, along with Mrs. Bunsen, who no one ever saw because she stayed in her house most of the time -- rumor had it that she was addicted to sleeping pills -- struck me as a dinner from hell; I pictured Frank and Gina, and Dad and me, too, as shishkabobs turning slowly over hot flames.
"Count me out, too," Frank said. "I've got something planned." He looked directly at Mr. Bunsen, as if daring him to ask what.
Mr. Bunsen didn't take the bait. He just kept smiling, although his jaw was set and he was talking through clenched teeth. "We don't have to do it tomorrow. There's no hurry. Maybe this weekend."
"I can't do it then either," Frank said. He paused -- for effect. "We'll be on our honeymoon." He gave Gina's shoulder a squeeze. She smiled a little, but the color had drained from her face; she looked like she had the flu. Mr. Bunsen wasn't amused. He shifted personalities again, this time from generous host picking up the tab to stern father who's had enough of his daughter's insolent boyfriend for one night.
"I'm a reasonable man," he said, "but let's get something straight There will be marriages of under-age children --" he stressed the word "-- as long as I'm in charge of one of those children." He looked and Gina, and although she glanced back, there was no defiance in her eyes, just fear. "I think you'd better come home with me," he said.
But Frank wasn't finished. "Don't you want to know where we're going on our honeymoon?"
"Frank --" Dad said.
"Shut up!"
Frank's words rang like rifle shots, and Dad, who had stood up, sat back down on the chair arm as if he'd been shot.
"Now see here, young man," Mr. Bunsen said. "I won't stand for --"
"We're going camping," Frank said.
"What?"
"For our honeymoon. We're going camping."
Mr. Bunsen frowned. "First, you're not getting married --"
"Sure we are," Frank said. His voice was steady but too loud, not quite under control. "I've checked it out. We can go right across the state border. They'll marry anybody who's got ten bucks." He pulled bill out of his pocket and held it up. "Plus I've got a full tank of gas."
Now Mr. Bunsen was sputtering, his face red. "It won't stand up. It won't last a day. I'll have it annulled. Jack, I need some support here."
Dad got up again, looking feeble. "Frank, why are you doing this? Think of your poor mother."
"Leave my mother out of this!" Frank barked. And to Mr. Bunsen: "You want to know where we're camping? On our honeymoon?"
"I know," I said, and when everybody looked at me: "The lake."
Frank nodded. His voice had settled down, but sweat glistened on his forehead. "That's right," he said. "We're going camping at the family lake. Just like my grandparents did."
Now Mr. Bunsen was nodding, too. "So that's what this is all about." He laughed, loud and sharp. "Why, you little conniver! I can't believe it! You actually think -- oh, this is rich!"
"What?" Dad said. Poor Dad, always the last to know.
Mr. Bunsen was laughing so hard he could barely get the words out. "This is quite a boy you've got here, Jack! Quite a boy!"
Dad smiled weakly. "I guess I'm not following you."
Mr. Bunsen stopped laughing and dabbed at his eyes. "You don't know what he's up to? Really?"
Dad shook his head.
"He thinks --" Mr. Bunsen had to stop and take a deep breath "-- he thinks that if he marries my daughter, he'll have the lake back in the family again!" He grinned at Frank. "I bet you think I'll give it to you for a wedding present, right?"
Frank licked his lips. "Dad had no right to sell it to you. It's been in our family since --"
"Of course he did!" Mr. Bunsen said. "It was his!"
"It was Mom's! And mine!"
Mr. Bunsen turned to Dad. "Jack? Some help here?"
Dad drew himself up, trying to look like the man of the house, but I could tell he really wished he could hide behind Mr. Bunsen like Gina was hiding behind Frank.
"The lake was in my name as well as hers," he said. "Either one of us had the legal right to sell it."
"No!" Frank took a step into the room, Gina staying glued to him like his shadow. "She never wanted it sold! She me! And she told you, too!" He turned to Mr. Bunsen, turned on him, actually. "And you have no right to fence it off and tear it up! It belongs to the people of this town! That's the way my great-grandfather wanted it! That's the way it's been for a hundred years!"
Dad started to answer, but Mr. Bunsen cut him off with a raised hand. "With all due respect," he said to Frank, his voice low, almost hushed, full of reason and quiet dignity, "your great-grandfather is dead. And times change. What seemed like a good idea in 1880 is not necessarily a good idea in 1960. Now we can talk about whatever you like, any time and anywhere you like, including your relationship with my daughter, but as far as I'm concerned, Woodsen Lake is a closed subject. I paid a fair price for it, and that makes it mine to do with as I see fit. Period."
"It's not zoned for commercial development," Frank said, struggling to stay calm. "You can't build all those apartments and condos."
"It's not zoned that way right now," Mr. Bunsen said, "but it will be after the City Council meets next Thursday and votes."
"But you're not waiting," Frank said. "You've already started. I've been down there, and I've seen the fences and the bulldozers and --"
"Improvements," said Mr. Bunsen calmly. "I'm making improvements to my property. No buildings -- yet. Just improvements to the land."
"How is knocking down trees improving anything?" Frank demanded.
"It's improving the view," said Mr. Bunsen.
"The view of what? There won't be anything left to look at!"
Mr. Bunsen ignored him and looked right at Gina. "I think it's time to say goodnight. You've got school tomorrow." He turned and stuck his hand out to Dad. "Jack, it's been a pleasure. I'll see you next Thursday at the Council meeting."
"Thursday," Dad said, nodding gravely.
Mr. Bunsen walked over to Frank and offered his hand. "Peace?"
Frank didn't even look at it. "I want the lake back," he said. "And I'll get it -- one way or another."
Mr. Bunsen's eyebrows went up. "Is that a threat?" When Frank didn't answer, he said, "Don't threaten me, son. Don't ever threaten me." Then he smiled and opened the screen door wide. "Come on, Gina. Supper's probably cold by now, and you know how Mother gets when anyone's late for supper."
There was a long moment of silence and then, from behind Frank, a mouse squeak. "No."
Mr. Bunsen cocked his head, like he wasn't sure he'd heard right. "What?"
"She says she's not going home," Frank said.
Dad stepped in, the peacemaker. "It's okay with me if she wants to stay a little longer."
Mr. Bunsen stopped him with an icy glance. "It's not okay with me." He stepped onto the front porch, still holding the screen open. "It's time to go home, Gina. Now."
Although it looked like a battle of wills between Gina and her father, the key figure really was Frank, who stood between them. He had played his best card, and Mr. Bunsen had called his bluff. This was David and Goliath, but David was out of rocks.
"Move out of the way, son," Mr. Bunsen said to Frank. "I'm taking my daughter home."
But the only thing about Frank that moved was his jaw.
"Frank, please," Dad said.
I held my breath, waiting for the climax. Would Mr. Bunsen actually hit Frank? Would he call the cops? Tell Dad he was having our house condemned and plowed under first thing in the morning? Could he? But suddenly I realized that this was not the battle it looked like, because of one fact that nobody in the room knew but Frank (and me): he didn't want to marry Gina. In fact, he probably didn't even like her. And if she wasn't going to get the lake back for him, he wasn't likely to fight to keep her.
He was obviously thinking the same thing. He stepped to one side. "You'd better go," he said softly to Gina. "We'll talk tomorrow."
She stared at him in disbelief. Tears glistened in her eyes. This wasn't how they'd planned it. Why was he letting her down like this?
He bent and whispered something in her ear, and she looked at him again. He nodded. Without bothering to wipe away the tears, she walked past him, past her father, and down our walk.
Mr. Bunsen smiled at Dad and shook his head. "Teenagers, huh? See you Thursday night, Jack." And to Frank, lower, "Stop by my office sometime, and let's talk."
"I'll see you to your car," Dad said, in what I suspected was less a show of manners than a strong desire to escape, or at least postpone, the inevitable confrontation with Frank once the Bunsens had left. At the door, he stopped and turned around, like he wanted to say something, but Frank was already halfway across the room, and by the time the door shut, his footsteps were banging up the stairs toward his room.
I beat a hasty retreat to my own.
CHAPTER TWENTY THREE
Lying on my bed, sweating through my clothes onto the sheets -- the overhead fan having finally given out, the little revolving fan on the floor in the corner puffing mightily but barely moving the air -- I closed my eyes and tried not to think. I was concentrating so hard on nothing that I didn't notice at first when Mom sat down on my bed.
I was in that unreal zone between sleep and waking, so that it didn't seem strange to have her there holding a damp cloth to my hot forehead, telling me that my fever was breaking and that she bet I'd be on my feet again in no time, hollering for food and raring to play ball. Her voice was like water over smooth stones, calming and cool. And then, without warning, without shifting her tone, she was talking about the lake, of how much it meant to her family, and couldn't I try a little harder to enjoy it, like Frank did, and wouldn't I like to come with her and Frank and my grandmother when they went there next weekend for a picnic?
I opened my eyes, gasping. I sat up. The room was buzzing like a defective power line had been strung across it. My neck hair prickled. My shirt was sopping and seemed suddenly so heavy that I couldn't bear the weight of it; I ripped it off, popping the buttons, and threw it as hard as I could toward the basket in the corner. Something dropped from it, two somethings, three, fluttering to the floor like moths in the semi-darkness. I reached over and turned on the lamp.
On the floor were two photographs and a folded piece of paper.
I lay back down. I didn't want to look. I knew what the photos were; I'd glanced at them when I picked them up from Grandma's kitchen floor: Mom as a baby in her grandfather's arms on the shore of Woodsen Lake, and Grandma as a teenager with the same man, her dad, on the same shore; the lake stretching behind in both shots, in a smooth gleaming sheet toward a distant line of cottonwoods and scrub oak and pines.
It was the folded paper I didn't want to see.
Maybe it was nothing, a love letter, or even a grocery list; Grandma saved all sorts of stuff. But it was more likely something about the lake, and I was full to bursting with lake lore, lake history, lake facts, and lake opinions. I lay back down and tried again to shut my thoughts out, but no matter how hard I tried, how close I came to clearing the screen of my mind, always right at the center, like the dying little star of light that stays after you've turned off the TV, was the paper. Glowing.
"Shit!" I said out loud as I got out of bed and picked it up.
It was so old that as I opened it, tiny cracks appeared at the folds. I took it over to the bed and laid it down gently and then got on my knees, like I was praying, to read it:
"My dear Mrs. Flowers,
I'm afraid that what I've discovered in my investigation will not bring you peace of mind concerning the death of Abe Woodsen. In fact, it confuses the issue to the point that I don't think it's possible to know what happened. It does appear that Indians were in the vicinity of the lake that night -- eyewitnesses confirm it --so they certainly could have burned down the cabin. But I also heard from a few older people that there was a witness to the fire who had not come forward at first for fear of being accused himself. I think you know of him. His name is Joshua Lott.
He claimed to have been fishing on the lake that night and to have seen, by the light of the moon, three men crossing in a boat. According to Mr. Lott, they got out on the other side and disappeared into the woods. Not long after, they came back out, running, got into their boat, and rowed 'like hell' -- his expression, not mine -- to the other side, where again they got out, dragged the boat away, loaded it onto a wagon, and were gone. He guessed they were headed back to town.
A few minutes later, Mr. Lott says he smelled smoke and then saw flames rising out of the woods in the general direction of Mr. Woodsen's cabin. He claims to have gone to the cabin but, seeing a boulder rolled against the door, decided it would be wiser for him to disappear, since he would likely be blamed for the fire himself. He only started telling his version when the newspaper printed its accusation of the Indians, and they were run out of the country. He doesn't seem to have been believed by most people, and, after a complaint from your father that Lott was trying to blackmail him, he was sent to the state mental hospital, where he died in 1912, still sticking to his story.
As I said, none of this is likely to bring you peace of mind, but neither does any of it point a finger of blame toward your father. Abe Woodsen had many enemies, so the three men in the boat, if indeed they existed, could well have been rival trappers or just hunters he'd run off his property, as he was known to do without much provocation, and always at gunpoint.
Your father was a fine and honorable man, and our town will miss him sorely. If I were you, I'd leave the whole sorry mess alone and enjoy the lake, as the rest of us do, thanks to the generosity of John W. Carpenter.
Best regards,
Preston Phillips
Private Investigator
P.S. A bill for my services is enclosed."
The letter was dated April 17, 1923. A month to the day after my great-grandfather's funeral. Apparently the old man was hardly in the ground, dead of pneumonia, when his daughter hired someone to check out his story, which must have been bothering her for a long time.
But what exactly did she suspect?
A knock at my door. So soft I could barely hear it. I turned off the lamp and closed my eyes and made snoring sounds. The door opened a crack.
"Jim? Are you awake?"
No! I wanted to shout. Instead I muttered, "Just about."
Dad's head poked into my room, preceded by a fog of whiskey fumes. "Jim, I know you're tired, but I forgot to tell you something. Your grandparents want us to go with them tomorrow to the cemetery, to put some flowers on your mother's grave. Is that okay with you?"
My body tensed like I'd stepped on a live wire. "I don't know," I managed. "Can we talk about it in the morning?"
"Sure, sure," Dad said. He shut the door, then opened it again, and I was so certain of what was coming next that I mouthed the words in the dark as he spoke them: "I didn't get a chance to talk to Frank about this, so if you see him before I do, maybe you could mention it?" The door closed on his mumbling. "I'd really appreciate it. 'Night, 'night."
Overhead Frank was clumping around in his room. I looked at the clock. Eleven-fifty. At midnight, I got up and started up the stairs, half-hoping he'd gone to bed, wonder ing what I would say to him, praying I'd think of something on the way.
Frank's door was closed, but a thin rod of light across the bottom let me know that he was awake. I'd decided just to tell him about the cemetery trip and see if he wanted to say anything else. I knocked, as timidly as Dad had knocked on my door.
"Who is it?"
"Me. Jim."
"What do you want?"
"I have to talk to you."
A silence, then, "No."
"Just for a minute."
"What about?"
"Open the door, and I'll tell you."
"I'm busy."
"Please?"
He said something low that sounded like "fuck" and opened the door.
I must have stood a long time just staring at the rifle in his hands, because finally he said, "I'm cleaning it. What do you want?"
"Can I come in?"
"No."
Behind him I saw a small box on his nightstand, the top up. I didn't have to walk across the room and look to know what was inside: bullets.
"Why are you cleaning your rifle?"
"None of your business."
I looked at him then, and it was hard to see my handsome brother in that face. His usually slicked-back black hair was in his eyes, which looked dull and dark through the strands, like burned-out light bulbs. He hadn't shaved in a while, so black stubble coated his cheeks. His breath was stale and smoky. He looked tired,and more than a little crazy. I backed up a step, my eyes on the gun.
"Grandma and Grandpa want us to go to the cemetery with them tomorrow."
He thought about it and then shook his head. "I'm not ready yet."
"When will you be ready?"
He looked at me again, and I took another step back. "Soon," he said and started to close the door.
"Wait!"
"What?"
I swallowed. "What are you going to do with the gun?"
"I'm going hunting. That okay with you?"
"When?"
"Tomorrow."
"Can I go with you?"
"No. Any other questions?"
"Yeah. One."
"What?"
"Do you really want to marry Gina?"
He smiled, but it wasn't friendly. "What do you think?"
The door shut then, and the lock clicked from inside. When I knocked again, he called out, "Go away!"
I talked through the door. "There's some stuff about the lake maybe you don't know."
Footsteps approached the door. It opened a crack. "Like what?"
I talked fast because I knew I might not get a second chance. "Like maybe our great-granddad got it by lying about the Indians killing Abe Woodsen, for once thing."
Frank's visible eye fixed mine like a death ray. "You believe that?"
"I don't know. But I saw a letter than Grandma had and --"
"Mom didn't believe it," Frank said and shut the door again.
CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR
I had a weird and scary dream that night.
I was in church, drepped up and sitting silently on a pew, Dad and Frank beside me. There were huge bouquets of flowers everywhere, and when everyone got up and started walking to the front, I realized I was at a funeral, and it was time to file by the casket. I didn't want to go -- I knew who was dead -- but when I tried to turn back, the crowd blocked my way, pushing me along. I yelled, but Frank caught my arm and told me not to be such a sissy. Dad said I was creating a scene.
I stood at the casket, eyes closed, refusing to look. Then I heard a soft voice telling me it was okay, and I turned and saw Mom. She was smiling and saying I needed to see. But if it wasn't her dead, then who? I looked down, into the flame-blackened face of Abe Woodsen. I tried to run, but his hand came up and caught my sleeve. A loud, wild laught echoed through the church, and when I turned around, I saw it was the preacher, Mr. Bunsen, arms spread, grinning. "It's all mine," he said. "The Kingdom and the Glory! All mine!"
That's when I woke up.
When I got to the kitchen, Dad had made coffee and left. A note was taped to the coffee pot: "Going downtown on business." That was a good sign, actually; he'd hardly left the house since Mom had died. A little arrow at the bottom of the note let me to the other side, where he'd written: "Don't forget Grandparents want to go to the cemetery this afternoon. Hope you got to talk to Frank. He needs to go with us."
I dropped the note into the trash and picked up the newspaper. My favorite team, the Yankees, had just lost the World Series to the Pirates -- and I'd missed it! As I read, it hit me that I hadn't looked at the sports page in weeks, that the teams had been playing all the while Mom lay dying, and now the season was over. Baseball, like life, had gone on as usual. Only Dad and Frank and I had been stopped in our tracks.
And it wasn't just her death that had paralyzed us.
It was that damned lake.
It had already pulled Frank and Dad under and was sucking at my own legs with every step. In my shirt pocket was the letter from the investigator to Grandma and the two photos that had fallen out of the album. What was I going to do with them? Carry them around all day, all week, all my life, like I carried the problem of Woodsen Lake?
No!
I actually banged my fist on the table. The noise startled me. I did it again. Again. No, no, no! I wouldn't be part of this craziness any more! I would go to the cemetery with my grandparents and cry my heart out at Mom's grave, like I was supposed to do, like I wanted to do, and I wouldn't from this instant forward, give that damned stupid lake another minute of my precious time! And I meant it, too.
Until Frank came in with his rifle.
"Kinda noisy, aren't we?" he said. He poured himself a cup of coffee and leaned against the counter, propping the rifle beside him. He gulped down the coffee and poured more. He was dressed in old jeans and the boots he always wore to the woods; gray mud was still clotted on the sides of the soles from his last trip down there, the day he shot Warhorse. He had on a camouflage T-shirt. He downed the second cup of cofee and put his cup in the sink and started for the door.
"Frank?"
He stopped but didn't turn around. "Yeah?"
Something was giving me the creeps about him going hunting. I knew but didn't want to know, wanted to say it but couldn't.
"When will you be back?"
"What's it to you?"
"Dad'll want to know."
"Tough."
"You going to the lake?"
"Maybe."
"They've got it all torn up down there. "
"So?"
"So there are guys driving big machines and all."
"What's your point?"
"You might shoot somebody."
He opened the door and looked back at hm. "Accidents happen," he said. The screen slammed behind him.
The hairs on my neck stood up. In my mind a scene flashed so quickly it took my breath away, and then it was gone, but not before I'd seen the beads of sweat on Frank's eyebrow as he'd stood in the woods that day, aiming that same rifle over the shimmering lake at a wide green lawn where Mr. Bunsen sat in a white plastic chair, smoking a cigarette, reading his newspaper like he did every Saturday morning of his life. And though he was already gone out the door, I heard Franks voice again just as I'd heard it that day. "Bang!" Then, lower, "So easy . . . so damned easy . . ."
Today was Saturday.
I caught up with him before he'd reached the end of the sidewalk.
"I really want to go with you."
"No."
"Why not? I won't get in the way, I promise!"
He shook his head but kept walking. "Maybe next time."
I laughed. I couldn't help it; it just blew out of my mouth. "Next time? There won't be any next time!"
He turned around and looked at me. "Why do you say that?"
It was now or never. "Because you'll be in jail, that's why."
It took a long time for Frank to answer. He staredfirstat me, then up at the trees, then the sky, and finally at me again. The expression on his face was unreadble, a foreign language.
"There's no law against going hunting," he said.
Go back home, I ordered myself. Just turn around and get your butt back in bed and pull the blankets upand hope you asphyxiate yourself. He's going hunting to relieve tension, like he's always done. Stomping around in the woods is the way he always copes. Don't be an idiot.
Instead, I said, 'Maybe not, but there's a law against killing people."
Inside our house, the phone rang. We heard it way up the block.
"Better get it," Frank said. "It might be important."
I didn't move. The phone kept ringing.
"Maybe you'd better get it,"I said.
His eyes narrowed then, and I backed up a step. "Let's get one thing straight," he said. "I've got my life to live, and you've got yours. I make my own decisions, and I don't ask for your opinion. I don't give a shitwhat anybody thinks of me. Now why don't you just go in the house and answer the damned phone and leave me alone?"
I cleared my throat to be sure I had a voice. "You don't have any right to do something that will make life harder for Dad," I said.
"Dad?" Frank spat the word out. "You don't think he made life harder when he sold the lake? Did he think about me when he did that?"
"He thought about Mom," I said.
"He shouldn't have. She didn't want him to." He put the rifle up to his shoulder, like a soldier about to go into battle. "Now please go back home and don't tell anybody where I went, okay?"
"Frank?"
He'd turned to go but looked back over his shoulder. "Yeah?"
"What about me?" I said.
"What about you what?"
"What about me when you . . . do what you're going to do?"
He looked at me like he didn't understand the question. "You're not part of this, Jim."
"Sure I am," I said. "I didn't want to be, but I am. I'm right in the middle of it. Dad's going to want to know why I didn't stop you."
"Because you couldn't," he said. "I'm bigger than you."
"Or why I didn't tell somebody."
"There's nobody to tell."
"Sure there is."
"Who?"
I thought. Who? Dad? Grandma? "The cops," I said.
He looked surprised.
"You'd do that?"
"I might."
"They wouldn't believe you."
"They might."
He looked at me like was trying to read my mind, but then his face seemed to relax, and his eyes went blank. "Go ahead," he said and did an about-face, marching off down the street toward the lake.
I ran after him. "You think I won't call them?" Did I think I would.
He finally turned around at the corner, and I stopped a few steps behind, sliding in gravel. "Go back home," he said.
I was having trouble catching my breath, and no just from trying to keep up with him. "What if I don't?" I puffed. "What will you do?"
Without a word, he took the rifle off his shoulder and shoved it at me, stopping just when it hit my chest. The end of the barrel came to rest on the middle button of my shirt.
"Forget you saw me today," he said. "I won't tell anybody you did."
This time when he turned and marched away, I didn't follow him. I yelled, though, and kept yelling until he climbed the Lessers' last fence and disappeared into the woods.
"I'm calling the cops! You don't believe me, but I will! They'll be waiting for you when you get there! And I get your room when they lock you up in prison! Do you hear me? I get anything of yours I want! Frank!"
My last desperate call, his name, never reached him, echoing for only a few seconds across the pasture, causing a spotted cow to look up, before dissipating among the cottonwoods. He was beyond hearing me and had been for a long time.
I was halfway to our house when I saw Mrs. Fellows standing on her porch, pretending to sweep but looking right at me. And although she looked away immediately, a quick scan up the block let me know that my performance had been well-attended. Heads were lowered, and brooms flew.
The Perkins boys are out of control, they said to each other without words but knowingly.
They didn't know the half of it.
CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE
The phone was ringing when I went into the house. I stared as it a long time and finally picked it up on the sixth ring.
"Hello?"
"Frank?" It was a girl. Gina?
"No, this is Jim. Frank is --" down in the woods getting ready to shoot Mr. Bunsen in his back yard "--not here."
"Do you know where he is?"
It didn't sound like Gina. "No," I lied.
"Is this Jim?"
"Yes."
"Jim, this is Janie."
Janie Waterman. The last time I'd seen her, she had tubes in her nose. "Oh hi," I said. I didn't know what else to say. "How are you feeling?"
"I'm all right," she said. "Do you expect Frank back soon?"
"I don't know." And I didn't. Mom's lessons about phone manners kicked in. "Can I take a message?"
"No. Yes. Yes, maybe you can." I could hear her take a deep breath. "I want you to tell him that if he's dating Gina Bunsen to try to talk her father out of putting up those buildings on Woodsen Lake, he doesn't have to." She paused. "Will you remember all this?"
"Sure."
"Do you promise you'll tell him?"
"As soon as I see him," I said.
"Okay." Another deep breath. "My dad is on the City Council, and he's going to vote against it. I think it scared him when I, well, you know, so he told me that if I wouldn't do that again, he'd do whatever I wanted, and I said that's what I wanted. Mrs. Parker, the librarian, will vote against it, too, because she never liked Mr. Bunsen. And Mr. Phillips will vote against it because he and Mr. Bunsen are business rivals. That's three votes against two, which means it won't pass. Will you tell Frank that? Will you tell him he doesn't have to keep dating Gina?"
I watched myself nodding in the mirror over the phone table, my head bobbing like an old bottle I'd thrown into the lake for Frank to blow to bits. "I'll tell him," I said.
"Thanks, Jim. Oh, and will you tell him one more thing?"
I nodded. "Sure."
"Tell him to call me. Tell him I don't blame him or anything and that I really, really want to talk to him, okay?"
"Okay."
"Thanks, Jim. You're a great guy."
"Bye."
I stood with the receiver buzzing in my ear, studying myself in the mirror. I hadn't combed my hair in days, hadn't bathed in a week, and I knew I'd been wearing the same clothes the day before and maybe the day before that. No wonder the women had come out on their porches to gawk at Frank and me, especially since he looked even worse. I could hear them clucking.
"This wouldn't be happening if Mary was alive."
And they were right.
I was about to hang up when I noticed a piece of paper by the phone with a number I didn't know. And a name I did. In Frank's handwriting. Before I could begin to talk myself out of it, my finger was dialing. A woman answered. Her voice was shaky.
"Hello?"
I started to hang up but instead cleared my throat. "Hello. May I speak to Mr. Bunsen?"
There was a long silence. "Who is this?"
"This is, uh, can I just speak to him?"
I heard another voice in the background. It was Gina. "Who is it? Is it Frank?"
A hand over the receiver, a muffled voice: "It's nobody you know, dear." And to me: "I'm sorry, but Mr. Bunsen can't come to the phone. Goodbye." Off the phone as she hung up: "Stay in here, Gina!"
Click.
I sat down on the chair by the phone table. What was going on in the Bunsen house? It sounded like some kind of family fight, probably over Gina and Frank, and the mother was trying to play peacemaker. "Stay in here," she'd said. Which meant that Mr. Bunsen was sitting in his back yard reading his newspaper, having laid down the law, his law, and was now determined to go abouthis pleasant Saturday morning routine, leaving the women to sort things out in the house.
I looked at the clock. Frank had only been gone fifteenor twenty minutes. The last time I'd seen him, though, he'd been running, and he was fast, especially in the woods. In my mind he stood half-hidden already behind a thick cottonwood, puffing a little, waiting for his hands to steady as he sighted in on . . . I picked up the receiver again and dialed.
After three rings, Dad answered in his office. "Hello?"
"Dad, it's me, Jim."
"Well, hello, son. I'm sorry I couldn't stick around this morning, but I have some people to see about this Woodsen Estates deal and --"
"You've got to come home," said, my breath coming in chunks like it had been me running through the woods. "It's important."
"What is it, Jim?"
"It's Frank," I said and was immediately sorry I'd called: I wasn't sure I have the energy to explain everything over the phone. And even if I did, I knew Dad wasn't going to believe me. It sounded too strange, exactly the kind of story a teenager under stress might make up. But it would be even stranger to hang up now, so I plunged ahead: "Frank went to the woods this morning, and he took his gun."
There was a silence. "And?"
"And he was acting weird."
"What do you mean by weird?"
"I don't know. Mad, I guess. Yeah, mad."
"Well," Dad said, "it seems to me he's been mad for a long time."
"This was different. He --"
Dad cut me off. "Did you get a chance to ask him about going to the cemetery?"
"No. Dad, I don't know how to explain this, but --"
"Jim, I really wanted you to."
"Dad, listen to me!"
"You don't have to yell," he said. Off the phone: "I'll be right there." Then to me: "Jim, I'm sorry, but I'm really busy here. We'll talk when I get home. No later than four-thirty. Okay?"
"Yeah," I said. "Sure."
As I sat staring at the phone, contemplating my next move, coming up with nothing, it rang. I jumped.
"Hello?"
"Jim, it's me. Sherry. I want to apologize."
"It's okay."
"It's not okay. You must think I'm a --"
I cut her off. "I don't think you're anything. Look, I can't talk right now. There's too much going on. I'll call you later."
She sounded hurt. "I said I was sorry."
"It's not about that!" I was yelling. "If you want to get drunk and ride around with older guys, that's your business! I've just got some stuff to do right now that won't wait, so I can't talk! Okay?"
She hung up.
I slammed the phone down. "God damn it!"
Pressure was building inside my head. I thought of the one time Frank had let me drive his car without asking if I'd ever driven a stick shift, and I'd left it in low all the way around the block until I thought the engine would explode. That's how I felt now. Life was moving faster and faster, and I didn't know how to shift gears. Something had to give, something had to happen. Soon.
I picked up the phone and dialed. I held my breath and waited.
A man. "Bunsens' residence."
"Mr. Bunsen?"
"No. Mr. Bunsen isn't available. May I take a message?"
"Uh, who am I speaking to?"
"Sergeant Newcomb of the Cherokee Police."
The engine exploded, blowing a hole in the top of my head. I held to the phone table, which wobbled dangerously on its three spindly legs. "Is something wrong?" I said.
"There's been an accident. If you'd care to leave a message --"
"Did someone get shot?"
Silence. "Who is this, please?"
I jammed the reciever down toward the phone, but my aim was bad, and the table went over, dumping the phone, the phone book, a pad and pencil, and me onto the floor. I scrambled to get the phone hung up while the tiny distant voice kept demanding to now who I was.
CHAPTER TWENTY SIX
I was halfway down the block when a loud, rude horn jolted me onto the sidewalk, followed by a loud, rude voice I recognized.
"What's the hurry, chief?"
Slick's Cheshire grin materialized from a car window-shaped cloud of smoke as he leaned across the seat.
I jerked open the door and jumped in. "I've got to go to the Bunsens' house! Now!"
"Whoa!" he said. "You late for brunch or what?"
"I'll tell you on the way."
As we sped to the corner, I heard screen doors slamming behind us and didn't need to look around ot know that the sweepers were on their porches, brooms in hand, antennae out and vibrating.
We hadn't gone two blocks when Slick slammed on his brakes. A car whipped around us, horn honking.
He shook his head furiously. "I don't want any part of it, man. You're talking murder!"
"I'm not asking you to be part of it," I said, trying to sound calm. "I just need a ride. I'm in a hurry. Okay? You're not involved."
"So you say." He looked at me in a way he usually didn't: straight on, hard, no kidding. " Are you onthe level about this? I mean, you got to admit you've been pretty wacky lately. You sure this isn't just something you dreamed about?"
"You don't want to take me, fine," I said and opened the door. "But I don't have time to sit here and jaw with you about it." I got out and slammed the door and started to walk fast.
Slick drove alongside. "I didn't say I wouldn't take you. I just want to know it's for real." Another car was honking from behind. "Awright, awright!" he yelled. Then to me: "Hey, come on. Get in. I'm about to get creamed."
We drove in silence a block or so then he said, "You're sure the cops were there? He saw my look and raised a hand. "Okay, fine. So what is it you plan to do when you get there?"
"I don't know," I said. "I just want to see if --"
He nodded. "If the old man got shot. Right. Hey, maybe he didn't. Maybe he fell off a ladder or something. They said an accident, right? Still, if what you said is true, and I'm not saying it's not --" I could tell he hoped it wasn't just an accident. He was scared but excited. Slick lusted after excitement; he just didn't want to be in the middle of it. He was a born spectator.
As we drove down through the city park, too fast considering all the little kids darting everywhere on a Saturday morning, he said, "Don't take this the wrong way, considering the circumstances, but somebody ought to shoot that bastard. You hear about the old Indian?"
"What old Indian?"
"Pocahontas' old man. He's in the hospital."
Heart attick, I thought. And for a split second, it occurred to me that maybe I'd brought it on by arguing with him the day before. Was Angel, that very minute, at home sharpening a tomahawk to come after me?
"What's the matter with him?"
"Got the shit beat out of him, that's what,"Slick said.
I looked at him. "When? Where?"
"Down at the lake. This morning early. Real early."
"Who did it?"
"Who do you think? Old man Bunsen's goons. See, the Indian's down there fishing, like he always does. Only this time the goons spot him, tell him to leave. He won't, so they come after him with baseball bats. Busted his head wide open. I hear they don't think he'll wake up again." He shook his head. "I hope he caught some damned fine fish."
I tried to file this new information, but my brain was crammed already with stuff I hadn't processed, like the "In" box on Dad's desk the week after Mom died. "What happens to the goons now?" I said.
Slick laughed. "Not a damned thing. The old fart was trespassing. Hell, he had to climb a six-foot fence to get in!"
We came up out of the park and turned onto Belmont Avenue, where the houses were two or even three stories, gleaming white, with big pillars holding up the porch roofs and close-clipped yards like football fields without the chalk lines. These were the homes of Cherokee's doctors and business leaders, and the further east you went on Belmost, away from downtown and Governor Throckmorton with a beer can on his finger, the bigger the houses got, the wider the lawns, and by the time the street curved around toward Woodsen Lake, you couldn't even see the houses; set back from the road, behind ornate iron gates and flower gardens like tropical jungles, they were "estates," modern day castles. The castle closest to the lake, actually overlooking it, belonged to the Bunsens.
"You know we're not going to get anywhere near this place, don't you?" Slick said as e slowed down, looking for the gated driveway.
"Maybe."
We came around a corner and Slick said, "Maybe not."
Up ahead a cop car was parked just off the road, nestled against a long and very tall hedge with dark waxy green leaves and pink flowers that had already dropped big petals onto its hood. A cop stood by the car,hands on hips, watching us come up the road. He waved us over.
"Shit," Slick said.
"Relax," I said. "We didn't do anything wrong."
The cop came over and stood by Slick's window. "Road's closed, boys. We've got emergency vehicles coming out of a driveway up here. You'll have to turn around."
Slick acted innocent. "What happened, officer?"
"I'm not at liberty to talk about it," the cop said.
Slick craned his head out the window, trying to see past the cop car. "Need any help?"
The cop moved over a step to block his view. "No thanks. Just back up and turn around."
Once we were out of sight of the cop, I said, "Pull over."
Slick looked at me. "Why?"
"I'm going to find a way in."
"You're going to find a way to get your ass shot off," he said. "If old man Bunsen's still alive, he'll do it, and if he's not, the cops will."
"I didn't say you had to go with me. Just pull over up here past that next driveway."
"Listen, Jimbo --"
"Stop the car, damn it!"
"Okay, okay!" He slid to a stop right there in the street, his bald tires squealing. "You want to die young, who am I to stop you?" Before I could say anything, a siren screamed right behind us. Slick looked wide-eyed up at the rearview mirror. "Shit, the cops!"
But it wasn't the cops. It was an ambulance, and it roared around us so close that it took the mirror on Slick's side with it and sent him almost into my lap. "We're hit!" he yelled.
"Get off!" I yelled back. "And get out of the street!"
He straightened up and put the car in gear and hit the gas.
The engine died.
Another siren, and this time it really was a cop car. Lights flashing, it swerved to avoid us, and just before it disappeared around the curve, I saw two heads in the backseat. Female heads. Gina and her mother."
I opened the door and jumped out. "I gotta go, Slick. I'm sorry, but I can't wait. Thanks for everything. I owe you one, okay?"
"Wait!" was all I heard as I darted across the street and slipped into a gap in another big hedge. When I looked back out, a second cop car was pulling up behind Slick's dead junker. A cop got out, hitched up his pants, and took out his ticket book. I took off on wobbly legs.
CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN
The hedge I'd come through wasn't as thick as the Bunsens', and when I looked around on the other side, I saw why.
Nobody lived there.
I stood on the edge of a sort of garden, fallen to ruin now, filled with the remnants notof corn stalks or tomato vines but of flowers and ornamental shrubs, so interspresed with tall weeds that it was hard to pick out the original plants. Where had they gone, the owners? Had the family lost all its money in the stock market? Had the husband and wife divorced and moved away, each to a different distant city? Or had the father died, leaving the rest with a house either too expensive or just too haunted to keep? Was this what the Bunsen estate would look like in a few years?
I came around the side of the big four-car garage, padlocked now, its white paint peeling badly, and stopped. There, across the wide, overgrown lawn, sprinkled with dandelions, was the Bunsen house. I could reach it easy enough without being seen, or at least get close, by cutting through a long grove of walnut and pecan trees that curved around behind all the houses on the street before blending into the cottonwoods that spread out down toward Woodsen Lake.
Hidden by the trees, I made my way around the three-story Bunsen mansion until the back yard came into view. My heart was thumping so fast I had to stop and lean against a walnut tree. A yellow police ribbon had been strung around the patio, looped through the arms of a couple of the chairs and tied to a drain pipe on the side of the house. I was no more than twenty yards away, and I didn't have to squint to see that one of the white chairs was splattered red.
Just then my legs gave out, like a switch had been flipped that shut down the nerve impulses, and I sank slowly down the trunk of the tree. I don't know how long I sat that way, held up by the tree, the rough bark biting into my back, when a voice rang out.
"Hey! You!"
It was a cop, the one that had been around front, and he was running across the yard toward me. "Come out of there!"
I tried to get up but couldn't. I flung myself away from the tree and began crawling, like a wounded squirrel, away from the yard. More than once my hand came down on a freshly fallen walnut still in its hard green skin, the size of a golf ball, and I pitched forward on my face and came up spitting leaves and sticks. Finally my legs started to tingle as the feeling returned, and I got up and ran, stumbling and ricocheting off trees, half-blinded by branches slapping my face. One big limb caught me square on the forehead and knocked me on my back. As I lay there gasping, my head a tom-tom of pain, I closed my eyes so the spinning sky wouldn't make me sick, listening for the crunching of heavy shoes, but hearing only bird songs and the wind high in the trees. Apparently the cop had stopped at the edge of the grove or a little way in, either because he was afraid to desert his post, guarding the crime scene, or because he didn't feel up to chasing me. I wondered if he'd drawn his pistol and toyed with the idea of taking a shot at me as I ran. It wasn't something I wanted to wonder about for long.
I got up and started walking. I was among cottonwoods now, so I knew I was close to the lake. Besides, I could smell it. The familiar stagnant stench was laced now with gasoline fumes from the bulldozers and graders and dumptrucks, but I couldn't hear their engines, which must mean that they didn't work on Saturday. Or maybe it was lunch hour. I had no idea what time it was. When I put a hand up to look at the sun, I felt a hard knot where the limb had caught me, and looking straight up made me so dizzy I gave it up. It didn't really matter what time it was anyway. Time had stopped back there in the Bunsens' yard.
Time was a red stain drying on a patio chair.
I was almost to the lake when I smelled smoke. Forest fire, I thought, remembering Bambi and his family and all the other woodland creatures scrambling like hell, wide-eyed in terror, while yellow and red and orange flames gobbled up the trees like cndy. But there was something different about this fire. The smoke had an aroma. Not just wood burning but something else, something exotic. Like flowers or spices. I followed it through the trees until was so strong my eyes burned.
It wasn't until I stepped out into a clearing that I realized I was at the site of Ane Woodsen's cabin. And kneeling there, beside the boulder that had been rolled against the door that fiery night so many years ago, was Angel. Pocahontas. The last Indian maiden in Cherokee.
She was bent over a good-sized pile of stones, smoke boiling out of the top as from a miniature volcano. She had her eyes closed and her hands clasped in front like she was praying. She looked up at me.
"Is he dead?"
A low-current shiver passed through me. "Who?"
"You know who."
I leaned against a cottonwood. "I don't know. They took him away in an ambulance."
She closed her eyes again. A tear popped out onto her cheek and ran down. "Oh God forgive me, but I had to do it!"
I stared at her. "Do what?"
Tears rolled down her face, and when she wiped at them, the soot on her hands from making the fire left black finger streaks on her cheeks like warpaint.
"I didn't want it to be me, but my father couldn't!" She sobbed, bent so low over the volcano that I thought her hair might catch fire.
"I heard he's in the hospital," I said. "I'm sorry."
"He was the one who was supposed to do this, not me!"
"Do what?" Was she crazy? Drunk? "What did you do?"
"This!" She pointed at the rock pile. "They said he was in a coma, that he might never wake up, but it's not true. He talked to me. I had to bend down and put my ear close to his mouth. All he could do was whisper, and I didn't get to say anything back because the nurse came in and made me leave. I didn't tell her he'd talked to me. She wouldn't have believed it. I didn't want to believe it, either, after what he said." She looked up, pleading with me to understand. "I pretended I didn't hear him. I ran away from the hospital, but my feet didn't carry me home like I wanted. They brought me down here." She shivered and hugged herself. "It was like I was in a trance or something, like somebody else was taking over my brain and guiding my hands to build a fire and feed it the right plants and flowers and leaves and then pile the stones around it." The scented smoke curled up around her until she looked like a genie unleashed from a bottle, against her will, and all I could see were her glistening eyes. "Jim, I don't even know what I said!"
Did she really think she'd cast some kind of spell that had killed Mr. Bunsen? "You didn't do anything," I said. "He --"
"I did!" she wailed. "I didn't want to, but I did!"
"You didn't do anything," I said again. "He got shot. My --" My brother. I couldn't say it.
"I didn't shoot him," she said, "but I made it happen!"
I didn't really believe any of this Indian mumbo-jumbo, but it was obvious that Angel did. Apparently her father had been as haunted as Mom and had passed on the curse to his daughter just like Mom had to Frank. But he'd gone a step further, because suddenly I knew that the violent ancestral spirit he'd told me about, rising out of the woods around the lake, hadn't just materialized there by chance: he'd conjured it. Or at least he thought he had. And it didn't matter if it was true or not, possible or not; what mattered was that, between Mom and the Indian ghosts, Frank hadn't stood a chance. I glared down at her.
"So what you're saying is that you made Frank do it, right?"
She shook her head. "You don't understand. There's more to it."
But I was already backing away. "Oh, I understand all right. What I understand is that you're some kind of witch, and your old man is, too. And I understand you're both crazy as hell!"
She got up. "No, wait!"
But I was gone, crashing headlong through the trees and bushes, not even feeling the branches this time, a wild animal in full flight. Behind me her voice trailed off, empty and pitiful as the cry of a trapped rabbit.
"Wait, Jim! Come back! Let me explain! Jim!"
Like the cop, she didn't chase me. I ran until I was on the other side of the lake and, as if homing in by instinct, collapsed right where I knew I would. At first I just knelt there, panting. Finally I stood up and gazed across the lake.
Rising out of the forest, green and clipped as a country club fairway, was the Bunsens' back yard. From this distance all the chairs looked pure white, and for an instant I tried to will myself -- and Frank -- back in time so that we were standing here together and I could try to reason with him, try to tell him how he'd been had, hoodwinked, bewitched by all those angry dead people; as a last resort, I would grad the rifle and wrestle him for it. He was stronger, but maybe my desperation would snap him out of the spell. Maybe he'd look at the rifle in horror and fling it as far as he could into the lake, where it would sink to the bottom and rust away for centuries like an old musket or ax or tomahawk.
But I knew where I was and when, and what had happened. And it didn't take an expert woodsman to see that someone had been there. Recently. That morning. Muddy footprints were everywhere, like he'd tried out different spot in the clearing to get the best view, the best aim. I looked all around for concrete evidence, maybe a bullet casing, but didn't find any. All that meant, though, was that Frank was careful.
The sun had sunk below the tops of the tallest trees, which would make it about three. My grandparents would be putting on their good clothes by now, getting ready for the trip to the cemetery. Dad would be doing the same, fumbling with his tie, dreading the trip but knowing it was time. He'd be wondering where I was and if I'd had a chance to talk to Frank. By the time Grandma and Grandpa showed up, he'd be worried, and they'd all sit around in awkward silence, stealing glances at the big clock on the mantel, maybe commenting on the weather, how hot it was for this time of the year, or how cool (who'd noticed?), and going out on the porch from time to time to see if they could spot me coming home. Finally they'd be faced with a decision: keep waiting or go on without me.
And it was a decision they'd have to make, because I couldn't move. Maybe it was the thought of going home and trying to explain to everyone where I'd been and what I'd seen, or going to the cemetery and actually having to admit that my mother was really gone, of having to say a real and final goodbye. Or maybe I was just too tired, in spirit as well as in body, to take another step. And as I stood motionless at the edge of the lake, hearing the gentle waves lap against th cat-tailed shore on this side where the eart-moving machines hadn't yet wreaked their havoc, I was surprised to find that I didn't mind being anchored there. I felt solid and calm and still; not like a statue, cold and inert, but alive, rooted. A tree.
I imagined warm sap rising in my veins as a soft breeze rippled my hair. It was so peaceful, so natural, that I didn't fight it. In fact, I liked being a tree. I had the feeling I could stand that way for decades, maybe centuries, not thinking, barely feeling, just being. And then someday, when the weather and the insects had finished their work on me, when the sap had dried up and I still stood tall and proud but hollowed out, empty, I would topple over -- painlessly, silently -- and lie on the forest floor to be lovingly dismantled by the elements. I would sink back into the earth to nourish future trees and grasses and flowers. But in the meantime, I would stand here and sense the lake and the sun and the birds and the air moving all around me, and that would be enough.
Then the most amazing thing happened. Someone spoke to me.
Not out loud, not sound waves in my ears translated into words, but a wordless voice from nowhere and everywhere at once. And I knew, as in a dream, surely but mysteriously, whose voice it was.
Go home, my mother said. It wasn't an order but a reassurance, an all-clear message. Go home You belong there. You're needed. And it's all going to be better now. Believe me. Trust me. I love you. I love you. I love you.
The tingling began in my toes and branched up through my body, a return of sensation, of feeling, of being me, alive and human again. And it felt okay. Something had beeen lifted from me. I was lighter. I looked out across the lake again, and the sunlight glinting there was liquid gold, poured so thin that it floated; I imagined that if I had a boat I could row out and scoop it up and bring it home in a bucket and paint my room, or Dad's, or Frank's. If I was careful, and it proved ad magic as it looked, I could paint the whole house.
As I headed into the woods, I glanced back once at the Bunsen house, where the cop had been joined by men in business suits, detectives, who moved about the yard measuing and dusting, earning their paychecks.
They seemed a million miles away.
I hardly remember making my way back through the woods that afternoon, but I know it wasn't like coming back after Frank had shot Warhorse. Though the sun's light had already faded, I felt no panic, and when the first old of evening hooted mournfully overhead, I didn't walk faster. Something in me had changed, and while I might never love the woods like Frank or Abe Woodsen or the Indians, I would never again be afraid of it, either.
My mother was there now, and that made all the difference.
CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT
Coming up Apple in the deepening shadows of the big elms lining our steet on both sides, I saw my grandparents' car in front of the house, but I didn't see the others I'd expected.
The police cars.
Just enough of my new-found tranquility had worn off by the time I reached our sidewalk that I didn't turn in and head for the front door but instead walked on across the yard and around the side of the house until was at the window that opened off the living room. I got as close as I could without being seen. If I was going to have to go in, I at least wanted to gather some intelligence first, to know what I was walking into. I was tired of ambushes.
Dad was talking. Actually, he was yelling.
"I've tried, damn it! He won't talk to me!"
Grandpa was agitated, too. "Nobody's blaming you, Jack. Simmer down. All we're saying is --"
But Dad wasn't in a mood to simmer down; his burner was on High. "You can't make somebody talk to you if they don't want to! He comes in and goes upstairs and won't say a word! Ask Jim!"
Grandma spoke up, much calmer, though there was an edge toher voice, too. "I'd be glad to ask Jim," she said, "but he's not here either."
Dad took this as a personal attack. "Are you saying I'm not doing a good job with those boys? Is that what you're saying?"
Grandpa: "I think what Pearl is saying--"
Grandma: "I can speak for myself, thank you!"
Dad: "Well, go ahead and say it, because it's true!"
He was pacing now. He came so close to the window that I had to duck. "You want to know the truth? I never asked to be a father. It just happened. I'm not saying I don't love my boys. I do!" His voice broke. "I just never expected to be raising them alone."
Grandpa wasn't having any of it. "No man ever wants kids, Jack. At least not till they're here. Mean want women, and women want kids. That's the way it's been since we all lived in caves. But you've got them, and you have to figure out what to do about it."
"I'm trying," Dad whimpered. "I'm trying."
"Maybe you need to try harder," Grandpa said.
Grandma jumped on him. "Stop that! It's not going to help a thing to have you accusing Jack like that!"
But Grandpa wouldn't back down. "If he gave a damn about those boys, he wouldn't be sitting around here every night getting drunk!"
There was a brief, but deep, silence in the room, then Dad said, "I admit I kind of fell apart right after Mary died. I drank more than I should. But that's finished! Don't think that solves my problems, though. This insurance deal was big. It was going to pull us all out of a financial crisis. And I not only got no thanks for it, I got blamed!"
"I didn't blame you," Grandpa said. "Not for that. I think it's the first rational thing you've done in a long time."
Grandma didn't like that. "It's not so cut and dried. The lake has been in our family for generations, and --"
Dad cut her off. "That damned lake! Half the people in town stopped talking to me when I sold it! And Frank! He can't think of anything else!"
"You're exaggerating," Grandma said. "He just needs some time."
Dad laughed. "Exaggerating? You want to know how far gone he is? What he's willing to do to try to get that lake back?"
I froze. He knew!
"Marry Gina Bunsen, that's what!"
He didn't know! I never thought I'd be so relieved to hear that Frank wanted to make Gina my sister-in-law. I decided it was time to go in. I went around to the front porch and did my usual stomping routine to make it sound like I'd just gotten home, but when I opened the screen door, Dad was still yelling.
"And yes, I do think he might do it! He's that crazy!"
As the door closed behind me, Grandpa said, "Well, I wouldn't worry about that right now. What happened today pretty much puts everything on hold. Including the insurance deal."
They did know! And it was too late for me to escape, because right then Dad saw me.
"Jim! There you are!"
Grandma and Grandpa both looked around. I smiled and waved.
Dad came over and put an arm around my shoulders and walked me across the room. "Where were you? I've been worried all day."
"Just out," I said. "Riding around with Slick. You know."
I bent down and kissed Grandma. Grandpa shook my hand.
"A boy needs to get away," he said.
"We're just glad to have you back," Grandma said.
I took a deep breath. "What were you all talking about when I came in?"
My grandparents looked at each other, then at Dad.
"You mean about Gina?" he said.
"I already know that," I said. "I was there, remember? I mean the other. When Grandpa said somthing about 'what happened today.' What happened?"
Dad frowned. "It's terrible. Maybe you'd better sit."
I sat, gladly, and looked up at him, my heart pounding.
"Mr. Bunsen was shot today," he said. "At his home. They took him to the hospital. They aren't sure if he'll live."
Grandma dabbed at one eye. "I didn't care for the man, but I would never have wished this on him."
I cleared my throat. Might as well get it out and over with. "Do they know who did it?"
Dad shook his head. "Not that I've heard. It's still early."
"He had plenty of enemies," Grandpa said. "Plenty."
Grandma said, "Is this something we really have to discuss right now? It's going to be dark soon, and if we don't get to the cemetery soon --"
"She's right," Grandpa said. He got up and gave her his hand to help her out of her chair. "We can talk about it in the car."
When we were all settled in the car, Grandma said, "Whever you all have to say about this awful thing, I want it finished before we get to the cemetery. I won't have such talk spoiling our visit."
Visit. She made it sound like we were actually going to see Mom, to talk with her, have some tea, then all hug when we said our goodbyes. Maybe that's how she had to think of it.
Dad and Grandpa were in front. I was in back with Brandma. It was a good arrangement, because we each had a window in case we thought of something about Mom that caught us off-guard ad made us need to turn away for a minute.
The drive to Pecan Grove took a half hour. We left the town and headed west, into the sunset. The sky had begun to turn from re-orange to purple, and a nearly full moon floated outside my window, just starting to brighten from white to golden.
Nobody said anything for a while. Dad was first to speak. "I'm sorry Frank isn't with us. It would do him good."
Grandma nodded. "Sometimes family is all you have."
"I think I could have talked him into going," said Grandpa, "but he left too fast."
I looked at him, at the back of his head. "Left where? When?"
Grandpa spoke without turning around. "The house. Not long before you came hom."
"You saw Frank? Today?"
"Didn't see him," Dad said over his shoulder. "Heard him. He got in his car and took off. Not a word to anybody." He caught Grandma's eyes in the rearview mirror. "Not even to his grandparents." It was his way of letting her know he wasn't the only target of Frank's lack of respect these days.
"I just wonder where he was all day," Grandpa said. "It's not like a teenage boy to go off like that without his car."
"Jim said he was down in the woods," Dad said. He looked at me in the mirror. "Right, Jim?"
I forced my head to nod; my neck was as stiff as a log.
"He likes to go down there to be alone," Dad said.
But where was he now? I didn't realize I'd asked it out loud until Dad said, "I bet he went to the hospital."
The hospital? I hadn't considered that. "Why?"
"To see Mr. Bunsen, of course. Or at least the family. Gina, anyway."
Grandma shook her head and clucked. "If there's any good to come out of this tragic thing, maybe it's that he'll see that he doesn't have to ruin his life by marrying someone he doesn't love. He's got his whole life ahead of him."
Some life, I thought. It was only a matter of time before the cops figured out what kind of bullet they were looking for and what direction it came from and who was likely to have been in the woods that day and why. Some night soon they would come knocking on our door. Dad would be astonished when he heard what they wanted. He'd go to the foot of the stairs and yell up for Frank to come down. Frank might or might no. I could imagine him holing up in his room with his rifle. I'd stay in my room that night, my radio turned up loud, pretending to do homework, my hands shaking till I couldn't even hold a pencil.
"Whatever happened to that girl he was going with?" Grandma said. "The Waterman girl."
"I don't know," Dad said as he turned off the highway onto the two-lane gravel road that led to the cemetery. A half dozen crows hunched on fenceposts, their black feathers gleaming in the early moonlight. "I never heard anything after she got home from the hospital. Maybe Jim knows." He glanced at me in the mirror. "Jim?"
I turned to the window, watching the crows watching us. "I don't know anything. Sorry."
"Such a nice girl," Grandma said. "And from a good family."
Family was a big deal to Grandma.
We rounded a bend, and the cemetery came into view. Suddenly Grandpa leaned forward. "Is that what I think it is?"
Up ahead, at the entrance to the cemetery, a car was parked off to one side, in the grass under a big oak tree. Even in the fading light, it was clear to all of us, at the same time, whose it was.
"Oh my," Grandma said.
We pullled up behind Frnak's car, and Dad shut off the engine. A one-lane gravel road led into the cemetery, winding among the stones, but it was only used by hearses. Mourners were expected to park on the main road and walk in. High up in the trees all around, birds and squirrels rustled among the dead leaves. We sat quietly for a while, staring at Frank's car or into the cemetery itself, where the silver light of the moon was already throwing the headstones into pale relief against the blackness between them and beyond.
"Maybe we should let him have his privacy," Grandma said. "He wants to say goodbye in his own way. They were so close, you recall."
"I don't know," Dad said. "This was supposed to be a family trip. And to tell you the truth, I'm more than a little tired of Frank's attitude. I vote we go in."
"I'm with Jack," Grandpa said. "She was my daughter before she was anybody's wife or mother, by God, and I have my rights, too."
He opened the door and got out. Grandma didn't like it, I could tell, but she opened her door without protest and swiveled around to being maneuvering herself into position to be helped out.
"Help your grandmother, would you, Jim?" Dad said.
I meant to, but hwen I stood up and shut my door, the cool night air settled down on me like an invisible net over a fish, and I felt myself being pulled, aay from the road, away from the car, and before I realized what I was doing, I was running into the cemetery, calling back over my shoulder: "I'll meet you there!"
Startled voices called after me, Dad's and then Grandpa's: "Jim! Come back! What are you doing? Jim, help your grandmother! Jim!"
They were like hounds yelping, and I ran like an escaped convict. I had to find Frank before they did. I had to plead with him to turn himself in, to claim it was an accident, that he'd been shooting at rabbits or even at bottles. I'd already made up my mind that if he needed an alibi, I'd give him one. I would stand up in court with my hand on the Bible and swear to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth and then I'd sit down and lie through my teeth, say I'd been with him the entire time or whatever it was he wanted me to say. After all, only Slick knew where I'd been all day, and he'd lie for me like I'd lie for Frank. Wouldn't he?
About fifty yards in, I tripped over something and went flying head-first, landing on all fours on a grass-covered mound of dirt I knew was a grave. When I looked up, my face was inches from a low weather-stained stone that was leaning sideways, sinking inch by inch, year by year, into the earth. Only the tops of the chiseled letters were visible, but I could see what they were trying to spell: LOTT. All around I sensed ghosts, real ghosts, and they weren't friendly like Casper.
Restless and angry, they moaned from the dirt.
I got up and ran.
I knew the way to Mom's grave because all her family was buried there, and many Sundays we'd come out, Mom and me and Grandma, to put out flowers or pull weeds. A low iron fence surrounded the plot.
I saw Frank before I reached the fence.
I stopped and edged forward. He was kneeling at Mom's grave, his head down, hugging himself, rocking slowly back and forth. I thought of the nights he'd come home late and gone in to sit by her bed, and the two of them had talked on and on, so low that I couldn't make out what they were saying. Now here he was, saying something to Mom again, and I still couldn't hear. I tiptoes closer, until I stood right at the fence, not ten feet from the grave, which was piled high with wilted, browning bouquets. I leaned over the fence and listened.
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry," Frank was saying over and over.
In the distance, the way I'd come, the hounds bayed through the twilight. "Jim! Jim, stop and wait! Jim!"
I was running out of time. I hopped over the fence and went and stood behind Frank. I didn't want to startle him, to have him turn around and jump me before he knew who I was. I cleared my throat.
"Frank?"
He grew silent, and the rocking halted, but he didn't turn around.
"It's me," I said. "Jim."
I had so much to say, and so little time -- the hounds were closer, their barking louder -- that I took a deep breath and was preparing to let it fly, the whole spiel, when suddenly he did turn around.
His face was dusty and streaked with dark tears. I was marveling at the fact that it was the first time in my life that I'd seen him cry when he said something that stopped the breath in my throat.
"I couldn't do it, Jim."
It took a few seconds before I said, "What?"
"I couldn't do it," he said. "I had the rifle up to my shoulder, and I had him in my sights, and my finger got tighter and tighter on the trigger . . . but I couldn't do it. I just couldn't. I don't know why."
My mouth opened, but nothing came out.
Just then the hounds found us. Dad came first, huffing and puffing and glaring at me. "What do you mean running ahead like that? Your grandmother --" He stopped, staring past me. "Frank," he said, as if stating a fact. "Frank."
Grandma and Grandpa emerged from the shadows, both panting. I sensed that Grandpa was aboutto light into me, too, and was bracing for it, when Grandma nudged him and pointed at Frank. They stepped closer, her holding onto his arm.
"Honey," Grandma said, "are you all right?"
Frank, still on his knees, looked up at them and whispered, "No."
While Dad and my grandparents huddled around Frank, hugging and stroking, murmuring condolences and offering support, I stood to one side, numb, mute again, but not like at the lake: I felt cold and lifeless as a graveyard statue, a broken concrete angel. All I could do was wait for someone to speak to me and snap the spell.
After a few minutes, Grandma suggested we all go home and come back the next day, Sunday, a better day for visiting the dead anyway. Dad said that was a good idea, especially since it was getting too dark to properly pay respects or even to see how to straighten things up. He put an arm around Frank and walked him away, talking low. Grandpa stood looking down at the stone a while, until Grandma gently took his arm, whispered something to him, and they, too, moved into the darkness.
Nobody noticed me. I wasn't surprised. I was used to it. All my life I'd been the little brother, the extra, while Frank got most of the attention. Now was different, though: now I didn't mind. I wanted to be left alone.
I couldn't imagine riding all the way back to town with Frank.
Finally Dad's voice drifted back to me out of the night: "Jim, come on now. We're leaving."
But as I turned to go, I nearly stumbled over a low blocky headstone. When I read the words etched there in the faded granite, I saw that all that time I'd been standing on my great-grandfather's grave.
On the way back, Frank sat in front with Dad, which spared him having to look me in the eyes. did he really think he could get away with it? I'd been prepared to stick up for him, to lie for him, but it looked like he didn't need my lies: he'd made up one of his own. And he'd said it with such conviction that I realized he was lying to himself, too, and was believing it. What was worse, he'd lied to Mom. He'd knelt by her grave and told her a whopper.
Dad did most of the talking in the car. He seemed so glad to have Frank back that he was one of those born-again types, so full of the spirit that he couldn't contain himself. He'd been down in the dumps, he said, but now he felt better, as we all should because Mom would want it that way. The last thing she'd want was for all of us to be moping around and not getting anything done. The lake was behind us, he declared, something we wouldn't have to worry about anymore. It was a pity what had happened to Mr. Bunsen, but -- he stopped and looked over at Frank.
"I don't know if you heard what happened today," he said.
Frank shook his head.
"He got shot," I said from the backseat. Frank turned and looked at me, and his eyes were wide. "Somebody shot him in his backyard." I added,"While he was reading the newspaper."
Frank looked surprised. I had to give him that. Even shocked. He turned back around without saying anything and stared straight ahead at the dark gravel road and the distant lights of Cherokee.
"I'm sorry," Dad said. "I guess I thought you'd heard. But if you've been down in the woods all day --"
Frank looked at him. "Who said I'd been in the woods?"
"I did," I said, and when he turned around to look at me, I added, "Don't you want to know if he's dead?"
It was Grandma who looked at me now. "Jim! I don't think that's a nice thing to say."
But I wasn't backing down. I felt had, betrayed, though it was hard to say exactly how. If my future father-in-law got shot, I think I'd want to know if he was dead or not."
Grandpa stepped in to mediate. "There's no harm in asking, though I don't think anyone knows right now, so why don't we all just be quiet for a while and ry to get home in one piece? I don't like this road."
"It's had its fair share of accidents, that's for sure," Dad said.
But I knew it wasn't accidents Grandpa didn't like about the road. It was that it led to the cemetery, where his daughter was buried, and he'd just got himself talked into coming out here to say goodbye to her, only to have to turn around and go home and start talking himelf into it all over again.
We rode the rest of the way in silence.
I sat staring at the back of Frank's head, the dark hair down over his collar now -- he hadn't had a haircut in a couple of months -- trying to will him to turn around and face me but secretly glad that he didn't.
CHAPTER TWENTY NINE
At home Frank excused himself right away and went up to his room, saying he was really tired and wanted to lie down. He hugged Grandma and shook Grandpa's hand and let Dad clap him on the shoulder: the prodigal son come home tothe fold. It made my stomach churn.
My grandparents decided it was too late to stay, and I walked them to their car. While Grandpa got it started, Grandma stood with me on the curb. "Tell your dad we'll stop by about one tomorrow, okay?" She leaned over, a hand on my arm for support, and kissed me on the cheek. "We're proud of the way you're holding up, honey. Don't you forget it."
I opened the door for her, and before she got in, she said, "Maybe we'll get a chance to talk tomorrow. I have some things I need to tell you"
Waving from the curb as they drove away, I wondered how I could keep from going in the house and dealing with Dad. And Frank. Maybe I could call Slick and ask him if I could spend the night at his house.
Slick.
I'd forgotten all about him. I'd left him, deserted him, out on Belmont Avenure, with a cop closingin fast. Healready had two tickets that I knew of, one for speeding -- believe it or not, in that heap -- and one for a broken tail light. Depending on what this latest one was for, he could be in big trouble. And it was my fault.
Shit.
Dad was nowhere in sight when I went in, soI quickly dialed Slick's number.
His mother anwered.
"Hi, Mrs. Harris. This is Jim Perkins. Is Ronnie home?"
She didn't know he was called Slick; she'd have moved to another town immediately.
She said he was but she wasn't sure he wanted to talk to anybody. He was in a bad mood. And she was mad at him.
Uh oh.
She said she'd ask him, though, since it was me, his best friend. While I waited, I could hear Dad in the kitchen. Ice tinkled in a glass. Something was poured.
Come on, come on.
"Hey Jimbo." He sounded surprisingly cheerful.
"Hey," I said. "I'm really sorry about running out on you."
"I got a ticket," he said.
"Sorry."
"Number three. You know what they means?"
"They take your license for six months?"
"Already took it," he said. "On the spot. I had the car towed home."
"Look, I'll make it up to you," I said. "I don't know how, but --"
"I know how."
"How?"
"Drive."
"Drive what?"
"M car. You go a license, right?"
"Well, yeah, but --"
"So what's the problem?"
"The problem," I said, "is that the last time I drove was when I took the test. Dad's only got the one car he uses for business, and you know he won't let me drive it. I don't even remember how to parallel park!"
"You don't have to parallel park at Leroy's," Slick said. "Besides, it'll all come back to you." He lowered his voice. "What did you find out about big bubba? Did he do the deed?"
"I don't know," I said. "I hope not.
"Look,"he said, "you need to get your mind off all that shit for a while. Why don't you come over and get acquainted with the machine? We'll take her for a spin."
"Now?"
"Hey, it's Saturday night," he said. "Time to cruise!"
"I can't. Really. Not tonight. Sorry." The light went off in the kitchen. "Gotta go," I said. "I'll cal you tomorrow, okay?"
"Yeah, great." He sounded dispappointed. "But if you change your mind, I'm up late. Night owl you know. Whoooo!"
I hung up just as Dad came into the living room with a big glass of something. "Who are you calling so late?" he said.
"Slick. I, uh, left something in his car."
Dad took a sip. He must have seen me staring at his glass because he held it up amd smiled. "Ice tea," he said. He took another sip. "So how's Ronnie? I haven't seen him in a while."
"He's fine," I said. I yawned. "I hate to be a party-pooper, Dad, but I'm sort of bushed, so if you don't mind --"
"Not so fast," he said. "We need to have a little talk."
I stopped mid-yawn. What did he know? "About what?" I said.
"Things." He went over to his chair and sat down and gestured toward the sofa. "It won't take but a few minutes."
I backed toward my room. "I'm really tired, Dad."
"Jim, I need to talk to you."
There was somehting in his voice that hadn't been there in a while: authority. He sounded like Dad again. "There are some things I have to get straight with you, and now is as good a time as any. No lectures, no surprises, I promise."
I sat on the edge of the sofa, studying him. He didn't look drunk. His eyes were clear, his hair was combed, his clothes clean and neat. And it really did look like iced tea in his glass -- with a lemon wedge. I relaxed a little, but only a little. I'd been fooled a lot in the past week.
"I know I've been a jerk lately," he said. "And I apologize."
"Dad, it's okay," I said. "You don't have to."
"Yes, I do," he said. "And I'd appreciate your not interrupting me. I want you to know that from now on things are going to be different. We haven't been much of a family lately, and that's my fault. Your mother's passing was the worst thing that ever happened to me, and even thought I expected it, I denied it right up to the end, and even pretended I could prevent it. Selling the lake may not have been the right thing to do, but if I hadn't done all I could to keep her alive as long as possible, I'd be in a lot worse shape now than I am. And we don't need that lake. The town does.. When the city council meets nest week, I have it from good sources that they're going to vote to turn down the Bunsen proposal to zone it commercial and they're going to vote to issue bonds to buy it and develop it into a park." He took another sip and smiled. "I think even your great-grandfather would think that was a good idea."
He'd said no surprises, but this was a pretty big one. "What about your insurance deal?" I said. "That was worth a lot of money, wasn't it?"
He nodded, slow, like it was something he'd thought about, probably long and hard. "That's true. But winnng a jackpot in Las Vegas is worth a lot on money, too. I even got close to that once, a long ago, before I met your mother. Lost on the last card. I've always done okay in the insurance business, and I'll do okay now. We'll get by."
"I didn't mean it that way," said. "I just thought --"
He held up a hand. "I know what you thought. But I was getting into that deal for all the wrong reasons, and before it was over, it would have made all of us pretty darned miserable." He smiled. "Mr.Bunsen isn't the type of man who hands out favors without expecting a lot in return. A whole hell of a lot, if you'll pardon my language." Another sip of his tea. "And how are you?"
What? Me? "I'm fine," I said.
"No, really," he said. "I know I haven't been paying attention to you, and I'm sorry about that." He settled back in his chair. "I want to hear how you feel, what you're thinking, how I can help you through all this."
Trapped, that's how I felt. I was glad he seemed okay again, but I still had the matter of Frank to deal with, and Dad didn't seem to know anything about that. He sat there smiling at me, waiting.
Like a gift from heaven, a divine sign, the phone rang.
I leaped up. "I'll get it!" Before he could protest, I was across the room. "Hello?" It was a neighbor worked at the hospital, asking for Dad. Perfect! "Oh sure," I said, "I'll get him. Me? I'm fine, thanks. Hold on." I put a hand over the receiver. "Dad, it's Mrs. Parker."
"Really? I wonder what she wants."
"Got me," I said. I handed him the phone and headed for my room.
"We'll finish talking later, okay?" he called after me.
"Sure!"
Five more steps. Four, three, two -- safe!
At least for a while. He would probably come in later, but I could always pretend to be asleep. Overhead no sound came from Frank's room. I pictured him lying on his bed, too, maybe his hands behind his head, starting at the ceiling, thinking. Was he smiling? Congratulating himself on having gotten away with it? Or was he hatching plans to make a run for it, to pack a bag and take off as soon as he was sure Dad was asleep. If he left a note, what would it say?
"Dear Dad, I'm sorry I had to kill Mr. Bunsen, but now I'm going to live in Alaska. Please forget about me and give anything I leave behind to Jim. He's a great brother, and I'm really going to miss him."
I'd just started making a mental inventory of his room when someone called my name from outside the window.
"Jim!"
I sat straight up, eyes wide, mind racing. I was trying to fit me feet into my shoes in the dark when I heard the voice again, low and secret.
"Jim, it's me!"
A girl.
I leaned across the bed and squinted through the screen. The moon was casting just enough light for me to make out a figure standing not ten feet away, against the hedge that ran along our side fence.
"Who's there?" I whispered.
"Me! Angel!"
Pocahontas? "You're kidding. Come closer so I can see you."
She took a few steps toward the window. It was her all right, dressed in the same worn skirt and blouse she'd had on at the lake. If the light had been better, I'd bet I could have seen the dirt on her knees from kneeling by her smoking pile of stones.
"What are you doing here?"
"I need to tell you something."
"I can't come out. I'm not dressed."
"You don't have to," she said. "Just get close to the screen."
I leaned further across the bed at the same time she took more steps, until her face and mine were nearly touching the screen from opposite sides. It made me nervous. Did she have a tomahawk behind her back?

"I have to tell you something about your brother."
"You already did."
"No. You ran off before I had a chance."
"Look, whatever you have to say --"
"He didn't do it."
For a second or two, I couldn't speak. Finally I managed, "What?"
"He didn't shoot that man. I was trying to tell you at the lake. The words I was saying weren't directed at your brother. They were directed away from him. My father likes your brother. He knew what was about to happen, and he --"
"Stop!" I said it louder than I'd meant to. I glanced at the door. The last thing I needed was Dad barging in and catching me taloking to a crazy girl through my screen. "Look," I whispered, "you don't know what you're talking about. Mr. Bunsen got shot. He's in the hospital. He might not live."
"I know all that," she said. "But your brother didn't shoot him. He couldn't. He wanted to, he meant to, but he couldn't. The spirit --"
"Shut up about spirits!" I didn't care how loud I was now. "There's no such thing as spirits. Now please go away and let me sleep."
But she wasn't finished. Her face was pressed against the screen so that she looked like a spirit herself trying to get into my room, into my mind. "Listen to me!" she hissed. "My father told me what to say so that the spirit of vengeance would pass from your brother. I don't care if you believe it or not, but it's true! And it happened! He didn't shoot that man! The spirit passed into someone else -- someone who did it!"
"Great," I said. "The spirit passed into someone else. Who?"
A knock at my door.
"Jim?"
Dad! "I've got to go," I whispered. "Now!"
"Jim, are you awake?"
I leaned into the screen. "Go! Please!"
She backed away but kep her eyes on me. They shone like a cat's. "My father wants to see you," she said. "He wants to tell you something."
"Okay, okay, I'll go see him. Just leave."
"He wants to see you now."
"Now? Tonight? I can't do it!"
She backed away until all I could see of her were those eyes, twin points of light in the darkness, distant headlights. "He's afraid he won't live through the night. You have to come now."
"Jim?"
"Just a minute!" I called. Shit! "Look," I said, turning back to the window. But she was gone, and everything was dark again.
My door opened a crack. "Can I come in a second?"
I flopped down on my back and let out a huge breath, which took with it all my energy, all my resistance. I was a deflated balloon.
"Sure," I said in a flat voice. "Come on in." Join the crowd.
Dad let himself down gently on th edge of my bed, a habit left over from all those weeks of sitting and talking to Mom, wanting to be as close as possible but knowing he had to be careful not to jiggle much. "I'm going out for a little while," he said. "I just wanted you to know."
Out? Dad? At night? "Where are you going?"
"The hospital."
"Why?"
"It doesn't look good for Mr. Bunsen. He's still unconscious, and his vital signs are weak. That's what Mrs. Parker was calling about. She's a nurse there, you know. I thought I'd go and see if there's anything I can do for the family. I didn't mean to disturb you. I know you need your sleep. But I didn't want you worrying if you woke up and I was gone." He stood up and started for the door. "I'll be back as soon as I can. 'Night."
I sat up. "Wait!"
He stopped, a hand on the doorknob, and looked back at me.
"I'll go with you," I said.
He looked surprised. "Why?"
I shrugged. "To keep you company?"
He smiled and nodded. "Thanks, Jim. I appreciate that." The door was almost closed behind him when he stopped. "What about Frank?"
"What about him?"
"I wonder if I should ask him if he wants to come, too."
"I don't know," I said, but I knew what was coming next.
"Would you run up there and just stick your head in his door for me?" he said. "Tell him he doesn't have to come, but it might be a nice thing to do. Whatever his intentions were toward that girl, he does owe her at least this much."
Thinking that I'd rather stick my head in a bucket of tarantulas, I said, "Sure."
"Thanks, Jim."
Frank's door was closed, and no light seeped from under it.
I knocked.
"Frank?" No answer. "Frank, it's me. Jim."
No answer again. I turned the knob. It wasn't locked. I opened the door a crack.
"Frank? Are you awake?"
I opened the door all the way, letting the weak light filtering from downstairs into his room. He wasn't there.
I took a step inside. How could he have gone out? Wouldn't Dad have seen him? He'd been talking on the phone, with a clear view of the stairs as well as the front and back doors.
Besides, Frank's car was was still parked our front. I could see it as I stood at his window.
That's when I heard a noise. A cough.
Not in the room. Outside. I squinted but couldn't see anybody in the yard or in the street. Then I heard it again, and I knew where it was coming from. The screen was off the window. I could lean out and see it on the roof, propped against the side of the house. I leaned more and saw Frank sitting not far away, looking up at the moon.
"Frank?"
He jumped a little, and the moonlight glinted off something in his lap. He folded his arms over whatever it was and looked at me.
"What do you want?"
"What are you doing out here?" I said.
"Thinking," he said, turning back to the moon.
"Dad's going to the hospital to see about Mr. Bunsen'sw family," I said, "and I'm going with him. Do you want to come?"
He just kept looking at the moon. "No thanks."
"Don't you want to see Gina?"
"No."
I leaned out as far as I could without falling. "What have you got?"
"What do you mean?"
"In your lap," I said. "What is that?"
A pause. "None of your business."
"Is it a gun?"
"What if it is?"
Behind me, down the stairs, Dad called, "Jim, we need to go!"
"I'll be right there!" I called back. And to Frank: "Give it to me."
He looked at me. "Give what to you?"
"The gun. I won't go till you give it to me."
"Why would I give you my rifle?"
"Because if you don't," I said, "I'll have to call Dad up here."
After a few seconds, he said, "Why do want my rifle so bad?"
"I just do," I said. "That's all." When he made no move, I said, "Do you know an old Indian man named Harold Red Cloud?"
"Maybe. Why?"
"He's in the hospital."
"I know."
"Don't you want to go see him?"
"Later."
"There may not be a later. He's in bad shape."
He looked at me, his eyes glowing like Angel's. "Leave me alone, okay?"
"Jim!" Dad yelled from downstairs.
"Just a minute!" I yelled back. To Frank: "His daughter is a --" a what? "-- a friend of mine. She said you didn't kill Mr. Bunsen."
"I already told you I didn't."
"I know. Now I have a second opinion."
"Did you need one?"
I didn't answer that. "She said her father told her what to say to keep you from doig it." I felt stupid saying all this, but I kept on. "She said the spirit of vengeance passed from you to someone else." My hadns shook on the windosill, and not just from holding me up.
Frank looked at me hard. "She said that?"
I nodded.
"Jim!" Dad yelled again. He sounded closer, like he was coming up the stairs. "We have to go!"
"He's coming," I said to Frank. I held my hand way out. "Please?"
Without a word, Frank held the rifle out, and I took it.
"Jim!"
"On the way!"
I looked back once. Frank was staring up at the moon again.
Dad was halfway up the stairs. "What in the world took you so -- is that Frank's rifle?"
I handed it to him. "He wants you to keep if for him. Lock it up in the cabinet. He didn't want to go to the hospital. He said he'll call Gina later."
I left Dad with the rifle and hustled past him down the stairs, two at a time, praying my legs would hold up all the way to the bottom, calling back, "I'll be in the car!"
CHAPTER THIRTY
We didn't talk much at first in the car, and then Dad said, "I think Frnak's coming around. He still hasn't said much to me, but he doesn't seem so mad. What do you think?"
"Yeah, I guess you're right." I turned toward the window, hoping he wouldn't ask me anything else.
He did, of course. "Any idea why he wanted me to lock up his rifle? I mean, he usually takes care of it himself."
I lied without giving it a thought. "He didn't want it just lying around, but he was tired and didn't feel like coming downstairs. No big deal."
Dad nodded. We rode the rest of the way in blissful silence.
I was the one who broke it. We had just wheeled into the hospital parking lot, past the emergency entrance, and were looking for an open space near the door, when I heard myself asking a question I'd been trying hard not to ask.
"So who do you think shot Mr. Bunsen?"
I held my breath and waited for him to turn and fix me with a look and say, "I think we both know, don't we?"
Instead, he said, "I don't know." He pulled into a space and stopped the car and turned it off. As he opened his door, he said, "But I think we'll find out soon."
We stopped at the reception desk and Dad asked the lady there which room Mr. Bunsen was in.
"321," she said. "But only family are being allowed visitation. Mr. Bunsen is --" she glanced at me like I was a little kid who ought not hear certain things "-- not doing well."
"I don't actually need to see him," Dad said. "I'm really here to see the family."
"Well, I guess you could go on up," she said. "But don't stay long." She looked at the clock on the wall to let him know she'd be timing us.
The elevator was deep, with wide doors, to accommodate patients on carts. Dad had just punched the close button when a nurse pushing a cart stuck her foot in it, and it opened again.
"Sorry," she said, "but I need to go up."
Dad held the door until she was safely in. She smiled at him and at me. We smiled back and then stared straight ahead, at the doors, at nothing, trying not to look at the cart. Although it was empty, I think we both sensed that if we looked, we'd see Mom there, thin and pale, eyes closed, on her way to another painful, useless surgery. When the doors opened on the third floor, we let out our breaths at the same time and stepped into the hall together, not even stopping to hold the door open for the nurse.
Policemen stood outside Mr. Bunsen's door, one on each side, like palace guards. Dad knew them both.
"Jerry. Pete. What's going on?"
The younger one looked at the older one, who shook his head and then, looking at Dad, made a zipping motion across his lips. "Orders," he said. "I hope you don't want to go in, Mr. Perkins. Family only."
"I'm a business associate of Mr. Bunsen's," Dad said. "I just thought I'd let his wife know that I'm here to help if she needs me. Will you tell her?"
The cops looked at each other again, as if not quite sure what to do about the request. But they didn't have to decide, because at that moment Gina appeared between them. I couldn't stop staring at her face: not just red and puffy from crying but bruised and swollen, one eye nearly closed. When she saw Dad, she threw her arms around him, sobbing. After he'd staggered back a few steps and regained his balance, he stood holding her uncertainly, lightly, not sure where to put his hands. The copes were too wide-eyed to offer any advice.
Gina pulled away a little and looked all around. "Where's Frank? He's here, isn't he? I want to see Frank!"
Dad shot me a desperate look, but I dodged it and kept going.
The third floor rooms, reserved for the very sick, the terminal, and those just out of ICU but still needing monitoring, were nearly all empty, so I had little problem finding the one I was looking for. In the first room I poked my head into, an old lady who must have weighed no more than eighty pounds lay in bed with her hands folded on her stomach, eyes shut, as if ready to be taken to heaven. In the second, a little kid about six, head shaved, pajamas hanging from his bony shoulders like laundry on a clothes line, stared back at me with eyes too big for their sockets, while a woman sat on a chair at the end of the bed, her face in her hands.
The third room was Harold Red Cloud's.
I looked up and down the hall and then tiptoed in.
It was a semi-private room, but the other bed was empty. I stood looking down at the white bulb of bandages sticking out of the blankets, covering even his nose, which had tubes running from each nostril to some kind of machine whirring beside his bed. Only his mouth showed, a straight line that saggeda little at one end, where a trickle of spit snked its way down, disappearing under his chin.
Why was I here? Angel had said he wanted to see me. Was that possible? If he wasn't deal already, he wasn't far from it.
I was just turning to go when he groaned. I looked back. His lips moved, and a hoarse whisper rose from them.
"Come closer."
I thought about pretending I hadn't heard and just tiptoeing to the door and then running like hell, taking the stairs this time, until I was outside in the parking lot, wolfing down lungfuls of clean night air. No one would blame me. No one would even know. And besides, maybe i'd imagined it all.
The lips moved again. "Jim?"
Shit.
Bending over him, I could see his lips were parched from breathing through his mouth, and his stale, sour breath nearly made me dizzy.
"I'm here," I said.
With great effort, and another groan, he lifted a hand and felt around in the air between us. I caught it and held it in mine. It was a woodsman's hand, rough to the touch, his grip still surprisingly strong. I thought about how different it was from my mother's hand the last time I'd held it: blue-veined and shaking, frail as a baby bird fallen out of its nest.
"Sit by me," the lips whispered hoarsely.
I let myself down lightly onto the bed and tried to let his hand go, but he held on. "Your daughter said you wanted to see me," I said.
"Angel."
The word rode out of his mouth on a rasping breath, full of despair and love. "Poor Angel. What will she do? She only had me,and now she'll have nobody."
I watched the door, afraid Dad would show up and want to know what was going on. I leaned down. "Why did you want to see me?"
At frist he didn't answer, just lay there struggling to breather. Finally he said, "I to tell you the truth."
"The truth about what?"
"The lake.'
Oh God. The last thing I wanted to hear about.
"I'm sorry to burden you with it," he said, "time is running out, and someone must know. The truth must be passed on."
I thought of Angel. "What about your daughter? Does she know?"
The bulb of bandages nodded slightly. "Yes. But that's not enough. One of your people must know."
Boy, have you got the wrong guy, I thought. "What about Frank?" I said. "He's the one who ought to know. He's the one in love with --" that stupid goddamned lake "-- the lake."
Now the bandages swiveled backand forth; he was shaking his head. "He doesn't want to know," the old man said. "I tried, many times, to tell him. He would listen." He squeezed my hand. "Will you listen, Jim? Please?"
I was trapped and knew it. "Okay," I said. "Sure."
He squeezed again and let go.
It took him a while to draw inthe breath he needed, but once he got started, it all poured out, as if he'd rehearsed it a long time in his mind.
"Your great grandfather was a good man. He wanted what was best for his people. Abe Woodsen owned the lake and kept everybody off. He even tried to chase away my people, we who had been there for hundreds of years. The spirits ordained his death. It was only a matter of how and when. Our Chief, Gray Wolf, gathered the tribe and told how he had received a message from our ancestors that this was the chosen night. When he asked for volunteers, ten braves stepped forward, and when the moon had risen above the highest branches, they set off through the woods. But soon the light of the moon grew dim, and they saw that it was covered by clouds. Then they smelled smoke, and long before they reached the cabin, they saw flames rising red and orange into the sky, exploding the tops of the cottonwood trees. When they reached Abe Woodsen's cabin, it was already a ball of fire."
He stopped, breathing hard, his breath sounding liquid in his throat. I reached for his hand and patted it. Whatever I was hearing was harder for him to tell than for me to hear, that was sure.
"A big rock had been rolled against the door," he said, "and there was no sound from inside but roaring and crackling. The cabin was burning down. The braves didn't know what do do, what this sign meant, but they were young and afraid and ran off into the forest. But as they ran, they saw four men getting into a boat about to row across the lake. The men saw them, too, and shot at them. One brave was injured, but the rest set upon the men and killed three of them with arrows in their boat. One escaped across the lake. My people put down three stones to lay to rest to souls of those men killed. You've seen them. They were all white men, and they smelled of whiskey and kerosene. One of those who died confessed that they had come to the woods to frighten Abe Woodsen away, but he shot at them, so they killed him and set fire to his cabin."
When he stopped to take a long, gurgling breath, I said, "What was the name of the man who got away?" Then silently mouthed the words with him: "Joshua Lott."
I started to say something else, but he shook his head. "Please, let me finish. I don't know how long I can talk." Another deep breath, so slow and drawn-out it made me wince. It was almost like watching Mom die again. I wasn't sure how much of it I could take.
"This is the hard part," he said. "But it's the part you have to hear. The last dying man, lying there in the long grass beside the lake, trying to make his peace with God, an arrow through his neck, said, the best he could, that they had been paid to come to Abe Woodsen's cabin and offer him money to leave. When he refused, and threatened them with his rifle, they killed him and set the cabin on fire. They rolled boulders against the windows to make it look like my people did it. The man who had paid them was your great grandfather."
He held my hand again tight in both of his. "But don't judge him harshly. What you must know, what you must carry from here in your heart and tell to your brother and to your grandmother, and to anyone else who has a right to know, is that he was a good man. He didn't mean for it to happen. He was only looking after his people -- and the lake."
"But he was wrong," I said. "He let the army run your people out and --"
He squeezed my hand to quiet me. "Shhh. It's true that he never told what he knew and he eoncouraged the army to scatter my people to the winds. But then he did the only thing he could have done to keep the vengeful spirits at rest: he made the lake open and free to all. And wheny my mother and father came back, years later, the only survivors of the tribe to return, he made them welcome and gave them a house to live in, the house where Angel was born. And it was only when the lake was sold again, when it passed into the hands of a man even worse than Abe Woodsen -- a man who wanted to fence off the lake and destroy the woods -- that the angry spirits rose once more. Now they're quiet. Now it's all over."
He let my hand go then and folded his own hands across his stomach. "And now I can rest."
For the longest time I just sat there by the bed, staring at him but not seeing him, seeing only the three stones laid beside each other int he woods. It was only when a nurse came in and tapped my shoulder that I blinked him into focus again.
"You're not supposed to be in here," she said. "Who are you?
"I --" How to explain? "I'm a friend of his daughter. She asked me to sit with him. She went out for a walk."
It wasn't a total lie, so I sounded fairly sincere, and while the nurse frowned and clucked at me, whe didn't call a doctor or the cops. "Well, you'd better gonow," she said. "I have to take his temperature."
"Sure."
I edged around the end of the bed, looking back down at him. "Goodnight," I said. "Pleasant dreams." It's what Mom used to say to me. The old man didn't respond. In fact, he didn't seem to move at all. Not his hands, his lips, not even his chest. I looked at the nurse.
Her face told me she suspected the same thing I did. She bent down and felt along his wrist with two fingers. Then she placed the same fingers on the side of his throat. Finally she leaned all the way over him and put her ear to his mouth. Suddenly she was sweeping by me on her way out the door, calling, "Doctor! Doctor West! I need you! Hurry!"
I was stealing one last look when I heard a voice behind me.
"How is he?"
Angel stood in the doorway, her face red and sweaty from running all the way from our house.
"Well?"
I didn't answer. I probably looked dead myself, standing there with my mouth slightly open and no expression.
She came into the room, looking alarmed. "What is it?"
"I think you'd better ask the nurse," I mumbled.
She ran to the bed. "Daddy? Daddy, are you all right?"
I had just managed to duck out the door when I heard her moaning, at first low, rising to a wail: "No, oh no! Noooooo!"
At the corner, I nearly collided with the nurse and a doctor and had to flatten myself against the wall to let them past. Two orderlies in white came right behind, pushing a cart at full speed.
When I got to Mr. Bunsen's room, the cops were gone. I was about to go in, or at least get closer and sneak a peek, when they came out, with Mrs. Bunsen between them.
In handcuffs.
Dad was right behind, fussing at them. "For God's sake, Jerry, do you really think you need those?"
"Orders are orders, Mr. Perkins," the cop said as he and his partner hustled her down the hall, each with an arm through hers.
Dad followed, still complaining. "I don't see why --"
"Stay out of this, Mr. Perkins!" the older cop snapped. "We're just doing our job, okay? Don't interfere, I'm warning you."
"I need to say something to Mr. Perkins," Mrs. Bunsen said to the cops, who slowed down but didn't stop or let go of her arms, so that she had to twist her head around and talk to Dad over her shoulder. Her face was amazingly composed: no tears, no fear in her eyes. "Please wait for Gina until she's picked up. I've called my sister, and she's on her way. It shouldn't be but a few minutes."
Dad said of course he'd wait, and was there anyone else he needed to contact or anything else he needed to do, but she shook her head and said no thank you and resumed her forced march down the hall with the cops. The older cop glanced back once and gave Dad a look to let him know not to follow them, then they disappeared around the corner.
Dad stood in the middleof the hall, staring, not saying anything.
Finally I said, "Dad?"
When he turned, his face was gray. "It's a terrible thing that's happened, Jim. But we can't be too quick to judge. Do you understand?"
"I guess so," I said, thinking: Mrs. Bunsen? She'd always been such a shadowy figure, someone you caught a glimpse of a couple of times a year, through the window of some clothes shop downtown or in the backseat of a Cadillac, being driven to church. On rare occasions, she'd show up at some big public event where her husband was the star; she'd stand so far in the background that you wouldn't have known they were a couple.
Dad put an arm around my shoulders. "You never know what's going on behind closed doors, Jim," he said. "All families have secrets. Some are silly, some are embarrassing, and some are downright scary." He pulled away and looked at me. "Are you okay?"
I nodded. My eyes had unexpectely filled, and my voice was shut down for repairs.
He squeezed my shoulder and said, "I think we'd better go check on Gina."
As we stood in the doorway, I realized it was the first time I'd seen Mr. Bunsen since I'd been at the hospital. He looked just like Angel's father, lying on his back, hands at his sides, tubes stuck up his nose, not moving, his head encased in the same mummy-wrap of white bandages. Gina sat on a chair beside him, leaning forward, her forehead on the bed, arms locked around herself in a great hug that couldn't still the heaving of her body. (Just like Frank at Mom's grave, I thought.) Her low sobs floated in the room thick as storm clouds.
"Do I have to wait?" I whispered to Dad.
He looked disappointed but whispered back, "No, I guess not. You can wait in the car if you want. I shouldn't be long."
"I'm going to walk home, if you don't mind," I said. "I need the fresh air."
He nodded. "Fine. I'll see you there in a little while."
I made my escape before he could change his mind.
CHAPTER THIRTY ONE
I didn't go home. I didn't intend to. There was a place I wanted to go, needed to go. Fast.
As I cut through alleys and vacant lots and even some back yards, where twice porchlights came on and once a big black dog nearly caught me before I could make the opposite fence, I tried to clear my mind of everything but thoughts of her. My brain needed the equivalent of a good nap, a break. And I only one way to get it, one person who could give it to me.
Her apartment was dark. The door was locked. I was standing there banging on it when a familiar voice assaulted me from across the walk.
"She ain't home, dickhead."
I fought the urge to run. It was the Creature From The Deep, Gerald. He stood on his small concrete square of a porch under a bare yellow bulb swarming with bugs, smoking a cigarette, drinking a beer. He took a last swallow, crumpled the can in one hand, and tossed it into the yard. His hair was wet from a shower, and he had on pressed jeans and a clean white t-shirt. He was obviously ready to go out and spend some of the cash he'd earned that week sweating in the textile mill.
"Do you know where she went?" I asked.
He laughed, took a last drag on his cigarette, and dropped it, gringing it with his heel. "Yeah,but you don't want to know."
I came down from the porch and looked up at him. "Yes I do."
He lit another cigarette and flipped the match at me. "She went out."
"Out where? With who?"
He grinned. "The football team."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean she went off with a carload of football boys." He held up two fingers. "Make that two carloads. And all drunk as skunks."
A jolt went through me like I'd stuck my own fingers in a live socket. "Are you sure?"
"Hey, you calling me a liar?"
"No," I said quickly, starting to back away toward the street. "I just, I just thought maybe you'd made a mistake or -- or --"
"You better get your scrawny ass outa here, boy." He made a move like he was coming off the porch.
I ran.
He hooted after me: "She should have took like little weenie of yours when she had the chance, squirt! Now she's gonna get more meat than she can handle! Run fast, boy! Maybe you can get in on the action!"
I'd only run a few blocks when I remembered why I'd never gone out for track: my skinny legs felt so heavy I started to think I was in one of those bad dreams where you run and run and don't go anywhere. Still I kept going, thinking, Maybe that's the problem: I'm stuck in a bad dream. I just need to wake up.
I woke up to Slick standing behind the screen door in his underwear holding a big glass of Coke and a bowl of popcorn.
"Hey man," he said. "I'm here. You can stop with the doorbell."
I took my finger off. How long had I been ringing? "Sorry."
He opened the screen. "No sweat. Come on in. I was just about to watch 'The Mummy.'" A finger to his lips. "Gotta keep it down, though. The old lady's in bed. And I'm not exactly on her good side after that ticket. Not to mention the tow truck. Forty bucks each. Ouch!"
"I don't want to come in," I said. "I just need to borrow your car."
His eyes lit up. "You want to cruise? Hey, why not? It's still early."
"I don't want to cruise," I said. "I just need the car -- now!"
He stood back, staring at me like I'd just hawked up a big wad and spit it at the screen. "What's up, man?"
"It's hard to explain," I said. "Look, if you can't let me have it --"
"I didn't say you couldn't have it." He stuck his head into the bowl to bob fr popcorn and came up with half a mouthful. "But when I talked to you just a little while ago, you didn't sound like you --"
"Things have changed!" I blurted. "Never mind. Forget I asked."
I started off the porch.
"Wait," he said. "Let me get my pants on. Won't take but a minute."
Before I could even turn around to tell him this wasn't an adventure he wanted to share with me, he'd disappeared inside and shut the door. I went over to his car and leaned against it, already sorry I'd come. If Slick thought the ticket was bad, not to mention losing his license, just wait till he saw what I was about to get him into now.
CHAPTER THIRTY TWO
The road to McIntosh Bridge was two lanes of loose gravel, turning to dirt just outside the city limits. It was dark, with willows drooping over a good part of the way so that you felt you were going through a tunnel. I felt awkward driving Slick's car, or any car, and I kept alternately hitting the gas and then, when the speed made me nerv0ous, the brake, so that we proceeded along the dark road in fits and starts.
Finally Slick, sunk down in the bottomless passenger seat, beside me, laughed.
"You drive like an old lady, Jimbo."
"I can't help it," I said. "I'm not used to driving."
"Hey, no sweat. We're not in a hurry, are we?"
"Yes."
"Want to tell me where we're headed? I mean, if I recall, Leroy's is about five miles back thataway."
"I told you, we're not going to Leroy's."
"So why the big mystery? You want me to guess or what?"
"I don't want you to guess," I said. "We're going to McIntosh Bridge."
He sat up as much as the dead springs allowed, which still left him about a head shorter than me. "Without a girl?" he said.
Okay, it was time. With both hands tight on the wheel, watching the headlights jump up and down as we ran in and out of big potholes, I tried to explain about Sherry and the football team.
When I'd finished, Slick whistled low. "Wow. You sure about this?"
I nodded.
After another half-minute or so, he said, "Look, I don't mean offense -- she's a good-looking girl and all -- but I don't want to be part of a gangbang."
I jammed on the brakes. We slid sideways into a thick hedge that bounced us to the other side of the road. When we finally stopped, broadside in the road, Slick practically had his feet up on the seat and was trying to get the door open.
"Are you crazy?" he yelled at me. "You want to get us killed?"
It was all I could do to control the urge to punch him in the nose. I was breathing hard through my teeth. "Listen, asshole," I said, "I'm not going out there to be part of it. I'm going out there to stop it."
Slick's eyes couldn't have been wider if he had no eyelids.
I got the car straightened out and we headed down the road again. "I didn't say you had to help," I said. "You can wait in the car."
"While you do what?"
I thought. "I don't know. Something."
"Something," he said. "He'll do something." He turned to stare out the window at the utter blackness there.
We were almost to the bridge when I said, "Look, I'm sorry I called you what I did, okay?"
Slick was down in the seat so far that I was talking to the top of his head. His face was nearly invisible in a fog of cigarette smoke. "No sweat," he said. "I'd call you a lot worse if my life wasn't in your hands." He sat up a little and squinted through the windshield. "Better slow down. That's a cop."
The car was parked just off the road on our side, its lights out.
"I bet he's asleep," I said. The local cops were notorious for driving out into the country and pulling off on a particularly wide shoulder to take a little nap. Nobody blamed them. I always thought that if I had to ride around Cherokkey streets all night, I I might need an occasional snooze, too.
"Just ease by real quiet," Slick said.
"With your muffler? Don't make me laugh."
"Maybe he's a sound sleeper."
"Maybe I ought to wake him and take him with us."
"Yeah," Slick said, "he'd like that. Just like old times for an ex-jock. The sonofabitch would probably be first in line." He laughed but cut it off quick. "Sorry," he said. "No offense."
I gripped the wheel even tighter to keep my hands from shaking.
We saw two cars just as we rounded the corner before the bridge.
"Cut the lights!" Slick hissed.
I did. The cars were parked one behind the other just this side of the breidge. Henry's hot rod was in back. Somebody's big Olds was in front.
Slick looked at me. "You got a plan, Einstein?"
"I'm thinking," I said.
We edged up the road in the dark, gravel crackling under our tires. About fifty yards away, we stopped, and I said, "I'm getting out."
"Yeah, me, too," Slick said. "And running like hell back to town."
I got out and stood by the car. Dark figures, silhouettes, clustered around the cars. Voices and low laughter floated in the still night air.
"Hey!" I yelled.
From inside the car, I heard Slick choking on a cigarette. "What the hell did you do that for?" he coughed at me.
I ignored him. "Hey, you guys up there!" I yelled.
The voices stopped.
Slick was at the wheel now and yelled at me, "Get in, you idiot!"
I walked a few steps up the road. "You guys better get out of here! The cops are on the way!"
A moment of silence, then the sound of feet on the gravel, coming our way. Fast.
Slick was trying to start the car. It turned over and over and over, in time with his exclamations: "Shit shit shit!"
I backed toward the car, still yelling: "I'm not kidding! The cops will be here any minute!"
A voice shot out of the darkness: "Stay right there, fuckhead! Don't move!" Other voices, excited, almost giddy: "Who is it? I want him first! No, me! I'll race you!"
The gangbang mentality had shifted to me. Soon they would would be lined up outside Slick's car, waiting not for a chance to have sex with me but to pummel me, to beat me to a pulp. It would be for some almost as good as sex; for some, better.
Going backward, I bumped into the hood of Slick's car. Like a balky applicance responding to a kick in the right place, it suddenly roared into life.
"Get your ass in the car!" Slick barked.
The footsteps were closer, faster, harder. I could see the outlines of four, five, six big guys bearing down on me. I could hear them huffing, rhythmically, like they were doing wind sprints.
I scambled around to the side of the car and jerked the door open and fell inside just as Slick put it into reverse and started backing up. The car weaved from one side of the road to the other, and it was all Slick could do to to keep it out of the ditches.
"Hold on!" he yelled and yanked the wheel to the left. The car spun crazily around, sliding sideways until we were pointed the other way, back towards town. He jerked it into low gear and took off, muttering, " Don't die . . . don't die. . . don't die."
Rocks poured out of the dust cloud behind us, pelting the top of the car. One cracked the back window like the bang of a rifle shot.
We rode in silence for several minutes, too stunned to speak.
Then I said, "I have an idea."
Slick didn't want to hear it. "Fuck your ideas! I'm going home!"
He was giving it all the gas it would take when we passed the cop car. But something was different this time: the cop was awake. We both saw his head swivel to watch us as we sailed past.
"Shit!" Slick pounded his fist on the steering wheel. "What now? What the hell now?"
"You getter let me drive," I said.
He looked over at me. "You drive? Why you?'
"Because you don't have a license, dummy."
As soon as we were around the next bend and out of sight of the cop, Slick slammed on his brakes and stopped right in the middle of the road. I leaped out and ran around and slipped in under the wheel while he slid over, muttering 'Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit."
I hadn't even taken my foot off the clutch when lights flashed in the rearview mirror. I eased over to the side of the road and stopped.
The cop pulled up behind and got out. I waited until he was almost to us, then let out the clutch and stepped on the gas. The heap lurched like a goosed animal and died.
"What are you doing?" Slick yelled. "Turn it off!"
I turned the key but not off. The engine whimpered and whined and then caught. The cop had stopped a short distance behind us and was watching, obviously not quite sure what he was dealing with. He was just taking a few cautious steps forward, one hand on the butt of his pistol, when I let out the clutch again, gave it some gas, and wheeled into the road, whipping a U-turn, heading back toward the bridge.
The cop stood by the road, open-mouthed, pistol in his hand.
"You've lost your goddamned mind," Slick said, looking at me with the same expression the cop had. "You might as well just drive up the road to Smithville and check yourself into the nuthouse. I'll come visit you and bring you some string to chew on or something!"
"I know what I'm doing," I said, not believing it myself.
"Really?" Slick said. "Then maybe you could clue me in, 'cause I don't have the damnedest idea what the hell you're doing!"
He puffed furiously at his cigarette for a mile or so, then he said, "You know what, Jimbo? If we get through this night alive, I think we ought to take a little vacation from each other for while. Not long, just a few years."
We were almost to the bridge. "You want out?" I said.
"Out? Here in the middle of nowhere?"
"I'll come back and pick you up," I said. "I promise."
He laughed. "Pick me up? You won't be able to pick yourself up! You'll be dead! If those football goons don't kill you, the cops will!"
I glanced in the rearview mirror. No sign of him yet. I slowed down. Suddenly I saw the colored light though the dust cloud, tiny and bright, flashing like a distant Christmas decoration.
"Hold on," I said and floored it.
"You know the funny thing?" Slick said. "My mom thinks I'm a bad infuence on you!"
The two cars were still by the road just this side of the bridge, lights out, the same silhouettes still milling around the one in front. As we got closer, I could see heads turn. One dark figure walked into the road and held up his arm for me to stop. I waited until what I figured was the last possible second before hitting the brakes. We slid,and the figure leaped out of the way.
I got out and slammed the door.
"I warned you guys," I said, my voicethin and papery. "Now you're in some real shit!"
The one who'd been standing in the road laughed. "Somebody's in some shit here, but it ain't us!"
"Who is this prick anyway?" another one said.
A third acually rubbed his hands together. "I don't know, but he's mine, all mine. Get his buddy outa the car, too."
I could hear Slick muttering, "Our father who art in heaven . . ."
I edged around behind the car, trying to keep it between them and me, buying time. "The cops are on the way," I said. "I'm not kidding."
They were really worked up now, just about frothing at the mouth as they circled the car on both sides, closing in. One of them pounded on the window, but Slick had rolled it up and locked both doors and was nowhere to be seen. I guessed he was curled up on the floorboard.
I started backing away from the car, down the road, remembering advice I'd once heard from a park ranger about the best way to get away from a bear: retreat slowly, avoiding eye contact. But I couldn't recall what to do if the bear decided to charge, and I could tell by the way the football boys feinted at me -- stomping their feet, faking a lunge, the laughing like hell -- that they were hoping I'd break and run. They wanted the chase. Then the mauling. I could almost feel the gravel digging into my face, the tap-heeled loafers cunching the back of my head, dozens of big fists raining down like a deadly hailstorm.
Then I heard it.
A siren.
They heard it, too, and all stopped, looking down the road, not ferocious bears any more but a startled herd of deer. I turned and saw the lights of the cavalry coming over the hill.
"Shit!" somebody said. "It's the cops!"
For once in my life, a plan I'd hatched had actually worked!
If the football boys had stopped to think about it, they might have realized what Slick knew: that the cop was likely one of theirs, an ex-jock, who most likely wouldn't care what they were doing to Sherry in that car. But being jocks first, thinkers second -- and drunk besides -- they fell victim to their reflexes, their physical impulses, which told them to cut and run.
A group of them jumped into the car in back, another into the first, and within seconds both were speeding away, over the bridge and into the night.
By the time the cop car pulled up, and the cop got out, I already had my hands in the air and was rehearsing my explanation, while across the road, just inside the fuzzy edge of Slick's headlight beams, barefoot and hugging herself, Sherry stared at me with eyes past hurt, past sadness, way past crying.
The cop let me off with just a warning since we were outside city limits and all the sheriff's deputies were off at a barn fire or something, but not before he'd spread-eagled me in the road and searched me for weapens and then made me do some line-walking and one-foot hopping to prove that I wasn't drunk. I think he may also have been thinking that we'd seen him napping. At any rate, he told me that he was going to follow us all the way back to town, which I thought was a great idea.
With the cop car behind us, we slowly made out way back to Cherokee, Slick in back, Sherry in front with me. She was staring straight ahead, her hands gripping each other tightly in her lap. No tears, but her eyes were wide, and I didn't see her blink the whole trip home. I reached over to pat her hand once, but she pulled away and shook her head.
"Bastards," I said.
"Bastards is right," Slick chimed in. "They're just lucky I didn't find my crowbar." I looked at him in the rearview mirror. He was stretched out in the backseat like it was his sofa at home. Now that the action was over, and he'd gotten neither a ticket nor a beating, he was brave, even cocky.
"What crowbar?" I said.
"I keep it under the front seat," he sais. "That's what I was looking for when the bastards were pounding on the window."
"Really?" I said. "I thought you were trying to see if you fit yourself under there."
"Ha ha," he said. "Nope, just looking for my crowbar."
We drove in silence past the it limits sign. The cop didn't turn and leave us alone until we were almost to Sherry's, and then he blinked his lights as a reminder to behave myself.
"You know," Slick said, "I could get used this lifestyle. Having a driver, I mean. Pull through Leroy's, boy, and fetch me a chili dog!"
"Can I please go home?" Sherry said to her window.
I walked her to her door. Her brother was home. We could see him in the kitchen, studying. She didn't invite me in.
"I'm really sorry," I said. "Really, really sorry."
She stood with a foot in the screen to hold it open, and a hand on the doorknob. Her eyes, her big beautiful brown eyes, were glistening with tears, and her mouth trembled from the effort of trying to smile for me. She reached out and touched my cheek.
"You came to my rescue, Jim, and as long as I live I'll never forget it." She leaned over and kissed me, light as a butterfly landing on my lips.
But as she turned to go inside, the tears beginning to spill down her cheeks spelled out another message, one still etched in my brain all these years later: I wish you'd rescued me a little sooner.
CHAPTER THIRTY THREE
I haven't been back to Cherokee much in the past few years, except to visit. Dad got married again, to a nice lady from the church I'd known since I was a little kid. He was very apologetic about it, but I think Frank and I were both glad for him, and relieved, too. They live in the house on Apple, and there are flowers everywhere; she's almost as good as Mom at growing things.
Granddad died of a heart attack when I was a junior in high school, and Grandma stayed with their old house another year and then moved into a nice facility where a lot of her widow friends lived. It's only a little way from Woodsen Lake, and on Sundays they all get dressed up and stroll around the lake on the fancy new boardwalk the city built.
The lake itself is something to look at. Picnic tables everywhere, a couple of gazebos, fully wired for night time parties, boat docks on all four sides, a place you can rent canoes and paddleboats, plus plenty of concession stands selling hot dogs and snow cones on weekends.
There's something else, too: three small bronze plaques on the north side, under a stand of willows turned into a little park or rest area, put up by the Historical Society but paid for -- anonymously -- by Grandma. One plaque honors her father, and the second is for Abe Woodsen: old foes together now through eternity. The third, put up later, is dedicated to the memory of Gray Wolf, the Indian chief whose people were hounded out of the woods so many years ago.
Several times I was tempted to tell Grandma what Angel's father had told me, but the time never seemed right. Finally she brought it up herself, or at least gave me the opportunity. It was right after the first two plaques went up. I was a senior in high school. There had been a short ceremony, attended by by a handful of local dignitaries and curious onlookers, after which I drove her back to her house. She invited me to stay for a glass of iced tea, and we sat on the porch watching the first puffs of spring coloring the trees in her yard.
"I'm glad it's over," she said. "I feel a weight has been lifted from me."
"It was nice," I said. "And the lake looks real good."
But she was troubled, and after a little while, she told me why. "I'm ashamed to admit it, Jim, but I never quite believed everything Dad told me about the lake and how he got it. I always suspected there was more to it, maybe a lot more, that he didn't want to tell me. Or anyone. But I guess we'll never know, and maybe that's for the best."
That's when I told her.
When I'd finished and was gulping the last of my tea to keep from looking at her, I felt her hand settle over mine as we rocked gently in the creaking porch swing.
"Thank you, Jim," she said. "And God bless you. That's what I needed to hear. Not wanted, mind you -- needed." She lifted herself up and held out a hand for my glass. "More tea?"
A week later, the third plaque appeared at Woodsen Lake.
The last time I saw Angel was at that plaque, under the willows on a sweet clear day in May of that same year. She was standing there, her head bowed. She had on an old cotton dress that had obviously belonged to someone else before, and her hair was done up in a long braid that hung halfway down her back.
I was about to go when she saw me and turned around.
"Hey," I said.
"Hey," she said back.
The next logical and polite thing to do was to ask her how he was doing. But I already knew the answer. Since her father's death, she'd been looked after by the kind ladies of the town's churches, given clothes and food and assistance in moving out of the family home which had been condemned, along with all the other houses along that street, as fire hazards, by the city. Angel had been put up in a hotel downtown that didn't even allow hotplates for heating soup. She'd stayed in school, though, and was graduating. So now what?
After a few long seconds of avoiding each other's eyes, she said, "I'm moving away."
"Oh really. Where to?"
"A reservation," she said.
I started to say, "You mean, like for Indians?" I caught myself in time and said, "Great. Where is it?"
She shrugged. "Wisconsin. I've got relatives up there, and they want me to come. I'll be going to college. On a scholarship."
"Congratulations," I said. "How'd you manage that?" I was going to college, too, but on loans, not scholarships.
She smiled. "I'm an Indian, dummy."
"So?"
"So you whiteys still owe us for taking our land."
We walked away from the lake together, back to the road, where I'd parked the old jalopy Dad had bought me for graduation, an antique Ford even more decrepit than Slick's and with half the horsepower.
"I'll give you a ride home," I said.
She shook her head. "Thanks, but I can walk." She took a few steps and then looked back. "You know what I'm going to major in at college?"
I thought. "Not a clue."
"History," she said. "I haven't read a history book yet that told things from the Indian point-of-view. I'm going to try to fix that."
Frank went off to college, too, and got a degree in forestry. He works for the government in a National Forest up in Wyoming. He didn't marry Janey Waterman, or anybody else. I don't know if he's got a girlfriend up there, but I know he's where he belongs. In the woods. One funny thing, though: he won't carry a gun. His boss tried to make him for a while, but when he threatened to quit, they gave up and left him alone. Sometimes at night, when I can't sleep, I picture him up there roaming those tall virgin forests, inhaling the clean, crisp air, thinking. Just thinking.
Who else? Oh yes, Mrs. Bunsen. She got out of prison after only a couple of years. Her lawyers made a strong case of self-defense and an appeals court over-turned her conviction. She moved right back into the mansion on Belmont Avenue, where people say she throws big parties and goes out socially more than most teenagers.
Gina didn't turn out so well. She married Henry Belew before they were even out of high school -- she was pregnant -- and rumor has it that he beat her up. I saw her once when I was home, four or five years back, and she looked awful: overweight, lipstick about three shades too bright, and so much makeup that it seemed to be making her face sag. I hardly recognized her, and, thankfully, she didn't recognize me.
Slick got a job right out of high school selling cars at Joe Marshall's Olds dealership and did pretty well for himself. I haven't kept in touch with him like I should, but we manage to get together from time to time. The last conversation we had was one I'll never forget.
I'd come back to help Dad sort through some stuff Grandma had given him. I took the picture albums, out of duty more than anything. Slick came by the house to have a beer and shoot the breeze. We sat on the porch steps talking about old times, and when the conversation wound itself around to the Bunsens, he said, "You know why she killed him, don't you?"
I nodded. "He was a bad dude. Beat her up. Her and Gina both." I remembered Gina's black eye under her veil at the funeral. Mrs. Bunsen didn't go, choosing to stay in jail that morning.
"He did more than that," Slick said. "To Gina, that is."
"What do you mean?"
"He was banging her."
I looked at him. "What?"
He made a circle with his thumb and forefinger and ran his other forefinger in and out of it.
"No way," I said.
Slick held up a hand. "Swear to God."
"Why didn't I hear about it?"
"It didn't come out at the trial," he said. "The old lady never said a word. She told people later, though. You're probably the last one in town to find out."
I watched the sun going down behind the cedars, remembering the time I'd sneaked up on Frank and Gina at the drive-in and heard her crying and tell him she couldn't.
"Jesus," I said.
Slick finished his cigarette and flipped it into the yard. "Amen." He thumped me on the knee. "How about another beer?"
Which brings me to Sherry.
We dated through high school and never talked about that night out on the bridge. We also never went "all the way," and even an idiot like me can see a connection there. She liked to lie in my arms and kiss me, but anything more than that would make her cry.
Just after graduation, some of her relatives -- from up in Missouri, I think -- came down and got her and took her away to live with them. We wrote each other for a while -- just chitchat, nothing intimate -- and then one day a letter of mine came back stamped, "No Forwarding Address."
Once in a while someone will offer up a rumor about her -- that she moved to Portland or that she's teaching school in New Mexico or that she had a nervous breakdown somewhere back East -- but the news is always second-hand, so I file it away and go on about my business.
Then, not long ago, I heard the most amazing thing yet about her, the one thing I didn't believe but wanted to believe more than anything else: someone claimed to have seen her in Cherokee. My first thought was, "Why?" Why would she ever go back to that little town full of such bad memories? What could she be looking for? Sometimes when I'm feeling especially lost and lonely, I make up an answer that helps me sleep. Or that keeps me awake all night.
Me.
She was looking for me.
I'm going back home myself soon for Dad's retirement party -- thirty years of hawking insurance -- and I'll ask around. Maybe this soap opera will actually turn into a fairy tale after all. Maybe we'll meet again and get married and start a family and have a real life together. I still haven't found anybody to replace her in my heart.
And, hey, don't we already share at least one family secret?
THE END

The Great American Novel Experiment

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