AS TALL AS MONSTERS

A Thesis

Presented to

The Graduate Faculty of The University of Akron

In Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements for the Degree

Master of Fine Arts

James Bigley II

May, 2014

AS TALL AS MONSTERS

James Bigley II

Thesis

Approved: Accepted:

______Advisor Dean of the College Mr. Christopher Barzak Dr. Chand Midha

______Faculty Reader Dean of the Graduate School Mr. Robert Pope Dr. George R. Newkome

______Faculty Reader Date Mr. Imad Rahman

______Department Chair Dr. William Thelin

ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page

CHAPTER

I. PROLOGUE…………………………………………………………………………….1

II. A POINT OF IMPACT………………………………………………………………... 2

III. THE CANDY MAN………………………………………………………………... 12

IV. A FAMILY AFFAIR……………………………………………………………...... 31

V. CHILD’S PLAY……………………………………………………………………...49

VI. A GATHERING OF STRANGERS………………………………………………... 74

VII. THROW BACK………………………………………………………………….....94

VIII. THE CALM BEFORE THE STORM……………………………………………120

IX. CONVICTIONS…………………………………………………………………....156

iii CHAPTER I

PROLOGUE

The sun was just coming up over the cornfields when I found Johnny walking on the railroad tracks. He was holding his arms out on either side for balance as he stepped lightly along one of the rails, like someone walking on a tightrope without a net and with miles and miles of nothing underneath him. He was without a shirt and his back was covered in mud. I could barely make out the scar on his left shoulder, but noticed right away that his hands had been painted red.

The air was unsettled with yellow dust so that it seemed like there were a thousand tiny fireflies rising up slowly from the ground all around us. I could hear the sirens from far off in the distance as they made their way through town, and I called out to him. He stopped and turned to look at me. He was clutching his shirt stained with the same blood-red color that covered his hands, and he was crying. For a moment we were just two boys facing each other as if for the first time in the low-lit dawn, not very far from home but far enough that we were alone. Neither of us said anything, but as the sirens started to get louder I realized that I never loved him more than when he turned and started walking away.

1 CHAPTER II

A POINT OF IMPACT

There are some beginnings that are more identifiable than others—moments that you can look back at and say without hesitation, “That’s when everything changed.” For me, that moment happened during the summer before high school, when my friends and I found ourselves caught in the throes of a small-town tragedy. It’s only been a few years, but it’s all right there in the back of my mind like it happened yesterday. Whenever I feel unsure of myself or I start to question the events of that summer, I look back at it the way you would pull a book off of a shelf and flip through the pages to find your favorite lines.

To understand everything that happened, though, I have to sometimes force myself to go farther back, because what happened during that summer wasn’t the beginning of the story, but merely the start of something that was always going to happen.

I met Johnny for the first time when I was six, maybe seven years old. Both of my parents were working full-time jobs; my mother, a nurse in a hospital forty-five minutes outside of town; my father, a car salesman not any closer. While they were away, I spent my time with a lot of the other kids in town over at the Sanders’ home. Back then, before

Mr. Sanders passed away, Mrs. Sanders was someone everybody looked up to and a lot of the parents relied on her to take care of us while they were at work. It’s hard to believe there was a time when that woman was happy, or at least significantly less insane than she ended up, but back then she was highly respected. People liked her because she was

2 strict. She had a way of making us listen when no one else could. She was authoritative and direct, but capable of terrifying us into doing things we never thought to do otherwise, as we’d quickly find out on our own.

She had a son my age named Steve, who went by his last name because he thought Sanders had a better ring to it. He had a pair of gold-rimmed glasses that he wore since the day that I met him, and he was scrawnier than any of the other kids. Over time, I developed a theory that he went by the name of Sanders because it made him feel more masculine, like the name gave him more control over who he was than who his parents wanted him to be. They had always been religious, some of the most conservative people in town, but where they were sometimes vindictive, Sanders was always a good kid with a kind heart and apt to never hurt anyone if he could help it. In a way, Sanders was like a younger brother I never had.

We were playing out in the sandbox in the backyard behind his house one summer when Johnny showed up for the first time. He was holding on to the back of his mother’s jeans as they walked across the yard towards us. She was a beautiful woman, and not very old though you could tell from the bags under her eyes and the sallow tone of her skin that she slept little and was under a lot of stress. Though Johnny was tall for his age and walked with a certain directness, there were similarities in his face that made me think he might have been ill when I first saw him. His mother left him there with us, standing beside the sandbox, while she walked away with Mrs. Sanders and continued their conversation with hushed voices. I expected him to say something, or even step inside the box, but he just stood there staring at us like he was unsure of what he was supposed to do.

3 “Are you okay?” I asked him after a minute or two.

He nodded his head, as if to say yes.

“Do you want to play with us?” I asked, holding out a plastic shovel, and moving over so that there was enough room for him.

He took the shovel out of my hand and sat beside me, and for the rest of the day he didn’t say a single word to either of us, though we tried talking to him. Instead, he kept digging holes in the box and then covered them when he reached the plastic at the bottom, only to dig the same hole again and recover it in the same way. He was like this for several weeks, keeping to himself and never saying more than a word or two so that it became a game between Sanders and I to see who could get him to talk. It was clear right away that nothing we did was ever enough to get him to react the way we wanted him to.

Instead, he’d just play with us silently, never saying much more than he had to. The only time we ever saw him excited about anything was when his mother arrived to take him home, and even then, there was a certain sluggishness about him that made it seem as if even that excitement was nothing more than for show.

He got worse when his mother stopped bringing him by and his father started dropping him off and picking him up in her place. Where she would always get out of the car and walk him up to the house, waving at us and smiling, he would always stay in his truck at the end of the drive, staring out the front of his windshield like he was waiting for a light to change. It was around this time that Johnny stopped coming around us at all, but he would sit far away and watch as we played or he would lay down in the grass and stare up at the sky for hours. It wasn’t long before we got bored with him, and left him to

4 do whatever he wanted, so that there was a brief moment in time when we were all at the same place five days a week but estranged from one another.

While all of this was happening, Mrs. Sanders was having a crisis of her own. It had rained nearly every day for the last few months of spring so that the ground was still swollen by the middle of summer. Her garden was barely producing any vegetables after being oversaturated with water, and while she was busy being devastated over their stunted growth, air pockets started turning up in the yard so that there were tiny hills running from the house to the edge of the property and the woods behind it. If you stood with your head cocked to one side, you could see them running in rows like lattice work, as if someone had been burying tiny plastic tubes underneath the surface of the lawn overnight. By the time Mrs. Sanders had noticed she had an infestation of moles, it was already too late, the backyard had been overrun.

Mr. Sanders tried setting up little cage-like traps using peanut butter as bait, but the moles were more clever than anyone had expected, having the ability to take enough of the prize without ever getting caught. It was a miracle, really, how the blind animals were able to get in and get out unnoticed. Mrs. Sanders would spend whole afternoons walking around the yard with a shovel and a rake, slamming the shovel against the ground to flatten the dirt and using the rake to comb the surface in the hope that she’d catch one of them by the back. Whenever she’d destroy one tunnel, another would rise, so that we were all secretly rooting for the moles and their silent takeover. Though we never saw any of them up close, we delighted in knowing how much power they had over a woman we were all growing to fear.

5 Mrs. Sanders was ruthless behind closed doors. Whenever she saw fit to punish us, she’d force us to stand in the corners of her kitchen for hours on end. There had been an argument once between me and Sanders over whose baseball mitt belonged to who when she shoved the two of us into opposite corners and forced us to stand there “as an example for anyone who coveted someone else’s things.” I had no idea what she meant by it at the time, but at the end of the two-hour period, my legs were so rickety and weak that I didn’t care about anything except collapsing into the lawn and stewing over how much I hated being there. I had complained to my parents several times about how I felt we were mistreated, how every day at lunch she’d feed us some version of cooked cabbage like it was the only thing she knew how to cook. They never paid much attention to my complaints for the same reason no one else paid any attention—we were just kids.

They hadn’t yet realized the full extent to which her cruelty could go.

One afternoon, Mrs. Sanders caught a mole. I’m not sure if it simply came out at the wrong time of day, or if it accidentally made a wrong turn somewhere and was unable to find its way back. It was just sort of rolling around in the yard like a lump of fat when

Sanders came across it. He called everyone over to check it out, and we all stood there,

Johnny included, staring at the thing while it raised its head and sniffed the air, probably never knowing that it was in a dangerous place. Before any of us could do anything, Mrs.

Sanders was on us, snatching it from the ground the way someone would rip a tick out of the back of a dog’s hide. For a second, I thought she was going to snap its neck right there, the look on her face was so hideously hateful, but instead of killing it she cradled it against her chest and disappeared into the house. When she returned a few minutes later,

6 she was carrying it inside one of her husband’s homemade contraptions and holding a rusted hammer in her other hand.

“Listen up,” she said, pulling me and Sanders away from everyone else. To this day, I still don’t understand why she chose me alongside her own son, but my only guess is that we got along well enough and she thought she could trust the two of us if we worked together, knowing even then that Sanders would shy away from most anything unless given the proper support.

“You boys are the oldest ones here, and I’m going to need your help with this,” she said, as she gave Sanders the hammer and held out the caged animal in front of me so that I was moved to take it from her. “I want you both to take this out into the woods far enough so that no one else will see, and I want you to get rid of it.”

Sanders and I looked at one another, confused.

“What’s the hammer for?” I asked.

“Well what do you think it’s for,” she said, pulling tight the jacket she was wearing around her shoulders. “I want you to take it out into the woods and bash its little head in. I’d ask your father, dear,” she said, looking at Sanders, “ but he won’t be getting home until late and I’m not going to risk the little pest getting free again while I have it caught.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, looking at Sanders for support, “but I don’t think I can do it.”

Sanders was staring at the hammer in his hands, his eyes wide, shaking his head back and forth as if it was the only thing he could think to do without denying his mother outright. As far as I was concerned, she couldn’t make me do a damn thing I didn’t want to.

7 “Listen, you little heathen,” she said, leaning forward and looking me right in the eyes. “I’ve had enough of this monster tearing up my yard. If you don’t have the balls to take care of it, my son will. Just make sure he gets it done and doesn’t chicken out.”

“Mamma, I don’t think it’s the right thing to do,” said Sanders.

“The right thing to do?” she mocked, her voice raised so that everyone was now looking in our direction. “I’ll tell you what the right thing to do and you’ll do what I say.

I’m your mother.”

“I’ll do it,” said Johnny, coming up from behind us. “I’ll take care of it if they can’t.”

He must have overheard the whole exchange, because he walked up all gangly- armed and wide-eyed with conviction, as if he didn’t need to hear another word about it.

Mrs. Sanders looked him up and down, like she was seeing him for the first time and trying to decide if she could trust him with the job. After a few seconds, she shrugged and turned towards the house, flinging her hands in the air as if to send us off on our mission.

“I don’t care who does it,” she called back. “Just make sure the three of you come back without it and make sure the damned thing is dead.”

Johnny took the hammer from Sanders and led the way, while I stayed far behind carrying the animal in its cage. I had never been to a funeral before, and had no intentions of ever being an executioner of any kind. I had seen enough movies to feel like there should have been some kind of drum roll or fanfare to send us off into the woods where the mole would meet its end, but the farther we walked the more silent the world became so that even our own breathing was hushed and kept low behind our lips. When we reached the tree line, we continued walking for several yards until we could no longer see

8 the house. The three of us stood there in a circle, staring at each other, glancing nervously down at our cargo. I was the first to speak because I felt like I could make a strong enough case for letting it go.

“We don’t have to do this,” I said. “She’d never know if we just set it free.”

“What if it crawled back?” asked Sanders.

“It’s not going to, you moron,” I said. “It’s blind. It’ll never find its way back from all the way out here.”

“Can I see him?” asked Johnny, the hammer hanging heavily from his right hand as he reached out with his left. “It’s okay, really,” he said. “Let me take him.”

It was easy for me to trust him in the same way that it was easy to jump into the deep-end of a pool on one of the hottest days of the year. The words came out of his mouth so smoothly, like he had been waiting to relieve me of the burden ever since he volunteered to lead us back at the house. The sight of his open hand reaching out for me at that moment carried with it so much promise, that it took only a second before I held the cage out to him and let it go.

He held the cage up to his face and stared at the mole for a minute, puckering his lips and squeaking at it as if to soothe the poor thing. He then sat on the ground and opened the cage in front of him so that the mole crawled out towards him with its head raised, nose twitching, eyes as vacant as they ever were.

“We can’t leave him out here like this,” he said, cradling the hammer in his hands.

“Why not?” I asked.

“Because he’s blind,” he said. “He’ll never find his family again. He’ll never have a way of getting food. There’s no shelter for him out here. Ground’s too hard. It’s only a

9 matter of time before something comes along and picks the son of a bitch up in its mouth.

Or worse. He’ll starve to death long before that happens.”

We all stood there for some time, staring down at the little beast that had inadvertently threated Mrs. Sanders simply by making its home in her backyard. What

Johnny said was right. We knew what had to be done but neither of us moved, not right away. We were all trying to come up with solutions, trying to find ways around doing the very thing we had been sent out there to do, but it all came down to the fact that this was the end for the mole or it was the end for us. At least, it felt that way at the time.

After several minutes of silence, Johnny reached out and held the mole down with one hand and lifted the hammer with the other.

“You should look away,” he said, lifting his face to look me in the eyes. “You shouldn’t have to see this.”

“Are you sure?” I asked. “There’s no other way?”

“Afraid not,” he said.

I took Sanders by the arm and we turned away, waiting there side-by-side, until it was over. When Johnny walked around us with the empty cage and a bloodied hammer in his hands, we didn’t follow him right away, but watched as he walked ahead of us. When he realized that we weren’t following, he turned around.

“You coming?” he asked.

We looked at each other and nodded, and then followed close behind. On the way back, Sanders thought it was a good idea to sing Amazing Grace. I didn’t argue with him.

Something about it seemed appropriate. Before we left the woods, I turned back to see if I could find the remains of the animal Johnny killed and was thankful when I couldn’t see

10 anything. If it hadn’t been for the blood on the hammer, or the way it sounded like a walnut cracking at the point of impact, I would have thought nothing had ever happened out in those woods at all.

But when I think about it now, after so many years have passed, that was the moment when it all started. We followed Johnny for the next seven years, each of us made more wild by the other, so that over time whenever I thought back on it, the point of impact sounded less like a walnut cracking and more like a crumpling of plastic bags.

11 CHAPTER III

THE CANDY MAN

I live in a Midwestern town and for the most part, the people here tend to stick to themselves. There’s not a whole lot else to say about it, really. There are probably a hundred other towns just like it in the world, though I would hope that those other places are a bit more livelier than ours. It’s like our town is frozen in time, surrounded by dense woods and large stretches of cornfields on all sides, thirty minutes away from any real city. Except for the Giant’s Festival, we hardly ever saw anyone new unless they were passing through on their way to some other location. We even had a Sweet Shoppe where they sold old fashioned ice cream until it closed down a couple of years ago. The windows are all boarded up now and the sign hanging above the door is missing a letter or two, but I’ve heard stories that the shelves inside are still stocked with candy. I’ve never seen any proof, but the way it just up and shutdown makes me wonder if there’s any truth to it. There’s been all this talk about reopening it lately, but I honestly don’t think it’ll happen. If it does, it won’t be for a long time.

It used to be a tradition for all the kids to ride down on the first day of summer and wait in line for the Sweet Shoppe to open. The summer before we were to enter high school was no different. Even though we didn’t know at the time that it was the last season it would be open, there was a strong sense of urgency. We were on the brink of

12 adolescence and felt that it was probably the last time any of us would want to take part in the ride.

Johnny and I stayed up all night getting ready for it by sitting in front of his house up at the trailer park on the hill overlooking the town, drinking can after can of Coke and tying them with twine to the backs of our bicycles, filling the empty cans with whatever change we could find. I had stolen the Coke from the Dairy-Mart downtown earlier in the day while Johnny distracted the clerk by dropping a few jugs of milk on the floor by the freezers in the back of the store. Luckily, the clerk was in the middle of stocking the cigarettes that were hanging above the register when it happened, so I was able to grab a pack and slip out the front door unnoticed. You’d think after so many times that someone would have caught on to this routine of ours, but in our town you could pretty much get away with anything as long as you were selective about who you pissed off and kept your head down when you needed to. Besides, we were fourteen years old, and no one in their right mind ever thought we were capable of half the things we did back then.

I heard Johnny on his bike long before I saw him pull up in front of my house the next morning. I lived in a two-story brick house located in a small neighborhood on the south side of town where every home had a chemically treated lawn and a white picket fence. I had lived there all my life, and while my family wasn’t rich by any means, we did well enough on our own. My father had become the head supervisor at his dealership and my mom found a permanent position in the emergency room at her hospital. Because of their busy schedules, I was looking forward to spending a lot of time on my own during the summer.

13 It didn’t surprise either of us when Sanders didn’t show up on time. We waited for him as long as we could, but decided to leave without him when he never showed. It had been five years since his dad died and ever since then he hadn’t exactly been the same.

When it happened, his mother stopped running her childcare, sold all their things, and moved them into a smaller house across the road from the Presbyterian church on Main

Street. She told him it was because they needed to be closer to God, and she devoted their lives to working with the church. Since then, Sanders had developed all kinds of strange habits.

He had become highly superstitious and increasingly afraid of upsetting some universal balance. We couldn’t walk down the street without him counting out the steps between sidewalk squares like he was marching to a cadence only he could hear, “One, two three; one, two…three,” and if he was thrown off his count, he’d start all over again, avoiding cracks in the concrete in case that bit about breaking his mother’s back would come true. Hell, we couldn’t even get him to leave his house without running across the street and pressing his hands against the red doors of his church for good luck, as if he was in some sort of danger the minute he stepped foot off of his property.

We had always known him to be a momma’s boy, but even his mother had grown increasingly odd, so much so that the moment of her insanity (if you chose to forget about the event that brought the three of us together) could be pegged to the death of her husband. Where she was once grounded and well-respected among all the people in town for being strict and responsible, she had evolved to be the self-proclaimed most devout follower of our Lord, Jesus Christ, the one true believer in the whole county and quite possibly one of the most frightening people any of us would ever know so that she was

14 then and forever after known to us as Mother Sanders. At face value she was a saint, running fundraisers to raise money for charity and teaching bible school in the basement nursery of the church; but then she’d turn on a flip of a dime, spouting out sermons of hell and speaking out against some of the most prominent members of our town so that there wasn’t a single one who wasn’t damned in her eyes. Even the sheriff had fallen under her pointed finger a time or two for not enforcing harsher punishments where the law was concerned. And then there was that year she forced the mayor out of office after claiming he was having an affair with his wife’s sister, though after the fact she announced proudly that she had always thought he was unfit to be a leader for not having been properly baptized and raised by a conservative family.

Regardless of his mother’s actions, Sanders was always one of us. We cared for him more after his father’s death than we ever had before, and chose to ignore all the strange things he did for the same reason we ignored his mother—none of it mattered as long as we were together. In fact, it didn’t even come as a surprise when Sanders ran out of his house barefoot and chased after us with his bike as we rode past his house and down Main Street toward the center of town.

“One of these days you’re gonna step on a nail and I ain’t gonna be the one to pull it out,” Johnny said to him when he finally caught up to us.

“Oh, man,” Sanders said, looking down at his feet as if he had only just realized he had forgotten his shoes. “What are they good for anyway?” he yelled back, his voice cracking over the sound of the cans on the concrete. “It’s the summer! We’re men now, and real men don’t need shoes.”

15 “You have a long way to go yet until you’re a real man like one of us,” yelled

Johnny. To emphasize his point, he arched his back, centered his hips and let go of his handlebars, raising his hands high above his head as he howled and continued to coast down the road hands-free.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Sanders asked, trying to mimic Johnny’s bike trick but unable to let go of his handlebars for more than a second or two.

“Don’t think we’ve forgotten that time you got your dick stuck in a two-liter pop bottle,” I said.

“You swore you’d never bring that up again,” yelled Sanders, hitting his handlebar with a clenched fist.

Johnny and I high-fived each other and laughed as we turned onto High Street, ignoring the traffic light when it turned red. It was almost noon, which meant the Sweet

Shoppe was about to open. The public square was empty as we passed by the barber shop, the beauty salon, and a family-owned Italian restaurant that served little side salads and what they called “New-York style pizza”. Except for the mechanic sitting outside his shop smoking a cigarette and a mother carrying a bag of books and her small child into the library, the square was still and quiet, the sound of our cans like pellets shot from an airgun at a tin roof. It was almost as if we were the only ones who knew summer had arrived, as if we were the only ones who had anticipated its coming. I imagined the rest of the adults hiding behind closed doors, watching as we rode by like outlaws in a ghost town.

We started to pedal faster when we spotted the Sweet Shoppe about a half-mile up the road on the other side of the train tracks across from the Dairy-Mart. There were kids

16 already lined up outside, and still more of them trickling in. Before we could get any closer, however, the crossing gates were lowered to allow the interruption of a passing freight train and we were all forced to stop and watch as each car passed us by in a blur of grey steel.

I had always found strange comfort in the sound of a passing train. The tracks ran right up against the neighborhood where I lived and I had grown used to falling asleep to the sound of their screams every night. I was still surprised by how loud they were up close, and I both loved and hated that they were ever even there. It was like a constant reminder right in my very own backyard that there were other places in the world outside of the town I lived my entire life.

I looked over at Johnny to see his red bike suspended in mid-cycle between his legs as he stood with his left foot resting on the higher pedal and his right foot digging into the street. He was crowned in his usual way with a taut pink bandanna tied around his head like a sweatband, and the hair on the back of his head was unevenly cut after having cut it himself. When the word FUCK showed up on the side of one of the railcars in bold blue letters, he raised a fist in salute and shouted the word just loud enough so that I could barely hear it over the sound of the train. Sanders and I followed suit, and suddenly we were all chanting the word as if it was uncoiling in our mouths for the first time. Sanders, who was so easily excited, punched Johnny in the arm, and Johnny retaliated by pushing him hard enough so that he fell over with his bike still caught between his legs. We all laughed, even Sanders. It was in this familiar affection, this swift approach to violence, where we found ourselves bound to one another.

17 We took off as soon as the tracks were clear and we left our bikes leaning next to a telephone pole near the edge of the lot while everyone else left theirs lying in the gravel and rushed to get in line. It wasn’t a very large building, maybe a bit bigger than the only gas station in town. If we were lucky, it would take about fifteen minutes to get in the door once it was open, but because of the shop’s size only fifteen customers were allowed in at a time. We would have been in line faster if it weren’t for shoeless Sanders who hobbled across the lot and yelped every time he put his foot on the ground. By the time we got to the back of the line, we were all the way at the end of the lot behind the building with thirty or so kids between us and the front door.

“You complain one more time about walking barefoot,” said Johnny, looking

Sanders right in the eye, “and I’ll be on you like a fly on a sack-a-shit.”

It was hard not to laugh when Sanders took Johnny seriously, looking dejected and covering his mouth every time he repositioned his feet.

“They should be opening soon,” I said, standing on the tips of my toes to see if I could get a better glimpse of the front of the line.

“Any minute now,” said Johnny. “Hey, you hear Old Man Gordon is back, right?”

“No way. Has anyone seen him yet?”

“I heard rumors that he can’t talk.”

“It’s true,” said Sanders. “I heard my mom talking about it on the phone the other day. Said he bit off his tongue when he had that heart attack in the middle of the store and someone picked it up thinking it was saltwater taffy and threw it out with the garbage.

She said he shouldn’t even be allowed to run the place.”

18 I tried to imagine Old Man Gordon without a tongue. He was a large man and not really all that old, but he’d dress up as Santa Claus every year for the Christmas celebration in the town hall. His voice was so loud that you could hear him from out in the parking lot before you ever got out of the car. And he had always been kind. Rumor had it that he first opened the Sweet Shoppe because he never had any kids of his own, and if he had, he would have spoiled them rotten, so he spoiled the rest of us to make up for it instead. He’d been gone for almost two years after he had the heart attack. The store switched hands after that and the town hall had been without a Santa Claus since, so to hear that Old Man Gordon was making a comeback was exciting news for all of us.

“You think that’s true,” I asked, “about Old Man Gordon biting off his tongue?”

“We’re about to find out,” said Johnny as he nodded towards the front of the line.

We couldn’t see it from where we were standing, but underneath all of the chatter we could hear the bell ringing over the front door every time someone stepped inside. We all cheered as the line moved forward a few feet.

“You guys still coming over tonight?” Johnny asked, pulling out the pack of cigarettes and offering me one. I waved it down and decided to just take a few hits off of his. Most of the time I could only get through half of one before my lips started drying out and the back of my throat started closing up. I’d just throw it away or let Johnny finish it off anyhow.

“Wait a second,” said Sanders. “What’s going on tonight?”

“Last night of freedom,” said Johnny, lighting the cigarette and taking a long slow drag before exhaling and explaining further. “The temps start moving back in tomorrow.”

19 The temps were what we called the members of a travelling carnival that moved into the trailer park every summer in preparation for the Giant’s Festival. Back then, it was the largest carnival in over 500 miles and it was held in honor of our only local celebrity, Martin Van Buren Bates, who was a former captain of the Confederate Army.

He was said to have been 7 feet 11 inches tall, and when the Civil War was over, he fled the country and joined a circus, travelling around the world where he was put on display for his enormous height. It was during his travels he met Anna Swan, another giant who was just as tall, and the story goes that the two of them fell in love. Once their circus days were over, they married and, for some reason, moved to our town in the north. They built a house near the cemetery on the west side and lived there for the rest of their lives. Their house is now a historical site, the arch ways of the doors nearly ten feet high, the furniture large enough that you have to climb up in order to sit down. There was really nothing outstanding about the giants except that they were our tallest citizens, and probably the tallest to ever live in our county. I guess when you live in a small town like ours where nothing exciting ever happens, even the most insignificant detail can turn out to be the most extraordinary.

“You think there’ll be fire-eaters this year?” asked Sanders. He perked up so fast that his glasses almost fell off of his face.

“They might,” said Johnny. “My dad said there’s gonna be a huge turnout this year. Almost every trailer we have is booked up solid. He says it’s gonna be one of the biggest ones we ever had.”

“Boy, I sure hope so.”

20 “What are you getting your panties all in a bunch for Sanders?” I asked, snickering. “You know your mom will never let you step ten feet within that festival.”

“Yeah, but I’m counting on you guys to sneak me in.”

Johnny laughed.

“We’re always saving your sorry ass,” he said. “You’re lucky we like you.”

Sanders’ face flushed and I made sure he saw me smile at him before turning back to Johnny.

“You have enough wood for a bonfire tonight?”

“I’ve got it covered. We’ll probably need some newspaper to keep it going.”

“I could grab some of my dad’s old magazines,” I said. “What time should we meet you?”

“Usual. Nine or ten would be alright. My dad should be passed out by then.”

Johnny flicked his cigarette butt into the parking lot and pulled out another.

“You think you’ll be able to sneak out if I swing by your place around nine?” I asked, looking at Sanders. He had a problem riding anywhere on his own after dark, and I figured if I offered to stop there first he’d be more likely to come along, though it was a little out of my way.

“Probably. My mom should be in bed by then.”

“Son of a bitch.”

We looked up to see Johnny frozen still, holding his lighter a few inches away from the unlit cigarette hanging from his mouth. I turned to follow his gaze and realized right away what he was looking at.

“Jack Chance.”

21 “What’s he doing here?”

“He’s probably here for the same reason as the rest of us,” I said, trying to keep the peace even though I didn’t fully believe it. Whenever Jack Chance was around, there was bound to be some kind of trouble. His family had a lot of money and lived in one of the newer developments we called the Rich North. He was our age but somehow his parents managed to get him into high school a year early. He was always one of those kids who did whatever anyone else hated for no apparent reason except out of spite, and you certainly couldn’t trust him at all or he’d find a way to stab you in the back. When he started high school he found others just like him, and whether his cronies followed him out of respect or legitimate fear, no one could be sure, but it was evident that he had some sort of power over them because they did whatever he commanded them to do. The thing about Jack was that he thought everyone would answer to him and that he could get away with anything, but he never considered Johnny in that equation. Everyone has an arch nemesis, and Jack Chance was Johnny’s. It didn’t matter if we were on our turf or theirs; we were natural born enemies because Johnny didn’t follow anyone, and by extension, neither did we.

As dangerous as Jack was, he wasn’t much to be afraid of. He was shorter in stature than either Johnny or me. For that reason he never went anywhere without a couple of goons at his side. Oddly enough, we couldn’t see anyone else that we recognized while we watched him from the back of the line. Even his kid brother was absent. Jack was wearing a white tank top. His hair was spiked as it usually was, and there was a gold chain hanging around his neck. The longer we watched, the more it was obvious that he wasn’t alone, because he was talking to the girl at his side. She was about

22 the same height, with long golden hair that fell over her shoulders in waves. She was wearing a light green dress and I could tell she was laughing by the way she’d lift her head and wrap her arms around the front of her waist like she was hugging herself, trying to keep her laughter at bay.

“Who do you think that is?” asked Sanders. “You think that dope got himself a girlfriend?”

“No way,” I said. “She’d have to be insane.”

“Or one of those dirty girls who’d give it up to just about anyone,” said Johnny, elbowing me in the side for a laugh.

We were halfway to the door when Jack looked up and saw us watching him. For a moment our eyes met, the three of us and him, and as intimidating as he was I knew that none of us would look away: it would be a sign of weakness.

Then a strange thing happened. He smiled, nodded in our direction, and leaned over to kiss the girl next to him. As they kissed, he pivoted on his heels so that she was forced to turn with him, and that’s when we realized that the girl was Lauren Cole.

The cigarette fell from Johnny’s lip as he sprung forward, and Sanders and I got on either side to hold him back.

“I’m gonna kill him,” he said. “Let me go!”

“Just let it go, Johnny,” said Sanders.

“It’s not worth it,” I said. “He’s just trying to get a rise out of you.”

Every single one of the kids in line stopped to turn and watch as Johnny continued to struggle in our arms. For a moment, I thought we wouldn’t be able to hold him back and we’d find ourselves in the middle of an all out brawl, but then he settled down,

23 shrugging us off of him with ease. I turned to look back at Jack, who was now smiling at us with a shit-eating grin, while everyone else continued on with their conversations as if they had already forgotten what they had seen.

“When did they become a thing?” Johnny asked, turning to face the two of us.

“You guys know about this?”

“No.”

“No way,” I said. “Last time I checked, she was still into you.”

“Yeah, well she can’t have me,” he said, turning to face the front of the line again.

“Not now, not ever.”

He bent over to pick up the dropped cigarette and put it back in his mouth as if it had never hit the ground. Behind him, I saw Jack walking through the door and caught

Lauren looking back over her shoulder. I couldn’t tell if she was concerned or if the sun was too bright for her eyes, but her face was scrunched up like she had no idea it would have ended up the way that it did, that she would go from Johnny to Jack, or that she would have chosen the wrong side.

Lauren was one-half of a set of twins. Her sister’s name was Loretta, and they were the sheriff’s daughters and town prodigies. They were identical and often wore the same clothing. They were so self-involved that it was just as easy to write them off as the same person, so most of us referred to them as a single unit and called them The Laurens to avoid confusion. There were rumors that even their parents couldn’t tell them apart but

I doubt there was any truth to that. Their mother was the head of the historical society and with the exception of Mother Sanders, no one could get anything past Sheriff Cole. Some would argue that Loretta had lighter hair depending on the time of year while others

24 argued that their hair had been made up from the same shade and that Lauren just had fairer skin. Others would argue that you could tell them apart if you got close enough to look at their eyes and see that Lauren’s had flecks of green while Loretta’s had spots of blue. If they were standing side by side and you were to ask me back then which one of them was the real Lauren, it would take me a while. I’m not even sure if I would have gotten it right, but one thing is for certain—Johnny could tell the difference and Lauren

Cole was a force not to be reckoned with.

Lauren was Johnny’s first love, for lack of a better term. There was a definite chemistry between them almost from the very start, and Lauren had eyes out for him ever since the fourth grade. I guess she thought he was something special, not being from around here and all. As the years passed, and as Johnny continued to grow out of his shell and became more comfortable with us and with other people, the two of them went from tackling each other on the playground to passing notes back and forth and meeting each other before and after school. It wasn’t often that you’d find the four of us together, as

Johnny tended to keep their relationship separate from ours. Whenever we’d ask about it he’d keep conversation to a minimum, as if their relationship was something to be preserved or kept secret.

It had only been eight or nine months prior to that summer when it all began falling apart for them. Sheriff Cole found them making out behind the shed in his backyard and kicked Johnny off of his property. He forbid Lauren to ever see him again and advised Johnny to stay away. I suppose Lauren put up a fight at first, even went so far as to push her father when he came between them. If it weren’t for her, he probably would have hung Johnny by the neck from the tree in their front yard to ward off any

25 other boys who wanted to get their hands on his daughter. I wasn’t around to witness it myself, but I got that much from Johnny when he came over to my house swearing up a storm and threatening to tear Sheriff Cole to shreds. They tried to meet in secret after that, taking as many opportunities as they could to see each other in between breaks at school, but then one day it all just sort of stopped. There were no more notes passed, there weren’t any thirty-second meetings between bells. It was like they’d never known each other at all and they just kept on going without the other.

We were silent for the rest of the time that we stood in line. Johnny kept smoking his cigarettes. Sanders kept watching his feet. I kept hoping that Jack and Lauren would be long gone by the time we got inside.

We had been standing in line for almost forty minutes by the time it was our turn to go in. Sanders almost barreled over us to get in the door but Johnny pushed him back and pointed to the “No Shoes, No Service” sign that was posted on the wall outside.

“Come on! Are you serious right now?” he yelled.

“Serious as a heart attack,” Johnny said, leading the way in. Sanders sat down at one of the tables out front while I followed Johnny inside.

The Sweet Shoppe was overrun with the scent of cinnamon. There were shelves built on top of shelves, each one holding more candy than any of us thought possible.

There were buckets full of Ring Pops and Now & Laters, baskets with Sugar Babies and

Charleston Chews, Chiclets, Mallow Bars, Rolos and Reisens, packets of Pop Rocks and cartons of candy cigarettes. I had heard somewhere once that Old Man Gordon's favorite was Atomic Fireballs and sure enough there was an entire corner devoted to only those, a

26 pyramid of bowls full of the little round red candies. Somewhere a slow melodic song was being played on a guitar and I found myself smiling at the sound of it.

I followed Johnny carelessly for a few minutes as we made our way towards the back, our hands grazing the open buckets on the shelves and leaving each one with one less piece of candy as we passed. I could see Old Man Gordon lumbering over the ice cream freezer behind the counter with a cone in his hand and a scoop in the other. His beard had grown out since the last time I saw him, and the hair on his face was significantly thicker and whiter than the hair on his head. He had combed it over, or at least what was left of it, and I could see the sweat on his scalp trickling down his forehead as he leaned over the ice cream freezer. As we got closer I pointed out the layer of ice cream that was caked to the underside of his forearm and wondered how many cones it would take before someone found his arm hair stuck to the back of their throat.

“You know what you’re gonna get?” asked Johnny. I shook my head, not sure if I wanted ice cream any more. I watched as Old Man Gordon passed off the cone to the kid in front of me and took his money in exchange without saying a word, and I wondered if what Mother Sanders had said was true.

“Come on,” said Johnny. “I want to make sure we make it out of here with some good stuff. You still have enough room in your pockets?”

I nodded my head and followed him to the other side of the store. In the far corner, there was an old jukebox that only played songs with candy-related references in the title. I stopped for a second to see what song was playing overhead and thought about my father when I realized that it was “So Like Candy” by Elvis Costello—he had always been one of my father’s favorites. One of my earliest memories of him was dancing in his

27 underwear to “Pump It Up” as he made pancakes for me and my mom in the kitchen. He used to play his music all the time on the record player in our living room until the needle broke. I tried to remember the last time I had heard anything by him, and then remembered that the record player and all of my fathers records had been put away into storage. I couldn’t remember the last time I saw him dance or listen to anything besides

NPR, and decided not to think much more about it.

When we were in the last aisle and out of sight, Johnny and I stopped in front of a basket that had old school Bazooka bubblegum, the kind with the comic strips still inside the wrapper. We waited until the aisle was clear, and then we grabbed them by the handfuls and pushed them into our pockets before anyone could round the corner and catch us. We had no sooner stocked up on gum and moved to a new basket when Jack showed up at the end of the aisle, gently pushing Lauren with his hand until she was pressed against the opposite wall. He started to kiss her and she closed her eyes, wrapping her arms around him and pulling him into her. I instantly grabbed Johnny’s shirt, thinking he was going to use this as an opportunity to swing at Jack, but instead he walked past me and turned into the next aisle on the other side of the shelf. I followed him and found him at the opposite end, peering around the corner and glaring at the back of Jack’s head as he continued to makeout with Lauren, ignorant of the fact that they had an audience.

“Johnny, maybe we should just go,” I said, but he waved a hand as if to silence me.

Before I could walk towards him, he took a step out into the open and yelled,

“Suck on this asshole,” and threw his whole weight against the shelf so that it tipped

28 towards Jack and Lauren. I watched as they turned around just in time to dodge it as the whole shelf came crashing down against the wall, scattering Lemon Heads and

Jawbreakers across the floor in a colorful rain of plastic wrappers and hard candy.

Kids who had been waiting outside were now swarming the front door to see what had happened, and I was suddenly aware of all the faces that were staring at us. Before

Jack and Lauren could register what happened, Johnny turned around and yelled for me to hurry up as he ran towards the exit, pushing his body into the throng of incoming children and making his way outside. I was halfway down the aisle when I tripped over an open box of Cow Tales, and was no sooner on my feet than Old Man Gordon was right behind me, fumbling down the length of the store with his hands out in front of him to grab hold of me.

As I moved backwards towards the exit, my eyes were transfixed on the large gaping hole that was his mouth and the strange operatic sound that was coming out of it.

It was almost like something had been lodged in the back of his throat, like he had eaten a tub full of cotton balls and peanut butter and they were clumped over his vocal cords so that every word he tried to yell sounded like the rhythmic beating of a hollow drum. I would have stood still and let him have me out of fear that if I turned around to run he would have been right at my back ready to swallow me whole, but Johnny had forced his way back in and dragged me back outside after him.

As the three of us rode away from the Sweet Shoppe, we left a long trail of bubblegum behind us. Old Man Gordon chased us as far as he could with his fat fists raised high above his head, and Jack and Lauren stood behind him holding hands and watching with all the other kids in town. The farther we got the easier it was to laugh the

29 whole thing off, but even as we split ways and headed towards our separate homes, I couldn’t forget the way Old Man Gordon called out to us and found myself haunted by his dead-speech and the absence of his tongue.

30 CHAPTER IV

A FAMILY AFFAIR

I spent the rest of the afternoon in my room shuffling through songs on my iPod and trying to get the sound of Old Man Gordon out of my head while I ate what was left of the stolen candy. I eventually managed to pack for the night, making sure to grab some magazines from the basket in the living room downstairs when my parents weren't paying attention. If they had known we were going to have a bonfire without adult supervision they would never have let me leave the house.

It was almost eight o'clock when my father came upstairs. He was still wearing the suit he wore to work and he looked haggard standing in the doorway. His hair was thinning and gray, and the skin around his eyes had grown tight over the years so that he appeared much older than he was. When he spoke, it was always straight and to the point.

"No fluff, no noise," he'd always say.

"Dinner's ready, kid," he said.

It must have been weird for him, standing there while I put another tack into the

United States map hanging above my desk. There must have been twenty of them, maybe more, all different colors and sizes. Chicago was blue; the city of New York was red; the entire state of California was a mix of greens and yellows along with one-third of the western half of the country and the island of Hawaii. My father spent his whole life working so that we could have a place to live and I spent mine waiting for the day when I

31 could leave it behind. I was putting a tack in Wilmington, North Carolina because I overheard someone say on a television show that people were kind there and it sounded like a nice enough place to be for a while.

I hadn't spent much time away from home. Whenever we'd go on vacation, we'd either go to my grandparents' or we'd go camping in the state park a few hours south from where we lived. I'd hardly call it a vacation, though. It was more like an excuse for my father to have time to himself since he didn't really have much of it after working six days a week. I guess it gave my mom a reason to spend time with him too, but she seemed to get along alright whenever he wasn't around. She managed to avoid any signs of aging.

She kept her hair short and never dyed it so that it was a plum black, and I couldn't tell when or if she wore makeup because she always looked the same. She worked just as hard as my father, and then came home and sang down the hallway while she did house work. She seemed to like it enough, so much so that I never really had any chores like other kids. I suppose she was just the kind of person that liked to stay busy.

They were already sitting in the dining room when I came downstairs. Between them, on the table, sat a large crockpot of chicken and dumplings, a bowl of mashed potatoes, and a small container of corn. My father had already started eating, while my mother sat patiently across from him, drinking coffee out of a small brown mug. I sat between them and helped myself, and only after I got my food did she do the same.

"How was your day?" she asked me as she pulled out a slice of bread and began buttering it.

"Wasn't too bad," I said, sure to avoid all talk of the Sweet Shoppe in case word had gotten around to them. "Just rode around with the guys."

32 "How is Sanders? I haven't seen his mother in a while."

"He's alright, I guess. It's probably a good thing you haven't seen her, though.”

“Andrew, you know better than to talk about other people like that."

"What?" I said, trying to hold back the food in my mouth while I spoke.

"Everyone knows she’s crazy."

"I'm sure she's a fine woman," she said. "She's just a little different that's all. You can't blame her for being a little hard. Not after what happened to her husband."

My father put his fork down and decided to join in on the conversation.

"It was a car accident, wasn’t it?”

My mother was pushing around the corn on her plate with a spoon when she looked up at him from across the table. "That's right," she said. "Over on the covered bridge. Rumor was he'd been drinking, swerved to avoid a deer. He ran off the road before he could make it to the bridge and ended up in the creek."

“That was one of the worst storms we ever had,” said my father. “We’re lucky the creek didn’t overflow much.”

"It happened once, didn’t it?" I asked. "The whole creek flooded and knocked out the power grid for almost a week?"

"You were barely a year old,” my mother said, turning to me, smiling. “How do you remember that?"

"I don't," I said. "I've heard people talk about it, I guess.”

She set her spoon down on the plate and leaned forward, resting her chin in her left hand and crossing her chest with her right. Even though it looked like she was staring

33 at the middle of the table I could tell she was seeing something else, somewhere far off and distant.

"You cried all night," she said. "We couldn't put you down for anything. You just screamed and screamed. We tried feeding you, and your dad walked up and down the hallway rocking you in his arms trying to get you to calm down. You wouldn't have it, though. It was one of those hot summer storms, the kind where the rain just dries up the second it hits the concrete. I swear you could even see the steam rising from the ground if you looked hard enough. The more you cried the more I couldn't stand it, so I finally went out on the front porch to get some fresh air." She looked up at my father and laughed. "Your dad came running out after me to see if I was alright. I was sitting out in the rocking chair, just sort of staring out into the storm. The wind was blowing hard and the rain just kept pouring down; you wouldn't believe how hard it fell. We just sort of stayed out there for a moment, listening to the thunder, the three of us on this tiny little island trying to stay dry. I looked over at your father and suddenly you were just fast asleep in his arms, out like a light. We couldn't believe it ourselves. It was like you needed a little bit of chaos in order to calm down."

"That sounds like me," I said, laughing.

"We slept on the porch all night, didn't we honey," my father said. He was leaning back in his chair with his legs crossed and when he looked over at me, he smiled. "We were afraid to go inside in case you woke up and started crying again. Your mother took you and fell asleep in the rocking chair while I lay down in the hammock. It rained all night. You didn't wake up once."

34 "Was I always like that?" I asked, still shoveling into my mouth what was left on my plate. "Was I always hard at sleeping?"

"Just about," he said. "You always woke up in the middle of the night screaming about something or other. Sometimes your mother would go into your room in the middle of the night and turn off your nightlight because she was afraid you wouldn't get enough sleep with it on. She'd no sooner walk out then you'd wake up crying."

"It's true," she said. "You were always better off with the light on."

"Good thing you got over it," said my father. "I don't think I could make it through another sleepless night."

"Speaking of which," I said, changing the subject. I could have had a second helping if I wanted it, but it was dark out and I needed to get to Sanders before it was too late. "Is it alright if I spend the night at Johnny's tonight?"

"You're still hanging out with that boy?" my father asked. He leaned forward and put his elbows on the table. I could tell the subject made him tense and I had expected as much.

"Leave the boy alone, David," said my mother before I could respond. "Johnny's his best friend." She looked at me with a reassuring smile. "Of course, you can go. Just as long as you call me when you get there?"

"I will," I said. I stood up and brought my dishes to the sink I was in the middle of rinsing them off and putting them in the dishwasher when my dad spoke up from the other room.

"You know," he said, "I think it's about time you got yourself a job, son."

I closed the door to the dishwasher and walked back into the room.

35 "A job? I'm fourteen years old," I said. "Why would I need a job?”

"I had one at your age. It's good to get an early start. Besides,” he said, “you need the discipline."

"You can't be serious," I said. I looked at my mom for support, but she had her head lowered and was staring at the empty plate in front of her. It was the first time the prospect of work had ever been brought to my attention, and I wondered from her reaction if this was something they had talked about whenever I wasn’t around.

"As long as you're hanging out with that troublemaker friend of yours, you're going to have to find ways to keep yourself grounded."

"Johnny's a good kid, Dad. You don't even know him!"

"I know him well enough, and I know his father even more," he said. He wiped his mouth with a napkin and got up from the table. "They're not good people, Andrew. I don't want you spending all of your time over there. If you want to make your own decisions, that's fine, so long as you get a job."

"Isn't that illegal or something?" I asked. "I thought I had to be sixteen."

"Not if you're working under the table," he said, his hands on his hips. "I'll talk to

Bill over at the newspaper. We'll get you a job as a paperboy. That way you'd be outside most of the time. Isn't that what you do anyway? Ride all over town with the boys."

"I'm not going to do it," I said. "Tell him, Mom. Tell him I don't have to."

"Your father might be right this time," she said. I was shocked. I could see summer disappearing right in front of me before it had even begun. If I got a job, I thought it would all be over. My mother never sided with him before on anything, so for

36 her to side with him then and on the most ridiculous of things, I couldn't believe it. There was nothing I could do. "It might do you some good."

"That’s bullshit."

My father walked right across the room and pushed his chest up against mine, making me take a few steps back.

"What did you say to your mother?" he asked. He had his hands clenched at his sides and his right arm was shaking. I wanted to look up at him then, tell him to fuck off, maybe even push him back, but I couldn't do it. Instead, I brushed past him and went straight upstairs. Before I even hit the landing I could hear them arguing.

“Do you always have to be so hard on him?” my mother asked.

“Someone needs to be,” said my father. “He can’t just be doing nothing all the time. He needs to start taking things seriously.”

“I know, but it’s the summer for Christ’s sake. Let the boy have a little fun.”

“Don’t do that.”

“Don’t do what?”

A cupboard slammed shut.

“Talk down to me like that.”

“I didn’t.” There was a pause. “I’m just saying that maybe you guys would get along better if you weren’t so hard on him. He’s sensitive.”

“You talk to me like I don’t even know my own son.”

I pulled out my cell phone and sent Sanders a message that I was on my way, and

I went into my room to double-check that I had everything I needed. I had almost

37 forgotten the pack of smokes hidden in my pillowcase, and just as soon as I’d put it in my bag, I heard a knock on my door and turned around to see my mom standing there. She looked tired, maybe even a little sad. I rarely cursed in front of her, but when I did she almost always had that same look, like she was losing something she couldn't possibly win and there was no stopping it.

She walked past me and sat on the edge of my bed.

"Sit down, will ya?" she asked, patting the comforter with her hand. I did what she asked, and waited for her to speak. A few minutes went by and the two of us didn't say a word. I thought she might just get up and leave without saying anything, but then she took her hand and placed it on my knee.

"Why's he have to be such an ass?" I said. I hadn't meant for it to come out that way, but it did and I was pissed off.

"Alright, enough with the language big guy," she said. “Your father means well. I think he's just scared, that's all."

"What's he got to be scared of?"

"That you'll end up wasting your time—"

"Like Johnny?" I asked, cutting her off.

"Listen, you know what I think of him. He’s a fine kid. It’s just—”

I got up and stood in front of her so I could see her face. I wanted her to know how serious I was. I wanted her to know that there was no coming back from something like this. I just started rambling, saying the first things that came to my mind. Among them was that high school was starting in a few months and the guys needed me around.

Things change when you start high school. People go their separate ways. For all I knew,

38 this was my last summer of freedom and I couldn’t waste any time working while the rest of the guys hung out without me. I just wanted to be a kid. Why couldn’t I just have that?

When I was done there was a moment when I thought she’d say that she’d handle it, that she’d talk to my father over night and convince him to change his mind. Then she looked up at me and said, “It’s not the end of the world. Maybe you could just do it a couple days a week. Humor me, Andy. Please?”

“Whatever,” I said, under my breath. I turned around and grabbed the gray hoodie hanging from the knob on my closet door and put it on. “I have to go. Sanders is waiting for me.”

I put on my backpack and started to walk away when she grabbed my arm.

“You’ll call me when you get there? Let me know you’re safe?”

“I told you I will,” I said, knowing that I wouldn’t.

*

You could tell Sanders’ house apart from all the other houses on Main Street by the ceramic statue of Jesus standing in the hedge garden on the front lawn. It was taller than a lawn gnome and smaller than me, and its hands were open and outstretched like a beggar on the side of the road looking for handouts. Johnny suggested once that we should steal it and hold it for some kind of ransom but it was decided that Mother

Sanders would find some way to say that it was a miracle, a sign that the rapture was coming and that the damned would be punished. The last thing any of us wanted to do was add any more fuel to her religious fervor, so we just left it alone and secretly hoped that something terrible would come of it.

39 I left my bike near the sidewalk when I arrived and snuck along the side of the house until I reached his bedroom window in the back. I tapped on it twice to let him know I was there and waited for a few minutes until he opened the window and let me in.

His room was small and simple. His walls were painted white with white

Christmas lights hanging around the perimeter so that it was dimly lit. The only other decorations were a couple of Star Wars posters and a family photo hanging on the wall above his dresser, taken when his father was still alive. The man wasn’t very large but he had this huge nose on which his glasses sat crookedly, black instead of gold like his son’s. He had on an old grey suit and Mother Sanders wore a lavender dress, towering over him in the photo while Sanders sat between them like a mouse in a button-down.

Sitting on top of his dresser underneath the photo was a worm farm inside of an old aquarium.

“Sorry I’m a little late,” I said, walking up to it and tapping my finger on the glass the same way I would if there had been fish inside of it. “How’s Burt doing? He growing any?”

Sanders came up next to me and pressed his face to the glass.

“I got him to come up to the surface last week,” he said. “Looked the same to me, but it’s been smelling like something awful lately. I think I need to clean it out.”

“So that’s where that smell is coming from,” I said. “I thought maybe you stepped in dog shit or something.”

He walked around me, picked a tennis ball up off the floor, and sat on the edge of his bed. He started bouncing it off of the opposite wall and made no move to leave.

“You ready to head out? Johnny’s waiting for us.”

40 “I don’t know if I can come out tonight,” he said between throws.

“Are you serious? I came all the way out here just to get you.”

“I know. It’s just my mom heard about what happened earlier and spent all night lecturing me about how I need to pick better friends.”

“Your mom doesn’t know what she’s talking about,” I said, a little too loudly.

Sanders stopped bouncing the ball and I pressed my ear against the door to see if I could hear anything. When I didn’t, I turned back around to see Sanders lying on his back, the tennis ball beside him on the bed. “It’s pretty quiet out there. She’s probably asleep by now,” I said.

“She went to bed an hour ago,” said Sanders. “She has to get up early tomorrow and help out with some breakfast thing they’re having at the church. She’s expecting me to be there.”

“We can have you back in time if that’s what you’re worried about,” I said.

“It’s cool. You should go and have fun.”

He walked over to the window and lifted it open, and then turned with a forced smile on his face. “My luck she’d wake up in the middle of the night to check on me, and then I wouldn’t be allowed to see any of you for the rest of the summer.”

“Suit yourself,” I said, rolling up my sleeves and throwing the hood of my sweater over my head. He lifted a hand as if to give me a high-five, but I faked him out and punched him playfully in the arm instead before climbing out the window.

The ride to Johnny’s was quiet. No matter how many times I’d made it in the past it always seemed like a long one, especially at night. It was easiest if you followed Main

Street south a half-mile out of town and made a right at the only stop light, which was

41 always yellow, always flashing. It was darkest out there, out on the edge of town where there were no other street lamps, but if you turned around and looked back the way you came there was this sort of low light that hung over everything like a thin sheet.

Sometimes I’d pull over to the side of the road just to get a better look at it. If you stood there long enough, depending on the time of year, you could follow someone’s headlights as they drove across town, flitting in and out of trees and houses as they made their way through. We spent many nights sitting underneath that stop light, talking about how we thought things worked in our universe, how things ended up being the way that they were. I don’t know what it was about that intersection that always drew us to it or to those kinds of discussions, but maybe it was nothing more than the fact that the stars were always brightest out there, when our town was just a stone’s throw away.

The entrance to the trailer park wasn’t very far once you made that right at the intersection. It was maybe a mile or so down on the right hand side, just when you thought you were heading out into the middle of nowhere. Johnny’s father had installed floodlights a few years before to ward off any trespassers. They came on as soon as you entered the driveway, and they were blinding. I closed my eyes as soon as I was at the bottom to shield them from the lights overhead and I pedaled as hard as I could up the steep incline. When I reached the top, I road past Johnny’s doublewide and followed the line towards the back of the property. There were about 15 empty trailers in all and passed them there was a large field several acres wide that ran up against some woods at the other end. I could smell the faint scent of smoke as I made my way across, and when the floodlights switched off it was pitch black, except for the flickering light from

Johnny’s fire dancing on the edge of the woods.

42 He was sitting in front of the fire Indian style, driving a stick into the burning coals when I reached him. It wasn’t very large but it was good enough, and probably better than some of the fires we made in the past. There was a pile of wood nearby, and next to it a smaller pile of twigs he must have gathered earlier in the afternoon. The hood of his jacket was pulled up around his head just like mine. Sitting near him in the grass was a forth of a bottle of whiskey and a few cheap bottles of beer, one of which had already been emptied and laid on its side. When I sat down next to him, he put the whiskey bottle to his lips and tilted his head back, and then handed the bottle to me without flinching or turning his head. When I took the bottle from him, he unzipped his jacket a little and removed his hood, and that’s when I noticed his eye was swollen and his cheek had been bruised. If it hadn’t been for the light from the fire I probably wouldn’t have noticed it at all.

“My old man,” he said. “We got into a fight.”

“What was it this time?” I asked.

“I forgot to take the trash out before we left this morning.”

Keeping his eyes fixated on the fire, he grabbed another beer and popped its top off with a bottle opener he had concealed inside of his front pocket.

“Where’s Sanders? He decide not to come?”

“Does that surprise you?” I asked.

“No, not really,” he said, throwing the bottle cap into the flames and pulling his hood back up around his face.

I took a sip of whiskey and started coughing immediately because I had forgotten about the burn. Johnny patted me on the back and looked at me with a wry smile.

43 “Take it easy, man,” he said. “It’s too early for any of that.”

“Your dad might be a giant prick, but at least he’s good for something,” I said after a few seconds of regaining my composure.

Since his father owned all the trailers in the park, we had access to them whenever they weren’t being used. Of course he never knew about it. He always kept the keys hanging on one of the cabinet doors in the kitchen and slept heavy enough that we never had to worry about waking him up. There were a few occasions we almost got caught by his mother, but she traveled a lot for work and was away from home for days at a time so we never really worried about her either.

When the temps left at the end of every summer, we’d rummage through everything and collect whatever they left behind. We’d often come across a few bottles of alcohol, some of which were opened, some of which were partially drunk. Once we found someone’s porn stash hidden in a drawer under their bed and divvyed up the pages of a few old magazines between the three of us. We usually stuck with the perishables and never really took anything of any real value, so that by the time the temps returned the next year they’d bring with them a whole new set of things, never realizing that we already laid claim to whatever they brought with them.

We sat there for a couple of hours, keeping talk to a minimum. We passed the bottle of whiskey back and forth until it was empty. By the time we finished off the last bottles of beer the fire was starting to die down because we ran out of our reserve of sticks and twigs and we had already burned through the magazines I brought from home.

When Johnny got up and started walking away in search for more, I followed him.

44 “My dad’s making me get a job,” I said after a few minutes of searching along the edge of the woods.

“Isn’t that illegal?” he asked, bending over to run his fingers along the ground in the growing dark.

“That’s what I said! He’s making me do it anyhow. Can you believe that shit?”

“That’s fucking righteous. Leave it to your pops to wait until the summer to give you that kind of punishment.”

I stumbled over a tree root jutting out of the ground and put my arm around

Johnny’s shoulder for support.

“Why do they all have to be so fucking terrible?” I asked. “You’d think they forgot what it was like to be our age, you know? Like they were never kids and they just sort of woke up one day, miserable and old.”

“I know what you mean,” he said, pulling his hood back so he could see better.

“Jesus Christ, Johnny,” I said, grabbing his chin with my hand and turning his face so I could get a better look at him. “How hard did he hit you?”

The swelling had gotten worse in the time that I had been there so that his cheek bone was puffed up and his eye was little more than a slit.

“It’s nothing,” he said, shrugging me off. In the fading light he looked a little sallow and deformed. “It’ll be alright by morning.”

“I hate him.”

“You hate who?”

“Your dad.”

45 “You’re not allowed to hate him,” he said. The pitch of his voice lowered and his tone changed just enough that I could tell there was some weight behind it. “He’s my dad.

Leave the hating up to me.”

After a second’s pause, I said, “You don’t deserve it, you know.”

“How do you figure?,” he asked, turning away from me and bending over to pick up more sticks.

“No one deserves to get hit like that,” I said. “Especially you.”

He dropped all of his sticks on the ground and turned towards me.

“Especially me. Let me ask you something,” he said. “What makes me any different than anyone else?”

I thought for a moment, and propped myself up against a nearby tree. In the distance, on the other side of the fire and across the field, all the trailers looked like giant bones in the night, like vertebrae rising from the ground, part of something ancient and sacred.

“You’re just like me,” I said, softly. “You’re one of the good ones.”

Johnny lowered his head so I could barely see his face, but when he took a few steps over to where I was standing I could see him well enough to know he was smiling.

He raised one of his arms and laid his hand on my shoulder for a moment, then he grabbed the back of my head with both of his hands and pushed our foreheads together so that I could smell the whiskey on his breath.

“I’m nothing like you,” he said, his voice hoarse, his eyes downcast. “You’re too good for me.”

46 We let the fire die and carried our empty bottles to the edge of the hill. At the bottom, hidden in the dark, there was an old abandoned junkyard and past that, the cemetery and the rest of the town beyond. It was so quiet, standing there on the edge of such darkness looking out to a town that was fast asleep under a halo of artificial light that we were moved to take our empty bottles one by one and cast them out into the dark, holding our breaths each time until they shattered somewhere far down below. Together, we stumbled back across the field. The grass under our feet was already wet with dew and our shoes were soaked through by the time we reached one of the trailers where we intended to sleep for the night. As Johnny fumbled through the key ring, I held my phone out and used the light from the display to help him see in the dark. Once we were inside, we found ourselves standing in a small kitchen area. I dropped my bag onto the floor by the door and followed Johnny down the length of the trailer toward the bedroom in the far back. The air inside of the trailer was stifling, so that by the time we made it to the bedroom we were both holding our jackets and shirts and fanning ourselves with our hands to cool down. Unfortunately the bed wasn’t large enough for the two of us, so I told Johnny he could have it and decided that I would sleep on the small couch just outside of the bedroom. There, under the cover of shadows and what little moonlight crept through the window blinds, we undressed and laid down in our respective places for the night.

“You can always sleep in here if you want to,” Johnny called out, just as I was about to fall asleep.

“It’s fine,” I said, holding tight to the thin blanket I found laying across the back of the couch. “You should take the bed after what you’ve been through.”

47 “You sure?” he asked. “Is it even comfortable out there?”

“It’s the most comfortable couch I’ve ever slept on,” I said. “Truthfully.”

A few minutes went by, and then Johnny called out to me again.

“Do you still have those nightmares?” he asked.

“Not as often as I used to,” I said, “but they never really stopped.”

“I’ll keep you safe,” he said.

It wasn’t long after that when I found myself falling asleep to the sound of rustling sheets.

48 CHAPTER V

CHILD’S PLAY

I still have the dream. I can usually tell when I’m going to have it because it tends to happen when I haven’t had it in awhile. Back then it was almost a nightly occurrence.

I’d find myself waking in the dream on the side of the road just outside of a city I didn’t recognize. Not knowing where I was or how I got there, I would walk towards that city in the hopes that I would find someone who could tell me how to get home. When I was just out of reach from the center of the city, I would see what looked like pale balloons bobbing along the surface of the road, and as I would get closer I would start to realize that they weren’t balloons at all but men and women of all shapes, sizes, young and old, walking in the middle of the road without any sort of direction. They would all be stark naked and their skin would be the color of salmon. The hair between their legs would be the same color as the hair on their heads, and their eyes would be just as black. I would ask them for help and they wouldn’t stop for me. Instead they would carry on with their listless expressions, a sea of hard cocks and wet tits.

And then I would come across a boy who looked just like me. He would be identical, down to the cowlick behind his right ear and the little birthmark that ran along the left side of his hipbone like a paint splatter. Only his eyes would be different, larger and clouded black like all the others. He wouldn’t say a word, wouldn’t even flinch when

I called his name. So I would grab him by the arm to shake him and that’s when they

49 would all turn, a hundred bodies or more rotating on their bare heels like they were being controlled with one mind, all staring at me with those terrible eyes as if seeing me standing there for the first time. I would let go of the boy but by then it was always too late—they would close in on me so that I was stuck in the middle, pressed against my naked other, until I was suffocated by the weight of their oiled bodies.

When I’d wake, I’d find myself swimming in soaked sheets and my skin would be warm and clammy. At first I’d panic, not knowing where I was or what had happened, and then the details of the dream would come back to me in short clips like a slideshow played in half time. It’d take a few minutes to catch my breath, and then I’d try to go back to sleep but often failed and lay awake staring at the ceiling instead.

Surprisingly, none of these things happened the night we slept inside the trailer because I hadn’t dreamt at all. It was just like Johnny said it’d be. I was safe. I slept well into the afternoon, and only woke when the light coming in from the blinds suddenly vanished. I rubbed my face with my hands and opened my eyes to find a girl my age, maybe a little older, standing beside the couch staring down at me with eyes so blue I could have sworn they had been plucked out of an ice tray. She was wearing a white tank top. A pair of jean shorts covered the top half of her thighs. Her hair was long and golden brown so that it came down in a straight length on either side of her face, and when she spoke it was with a strong southern accent.

“Who in the hell are you?” she asked, crossing her arms and sticking her neck out as she spoke. I looked behind her to the bedroom and saw that Johnny wasn’t there and that the bed had been left unmade. I quickly became aware that I no longer had a blanket

50 but was lying on the couch still naked from the night before and that my clothes were in a pile on the floor.

“Look,” I said, sitting upright and trying to cover myself up with my hands. “I meant no harm. I just—“

“Get the fuck out of my daddy’s trailer!”

I snatched my clothes up off the floor and moved towards the exit. I no sooner had my boxers on and was fumbling with my pants when I tripped over the top stair and fell head first out the front door, landing on my knees in the dirt. I barely managed to pull my pants up over my thighs and button them before rolling over to find her standing at the top of the steps with my bag in her hand.

I could hear Johnny and Sanders laughing and turned to find them laying on their stomachs in the grass a few yards off next to the burnt-out remains of our campfire.

Johnny was looking through a pair of binoculars while Sanders slammed his fists into the ground in dramatic fashion.

“Those your friends?” the girl asked. She flung my bag as she stepped down from the trailer so that it landed on the ground beside me. I stood up and put my shirt on, then grabbed my bag and took a few steps back. It was then that I realized the rest of the temps had already begun to move in. Everywhere I looked there were people scattered about the lot, carrying groceries and enough supplies to last them for the next few months while they made this place their home.

The air was filled with a fine dust caused by the shaking of rugs and blankets after they had been left in their trailers for nearly a year. Food carts and bandwagons were intertwined with the trailers in no noticeable order, like they had come in from off the

51 road and just stopped wherever they found enough space to pull through. There were more mobile homes, too, so that the field seemed to have grown a bit smaller than the night before.

I only recognized a few of the temps from previous years. There was the stone- eater who was hauling four bundles of wood at a time and carrying them from the side of

Johnny’s house to the center of the lot in order to build a large bonfire. He was giant, nearly twice the size of any man I had ever seen, and that included Old Man Gordon. I’d watched him guzzle down a mason jar of gravel the year before and even saw him bite off a chunk from a pumice stone without ever breaking a tooth.

I recognized the Band of Juggling Men, too. They were three brothers who claimed to be some of the most flexible, most lithesome-bodied men in the world. I’d seen them do a number of things, including a balancing act where they used nothing more than their chins to hold up participants while they sat in metal folding chairs. They each had on a set of suspenders and white and red-striped shirts underneath, and it was hard to tell them apart from one another as they led a pair of horses to graze along the edge of the lot.

“You gonna run along and play with your friends or you waiting for me to invite you back inside?”

The girl that kicked me out of the trailer was standing on one foot, with the other pressed against the door. I hadn’t noticed until then that she was barefoot. Her toes were painted white and around her left ankle was a charm bracelet. I couldn’t make out all of the pendants from where I was standing, but I caught a glimpse of a tarnished silver grizzly bear with one golden eye. The corner of her lip curled when she smiled. There

52 was a decent breeze flowing through the lot so that a few strands of her hair were caught in the wind and fell across her forehead and alongside her mouth. She reached up and pulled her hair over one shoulder, twirling it in her hands to form a temporary braid that ran nearly all the way down past her chest.

“I’m gonna be on my way now,” I said, taking a few more steps back. “Just so you know, it was my friend’s idea. To sleep in your trailer and all.”

“Haven’t you ever heard that your friends will be the first to get you in trouble?” she said. She turned around and went back up the steps into her trailer, leaving the door open behind her. I had a fleeting temptation to go back in and recognized it as the kind of feeling you’d get when you found just any old open door in any other building in the world, the kind that required an empty space to be filled. Instead of following my gut, I thought it was best if I just left it alone.

Johnny and Sanders were already on their feet when I started crossing the field.

Before I could reach them, a large brown mutt came running by with his tongue hanging out of his mouth. A small band of children no more than five years old followed behind him, scrambling to catch his tale. I stopped to watch them pass as they ran by. They were all simply dressed and their faces and hands were covered in mud. They were also without any shoes, and I wondered who’s children they might be and what their parents were like. When they disappeared around a bend I continued to walk, making the occasional eye contact with those I passed. It crossed my mind that any one of them could have been related to the blue-eyed girl and thought that it was best we get out of there before any of them found out what had happened.

53 “It’s about time you came outside,” said Johnny, slugging me in the arm as I approached. There was a dark blue line still noticeable underneath his eye and the surrounding skin had already turned a pale yellow, but I was surprised by how much the swelling had gone down overnight. “I know what you said back there. It was just as much your idea as it was mine, and you know it.”

“Yeah, but I wasn’t gonna tell her that,” I said, slugging him back. “Who is she, anyway?”

“I don’t know. Never seen her before. You didn’t recognize her from past festivals?”

“No, never saw her a day in my life,” I said.

“Was she hot?” Sanders asked. “I couldn’t really see from all the way over here and Johnny wouldn’t let me use the binoculars.”

“You wouldn’t know what was hot if you touched a stovetop with your bare hand,

Sanders,” said Johnny.

“No, seriously. I think I need new glasses.”

“She was alright,” I said. “I think she’s a little older. Seems kind of stuck up, if you ask me.”

“How old do you think she was?” asked Johnny.

“Maybe 18, 19,” I said, turning around to see if she’d come back outside. “You could have let me know you were leaving by the way.”

“I didn’t want to miss the show,” said Johnny, laughing along with Sanders.

“I’m gonna find a way to get you back.”

54 “You’ll have to wait for another time, my friend. We need to get a move on,” he said, walking towards the driveway. “We’re already late for a game of smear-the-queer.”

It was another summer ritual, one that had been passed down by the last generation of guys that came before us. It was a right of passage, a game that forced you into bravery the way war forced soldiers into battle. Any number of people could play, but the more players you had the more competitive it was. In the beginning, all the players would gather around a tennis ball and wait for someone to reach out and grab it.

The person who took the ball was the It-Kid, and they became a moving target for everyone else to tackle. There wasn’t any kind of point system to decide the winners; the whole point of the game was to see who could be brave enough to grab the ball and how long they could run like hell before someone laid them out cold. Once the It-Kid was tackled, he’d throw the ball so someone else could pick it up, and the game would continue until everyone decided that it was time for the game to end. Though the name might suggest otherwise, it wasn’t a game that was meant to be malicious, but it certainly had a way of building the kind of reputation you needed in order to get any kind of respect from any of the other guys our age. You were a coward if you never went for the ball, and that was a far worse fate than anyone pile driving you into the ground.

The game was already under way when we arrived at the old train yard, about 2 miles down the tracks from the Sweet Shoppe. It was our usual hunting ground and the three of us claimed it as part of our turf after it had been passed down to us by one of the seniors at the high school. It was surrounded by woods and there was an abandoned boxcar on the side of the tracks that was rusted and overgrown with weeds. We headed

55 straight for it when we arrived, and sat on the edge of it while everyone else finished the round.

Kyle had the ball. He was just some other kid we knew from school, and not really anyone of importance. He had been the one to get the game started, and when we arrived he was nearly surrounded. His back was to the woods and he was being flanked on both sides by two other kids I recognized to be on the cross-country team. Behind them were at least 5 or 6 other guys, some of whom I had also known from class but didn’t really associate with. They kept back a few paces, while the two guys in front of them lunged forward at the same time. Kyle managed to avoid them both by jumping out of the way and cutting behind a few trees, but then the rest were on him, chasing him along the edge of the woods so that he either had to face them full on or try to cut back the other way.

“You think he’s gonna try his luck out in the woods?” asked Sanders, who jumped off the edge of the boxcar the minute the chase started up again.

“No way,” I said. “Everyone knows that’s suicide. They’ll be on him faster than he can blink an eye.”

“I’d take my chances in the woods,” said Johnny, with a sly grin on his face. His eyes followed Kyle as he ran. “He’s done for.”

I turned to watch Kyle cut back in an effort to fake them out, but he tripped over a root that had been sticking out of the ground and stumbled a few paces forward. He regained his balance almost immediately but it was already too late. One of the cross- country runners had cut around through the woods so that he could tackle Kyle from the side while he was distracted. When they hit the ground, the tennis ball flew out of Kyle’s

56 hand and you could almost hear the breath rush right out of him while everyone else piled themselves on him like a pyramid.

The three of us started to walk over as they were getting back up off the ground.

In any given situation, the three of us always had each others’ backs and always sided with one another. We knew a game couldn’t really change that, but whenever smear-the- queer was involved, there was a deep-rooted understanding that it was every man for himself. Whoever had the ball was the target and it didn’t matter if the target was one of us. We’d take each other out if we had to.

Sanders took his glasses off and left them in a low branch of a tree so that they were safe and out of the way, but I had no idea how he planned to make any headway in the game with his eyesight as bad as it was. When Johnny walked over to help Kyle up, I pulled Sanders to the side and away from everyone else.

“Stay close to me,” I said. “And try not to touch the ball.”

“But isn’t that the point?”

“You can’t go in there blind,” I said. “Just follow my lead.”

“Hey, whenever you guys are done talking we’d like to start a new game,” yelled

Johnny. I looked up to see that everyone else had already gathered around the ball.

“Alright,” said Johnny. “You all know the rules. Anything goes.”

We circled the ball in the grass, waiting for the moment when one of us would grab it and take off. I looked at Sanders, who had positioned himself across from me. He nodded in my direction as if to acknowledge what I had said earlier. You could see it on everyone’s face, the desire to take the ball, the drive to run away with it. I considered going for it first to get it over with, but before I could act one of the smaller guys went for

57 it instead. As soon as he picked it up we were after him, chasing him around in a large sweeping circle and trying to cut him off. Just before Johnny was about to grab him from behind, the kid made a sharp right turn and headed for the other side of the boxcar.

Everyone lined up on one side, waiting for him to come around, while Johnny and I went on opposite ends to corner him. The target was just standing there, with no other option but to give in or run out into the woods. If he tried to run around either of us, the other would get him from behind, and he’d never try to slide under the boxcar since there was no telling what could be underneath it with the weeds overgrown on all sides. We were crouched low, ready to run if he tried anything.

“What’s it gonna be, man,” said Johnny. “You’ve got nowhere to go.”

The target was beginning to panic and with good reason. It was only a matter of time before we had him down on the ground. The kids on the other side of the boxcar started yelling and drumming their hands against the metal walls so that the air was heavy with a wild roar. The target weighed his options and looked frantically between us and the boxcar at his back.

“You guys let me go, and I’ll give one of you the ball,” he said, holding it out in front of him as a last minute bargaining chip and looking at us from one to the other.

“Don’t be such a pansy,” I said.

“Deal,” said Johnny, standing upright. “You give me the ball and we’ll let you go.”

I wasn’t surprised. If Johnny ran out from behind the boxcar with the ball in his hands he’d be given the credit for taking the target down, not to mention he’d have the

58 ball and we’d all be at a disadvantage. It didn’t matter how many of us there were, he was good and he was fast. The target turned to him and held the ball out in his hand.

“Take it and run,” he said. “It’s all yours.”

Johnny walked up to him slowly while I stayed low to the ground. I wanted to be ready to take him down in case the target had some trick up his sleeve, but surprisingly enough, he let Johnny have the ball and backed away from him when he took it. Johnny tossed the ball up and down a couple of times and then looked at me and smiled. He knew I’d let him have a head start. When I nodded at him, he took off.

A few seconds later, I yelled, “Johnny’s got the ball!” and took off after him. Just as I thought he would, he headed straight down the tracks and into the woods. Kyle stayed behind with a few others in case Johnny found a way to circle around and come back to the train yard, while the rest of us followed him.

The tracks were elevated and surrounded by white pumice stones on either side so that there was a sharp decline once you stepped off the tracks, and Sanders nearly fell on his face while he was running down. Johnny was easy to follow since he chose to run in a straight line, not bothering to hide like the rest of us would if we had taken to the woods and were being pursued. I was making good time, darting between trees and jumping around bushes in order to keep up with him. In some areas, the grass had overgrown so that it was taller than us, and I was thankful that he was avoiding it so that I couldn’t lose him.

“Come on boys,” he yelled back over his shoulder, toying with us. “You’re never gonna catch me if you keep up at this pace!”

59 I looked over my shoulder to find Sanders right on my heels. The other guys had taken off farther to the right so that we were running parallel with them through the woods. The idea was to force Johnny into running towards either side, but he was faster than any of us and he wasn’t letting up. There was really nowhere for him to go except straight ahead, and the farther we ran the more we closed the distance between our two groups so that we became a long line of offense. A few of the guys fell back after a minute or two, until it was just Sanders, myself, and one other kid we called the Hulk because his shoulders were squared off and he had a habit of hunching over like a football player whenever he ran. When Johnny came up against a large oak tree surrounded by thorn bushes on either side, he jumped right up into the tree, clambering up the lower limbs just in time for his feet to be out of reach when we got to the bottom.

I turned around and shouted for everyone who fell back to stay where they were, in case Johnny managed to get around us somehow and head back in the other direction.

The Hulk went around to the other side in case Johnny tried to get down from there, while Sanders and I faced him head on.

“You’re stuck Johnny,” I said. “You might as well come down.”

“Ain’t no way in hell I’m giving up that easy,” he said. “You should know me better than that!” He lifted his shirt and wiped the sweat away from his face and then climbed two branches higher. “You’ll have to come up here and get me or wait all night.

It’s up to you.”

“I’m going up,” said the Hulk from the other side.

“I’ve got it over here,” said Sanders, grabbing a branch overhead and pulling himself up into the tree.

60 I took a few steps back and caught the smile on Johnny’s face as they started to climb up after him. Sanders was the first to reach the branch that Johnny was standing on, but by the time he had gotten there Johnny had inched six feet out to the very end with the tennis ball in one hand and the branch above him in the other.

“You fall Sanders and I won’t be the one to bring you back to life,” I yelled out, watching as the branch underneath them bowed from their combined weight. The Hulk wasn’t moving very far from the trunk of the tree and it was obvious that he had gone up without thinking about what he’d do once he got there. Luckily, Sanders had a good idea in mind. Instead of following Johnny out to the edge and putting himself at further risk, he held onto the branch above him for leverage and bounced up and down on the branch they were standing on to try and throw Johnny off balance.

I could hear Sanders saying over and over again, “You got this, you got this, you got this,” like it was his own personal mantra. They weren’t really all that high up, but it was high enough that if either of them fell it would leave them with one hell of a bruise, and not to mention they’d be covered in thorns. Johnny didn’t seem phased at all. When

Sanders started shaking the branch underneath them, Johnny did the same, so that the whole lower left side of the tree was shaking. Sanders was struggling to hold on the longer Johnny shook his side of the branch, and just when I thought Johnny had outsmarted him, there was a loud crack in the wood. Before they could react, the branch underneath them split off from the tree and fell to the ground below, causing Johnny to drop the tennis ball and leaving the two of them hanging from the branch above them.

“Real good, Johnny, real smooth,” said Sanders as he tried to lift himself up and failed.

61 “It’s not my fault,” said Johnny. “This is all on you!”

Before either of them could continue arguing, the branch they were hanging on snapped as well and they came plummeting down into the bushes.

It took the Hulk longer to get out of the tree than it took Johnny and Sanders to get out of the bushes. Sanders had a thorn sticking out of his neck and almost refused to pull it out but when Johnny started telling him a story about how it could get sucked into his skin and travel through his bloodstream until it reached his heart, he squealed and pulled it out himself. They didn’t have any other injuries except for a few scratches in their arms and legs.

The ball was lost, having fallen into the deepest part of a bush so that it was unreachable. We were all silent as we made our way back. The game had been short lived, and without a ball there was no other way we could carry on. No one had considered bringing a backup.

When we climbed the hill and reached the top of the tracks we found the rest of the guys standing on the other side of the yard, facing the opposite direction. They turned around when they heard us coming and we all stopped dead in our tracks, shocked to see that Lauren and Jack were among them.

“Who the hell invited you,” yelled Sanders, his voice a few notes higher than he had intended when he said it.

I stepped forward instinctively to cover the ground between Johnny and Jack, and

I was surprised when Johnny placed a hand on my shoulder.

“It’s alright,” he said. “I’ll handle it.”

62 I hesitated for a few seconds and only stepped out of the way when I realized how unusually calm he was compared to the day before. Everyone held their ground as the two of them walked towards one another. I looked across the gap to see Lauren with her arms crossed, breathing in and out of her mouth. I couldn’t tell if she knew about Jack’s intentions or if she had come along with him without knowing where they were headed, but she looked just as much on edge as the rest of us. Standing on either side of her were

Scott and Sam , two of Jack’s main goons. They were enormous for their age and so dim- witted that we were all convinced their brains had been affected from all the fat that had been building in their heads over the years. I also recognized the kid standing beside them as Jack’s little brother Brian. He followed pretty closely in his brother’s footsteps, even mirrored the way that he looked by spiking his hair with too much gel and wearing the same generic off-white t-shirts his brother was famous for wearing. It was comical, really, seeing them standing their like greasers out of an old 50s movie.

“What are you doing here,” said Johnny in a low voice, stopping in front of Jack just out of arms reach.

“I thought I’d take my girlfriend and my little brother out for a walk,” said Jack.

“Is that alright with you?”

“Funny, my ex-girlfriend doesn’t look like she’s dressed for the great outdoors.”

Lauren looked away like she was mildly ashamed and Johnny stared her down while the rest of us laughed. She was wearing a blue and white polka-dotted dress and her hair was done up in matching bows. She didn’t look any different than she did on any other day, but it was a bold move for Johnny to call her out on how ridiculous she looked in front of everyone. Her mother was a little obsessive as the town historian and made all

63 of the Laurens’ outfits by hand. When they weren’t performing reenactments of Civil

War battles, they looked like they were from another time, dropped in place like little marionettes. We all felt sorry for them because they were a product of their parents’ fanaticism, born and raised even in the same house as the Giants for which our annual festival got its namesake. Whether they embraced the life their parents crafted for them or they were ashamed of it as much as the rest of us, in all the time we had known the

Laurens, we had never seen either of them try to change their fate.

“You should leave,” Johnny said, before Jack could respond. “You know this is our turf.”

Jack seemed to give it some thought, and then looked at his brother and waved him over.

“I’ve got a better idea,” he said, grinning as he turned back to face Johnny. “My little brother here really wanted to play a game of hide and seek, and I wouldn’t want to disappoint him. What do you say we play a game?”

“What’s the catch?”

“The catch? Who said anything about a catch?” He slipped his arm around his brother’s shoulders while Scott and Sam pushed through the rest of the guys into the middle of the yard.

“There’s always a catch,” I said, nudging Sanders to follow me while I stepped forward to meet them in the middle.

“Looks like your boy here wants to play, too,” said Jack. He looked me in the eyes for a split second before looking back at Johnny, and I fought like hell not to reach

64 out and punch him in the face myself. “I’m a generous man, and since we’re on your turf,

I’ll let you decide. Hunter or hunted. Which is it gonna be?”

I could tell Johnny was weighing all the ways it could play out in his mind. He had to have been worried. If he made one wrong decision not only would Jack win but he’d be losing in front of Lauren. After a few seconds of silence, he stepped forward so that there was barely a breadth of space between them. Scott and Sam wrung their pudgy fists, ready to attack the second Jack gave the word while Sanders and I looked at each other knowing we’d do anything to defend Johnny if it came to blows.

“You’re going to hide,” said Johnny, “and we’re going to hunt you down, and you better pray to whatever god you believe in that I don’t find you myself.”

“I hope it’s you who finds me, Johnny,” said Jack. “I’m actually counting on it.”

We split up into teams so that it was Jack, Scott, Sam, and Jack’s little brother

Brian against Johnny, Sanders, Kyle and myself. Everyone else gathered by the boxcar while we broke off into our groups. Lauren stood off to the side, away from everyone else, so that she stood out like a sore thumb. I couldn’t tell what she was feeling and I honestly couldn’t care less, but you had to be an idiot not to notice that she was torn between them.

“I hope you’ve got a good plan, Johnny,” I said, as we huddled down in a circle far enough so that no one else could hear.

“Actually, I’ve got nothing,” he said.

“That’s not what I wanted to hear.”

“I don’t give a damn what happens as long as you guys leave Jack to me.”

“And what about the rest of us?” Sanders asked.

65 “Do whatever you have to do to run them down. Find a way to confuse them. It’ll be easier to take them out when they’re separated.”

“And what if we find Jack first?” Kyle asked. “What should we do then?”

“Hold him down and yell for me,” said Johnny. “I’ll come as fast as I can.”

I had to admit, it didn’t sound like a good plan at all. Hell, it wasn’t even a plan, but if Johnny got his hands on Jack there was no telling what he’d do. It would have been rightfully earned, maybe even destined, like some universal karma had lined everything up so that we could be there in that moment and Johnny could be the one to exact revenge for all the things Jack had done so far with his pathetic life. I didn’t know any better than anyone else, but if Johnny could get one good hit in then it would all be worthwhile.

We lined up in the middle of the yard, so that each of us faced another man on the opposing team. I found myself pitted up against Sam, and to show him I wasn’t afraid, I bared my teeth and growled. He just smiled back and licked his lips like he couldn’t wait to chow down on my arm. Everyone started cheering except Lauren, who was standing at the edge of the boxcar, her knuckles white, holding onto the side for support.

When Johnny closed his eyes, the rest of us followed, and we began counting down out loud in unison from fifty. Soon the sound of stomping feet had faded and all I could hear were our voices, and I imagined that if I listened hard enough I would hear the sound of Lauren’s heart thrumming in her chest as she worried for both sides like anyone who had ever loved two people would. I felt sorry for her and I hated her all the same because she hurt my friend and never tried to reconcile her mistakes. Part of me hoped

Johnny would get his revenge solely for the fact that it would hurt her too, in the process.

66 How romantic, that Johnny and Jack would hate each other so much over someone so insignificant.

When the countdown stopped we all opened our eyes and walked towards the tracks.

“Kevin, Sanders—you two go left. Stay close by in case any of them decided not to go too far,” said Johnny. “Andrew and I are going to head towards the dried up riverbed. Remember what I said—“

“Yeah, sure,” said Kyle, as he ran off with Sanders. “He’s all yours!”

“Come on,” Johnny said. I followed him down into the woods the same way we had gone earlier. The riverbed wasn’t much farther off than where we were before. It was darker there, and cooler from the density of the limbs overhead. It was always darkest in the middle of the day, when the sun was at its highest point in the sky and out of view.

The place had a way of making you forget about how much time had passed. We barely made it out of the woods before the sun set on one other occasion, and if it hadn’t been for Sanders, who brought along a plastic compass due to his own hysteria of getting lost, we probably would have never made it out as fast as we had.

I let Johnny lead the way while I kept a lookout for any signs of where Jack and his boys might have gone. From the riverbed we’d have a better vantage point and there was a large chance that some, if not all of them, were hiding out there. There were boulders large enough for anyone to hide behind, and even though the riverbed itself was flat, if you played your cards right it was easy to stay hidden.

We split up once we got there in order to cover more ground. Johnny went left, while I went right. While I was searching my side, I made sure to keep Johnny in my line

67 of sight in case he was overrun. He was swift, only stopping every few feet to check his surroundings. I was more meticulous in my search, keeping low to the ground in case I came up on anyone unexpectedly. When we came full circle and still found nothing, we stood there scanning the trees for any signs of movement.

“Where do you think they could have gone?” I asked.

“Beats me,” he said, shaking his head. “They could be anywhere.”

We climbed on top of one of the boulders and looked off in the direction from which we came. As far as I could tell there wasn’t a single moving thing except for the occasional squirrel and a few small birds. After standing there for a few minutes with no results, I pulled my phone out and sent Sanders a text message telling him to meet us at the bottom of the tracks.

“You guys are lucky,” said Johnny as he jumped off the boulder. “My parents would never buy me a cell phone. I’ll be lucky if I get one before I move out on my own.”

“Let’s take a moment to consider the facts,” I said, jumping off after him.

“Mother Sanders only bought him that phone so she could keep tabs on him at all times, and my parents only got this for me after I got on the honor roll last year. A luxury like this comes at a price.”

“When you put it that way, I’d rather not owe my parents for anything,” said

Johnny, snickering.

I thought about my mom. Before we arrived at the train yard, I had gone through my phone and found two missed calls and a series of text messages asking if I was okay; all of them were from her. I made sure to send her a message before we joined in on the

68 games so that she wouldn’t have a reason to worry, but part of me delighted at the idea that she worried at all.

The light in the woods started changing as we continued to walk. It was at our backs, casting everything in this strange golden light so that everything looked a little orange. It was hard to walk through the woods quietly with all the brush underneath us, but we tried to be as calculated as possible with where we let our feet fall. I noticed a few of the guys standing at the top of the hill when the tracks came into view. Thinking they were on our side, we started sprinting towards them but suddenly realized that it was

Jack’s goons instead. Before they could spot us, we made straight for one of the big trees and hid behind it, and from there we watched as they stood at the top of the hill like sentries guarding something valuable. Johnny got my attention and motioned towards the direction of another large tree, this one closer to the hill, and so we kept close to the ground and crept as fast as we could until we were behind it. We did this a couple of times, slinking along the bottom of the forest floor from tree to tree, each time coming closer to the bottom of the hill, until we were crouched behind two large bushes.

From there we could see everything perfectly. Sam and Scott were standing with their backs to us, talking to someone out of view in the train yard. I scanned the length of the hill, looking for any sign of Jack, and saw Lauren sitting not far off on one of the rails, staring out into the woods listlessly. I was about to tell Johnny that we should make for the hill and tackle them from behind, or maybe even head farther down and come at them from the side, but Scott was suddenly animated with laughter. I looked up to see what had caused it and saw Kyle standing in front of them on the tracks holding onto

Sanders by his hands behind his back like a prisoner.

69 “That son of a bitch,” I said. I was getting ready to stand and run towards them, but Johnny put his arm on my shoulder and held me in my place. Jack had appeared with his little brother at his side, clapping his hands as if to applaud everyone for a job well done. He said something inaudible to Sanders, as he was struggling to get out of Kyle’s hold. When Sanders looked up at Jack and shook his head, Jack looked at Scott nodded.

Without a second’s hesitation, Scott took his fist and slammed it into Sanders’ side, sending him to his knees.

“That’s enough,” Lauren shouted. She stood up and was walking towards them.

Jack started to say something to her, but I didn’t care about them. Instead, I held my eyes intently on Scott as bent over Sanders. When he stood up, he had Sanders’ cell phone in his hand and tossed it to Jack, who caught it and gently pushed Lauren out of his way.

“What the hell are they doing?” asked Johnny, as he moved closer to the edge of the bush to get a better view.

“We’ve got to move fast,” I said. “Who knows what they’re going to do if we don’t—”

Darth Vader’s theme song started playing from the pocket in my jeans. For a second I thought it was some cruel joke my imagination was playing on me, but I looked up and saw Jack with Sanders’ phone pressed against his ear and realized what was happening. In the struggle to get my phone out of my jeans, I dropped it on the ground and looked up to see everyone on the hill turning towards us. I grabbed it and shut it off, but it was too late—they already knew where we were hiding.

Johnny was staring at me with his back to the hill when the first white stone came flying from above. It hit him square in the back between his shoulder blades, nearly

70 knocking him over. Several stones followed, scattering across the forest floor like hail.

We crouched down close together behind the bush as they kept falling all around us in large, sweeping arcs, so that there was a low steady thrum that resonated with every stone hitting the ground, and somewhere beneath that sound was the sound of Jack’s gang taunting us from the tracks on the hill. I looked at Johnny to see if he was alright. His jaw was clenched, his face was flushed, and I could see the blood pulsing through the artery in his neck as he pressed himself against me. I managed to stand a little so I could get a glimpse of the hill, and I saw Sanders standing on his feet shouting for us to run. Kyle was still holding onto him from behind, while all the other guys continued to throw their stones. There was nothing I could do stuck in the position that I was in, so I did the only thing I could do.

I picked up the next stone that fell close by and launched it back up the hill. The rock landed just short of where Jack was standing. For a moment, the rocks stopped, and in their absence came a silence so heavy that I thought the air itself had gotten thin. I stood up straight and watched as Jack turned to look at the others. Lauren was standing beside him with her hands on Brian’s shoulders, while Sam and Scott flanked his other side. No one else intervened.

We had an advantage because of the light at our backs. From up on the hill, Jack and his boys were bathed in its orange light and Lauren’s hair was on fire. I imagined from where they were standing that we looked like nothing more than pale faces in the shadows below. I looked down at Johnny and nodded as if to say, “This is it; this is our chance to make a move.” As Jack bent over for another stone, Johnny stood up and we started hurling the stones they had thrown at us back up the hill so that they looked like

71 white diamonds in the setting sun. We dodged the rocks they threw at us and continued to hurl them back, coming closer to hitting them with each and every throw until Sam and

Scott were the first to be hit at the same time—one in the knee, the other square in the chest. Before they could recover from the shock, I shouted at Johnny that we needed to focus all of our energy on them so that they were forced to pull back. With Sam and Scott out of the way, we began making our way up the hill, rocks in hand, walking, throwing, dodging all at once. Jack managed to hit me pretty good by nailing me with a stone in the side and when I buckled, Johnny jumped in front of me to buy me a few seconds of time, hurling a rock at Jack and missing his head by just a few inches.

“Is that all you got?” Jack shouted as he continued to throw rocks down at us.

“You guys are a bunch of pussies!”

“Shut your goddamn mouth Jack,” I yelled back, standing tall regardless of the pain in my side. “Johnny will have your ass soon enough!”

“Just like I had his momma’s ass last night,” he said from above. “You hear that

Johnny? YOUR MOTHER’S A ROTTEN WHORE!”

Johnny dropped the stone in his hand and started running up the hill, picking up rocks as he moved, chucking them overhead in a frenzy so that they went every which way. Kyle was forced to let Sanders go and took off in another direction before we could get to the top, and Sanders ran off in the opposite direction to grab his glasses from where he left them. I tried to keep up with Johnny, but he was too fast and when we were halfway up the hill he started to shout something that sounded like an ancient war cry.

You see, violence was an infection and it was nothing foreign to us. It had been stewing in our guts ever since we were born, collecting in the darkest corners of our

72 joints and spilling over into our undeveloped meat and muscular tissue so that our nerve endings were like live wires in our fourteen-year-old bodies, infinitely misfiring and sensitive to the smallest receptive action so that even in the most insignificant of moments we were filled with a dangerous belief that we too were infinite and therefore invincible. When Johnny started shouting I recognized this deep-seated violence in his voice and Jack recognized it, too. He stepped back from the edge of the hill and dropped the rocks in his hands, every step made faster than the one before it, until he grabbed

Lauren’s hand and pulled her along after him. Brian hadn’t followed them because he was rooted to the ground where he stood, frozen out of fear, not yet old enough to know the same kind of violence we knew.

When Johnny reached the top of the hill, he knocked Brian to the ground and mounted him, hitting him again and again in the head with his fists. Lauren yelled for him to stop and Jack started to run towards him in an effort to save his little brother, but before he could reach him, I tackled Jack to the ground and closed my hands around his throat in an attempt to hold him down. We rolled in the grass to the sound of Johnny hitting Brian in the face, and right when I was about to give Jack the same treatment,

Sanders grabbed me by the back of my shirt and pulled me off of him. I turned around to see Johnny hovering over Brian, who was lying still in the grass covered in his own blood. It was all Sanders and I could do to tear him away from that place before Jack could do anything about it.

73 CHAPTER VI

A GATHERING OF STRANGERS

Johnny was quiet the whole way home, hunched over his handlebars like he was burdened by the weight of what he’d done. Sanders and I didn’t say a word either, afraid that we’d upset him if we had. To be honest, I think we were all in shock because none of us had planned on any of it happening the way that it did.

It was nearing nightfall when we arrived at the trailer park. Johnny just dropped his bike on the ground without acknowledging either of us and went inside, letting the door slam shut behind him. Sanders and I stood there quietly, waiting to see if he’d come back, but after a few minutes it was clear that we wouldn’t see him again for the rest of the night.

“You think he’ll be alright,” Sanders asked, still astride his bike.

“Of course,” I said, shrugging it off. “This ain’t nothing.”

“What do you think will happen to that kid? He looked beat up pretty bad.”

“I’m sure he’s fine, Sanders,” I said, though I wasn’t sure if I fully believed it.

“But I’ve never seen Johnny like that before.”

“That’s enough,” I said. “He did what he had to do. We all did.”

I wouldn’t allow myself to think about the possible consequences that could come from the fight we had. There was no sense in it. In the end, regardless of what happened, we’d stand by Johnny no matter what.

74 “Hey! You boys hungry?”

I had forgotten all about the temps, so when I turned around to find that we had an audience I was a little confused. The woman who had spoken to us must have been in her late thirties or early forties. She was wearing a yellow bandanna and her hair, which was blonde in some areas, brown in others, was cropped short and sticking out all over the place. A lot of her upper body was left exposed by the white sleeveless shirt that was tied around the back of her neck, and she was wearing jean cutoffs and a pair of sandals.

Her skin, from the underside of her neck all the way down to her ankles, was covered in tattoos. There was a red rose on the side of her neck. It curled so that the petals opened up on the underside of her ear. A little red devil sat on the top of her left breast. He was aiming his pitchfork towards the space just underneath her collarbone and above her cleavage where it looked like her skin had been stitched together, a former hole where her heart might have been. The other images varied—skulls, plants, tiny little tigers—and they were all intertwined with tattooed vines of ivy.

“We have more than enough food,” she said, as she wiped her hands on a dishtowel. “I’d hate for it to all go to waste. You boys should come over, say hi to the rest of the gang.” She gestured towards the center of the lot where they had a bonfire going, and started to walk away, the backs of her knees tattooed with two large violet eyes.

“What do you think we should do?” I asked, nudging Sanders. “You think we should trust them?”

He just sort of stood there staring at the woman with his mouth hanging wide open.

75 “Why not,” he said, after considering it for a few seconds and dropping his bike next to Johnny’s. “Let’s find out what they’re all about. They might even show us a few tricks.”

I followed his lead and stayed close to him as we wound our way through the maze of trailers and trucks, ducking several times to avoid clotheslines that were hanging like webs between trailer windows. Before we even reached the center I could feel the heat from the bonfire. The light from it was so bright that it took a few moments for my eyes to adjust, and when I was comfortable, I was surprised to find a much smaller group than I had imagined.

Aside from the tattooed woman, who was busy folding clothes in one basket and putting them in another, there were only five of them. Four of them were sitting on the other side of the fire, facing us in a sort of half-circle, while the fifth sat on a stool a little farther off from the rest. He had on a pair of overalls and a trucker’s hat, and he was picking his teeth with a metal fork so that there was a sharp clicking noise coming out of his mouth.

“Bill, would you go on inside and get these boys a bowl of your chili?” the woman asked.

He pulled the fork out of his mouth and gave us a huge smile so that we could see he was missing a front tooth.

“Coming right up,” he said, getting off the stool and disappearing into one of the trailers nearby.

76 “Bill sort of takes care of all of us,” said the tattooed woman, as she slung her dishtowel over her shoulder. She put the full basket of clothes inside of the empty one and walked it over to the other side of the fire and set it down next to an empty seat.

“I sure am starving,” said Sanders, grabbing an empty lawn chair and sitting so that he was closer to her than the other four. I stood there for a second, shocked that

Sanders was being so forward, and pulled up a lawn chair beside him. When I started to sit down, pain shot through my abdomen, causing me to wince.

“What’s a matter with him?” another woman asked out loud. She looked surprisingly identical to the woman who had invited us. Except for her hair, which was much darker and only one color, everything was the same, down to the tattoos as far as I could tell from where I was standing.

“We got into a bit of a fight earlier,” I said.

“Here, let me take a look at it.”

The woman who invited us got up and walked around the fire. I stood still as she lifted my shirt and gently pressed her cold fingers against the side of my rib cage. Each time she pressed on the area I pulled away and gritted my teeth, partly because of the cold from her touch and partly because it was really sensitive.

“You’re going to have a nice bruise in the morning, but it doesn’t feel like you broke anything,” she said, turning back towards the trailer where Bill went inside. “Bill, would you bring out a bag of ice! We have an injured kid out here.”

“I’m hurt too,” said Sanders. He stood up and lifted his shirt so he could be looked at next. The few people sitting around the fire started to laugh. “I mean it,” he

77 said. “This guy twice my size had me in a headlock and was pummeling me in the chest.

I’m lucky I made it out of there alive.”

“Alright, I guess I can take a look at you too,” she said. I glared at him over her shoulder, while he smiled like a weasel.

When Bill came out a minute later he was holding too clay bowls in his hands and was balancing two Ziploc bags full of ice in the crook of his arms. The woman took the bags from him and handed them to us. I managed to lodge mine underneath my arm so that it was pressed tightly against my side when I sat down. It felt better almost immediately.

“I hope you boys like white chili,” said Bill, as he handed us the bowls. “I’ve never cared much for kidney beans myself. It’s my ma’s recipe.”

“Thank you,” I said, holding the bowl in my lap and using my right hand to stir the chili with a spoon. “It smells really good.”

“I suppose we should properly introduce ourselves,” said the tattooed woman, as she returned to her seat across the fire. “My name is Marjorie, and this is my twin sister,

Jolene.”

“Good evening,” she said, waving at both of us. I could tell right away that she was livelier than her sister and perhaps a bit more relaxed. “We’re not really anything special like some of these other folks, but we’re really interested in art.”

“Jesus, Jolene, give us a little more credit than that,” said Marjorie, turning back to us. “We’re basically gypsies. We never really stay in one place for very long.”

78 “We’ve been doing it since we were little girls,” said Jolene. “Our parents moved us around a lot when we were kids, and we just never got used to settling down anywhere. When we turned eighteen, we got our first tattoos and ran away from home.”

“Never looked back,” said Marjorie.

“Where you guys from originally?” I asked between mouthfuls.

“Down near Louisiana,” said Jolene, turning to the side and lifting the back of her shirt to show the alligator across her lower back. It had its head raised at the center of her spine as if it was trying to catch something out of sight with it’s mouth. “It was our first one that we got done. Figured it would be a good reminder of where we came from.”

“Cool,” said Sanders, which made the two of them laugh.

“Next to Jolene, we have Franklin,” continued Marjorie. “He’s one of our resident contortionists, and one-third of the Band of Juggling Men.”

Franklin stood up and took a bow. He was no longer wearing the suspenders and the red and white, striped shirt I saw him wearing earlier in the day. He had replaced it with jean cut-offs and an old gray hooded sweatshirt instead, and he was sucking on a small pipe.

“Hello tiny gentlemen,” he said, sitting back down almost immediately. “I hope you would excuse my dear brothers for not being here. I’m afraid Freddie has always retired to bed quite early, and my little brother Forde is tired from having worked all day.

He’s never been much of a worker, as I’m sure you’ll find him slacking a lot over the next couple of weeks until the shows start. It’s a wonder I’m not with them because it’s been a long day, but I’ve always been somewhat of a night owl, myself.”

“Where are you from?” asked Sanders.

79 Franklin held the pipe firmly between his lips and took a deep inhale before blowing out a short succession of smoke rings, each one smaller than the last.

“A true traveler never shares his origins,” he said, with a wry smile.

“Last but certainly not least,” said Marjorie, “we have Sampson. He’s—“

“A stone-eater,” I said. Everyone looked at me, surprised just as much as I was that I had interrupted her. “I saw you last year,” I continued, as he rose from his seat.

“You were pretty incredible.”

He walked over to where I was seated and I flinched when he clapped my shoulder with a hand so large my whole head could fit inside of it.

“What is your name, boy,” he said, towering over me as he stood between me and the fire. It was easy, even in the dark, to make out the definition of the muscles in his arms and chest. His head was shaved, except for the little bit of hair on his chin, and when he laughed, his whole body shook.

“I’m Andrew, and this is my buddy, Sanders,” I said. “Our other friend, Johnny, is in for the night. His father owns the place. You all probably met him when you came in.”

“He’s like a fly that sucked up too much sugar,” said Sampson, abruptly. “Always going on and on about something. Short man needs to learn how to live life, and take it by the balls.”

“That’s some pretty good advice,” I said, laughing because it sounded strange coming from Sampson. “You should probably try and tell him that.”

“I would but he’s the kind of man that doesn’t listen,” said Sampson, rubbing his chin with one of his hands and crossing back over to his chair. “So where is your friend?

Why is he not with you?”

80 “We were all involved in a fight earlier,” I said. “He’s pretty messed up from it.”

“Why? Did he lose?”

“Not exactly.”

“What caused the fight?”

“It was over some dumb girl,” I said, thinking it was the easiest explanation for what happened without going into much detail. From the look on Sampson’s face, I could tell that he was confused. After a brief moment, he slapped his knee and sat up straight, smiling.

“Things are always difficult when it comes to love,” he said. “It doesn’t matter whether you win or lose, it just matters that you fought well.”

I wasn’t sure how to respond, or how the two statements coincided with each other and what happened out at the train yard, but everyone around the bonfire nodded there heads and started murmuring with each other so that everyone seemed to be in agreement—Sampson’s words were good and they were words everyone should live by.

“How long are you guys staying in town?” I asked.

“Festival starts in three weeks,” said Bill. He had moved from his chair to a spot in the grass closer to Marjorie and the fork he was using to pick his teeth was no longer in his hands. “We won’t be staying too long after the festival. Maybe two or three days at most.”

“Will there be rides this year?” Sanders asked, setting his empty bowl on the grass and leaning forward with a little too much excitement.

“Of course, there’ll be rides,” said Bill, taking off his hat to expose a balding head and setting it on his lap. “There’s always going to be rides and the kids are always going

81 to enjoy them but I’ll tell you what—the real entertainment is in the tents, in the shows, with people like these guys.”

“People like them?” asked Sanders.

“You know, the weird folk.”

“Watch who you’re calling weird, Bill,” said Marjorie, snapping her head in his direction.

“You know what I mean, woman” he said, leaning back on his hands so that he looked more lax. “What you all do isn’t entertainment. It isn’t even art. It’s your way of life. It’s how you thrive.”

“Here he goes again, getting all sentimental and shit,” said Jolene.

“I’m serious,” he said. “People don’t appreciate carnivals the way they used to.”

“What was it like? Before it changed?” I asked, setting my bowl on the ground and giving Bill my full attention.

“People used to come from all over for the shows,” he said. “If you were part of a carnival it used to be that you would sometimes come across another one out there on the road. Nowadays, that doesn’t happen. We’re one of the only ones left. The Barnum and

Bailey Circus is the one that everybody talks about but that ain’t no real carnival. It’s nothing but a performance.”

“But what’s different?” I asked. “I’ve been going to your carnival ever since I was a little kid. You have the same rides every year, there’s the petting zoo with all the same kinds of animals, the same sideshow acts—what makes yours different from Barnum’s?”

“For starters, you won’t find any clowns in this neck of the woods.”

82 It was the girl with the charm bracelet around her ankle, the one who had kicked me out of her trailer earlier that morning. She had come up from behind us so that I hadn’t seen her until she spoke up, and then she walked over to the spot in the grass between Bill and Sanders and sat down. She had an old quilt wrapped tightly around her shoulders, and her hair was pulled over to one side. Underneath the blanket it looked like she was wearing a plain old white t-shirt and a pair of shorts. Just as soon as I was taking it all in, Sanders stuck his neck out like he was studying her from behind his glasses and then looked at me with his mouth hanging open, calling more attention to the situation than I cared for. I could feel my face getting hot and I whispered for him to turn around when Bill started to speak again.

“Boys, I’d like you to meet my 17-year-old god-daughter, Florence Mae

Johnson,” he said, wrapping an arm around her shoulders and giving her a tight squeeze that made her eyes roll. “This here is Andrew and Sanders. They’re friends of the family that own this here property.”

“We already met,” said Florence, looking at me directly. As she spoke, the corner of her mouth curled so that it felt like I was being challenged. “You were the boy I found sleeping in my trailer this afternoon.”

“You mean the one that was naked?” Jolene asked, leaning forward and laughing before I could even respond. “Well this got real exciting all of a sudden.”

“Jolene, hush and leave the boy alone,” said Marjorie. The two of them bickered back and forth while Sanders started to laugh. Franklin, Sampson, and Bill just stared at me like I was all of a sudden an enemy in their midst, while Florence sat still, staring at me and smiling.

83 “I’m really sorry about this morning,” I said. “I had a little bit too much to drink last night. Don’t really remember how I ended up inside your trailer.”

“Well that explains why you didn’t have any clothes on.”

Sanders chuckled again and I punched him in the arm real quick to shut him up.

“I wasn’t really thinking,” I said, turning back to Florence. “I didn’t mean to be disrespectful.”

“Just don’t let it happen again,” she said, “if you know what’s good for ya, that is.”

“What do you do?” asked Sanders, rubbing the spot on his arm where I hit him and leaning farther on the edge of his chair.

“What do you mean? You asking me what I do with the carnival?” she asked.

“Well, yeah. I mean, you do something, don’t ya? Like breathe fire, or swallow knives?”

I turned and looked hard at Sanders, ready to punch him in the back of the head.

Florence seemed to get a kick out of it, though, as her whole body relaxed and she started to giggle.

“I don’t know about any death-defying acts, but I’m here to help out wherever

I’m needed,” she said. “This is my first time coming out with everyone.”

“I was gonna say, I didn’t think I recognized you,” I said. “How do you like it so far?”

“It’s not bad. I’ve only been on the road for a few months. We were in Kentucky last week and in Arkansas a couple of weeks before that. Both places were kind of boring if you ask me.”

84 “Well what did you expect, for it to be like Florida?” Marjorie said. “It’s

Arkansas for Christ’s sake. No one likes Arkansas.”

“I didn’t say I didn’t like it,” said Florence. “I just meant it wasn’t what I thought it would be, that’s all.”

“So where you from?” I asked, getting up for a moment to reposition myself so that I was sitting on my feet. I was trying to stop my leg from bouncing up and down. All that talk about traveling was getting to my nerves and the longer we talked about it the harder it was to sit still. Part of me wanted to go with them, to run away from home like

Jolene and Marjorie, but I knew my parents would never have it and they’d find me out eventually.

“The closest thing I have to calling a home is only a couple of hours south of here, out near Lima,” said Florence. “My grandmother is from there and she’s pretty much taken care of me my whole life.”

“Why hasn’t she joined us,” Franklin asked. He was no longer holding his pipe, but he had a stick in his hands and he was pealing the bark off of it like someone picking apart a log of string cheese.

“I already told you, Franklin, she just doesn’t feel right about it,” said Florence, sitting up straight and letting the quilt slouch a little off her shoulders. “You know how she is. She ain’t gonna do nothing she doesn’t want to.”

“The last time your grandma was out on the road with us, you were but three or four years old,” said Bill, taking the hat on his knee and putting it back on. “It ain’t right.

A woman with her kind of talents should be out putting them to good use, not hiding in the middle of nowhere growing a damn vegetable garden.”

85 “You keep talking like that and she’ll find out and put a curse on you, Bill,” said

Florence, looking at him over her shoulder.

“She ain’t some sort of a witch is she,” asked Sanders.

“What if she was?” Florence asked, turning around to stare at him with a furrowed brow.

Sanders fidgeted in his seat and looked at me, and I just shook my head to let him know that he was on his own.

“I don’t mean nothing by it if she is,” said Sanders, looking back at Florence nervously. “It’s just my mom says witches are like foot soldiers for the devil.”

Everything was silent except the crackling from the fire. They all had the same look in their eyes as they stared at Sanders, like he had just taken something personal of theirs and pissed all over it. Somewhere out in the dark, somebody’s dog started barking, and Sanders jumped in his chair at the sound.

“What else did your momma tell you?” asked Florence. “She tell you about all the babies we pick up along the way and eat for breakfast?”

“No, she never told me nothing about that,” said Sanders, shrinking in his chair as he swallowed hard and wiped the back of his mouth with his hand.

“If your momma told you about the children, you realize we can’t let you leave,” she said, leaning forward with teeth bared. “We’ll have to keep you.”

“Oh, I swear she never said nothing about that,” said Sanders, turning to face me.

“Tell them, Andrew. Tell them how my mom is crazy.”

“Relax, man,” I said. “She’s screwing with you.”

86 Everyone around the fire started to laugh and Sanders whirled around, causing his half-melted ice pack to fall out of his shirt and onto the ground in front of him. I reached out and put my hand on his shoulder to reassure him and it was like a switch had been flipped. A wave of relief fell heavily across his face as he realized it was all a joke, and he settled back into his chair, taking his glasses off and rubbing the lenses against the front of his shirt where it was still wet.

I felt for the ice pack at my side and removed it, letting it fall on the ground next to Sanders. When I looked up, I saw Florence staring at me. She was no longer laughing with everyone else, and there was something awfully sad in the way she looked at me, in the way the reflection of the fire danced in her eyes.

“You asked earlier what made us different than Barnum,” she said, calling attention to the conversation we were having before she showed up. “You know, it’s one thing to teach animals tricks, but it’s another to get inside their head, know what they’re thinking, what they’re feeling, what they want. We have a Master of Animals with us, and I’ll tell you what—he’s more in tune with those creatures than you and your friends are in tune with each other. He takes over their minds, controls them, harnesses their wildness and makes it his own.”

“How is something like that possible?” I asked.

“Just like anything else is possible,” she said. “It just is.”

It wasn’t an answer I was satisfied with and I had a million questions running through my head. What she was saying was crazy because it undermined the laws of science and logic.

87 “You’d be surprised what you’d find once you’re out there in the world,” said

Bill. “Y’all are just specks inside a much bigger picture, and you’ve got to remind yourselves to think outside of your own head every now and then so you don’t find yourselves stuck. We’ve seen things, things that don’t really have any explanation at all.

Some of us have tried making sense of it and why we do what we do or how we’ve come to these places in our lives where we feel like we need any of this—show business. At the end of the day, it’s just what makes sense.”

“Is that what you did?” I asked, looking at Sampson across the fire, thinking he’d be the most well-spoken on the matter. “You just wake up one day and decide you were gonna eat rocks for a living?”

Sampson laughed out loud, full and hearty.

“Everything I’ve done I owe to the salt of the earth,” he said. “Nothing smells so wonderful or tastes so clean as a rock plucked fresh right out of the ground. My mother tried to get me to stop when I was young but my hunger has always been insatiable. The older I get the more uninterested I am in real food. The earth is what gives me my strength.”

“That can’t be healthy though, can it?” Sanders asked.

Everyone turned to look at Sanders again with the same old expression.

“Well, think about it,” he said. “You’re putting dirt and all types of shit in your mouth. It can’t be good for your teeth.”

“If you based all your decisions on what’s healthy for you, young man, you’d never step one foot outside of your home,” said Franklin, flicking his wrist towards

88 Sanders and pointing at him as if to give an example. “The world is far more dangerous a place than to worry about digesting a few small stones during your lifetime.”

“I still don’t get it though,” I said, drawing everyone’s attention back to me.

“How does one develop a taste for stones?”

“Let me ask you this,” said Sampson, as he stood to retrieve more wood for the fire. “Have you ever wanted something so badly, something you really desired but couldn’t exactly explain where that desire was coming from?”

“Maybe,” I said. “Once or twice.”

I looked at Florence out of the corner of my eye without meaning to and hoped she hadn’t noticed.

“It’s sort of like that,” he said. “It’s just something you just know.”

“You mean like destiny or something?”

“That’s one way of looking at it.”

“Child, don’t you listen to him,” said Jolene as she leaned forward in her chair.

“There ain’t no such thing as destiny. There’s right, there’s wrong, and then there’s the decisions you make along the way. Sampson here just doesn’t want to admit that he’s a freak like the rest of us.”

“Jolene, what did I tell you about using the F-word,” Bill shouted.

“Well that’s what we are, ain’t we? Everyone seems to think so and they don’t call it no freak show for no reason!”

“Jolene,” Marjorie said in a high-pitched voice, as if to warn her from carrying on.

89 “All I’m saying is that there’s no sense in filling these kids with crazy ideas that we’re divinely inspired when we’re just as screwed up in the head as everyone else in the world. The only difference between everyone else and us is that we’ve got the balls to embrace it.”

Sanders and I snickered as Marjorie rolled her eyes.

“What Jolene means to say,” said Florence, “is that my grandmother ain’t a witch.

She’s just got what I’d like to call a woman’s intuition.”

“My momma’s got that, but she’s often wrong,” said Sanders. “Hopefully she doesn’t try to run you guys out of town again. She tries something just about every year.”

“Wait a minute,” said Bill, standing up and scratching the side of his face as if he was in deep thought. “Is she the one that takes up near the front of the festival, passing out pamphlets and speaking all kinds of nonsense?”

“That’s the one, alright,” I said. “You’re lucky that’s all she’s done. She’s been known to do worse than that.”

“Why’s she so against us being here,” asked Marjorie, leaning forward so that she was resting her chin in the palm of one of her hands. “I mean, we might be a little weirder than most folks, I’ll give you that, but isn’t that the point of a carnival? You get to live outside of yourself for a little while, see things you’ve never seen before.”

“My momma’s real religious,” said Sanders, lowering his head as if ashamed.

“She’s not really fond of a whole lot of people.”

“I think I might’ve run into her in town earlier today,” said Florence. “I had to go pick up some things from the store. When I was leaving I stopped to ask this young girl in a blue and white dress if she could help me out with directions. She was with another

90 boy, maybe your age. She was real helpful, but when I was walking away, this woman stopped me cold in my tracks, grabbed the back of my arm and looked me right in the eye. Said, ‘I don’t believe I ever seen you round these parts before.’ She was tall, had her hair done up on the top of her head like some sort of beehive, and she was carrying the ugliest purse I ever saw. I told her I was from out of town and that I was just stopping through. I didn’t want to bring any unnecessary attention to myself.

“She didn’t say anything nasty to you, did she?” Sanders asked, jumping out of his chair either from excitement or anxiety. “I sincerely apologize if she did. She doesn’t mean any harm, she just can’t help it.”

“It’s alright,” she said. “ It was fine, really. She didn’t say anything else except give me a look that was something awful. Besides, I can take care of my own.”

“Wait a second,” I said. “You said it was a girl in a blue and white dress. Was she blonde? Dress covered in polka-dots? Walking around with some asshole with his hair greased back?”

“Sounds like someone’s got a little animosity over there,” she said, leaning back on her arms and crossing her legs out in front of her so that the blanket around her shoulders fell to the ground and her tank top went tight across her breasts. “To answer your question, she was wearing a dress with polka-dots and she was with another boy.

Which one of them do you have it out for?”

“My friend Johnny has beef with the guy,” I said. “She’s his ex, and that kid you saw is a hateful son of a bitch. My friend popped his brother in the face real good.”

91 “You have a large vocabulary for someone that’s only twelve years old,” said

Bill. He had an awkward smile on his face like he was trying to act the way a father figure would but couldn’t help appreciating my choice of words.

“With all do respect, Bill,” I said. “I’m fourteen. I’m practically an adult.”

“I can see that,” he said, chuckling to himself. The laughter seemed to spread through the rest of the temps like a hushed whisper, and I could tell from the look in their eyes that they valued my presence without passing any judgment. Everyone except

Florence, that is. She kept her eyes on me, and the look she gave me was strange, almost playful.

“We should probably be heading home,” I said, standing up and handing Bill our empty bowls. I wanted to end things before Sanders said anything else that could be taken the wrong way. “Thank you Bill, for the chili. It was really nice to meet all of you.”

“You boys feel free to come back any time you want,” said Marjorie, coming over to give me and Sanders a hug before sending us off. “We could always use a few hands around here until everyone else arrives.”

“I’ll definitely keep that in mind,” I said.

I walked over to Bill and then Franklin, and shook both of their hands after saying goodbye to Jolene. When I got to Sampson, he took both of his arms and placed them on my shoulders. I thought for a second he was going to pick me up and bring me face to face with him to show off his strength, and I was relieved when he didn’t because I was afraid he’d actually break my rib in the process. Instead, he bent over and said, “See you next time, tiny man.”

92 When Sanders started to lead the way back, I waved goodbye to Florence, trying not to make a big deal out of it or call attention to the awkwardness between us, but just as I was about to follow him, she called out to me.

“It was really nice meeting you with your clothes on,” she said, bringing laughter to the group again and causing my face to flare. “We should do it again sometime.”

I didn’t know what to say so I just turned and walked the other way without saying anything at all, carrying with me this strange dry warmth on my tongue that seeped down into my throat and drained out into my lungs.

93 CHAPTER VII

THROW BACK

We came back the next day expecting to tell Johnny about everything he missed, but he wasn’t having any of it. We probably knocked on his door for almost twenty minutes before he answered, and when he finally opened up he told us that his dad had him doing extra chores. It’d be another week before he’d be able to come out again. I could tell he was lying and thought about calling him out but I knew more than anyone that it wouldn’t have done any good. He was going to come around as he always did—on his own terms.

I considered heading home after Johnny shut us outside because without him it was just another lazy summer day, better spent huddled around the AC unit in my living room and flipping through the channels on the television while my parents were at work.

I looked to Sanders to see if he wanted to come back with me, but he was staring off into the field near the outer rim of the property with his jaw slack like he had just seen something his brain couldn’t process. I turned to find out what he was staring at and saw that it was Florence Mae Johnson, laying on her back and holding a book over her head the way someone would hold an umbrella to block out the sun. She seemed to be reading out loud because her smiling mouth was moving in a calculated, measured sort of way, pausing only when she turned a page. She seemed so delicate, lying in the grass like that,

I almost overlooked the guy lying next her.

94 I didn’t recognize him because the top half of his face was covered with a fedora.

He was dressed well enough for a wedding, wearing tight black corduroy pants and a matching vest over a plain white t-shirt. Every so often, he’d respond to whatever

Florence was reading him and he’d laugh. It was after one of these fits of laughter that

Florence sat up and leaned over him to remove the fedora from his face, putting it on and tilting her head back with what seemed like a mocking gesture.

“You think that’s her boyfriend?” Sanders asked me, grabbing my arm to get my attention. He leaned forward and squinted his eyes, like it would help him assess the situation better, but I had already been thinking along the same lines.

“Come on,” I said, “let’s go check it out.”

As we crossed the lawn, I was thinking of ways I could figure out their relationship without asking directly. Florence didn’t seem like the kind of person who would share intimate details about her life with just anyone, and I had already made it perfectly clear from the get-go that I had little regard for privacy. I looked at Sanders and motioned for him to keep his mouth shut, hoping it would be enough for him to follow my lead. If he blew it and jumped the gun the way he sometimes tended to do, I was going to let him have it the first chance we were alone.

By the time we got to them, they were sitting up and looking at us. The distance between them had grown significantly smaller than when we were on the other side of the property.

“Didn’t think I’d see you boys again so soon,” Florence said, leaning back on her elbows with a coy grin on her face. “You just keep coming back for more, don’t you?”

95 “You know me,” I said, digging my hands into my pockets and relaxing the muscles in my back so it looked like I was keeping my cool. “I’m always looking for trouble. Can’t get enough of it, really.”

I didn’t mean to imply that she was trouble, but that I was always getting involved in things I probably shouldn’t have been involved in. My parents were pretty liberal compared to Mother Sanders when it came to most things, but even they would have had a problem understanding my fascination with the temps, and more importantly, my fascination with Florence. As far as they were concerned, I had been at Sanders’ house the whole day before, and I was helping out Johnny with a project we were working on that afternoon. I told them we were building a tree fort, and even though my dad complained for a few minutes on how I needed to take his advice about Johnny seriously, he was all about the idea of building an escape pad in the middle of the woods and kept going on about how when he was my age his favorite memory was building a fort with his friends. I didn’t really regret lying about my whereabouts because it would buy me a lot of time and save me from having to explain myself or answer to anymore questions, but I did feel sorry for him that his favorite memory revolved around a fort that was torn down just as quickly as it had been put up.

I turned to face the guy sitting next to Florence, and thrust my hand out in front of me.

“Name’s Andrew,” I said, trying to err on the side of confidence by being more aggressive than usual.

He casually held out his hand, the way someone would if they saw a person they knew but hadn’t seen in a long time. When we shook hands, I was surprised by the

96 softness of his skin and the strength in his grip, expecting one or the other and not both, and it was everything I could do to not show the surprise on my face.

“I’m Forde,” he said, the twang in his voice thicker and more southern than

Florence Mae’s. “Full name is Forde Mason, but most people just call me FM for short.”

“You mean like the radio?” Sanders asked.

“Yeah, like the radio,” said Forde, chuckling. “I’m sure my old man thought it was funny when he picked it out, though I don’t really think it fits all that much since I’m always a bit out of tune.” He looked at Florence and smiled, and then her whole face lit up like they were referring to something we wouldn’t understand. He reached out and took the fedora back, placed it on his head and tilted it back so that his hair unfurled from underneath the hat in a wave of tangled curls.

“We actually heard about you,” I said. “Franklin mentioned you last night. Said you were pretty tired.”

“Now don’t go listening to anything my older brother tells you,” he said, lifting the front of his hat with a finger to give his eyes a little bit more room to see. “ He has a tendency to say that I’m the laziest in the bunch but the reality is that he just works too hard. People need to learn to kick back every now and then. Take the weight of the world off their shoulders and all.”

“If you guys are brothers, why do your accents sound so different from one another?” asked Sanders, pushing his glasses up higher on the bridge of his nose.

“You have a good ear on you. It’ll come in handy someday,” said Forde. “It’s a long story, but we’re all basically adopted. Freddie and I were in the same group home

97 and Franklin was working there part-time to pay the bills. Eventually, when we were old enough, we just decided to adopt each other. It’s the best damn family I ever had.”

Florence touched his arm with her hand as if to console him, and another moment passed between them as they looked at one another, half-smiling, so that I couldn’t tell if they felt like they were part of the same adopted family or if they looked at each other like lovers. The moment was brief, and when Florence looked back up at me I thought I recognized a subtle difference in her expression, like she had been made calmer by what

Forde had said.

“So what are y’all doing out this way anyhow?” she asked.

“Remember that friend I mentioned last night?” I said. “We came to see him but he isn’t up to hanging out. Thought maybe we’d see what you guys were doing instead.”

“Florence was just finishing up a story from one of her books,” said Forde. “She reads to me whenever she gets a chance.”

“I only read to you because you’d never read anything good if I didn’t,” said

Florence.

“That’s not true,” said Forde. “Sometimes I like to read what’s in the paper.”

“So you like to read a lot of bullshit, is that what you’re saying?” said Florence, biting her bottom lip as if to hold herself back from laughing at him.

“Don’t do that.”

“Do what?”

“Give me that look like you know better.”

“I do know better,” she said. “I know more than you.”

“You only know what you read in books. That’s not saying a whole lot.”

98 “It’s still more than you,” she said, finally allowing herself to laugh out loud.

“Boys, let me tell you something,” Forde said, turning back to face us. “You ain’t never gonna win an argument with a female. Girls like Florence are thick-headed and always one step ahead of the rest of us. You’re better off doing whatever they tell you because they’ll have the upper hand no matter what.”

“Who are you calling thick-headed?” asked Florence, slapping him in the arm.

“You’re the most stubborn girl I ever met,” he said.

Florence recoiled a few inches, and the tone in her voice suddenly shifted to that same tone she used with me when she kicked me out of her trailer.

“You might be a year older than me, Forde Mason, but I’ll have you know that I can put you out any time I want, so you better watch the way you’re talking to me.”

“What’re you reading?” I asked, seeing an opportunity to interrupt before the argument got out of hand. I was aware of a sudden heat behind Florence’s eyes when she looked at me, and when I looked at Forde I could tell that he was thankful I interrupted when I had.

“It’s a book of fairytales,” she said, after a few seconds pause.

“You mean like Snow White?”

“And others,” she said. “You ever heard of Grimm?”

“Not really,” I said, afraid to lie and find myself having to give an opinion on something I never heard about.

“Didn’t your parents ever read to you when you were a child?” asked Florence.

“How have you never heard of Grimm’s Fairytales?”

99 “My dad’s not one for reading unless it’s from the sports column, and my mom bought me the whole collection from Dr. Seuss. Other than that, I pretty much taught myself to read.”

Florence cocked her head as if she was trying to decide whether or not I was telling the truth. After a few seconds of studying, she asked, “What is it that you read?”

“Whatever I can get my hands on,” I said, not missing a beat. “I like travelogues a lot, or anything to do with being somewhere else, really.” I heard Sanders snicker and shut him up by glaring at him. I’m not sure if Florence bought what I said, though I admit

I stretched the truth a bit. I didn’t mind reading and whenever I sat down long enough to do it I would soak in all the information like a sponge, but reading for me usually amounted to flipping through copies of National Geographic or looking up vacation hotspots on Google Images. I did well enough in school and read what I had to when it was asked of me, but I just wasn’t the kind of kid who would check books out at the library and find a spot to read underneath a tree somewhere. Back then you’d still find me climbing trees or daydreaming in front of the computer at home, and there wasn’t much more to it than that.

“You fellas ever been to the drive-in next county over?” asked Forde, changing the subject before Florence could say anything about my tastes, or the lack thereof, in literature.

“You kidding me?” Sanders piped up, his voice cracking with excitement. “I used to go to the drive-in all the time. Haven’t been there in years.”

100 “We passed signs for it on the way into town,” said Florence, brushing off her legs as she stood up. “Thought it would be a good idea to get out of here for a little while, maybe do some exploring and see a movie or something.”

“I don’t know if you guys have anything planned but we’re heading there later if you’re looking for something to do,” said Forde, rising to his feet. I was surprised to find out that he was a few feet taller than I imagined, taller even than Florence. “I’ve got my truck and we can all just sit in the back.”

“I’m sure they’ve got somewhere better to be,” said Florence. She looked right at me when she said it, and it felt like another challenge, like she was dangling a ball of yarn in front of a cat’s face and waiting for it to jump. Luckily, I didn’t have to jump because

Sanders did it for me.

“We don’t really have any other plans, do we Andy? I would love to go,” he said, stomping his feet and looking at me for permission.

“Wouldn’t your crazy momma have a fit?” Florence asked.

“She’d be alright,” I said, coming quickly to his defense. “We could just tell her that he’s coming with me and my parents, and I’ll have my mom vouch for us in case she tries to check up on him later.”

“And what if they find out you’re hanging with circus folk,” Florence asked, crossing her arms in one last line of defense.

“Geeze, Flo, lighten up a bit,” said Forde, throwing his arm around her shoulders.

“There’s no harm in them tagging along. Besides, they know their way around better than either of us. We could probably use the help.” He winked at Sanders, which made him smile wider than I’d seen in a long time.

101 I couldn’t tell if Florence was happy with the final result, but she let it go when

Forde stepped in. I still couldn’t tell whether or not they were together, but it seemed like she might have been threatened by us being there, like she might have been looking forward to their time alone. He invited us along without really knowing either of us. For all he knew, we were just a couple of maniac kids willing and eager to do anything so long as we had some freedom, and while part of that was true, he never once seemed to hold it against us. In fact, he seemed just as eager to have us with them as I was as eager to find out more about their relationship, and I wondered if that was a sign that perhaps he wasn’t interested in her the way a boyfriend might be.

There were still a few hours left before the sun went down, so we had a little while yet to get ready before heading out. I didn’t want to seem like I was trying to impress anyone, but I also didn’t want to seem like I was just some other kid looking for attention. Given what Forde had been wearing in the middle of a field in the afternoon, I figured there was room to dress up for the occasion, expecting that he’d be just as well dressed if not more so when we went out. I told Sanders to grab his best outfit and went home in search for the same, strewing long-sleeved shirts and polos across my bedroom floor before finding a dark grey button up and a pair of slacks. I slicked back my hair and rolled up the sleeves so I’d look more casual, and I wrestled with the idea of wearing the clip-on bowtie my father bought me for my twelfth birthday. When he gave it to me, he told me that there came a day when every man needed to learn how to fix a tie but until that day I’d always have one ready-made. I had only worn it on a few occasions, all of which were for holiday related events. I didn’t want to put my cards out on the table all at

102 once. If another opportunity presented itself later, then I’d reconsider it, but until then it would have to wait, hidden on the top shelf in the back of my closet.

Before I left, I snuck into my parents’ room and found my dad’s bottle of Stetson cologne. I sprayed it on an old t-shirt I found laying around in his hamper and dabbed the sides of my neck in case it came off smelling too strong, then stuffed the shirt to the bottom of the pile so he wouldn’t notice what I had done.

I left a note for my mom explaining the situation on my way out, and made sure to apologize for not being around much for the third night in a row. I was sure my dad was having a fit. Knowing how they’d handled things in the past, I imagined my mom was going to get the brunt end of it. Given that my days of being jobless and free were quickly coming to a halt, I was sure she’d pull through and find some sort of excuse to let us go. And if Mother Sanders did check in, my mom would stall and say she was taking good care of us like she’d done in the past. She appreciated my friendship with Sanders and felt just as sorry for him as the rest of us, even if she actively tried not to say an ill thing against her. I always thought that was my mother’s biggest weakness—it didn’t matter what she believed, she always had to do the right thing and was always afraid of confrontation.

When I returned to the trailer park, I was glad to see Sanders had taken me seriously. He was wearing his Sunday’s best—black dress pants with matching shoes, and a white collared shirt. I was surprised that he wasn’t wearing a tie or his suit jacket, thinking he’d overshoot it. When I asked him why he didn’t go all out, he said that he only had one jacket and one tie, and if his mom saw them missing she’d know for sure that he hadn’t gone to the movies with my family, as if we weren’t the kind of people

103 who dressed up when we went out in public. It was just one example of why I hated the old bitch, and every day that passed was another day we all hoped she’d come up against some sort of karmic retribution for all the things she’d said and done.

The ride to the drive-in was rough. When Forde said he had a truck, I thought he meant he had an SUV and didn’t expect to be riding in the back of a rusted truck bed like two farm hands on the way to a job. Luckily, it was clear of any debris that might have otherwise messed up our outfits, but we had to brace ourselves from flying out every time Forde took a turn or hit a pothole. Sanders was clutching to the side with both hands staring out the back of the truck bed as if the tailgate would fly open. I held myself down with my left arm and pressed my back against the window on the passenger side so that I was wedged comfortably into the corner and sitting behind Florence.

Her right arm was hanging out of the window, sun-kissed and drifting slow like a rollercoaster in the wind. The window between us was open so that her hair was lifted up and floating out behind her. She smelled like oranges and sunscreen. When I closed my eyes I could see her sitting alone on the beach somewhere, holding her knees close to her chest and staring out at the ocean as the waves rolled in. She’d curl her toes into the sand.

Her arms and legs would be freckled with it.

I had never been to the ocean. The closest I had ever come to a beach was our town’s man-made lake, located just a mile or two out past the Sweet Shoppe. Lake Anna was nestled in a park surrounded by woods, which was nice enough, except the water was murky and the beach was always overcrowded. There was always a smell that lingered there too, like an old barn might smell after it was water logged for years and abandoned in the middle of the woods.

104 I opened my eyes and caught Florence looking back at me through the side mirror. She looked away, almost immediately, and then returned her gaze a few moments later to find me staring at her reflection. I raised my hand and smiled, tapping into my boyish charm so she wouldn’t be freaked out by my staring. To my surprise she returned the favor, smiling out of the corner of her mouth like she was reluctant to do so but did because she couldn’t help it.

I would have said something to her then if I knew she’d hear me over the sound of the folk band playing through the stereo speakers. Forde put the CD in as soon as we pulled out of the drive and I immediately recognized the band and the raw energy behind the lead singer’s raspy voice. I had heard a song or two of theirs on the radio a few years before when they first got big on the radio, and when it came time to ask for Christmas gifts that year I told my parents I wanted their album. I listened to it every day for months, stomping my feet and pounding my fists against my desk to the beat of the drums while I shouted out the words to their songs. It wasn’t often that I was moved by a band the way they moved me, and I could tell Forde felt it too. He was drumming his hands against the steering wheel and taking his eyes off the road to sing out the words above the music. Every now and then he’d look at us over his shoulder or turn to look at

Florence as if we were an audience voting on his performance, and the longer we drove the more we all started singing along so that even as we turned into the gravel lot and paid for our entrance into the drive-in, our open hands were coming down hard on the sides of the truck to the beat of a song.

Sanders was out of the truck as soon as it was parked in the back of the lot, and I followed him by jumping over the side. He ran a few feet ahead before coming to a stop

105 and looked up at the blank white screen looming over us. It looked like a long forgotten billboard. The dust kicked up by our arrival settled on our faces, adding to the air the taste of chalk.

“Is it just like you remembered it?” I asked, noticing even as I said it that the screen was weather-worn and battered around the edges. The surrounding trees seemed much larger than I remembered them, too.

When Sanders spoke, his voice was quiet, more brittle than usual.

“It hasn’t changed a bit,” he said.

I turned to look at him. He had removed his glasses, and was wiping at his face with the sleeve of his shirt.

“You used to come here a lot, didn’t you? With your dad,” I said, having trouble remembering the last time we had a serious conversation about his father.

He nodded his head.

“We used to come every week in the summer,” he said, putting his glasses back on and turning to face me. “He always wanted to come see the sci-fi shows. They were pretty bad,” he said, laughing, “but I didn’t mind them so much.”

“Do you miss him?”

“All the time.”

“What does your mom say about it?”

“She doesn’t like to talk about him,” he said, shaking his head. “She’ll change the subject whenever I bring him up, but she’ll still leave a plate out for him at dinner time.”

106 “I’m really sorry, man,” I said, unable to come up with something more substantial to say in the moment that would make him feel any better. I patted him on the shoulder, hoping that would be enough. “Your dad was really cool.”

Forde and Florence passed us as they walked towards the concessions building.

We followed them quietly across the parking lot, walking in and out of cars and holding our breaths whenever we walked underneath the lights where the gnats gathered.

The yellow sundress Florence wore was vintage and printed with bluebirds, so that when she moved they seemed to hover against her back. The material was thin enough that if she’d have turned at just the right angle I might have caught a shadow of her skin underneath the fabric, so I slowed to a half-step, hoping she’d find us lagging behind.

Forde was wearing the same outfit from earlier, but there was something youthful about him now that he was animated. It was as if he just woke up that morning in a body too big and was learning how to walk for the first time. Every movement was more exaggerated than the last, and when we reached the building and Forde held open the door for us, I found myself straightening my spine as I passed him, hoping to remove that exaggeration from my own step and appear more put together.

Sanders sprinted to a corner where other kids were gathered around ancient arcade games. I followed close behind Florence and Forde as they made their way towards the line. The air was filled with the clang and buzz of Pacman and pinball machines, and I was overwhelmed with the smell of buttered popcorn. Overcooked hotdogs rotated on grills behind the counter while employees wearing red and white paper hats walked back and forth between the soda fountain and the register. I wasn’t hungry, but asked for

107 nachos and a small Coke when Forde offered to pay for everything, thinking it would have been rude if I had said no. Forde ordered a large Coke for themselves and a large bag of popcorn to split between the four of us. When the girl behind the counter handed him his items, he walked off to join Sanders, leaving Florence and I waiting for mine.

My mind was racing in the few seconds that followed. I couldn’t decide if I should turn to her and say something or if I should just stay quiet and watch her out of the corner of my eye. She was leaning on her arms against the counter with her chest pressed out in front of her and her right leg kicked out behind. I could make out the curve of her breasts when she inhaled, and wondered if I could refrain from staring at them if we faced one another under the fluorescent lights. I found myself getting jealous of Forde’s relationship with her, and wondered how many times he might have seen her naked. If they weren’t together, it might have happened on accident in a number of ways; he might’ve walked into the bathroom unannounced, for instance, not knowing she was stepping into the shower and getting a glimpse of her lower back as she turned to pull the curtain behind her. If they were together, he would have seen her every night, the two of them clinging to each other under the sheets the way I thought lovers would.

“You’re wrong, you know,” said Florence. I turned to look at her to see who she was talking to, but she was just standing there at the counter watching Forde and Sanders on the other end of the room while they smacked the sides of a pinball machine and cheered each other on. There was no one else around.

“What did you say?” I asked, stuttering over my words a little because my mouth was dry.

108 “I said you’re wrong,” she said, turning her head and smiling. “Forde isn’t my boyfriend.”

I felt the blood leave my face as she said it, but resolved on trying to play it off.

“I never said he was.”

I turned back to face the counter and the girl behind the register handed me a small plastic tray of warm cheese and cracked tortilla chips. Before I could maneuver around Florence, she blocked my path with arms crossed.

“You thought it though,” she said. “That’s why you came with us, isn’t it? To find out if we were together.”

“If this is what you call that woman’s intuition you were talking about last night,

I’d say you’re pretty good at it,” I said, making sure to keep eye contact. I could feel the skin on the back of my hands getting clammy.

“I don’t know why you’re even thinking about it. I’m not really his type,” she said, plucking one of the chips out of my tray without asking and dipping it into the cheese.

“You mean he’s not interested?” I asked. The thought of him not finding her attractive had never crossed my mind.

“Does that surprise you?” she asked. I held the tray between us while she twirled the chip in her fingers so that any excess cheese could drip off. She blew on it before she put it in her mouth, and when she swallowed, she smiled, wiping her lips with the back of her hand.

“I guess I find that hard to believe,” I said, holding up the tray in case she wanted another. “Is he blind in one eye?”

109 “No, he ain’t blind,” she said, waving away the tray. “He’s just not interested.”

“In my experiences, you can still find someone attractive and not be interested,” I said, as if I had had the experiences to know what I was talking about.

“Well, what about you?” she asked, putting her hands on her hips and cocking her head to one side. “Do you think I’m pretty?”

I wasn’t given the opportunity to respond because the lights overhead started flashing to let everyone know the movie was about to start. Sanders ran up and grabbed my arm, pulling me towards the door before I could get anything out. I turned around to see Florence staring at me, with that same mischievous smile on her face. It was like she was trying to get under my skin, and for some reason I didn’t seem to mind it so much.

They sat in front of us with their legs hanging over the edge of the truck bed while

Sanders and I sat behind them. It was Retro Night, which meant they were showing a double-feature of movies that were popular during the 80s and 90s. They showed The

Goonies first, which had always been one of my favorites. The kids in that movie reminded me of my own friends, only instead of looking for treasure we were always looking for a way out. Sanders reminded me of Chunk, only he wasn’t fat or nearly as pathetic. When Chunk lifted his shirt up and did the truffle-shuffle, Sanders and I looked at each other and laughed because we both knew it wouldn’t be difficult for us to convince him to do something like that. The name of One-Eyed-Willie wasn’t lost on us either, and whenever they said it on screen Sanders and I cracked up laughing, causing

Florence and Forde to turn around and look at us like we were crazy.

I always hated when the ship left them on the beach at the end of the movie. Sure, they’d keep their homes and they’d be together once the ship sailed off—but what if they

110 had escaped with it and had their own adventures? Their families would have moved on, had lives of their own, and the kids could have carried on without rules, without supervision; hell, if they could come up against mobsters with guns and befriend a freak, they could face anything. I always thought it was shitty of them to just throw a bow on it like that because I couldn’t imagine back then going back to a boring life after getting a small taste of adventure. Before the end, I volunteered to get us a refill on the popcorn so

I wouldn’t have to sit through it. I thought maybe Florence would offer to come with me, but she just sat there as Forde dug some cash out of his pocket and thanked me for running the errand.

I wasn’t really in a hurry to get back. As much as I’d wished that Florence would have joined me on my trip to the concession stand, I was partly grateful for the time to myself. There was something about her that made me feel unhinged, like simply being around her caused my body to build up all this pressure until I felt like I was about to burst. I made sure to stop at the bathroom and take a piss before heading into the building to get our refills, and by the time I was back outside, the credits were rolling, and a parade of people were coming out of the darkness to follow in my footsteps. I leaned up against the building and waited patiently, thinking that Florence, Sanders, or maybe even

Forde would come looking for me, but when the credits stopped and they started showing old theater commercials from the 60s I figured it was about time I started heading back to the truck.

I was halfway across the lot when I heard a noise that sounded like someone was getting ready to hurl. I stopped and looked around to see if anyone was hunched over or hanging out of a car door. When I heard it again, it sounded deliberate, like someone who

111 grunts when they’re doing a bench-press or someone who had just finished running and felt good about being out of breath. The noise was coming from a black four-door sedan rocking back and forth just outside of one of the overhead lights. When I was a few feet away, I noticed the back windows had been rolled halfway down, and through them, I saw a man’s pimpled white ass clenching and unclenching in the dim light reflected off of the theater screen.

He was breathing heavily, grunting every time he thrust into the person underneath him. His shirt was wet and white, coiled around the back of his neck so that the muscles in his back were exposed. There were a number of scratches along the surface of his skin leading to a pair of hands that held tightly to the folds of fat above his crack. His body was framed by a pair of knees, and aside from the hands that held him, there was nothing else I could see of the other person.

Unless you counted the times Johnny and I jacked off to the videos we stole from his father’s porn stash and the occasional browsing I had done alone on the internet, I had never seen two people have sex before that moment. I had had very little experience and was still a virgin, but I felt like I had seen enough to know the difference between love and fucking. Johnny and I were watching a scene once where a male teacher kept a female student after class so they could have sex between periods, and Johnny yelled out,

“Look at him fuck her like she’s gonna be saved by the bell!” I remember how hard we laughed. I thought of it then as I was eating popcorn and watching that random guy nail some girl in the backseat of his car, and thought it was a perfect opportunity to pull out my cell phone and start recording a video. I wanted to show Johnny what I had seen, but

112 more importantly, I wanted to remember that moment and the sounds that they made while their whole car rumbled around them.

I had only been recording for a minute or so when a hand came out of the dark and grabbed me by the ear, pulling me away from the car and the people inside of it and causing me to drop the bag of popcorn in the process. I had maybe been dragged a good ten feet before I realized that the hand that caught me belonged to Mother Sanders and I immediately began to panic, plunging my phone into my pocket as deep as it would go.

When she didn’t ask to see it but demanded that I take her to her son instead, I was relieved because I had no idea how I might’ve explained what I was doing. She would’ve jumped at the opportunity to take the video straight to my parents as proof for being a terrible influence on her son, and for that reason alone I was grateful she hadn’t noticed.

Her hair was up in curls and she was holding tight with one hand to the front of a raincoat she had thrown over a pink robe. Had she not been clutching my ear and leading me through the parking lot like a dog on a leash, I would have thought she was something my mind made up to play tricks on me because I never would have imagined seeing her there let alone in the state that she was in. When we were only a row or two down from where Forde’s truck was parked, she squeezed my ear so hard it felt like she was punching a hole through the lobe and I yelped in pain.

“Where is my son?” she said again, behind clenched teeth.

“Let me go,” I shouted, just barely managing to wrench myself away from her.

My ear was throbbing, and when I raised my hand to it I was surprised that there hadn’t been any blood. “You touch me again and I’ll make sure everyone in town knows about it,” I said. I was just about to turn and run towards the truck in the hopes that I could warn

113 Sanders, but his mom grabbed me by the collar of my shirt and pulled me back within inches of her face.

“You think you’re so clever threatening me. Do you have any idea how frightened

I was when I called your house and your father said that my son wasn’t there?” she asked.

Spittle flew from her lips as she spoke so that my face was wet, and though I tried again to struggle out of her hold, she held me firmly in my place. “I was worried sick,” she said, “driving all over town and then your mother called me to tell me that he was here with you. Now I’ve been marching through this parking lot for twenty minutes, and I want to see my son right now or so help me God I will tear you limb from—”

“Mom, let him go,” Sanders shouted. He was running towards us with Forde and

Florence flanking him on either side. People were starting to get out of their cars, and when Mother Sanders looked up and noticed the attention she had drawn to herself she let go of me and smoothed out the front of my shirt as best she could before walking swiftly towards her son and clutching him to her chest.

“You are in so much trouble,” she said, kissing him on the forehead and simultaneously shaking him by the shoulders. “Who’s idea was it to come here? Was it yours? Was it your friend’s? Why would you lie about where you were?”

“Because you never would have let me come here if I told you where I was going,” Sanders yelled. She pulled her hands into her chest and let him go like he had stabbed her with a knife. “It was my idea,” he said. “I wanted to come. Leave everyone else out of it.”

114 I had never seen him openly talk back to his mother before. The look on her face was one of absolute horror, like she no longer recognized him and was looking at an imposter pretending to be her son.

“Is everything alright?” asked Florence, stepping forward out of the dark to stand by my side. Forde had his hands on her shoulders for support. When Mother Sanders looked up to see who was standing beside me, I could tell she was counting the steps it would take for her to close the gap between our side and hers, that for a moment she was thinking about lunging at any one of us or all of us at the same time for having been there in opposition of all the things she stood for.

Her whole demeanor changed then. She straightened up like a steel rod had been shoved through the top of her spine, and her eyes narrowed, her lips tightened. Instead of making further accusations or acknowledging that her son had been in the presence of the temps, she drew in a deep breath and spit on the ground in front of her. If I hadn’t known any better I would have thought she had cast some kind of curse on all of our heads in that moment.

Mother Sanders looked down at her son and said, “We’re going home,” before turning away slowly towards the front of the parking lot. “I’ll be waiting for you in the car,” she said over her turned shoulder. “You have two minutes to say goodbye to your friend. We’ll pick up your bike on the way home.”

When she was out of sight, Sanders turned around and unexpectedly gave Forde a hug, and then did the same to Florence. When they were done saying their goodbyes and making sure he was okay to leave, they went back to the truck and Sanders and I stood there for a moment in silence, going over what had just happened in our heads.

115 “I’m really sorry,” he said. “She didn’t hurt you did she?”

“No, I’m fine,” I lied. “Are you okay?”

“I’ll be alright,” he said, though the sound of his voice betrayed him. He gave me a hug and started to walk away, but then stopped and turned around again. “Earlier, you asked me what my mom thought about my dad being gone,” he said. “To be honest, sometimes I think she’s a little scared.”

“Scared of what?” I asked.

He lowered his head as he shuffled his feet on the ground.

“I think she’s worried,” he said, “that I’m going to turn into one of those kids who shoot up a school and then kill themselves because they feel bad about it afterwards.”

“Jesus, Sanders. Why the fuck would you think something like that?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I hear her at night sometimes, praying in her room before she goes to bed. Every night it’s the same thing; she tells God to forgive my dad for leaving her alone with me, and she asks God to make sure I turn out alright.”

“But you’re fine, man,” I said. “Sure, you’re a little odd, but you’re one of the brightest kids I know. I wouldn’t hang out with you if you weren’t.”

“Thanks, I guess,” he said, putting his hands in the pockets of his dress pants and looking up at me. “But what about Johnny? Why do we hang out with him?”

“We’ve been over this.”

“Have we? Because last time I checked, my mom’s afraid I’ll end up just like him, or worse. And your dad’s the same way,” he said.

116 “My dad has nothing to do with this,” I said, feeling my hands inadvertently tighten into fists at my side. “Johnny’s a good guy. You know it or you wouldn’t want to hang out with him just as much as I do.”

“Maybe you’re right, but everyone else is afraid of him,” he said. “You saw my mom tonight, and I know how it looks; I know what you think. But that wasn’t her being crazy. That was her being scared, and maybe she oughta be.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I just stood there, rubbing my throat and watching as he sulked back to where his mom was parked out front.

We didn’t stay for the second film. When I got back to the truck Forde already had it running, and they were sitting in the car waiting for me. The ride home was a silent one. Forde left the radio off because he said he liked the way everything came alive at night, but I wasn’t much in the mood to listen to music anyway. The sounds of crickets and the occasional howling of a yard dog carried us all the way home, and the brake lights lit up the road behind us with a red glow just before everything disappeared into darkness.

When we pulled into the trailer park my eyes were heavy and I said my goodbyes without thinking too much about them. Just before I was about to hit the end of the driveway on my bike, Florence came running down the hill calling my name.

“Listen,” she said, a little short of breath. “I just wanted to tell you that what you did back there, putting yourself in harms way and standing up to that woman like that—it was pretty brave.”

If there had been enough light out there in the dark, she would have seen the depth to which my face turned several shades of red. Before I could say anything in

117 return, before I could even argue against her observation or repay her with some kind of compliment, she pushed a piece of paper into my hand.

“It’s my number,” she said, walking backwards away from me as if she was afraid

I’d try to give it back to her. “You can text me if you want.”

I watched her turn around and walk back up the hill, and when she was finally out of sight I put the piece of paper into my pocket and rode home as fast as I could.

When I arrived, I found my dad asleep on the couch, a newspaper draped over his chest like a bib. He had fallen asleep with the television on. The sound was muted, and no other lights were on in the house except the hallway light upstairs. I crept past him, and checked in on my mother. She was sitting up in bed reading a book.

“You have fun tonight?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said, lingering for a moment in the doorway. “What about you?”

“It’s been quiet,” she said, closing the book and setting it on the nightstand beside the lamp. “Is your father still asleep downstairs?”

I nodded my head. She took off her glasses and set them gently on the book.

“I guess I should get some sleep,” she said, before saying goodnight and turning off the lamp.

I left her door cracked just the way she liked it, and then went to my room and closed my door behind me. I took the piece of paper Florence gave me out of my pocket and took off my clothes, leaving them in the middle of the floor before crawling into bed.

I laid still for a while, listening to the crickets outside my window, and staring at that piece of paper. Her handwriting wasn’t as elegant as I thought it’d be, and looked more like chicken scratch than anything I’d ever seen before. For a while I wrestled with

118 whether or not I should send her a goodnight message, but decided that it would be best to leave it until the morning., putting the piece of paper on my nightstand underneath my phone. When I was sure I was the only one still awake in the house, I put my hands between my legs and started jacking off.

I closed my eyes and thought of Florence. I imagined that we were lying in the back of a car somewhere while the whole world was vibrating. When I came I bit down hard on my lip and fell asleep with the taste of blood in my mouth. I didn’t dream a single dream that night.

119 CHAPTER VIII

THE CALM BEFORE THE STORM

While everyone slept in their homes, I rode past them unnoticed. The only sound was the steady rhythm of my breath and the slow drag of my tires along the concrete. My town was more beautiful at this hour, just before the sun came up. I would pretend that I was the only boy left alive in a world full of abandoned houses, littering yards with newspapers no one would ever read. My route would carry me through my neighborhood and along all the side streets until I passed through the square downtown and came up against the Rich North. I would stand there, after I threw out my last paper, and watch as everyone behind me started to wake up and everyone before me held on to their pillows a while longer. I would feel like I was on the brink of something huge and unattainable and stand there until the sun fell across my face. Then I would ride back the way I came, more awake and ready for anything.

I had been doing this for almost two weeks, my dad coming home with the papers for my first delivery a couple of days after the night at the drive-in. I was pissed off in the beginning. He would come into my room at 5 a.m. unannounced and turn on the light, sending me jumping out of bed in a state of shock. If I continued to hide under the covers he would yank the comforter off of my bed and I would be forced to move. Having to get up that early had never been in my original plans for the summer, but after a few days I

120 realized that it wasn’t so bad. When it came down to it, I would have the whole rest of the day ahead of me.

I guess it also helped that Florence Mae Johnson would text me every morning, usually with a quote from a poem or a book she was reading. My favorite was from an

Allen Ginsberg poem.

“We’re not our skin of grime, we’re not our dread bleak dusty imageless locomotive,” she wrote. “We’re all golden sunflowers inside, blessed by our own seed & hairy naked accomplishment-bodies growing into mad black formal sunflowers in the sunset.” It reminded me of home, and of all the reasons why I looked forward to leaving it behind some day.

We had been texting a lot, actually, our conversations revolving mostly around lines and lyrics, exchanging songs, and talking about what the rest of the temps were doing throughout the day. There had been a few times when she’d mention a project that

Forde and his brothers were working on and I would volunteer to help them out.

While the incident at the drive-in left us with a few minor problems, most of them handled themselves. Mother Sanders had enforced restricted hours during which Sanders was allowed to hang out, but she started showing more support for our friendship, probably more then than she ever had before she grabbed me by the throat. It was sort of her act of goodwill, as Sanders put it. She had felt bad about the way she treated me, and wanted me to know that she liked the fact her son had a good role model in his life. Even though she was adamantly against us spending time with the temps, she couldn’t exactly keep it from happening. We saw them as often as we could and helped out wherever we were needed.

121 There was a day or two where Sanders and I helped the temps set up horse barns in the park near Lake Anna where the festival would take place. Even though Sampson could have done a majority of the work himself by carrying all the supplies from Forde’s truck in merely a trip or two, they seemed like they wanted to have us around. There was even an afternoon when I sat and watched a couple of the younger kids while their caretaker, a middle-aged woman named Rose, traveled into town with Bill to get some supplies from the hardware store. It resulted in a game of hide and seek where I was convinced that I had lost a four-year-old, only to find out after an hour of searching that he had fallen asleep underneath one of the trailers.

More of the temps were moving in each day, so that it wasn’t just the main attractions living in the trailer park anymore but food vendors and ride operators. The park near Lake Anna was beginning to look more like a carnival and less like a hodgepodge of machine parts and construction materials. Rides were being installed and tested; tents were being erected. When the Ferris wheel was put up nearly everyone in town came to see it lit up for the first time. You could even see the glow of it against the night sky from any point in town. People were getting excited the closer we got to the start of the festival, but I grew uncomfortable when I realized it was only a week away. I was getting used to having the temps around, used to being someone other people needed to have around. Hell, I was still getting used to the idea of Florence Mae Johnson and I couldn’t get her out of my head if I tried.

Whenever I was alone I’d catch myself saying her name out loud. I liked the sound of it, the way Florence came off of my tongue and how my lips puckered when I hit the ‘O’ and the ‘R’. I liked the way Florence rolled into Mae and then jumped off into

122 Johnson like it was being ejected from my mouth so that I couldn’t just limit myself to calling her by her first name. When I tried, it felt like I was cutting her short, like the removal of the other parts was a disgrace to her whole. These feelings for Florence Mae

Johnson were unexpected and nothing like I had ever experienced before, and though our conversations over text messages weren’t telling in the way I had hoped they’d be, there was something about the way she addressed me that gave me the idea she thought of me as something more than a kid, something substantial and real. It was like we were puppets wound up in the same invisible string. I couldn’t make sense of it, but there was something different about her.

There had been a couple of times when Sanders and I sat at Florence Mae

Johnson’s kitchen table playing cards with her and Forde. He taught us how to play poker and in exchange we taught them euchre. We would go back and forth, using bottle caps as chips. As hard as we fought to beat them, Forde and Florence always came out as winners in the end. There were a few times I caught her staring at me from across the table, and on the few occasions we were left alone I was unable to really say much of anything. She still made me nervous in the way that I didn’t want to say the wrong thing or come off as someone who wasn’t worthy of her attention. She always seemed to be studying me, though, like someone would study an ant underneath a magnifying glass right before it popped. I took the fact that she continued to message me everyday as a sign that she was still curious and perhaps slightly interested, though what she was interested in remains to be clear.

Several hours after I got home from running my route, she sent me a message asking if I wanted to run some errands with her in the afternoon while Forde was

123 finishing up work down at the park. I had no idea what sort of errands she had in mind, but I went because it was going to be the first time the two of us were significantly alone.

When I arrived at the trailer park, however, Johnny was sitting on his front step waiting for me.

I hadn’t really seen him since he shut himself up in his trailer after the rock fight.

I had tried several times since to talk to him, or at least catch him up on everything that was happening without him, but every time I had tried he’d shirk it off like he had been too busy to hear anything I had to say. So when I saw him sitting there, I was surprised and extremely grateful. His eye was no longer swollen and he was no longer ambling around like he had been. Instead, he was more erect and decisive in the way he moved, and when he stood up to greet me it was like we had never spent any time away from each other.

“I was thinking of heading to the lake before it gets too hot,” he said, picking up his bike which was lying in the grass a few feet away. He turned around and smiled at me over his shoulder. “You coming?” he asked.

I turned to look towards Florence Mae Johnson’s trailer, but she hadn’t come outside and there was no sign of her noticing I had arrived. Before I could get a chance to send her a message that we would have to change our plans, Johnny took off and I followed, not wanting to miss the opportunity to have him around while I still had it.

Even though we were only in the first few weeks of June, it was unbearably hot, even for Ohio. It was the kind of heat that stuck to your skin like a wet film, and by the middle of the afternoon we had to wring the sweat out of our t-shirts so that they wouldn’t wear us down. The cutoffs I was wearing felt like scales against my skin, and

124 while we rode our bikes to the lake I was silently cursing my mother for donating so many of my clothes to Goodwill after I started showing signs of growing out of them. It would be the end of summer before she’d take me to the store again to stock up on summer clothing after they went on sale, but by that time it’d be pointless. Ohio summers always ended sooner than anyone wanted them to.

When we arrived at the lake, we veered away from the main park and took the side road that led down to the beach. As we were passing by, I waved at Forde, who was in the process of lifting up one side of large tent while Franklin and Freddie struggled on the other side. He waved back, and Johnny asked who he was.

“Forde’s an acrobat,” I said. “He’s in the Band of Juggling Men. Sanders and I went with him and Florence to the movies a couple of weeks ago.”

“You still have it out for that girl?” he asked, slowing down so he could ride beside me.

“She’s alright,” I said, laughing. “She’s great when she isn’t giving me shit.”

“Don’t lie, man,” he said. “You think she’s hot. Even when she’s yelling at you.”

He reached out and pushed me with his hand so that I veered off the road and back again.

“Yeah, whatever,” I said, shrugging my shoulders and trying to downplay my attraction. “I don’t get it. She’s really weird, you know?”

“Of course she’s weird. She’s a carney. She’s probably a necrophiliac, too.”

“What makes you say that?”

“She seemed like she wanted you dead the day she was yelling at you. If there’s any hope in you fucking her, she’ll probably have to kill you first,” he said, standing up

125 and lifting his leg over his seat so that he was standing on one peddle. He was laughing so hard I thought he was going to fall off his bike, but he kept coasting until he came to a slow stop in front of the bike racks at the edge of the beach.

“You’re an asshole,” I said, pulling up beside him and getting on my knees to put in the combination for my bike lock.

It was a Saturday, so the beach was packed with all kinds of people. The lifeguard had just blown his whistle so that an army of kids were running in from the shallow water while their parents watched them, probably horrified. Past them the red buoys bobbed in the water, a little closer to the shore than necessary.

“You honestly don’t think she’s attractive?” I asked, as I wrapped the lock around the main frame of my bike and weaved it around the metal bars of the rack.

“She’s definitely hot but she’s not my type,” said Johnny, slapping his bike seat and standing up tall. “I’m just saying you don’t have a chance.”

“I have a better chance than you.”

I stood up and slugged him in the arm, and we walked together along the edge of the parking lot until we reached an old bike trail that ran into the woods. We followed it for a while, and then veered off the path to the left in search of the old stone dock. We had been there several times before, having found it by accident one summer. Not many people knew about it, and if they had we never ran into anyone else while we were there in the past. I guess it had once been used as an old fishing dock, a halfway point across the lake for people to anchor and rest. The lake itself wasn’t that large, but the dock was far enough from the shore that it was isolated and kept hidden by the overgrowth of trees.

It was one of our best kept secrets.

126 As we walked through the woods I told him about the details of everything that had happened at the drive-in, about Mother Sanders showing up and how she interrupted the video I tried to take of the couple in the back of their car. He wasn’t as disappointed as I thought he’d be but made sure to give me the advice that if I ever tried something like that again I’d need to take it from a better angle. I then told him all about the rest of the temps, about all the places they said they’ve been, about Sampson’s eating habits and about Bill’s chili. When I told him about Marjorie and Jolene, he asked if they were hotter than Florence.

“You’d be all over Jolene,” I said.

“You said they were twins. Why would I pick one and not have the other?”

“Because Jolene’s got a mouth on her,” I said. “Marjorie couldn’t keep up with you if she tried.”

“You know me so well,” he said, throwing an arm around my shoulder and bringing me close to him while he dug his knuckles into my head with his other hand. I pushed him off of me and started to run through the woods in the direction of the dock.

By the time we reached it, we were covered in dirt we kicked up along the way.

Johnny removed his shirt to wipe off the sweat on his face. There were streaks of mud on his cheeks and across his forehead when he was done, but I decided not to bring it to his attention. I took off my shirt the same way, and followed him towards the water’s edge. The dock had broken up over time so that there were large gaps in the concrete the farther down we walked, forcing us to hop from one slab to another. It was wide enough for the two of us to be next to each other, and we stood there half-naked and silent at the

127 edge of the final break, looking out over the last small section of concrete in front of us and skipping rocks along the surface of the lake for what felt like a long time.

We couldn’t see the beach from where we were standing but we could still hear all of the people underneath the steady sound of crickets and cicadas. Sometimes a straggler would swim out past the buoys and we’d catch a glimpse of them before they had to swim back to the shrill sound of the lifeguard’s whistle. Occasionally, a plane would fly overhead and we’d watch as their vapor trails drew lines in the sky above. It was as if we were far removed from everyone else.

Out of the corner of my eye I could see Johnny weighing every stone in his hand before tossing it out into the lake. Every time he picked up a new stone, he threw it harder than the one before it, grunting every time they left his hand, so that by the end he was just throwing rocks into the lake. I noticed a heaviness in the air around us and thought maybe he was thinking about what had happened with Jack.

I hadn’t seen Jack since the fight, but word had travelled around that Brian broke his nose after falling off of his bike while he was riding downhill. I wasn’t surprised that they had lied about it, though they probably could have come up with something better.

Had they told the truth to their parents, our punishment for what we had done would have been in the hands of the parents and they wouldn’t have been able to exact the kind of revenge we deserved. We all knew it would only be a matter of time before we’d hear from them again. I wasn’t going to worry about it, though. Jack was an inbred, no matter how much we deserved to pay for what we did. He’d try to strike at us when we least expected and he’d find a way to mess it up somehow, that I was sure of. When I told

Johnny what was going around he didn’t seem surprised either. I could tell it was

128 something that still weighed on him, though, and decided not to push the issue in case it’d cause him to retreat back into his trailer.

“Where’s Sanders?” asked Johnny after a few moments of silence.

“He said his mom needed his help with something down at the church. He’ll meet up with us later.”

“She’s probably got him cleaning out the bathrooms again. Last time she had him scrubbing tiles with a toothbrush, remember?” he asked as he threw another stone into the lake, landing it farther out than all the rest.

“You know she already started hanging up those flyers of hers around town?” I asked, picking up another rock. “She’s got them hanging on every telephone pole and mailbox from the one side of town to the other.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I wish. She even has some of the librarians passing them out this year. Sanders and I caught wind of it and tried stealing as many of them as we could but we got kicked out before we could make a run for it.”

“You think she’ll be passing them out in front of the festival like she did last year?”

“No doubt,” I said. “If she doesn’t sneak into the festival and set some of the tents on fire, she’ll at least be out front protesting the damn thing.”

“We should probably do something about it, unless of course you’re afraid she’ll choke you out again,” said Johnny, hitting the back of his hand against the front of my chest to drive the joke home.

129 “Real funny,” I said. “You should have been there. We’ve been taking down the flyers whenever we see them, and we’ve been burning them at night up at the trailer park.

Every time we turn around though, there’s more of them. Doesn’t look like she’s really going to give up until they’re gone.”

“I’m not surprised,” said Johnny, tossing one last stone before turning around and lying down on the concrete. His legs hung over the edge so that his feet were submerged in the water and he folded his arms behind his head. I did the same and was surprised to find that the stone was so cold against my back while everything else was so hot. Since there wasn’t a whole lot of space for the two of us to lay side by side, I let my arm rest on top of his and waited for him to move. We settled into a brief silence when he didn’t and

I found it hard to lay still. Every time I made the slightest movement it was like pushing and pulling two fingers apart that had been glued together. It was automatic, this sticking and unsticking of arms. I felt swollen from sweating so much.

“You believe in all that bullshit about the meek inheriting the earth?”

The question came out of nowhere, and for it to come from Johnny was a big surprise. He wasn’t really religious, at least not in the way that Sanders’ family was religious. Johnny and I had talked about it before and we both decided that we certainly believed in something, though what that something was neither of us knew or cared to know. Life always went on the way we thought it was meant to, and there wasn’t much of a reason to make it more complicated than that.

I looked at him when he asked the question and felt a certain heaviness in the air between us. I was surprised by how calm he appeared to be. He was like that, enraged one second and peaceful the next. There was no telling how he would react in any given

130 situation. I had known him for a long time and could tell when he was feeling one way or another, but there were moments like this when I’d find myself surprised by a sudden switch in character. His mouth was open and his eyes were closed. A slight breeze passed over us and filtered through a few strands of his hair so that they were lifted lazily off of his forehead. Once it passed, his hair settled down, still wet and limp. I turned on my side and propped myself up on my elbow so I could see him more clearly, lifting my legs out of the water and letting them hang over the edge.

“Where’s this coming from?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I guess it’s been on my mind.”

“Does this have to do with what happened with Jack?”

“I don’t know,” he said. He raised his arm that was closest to me without opening his eyes and traced his fingers along the surface of his chest. Another breeze came through as they trailed the length of his abdomen and came to rest underneath the lip of his shorts. I caught sight of his pubic hair and looked away, shivering from a sudden drop in temperature. The lower half of my legs started tingling as if they were about to fall asleep and I pulled them up towards me so I was in a sort of fetal position with my knees resting against his side.

“It’s all sorts of messed up don’t you think? If it’s true, I mean,” said Johnny,

“about the meek outlasting the rest of us.”

“Yeah,” I said, really thinking about it for a second. “But what do you think happens to the rest of us? The ones that don’t inherit anything?”

“We burn,” he said. “At least that’s what Mother Sanders would tell you. If she had it her way she’d watch from the front row, maybe even pour the gasoline and light

131 the match with her bare hands.” He smiled and turned his neck so that the back of his head was facing me, and he slipped the fingers of his other hand inside the front of his shorts so that his thumbs were hooked on the outside like lazy hands in side pockets. I felt a tightening in my chest and sat up, pulling in my knees so there was a little distance between us. A small itch was building in the lower half of my spine. I wasn’t sure where to look or what to focus on, so I kept staring at his thumbs as he tapped them along the line where his shorts fell across the lower part of his hip bones. “My dad would do it, too, you know,” he continued. “He says we’re all going to burn eventually. Almost like he’s waiting for it. Like he’s counting on it or something.”

“I wouldn’t count on either of them, if you ask me.”

“Well that’s how the world’s supposed to end, ain’t it? Hellfire and brimstone.”

“I don’t know about any of that,” I said. “If the world’s gonna end, I’d like to kill a few zombies first.”

“Maybe if we’re lucky, Jack and his gang will get eaten along with the rest of this shit-hole town,” he said, with a smile on his face as he turned to look at me. “You and I could take them out together.”

“If Sheriff Cole didn’t make it, we could break into the police station,” I said.

“Or take it from him anyhow.”

“You think they’d have enough ammo in there to last us?”

“We wouldn’t have to rely on the police station for ammo,” he said, turning back to face me. “You know everyone in this town has a handgun or a shotgun hidden underneath a floorboard somewhere.”

“Your parents have a gun?” I asked. He had never mentioned it before.

132 “It’s my dad’s,” he said. “He keeps a pistol in the closet behind all the towels.”

I never noticed it but we hardly ever went inside unless his father wasn’t home or he was outside working, though I’m not sure what he did qualified as work. He always had a wheelbarrow he was pushing around, running back and forth acting like he had something to carry, and when he wasn’t doing that, he’d stand in front of the open hood of his truck with a cigarette in one hand and a beer in the other, staring at it as if he was waiting for it to start itself. In all the time I knew Johnny I hadn’t a clue if the damned thing had anything wrong with it. I asked him once what his father was trying to fix but he just looked at me like I had crossed a line I didn’t know was there and said something about how it calmed his father down and kept him focused. Whether it was true or not, I knew his father wasn’t around nearly as much as he had hoped; and when he was, it just ended up like the night he hit Johnny across the face. I hated his dad just as much as I hated Jack or Lauren, and all for the same reason.

My phone vibrated in my pocket, and when I pulled it out to look at it I was surprised to find that it was Florence messaging me, asking where I was.

“Who is it?” asked Johnny.

“It’s nothing,” I said, shutting the phone without responding and putting it a few feet away underneath my shirt. “My dad’s been up my ass lately ever since I started delivering papers. It’s like he wants to use it as an excuse to spend time with me or something. He wakes me up every morning and then sits at the kitchen table drinking his coffee and flipping through the pages. Whenever I come downstairs he’s got them all ready for me, and he always asks me if I want him to make me breakfast before I head out.”

133 “What do you say?”

“I tell him I’m not hungry and then I grab my papers and leave,” I said. “What am

I supposed to say?”

“Have the man make you breakfast,” Johnny said with a laugh.

“So he can find more reasons to bother me?” I said. “No thank you. I’d rather starve.”

“You won’t make it very far if the world ends and you’re nothing but bones,

Andrew,” said Johnny, looking up into the sky above us.

Florence Mae Johnson crept back into my mind then, and I wondered what role she would play when the world was over. She would be hard and focused, motivated from being the only one left alive in her group. I imagined that it would be hard to convince her to join us since she would most likely establish her own colony with her own set of rules. I couldn’t actually see Johnny going along with the idea of her joining us anyway, given his reaction to her being a carney. No, Florence Mae Johnson and I would end up in opposing camps, fighting each other over food and space. We’d take over the bank and the police station and she’d take over the Dairy Mart and the library as a hoarder of information and protector of supplies. We’d have to convince her to trade with us so we wouldn’t run out of food and she’d eventually give in because she’d need the extra ammunition. After fighting against the gruesome dead and fighting against each other, it would come down to the three of us and I’d have to make a decision: Stay with my faithful friend and rewrite our history, or join Florence Mae Johnson in an effort to protect the past and carry on. The way I saw it, the way I imagined it, there would be great loss on either side and I’d end up selling my soul just to stay in the middle.

134 “Did I ever tell you the story about how my folks met?” asked Johnny.

“I don’t think so,” I said, struggling to recall such a memory and surprised when I couldn’t find it. I thought a simple fact like that would be something I had known about a boy I called my best friend.

“They always told me they met on the job. Said my mom’s car broke down and my dad fixed it for her. Love at first sight and all that horseshit.” Johnny paused, pulled his hands out of his shorts, and pushed himself up by the forearms to look at me. “A few years back my mom would lock herself in the bathroom every Sunday afternoon while my dad took a nap. She always fed me some line about how she needed her privacy, but then I’d hear her talking on the cordless phone. Whenever I asked about who she was talking to, she’d say she was catching up with my aunt. Couldn’t even take a piss; I’d have to go out back and piss in the weeds. Anyway, I was curious enough one afternoon to pick up the other line in our kitchen and find out what was so important that they had to talk every Sunday. She wasn’t even speaking to my aunt. She was talking to some troll

I didn’t recognize. I guess she had been in love with him and she ended up leaving him for my dad. She’d tell him about how much she missed him though, how much she wanted to go back. I’d listen in on their conversations every week, wondering what else she would say. It was always the same thing, until one afternoon when she told him she made a mistake, that she was thinking about leaving us.”

“She never left, though,” I said. He was biting his lip and looking off into the air above my right shoulder. It was painful to see him glazed over like that, as if he hadn’t planned on saying any of those things and only now regretted it when it was laid out

135 between us. It was difficult, fighting the urge to reach out and touch him, show some sort of compassion.

“No, she never left,” he said. “The other guy told her he didn’t like the idea, said he was moving on and she should too. He hung up on her and stopped answering the phone after that, and after a few weeks she stopped trying to call him back. I don’t think my dad even knew what was going on and I sure as hell wasn’t going to be the one to tell him. But I guess my point is that there’s some truth behind every single one of the stories you hear, Andrew. Jack was right, and so is Mrs. Sanders and everyone else. My mother was a whore.”

He had a wildness in his eyes when he finished, and I wasn’t sure whether I should agree with him or if I should defend his mother’s honor. I felt like there must have been some sort of consolation that I could have given him but it didn’t seem like he wanted any. It was like saying it out loud had been consolation enough, like he had to say it so he could find a way to let it go. I only met his mother a few times because she was always away on business, but the few times I met her, she had always been kind to me.

What I knew of his parents and of his past was little. The only thing he ever kept to himself was what had happened in his life before we met, when both of us were too young to know any better. I only knew this Johnny, the version that was already hardened and dark, the version that was immediately cold when provoked.

“You’re probably right not to, you know, count on anyone,” he said as he stood up. “Everyone’s off their fucking rocker. Everyone except us, anyway.”

136 “You think that’s true?” I asked, thinking about what Sanders had said about his mom, about how she wasn’t crazy but just concerned. “You think everyone’s crazy except us?”

“Yeah, don’t you?” He ran and jumped onto the final, solitary section of the pier.

The sun was directly behind him so that his face was darkened when he turned towards me, his matted hair painted gold in the light.

“Sometimes I feel like you and I are the only normal ones,” he said.

There was a moment when we just stared at one another in silence. When he spoke next, the tone in his voice changed so that it was soft and low.

“You know I didn’t mean to do it, right?”

“Do what?”

“I didn’t mean to hit Brian the way that I did. I didn’t mean to hit him at all. It just sort of happened.”

“Yeah, I know,” I said, standing up to face him. “Sometimes things just happen. It wasn’t your fault.”

“It was my fault,” he said,” and sometimes things do happen but that was a mistake. I wanted to hit Jack. I just ran up there without thinking and then it was Brian underneath me and Brian’s face I was hitting, and before I knew it there was blood everywhere and I couldn’t stop.” He paused and ran both of his hands through his hair.

“I just need you to know that that wasn’t me out there,” he said.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “You weren’t the only one who made a mistake.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about. You were defending me, but you wouldn’t have had to if I didn’t take it so far.”

137 “Maybe, you’re right,” I said, “but I know who you are. And I know you didn’t mean it.”

The muscles of his arms and chest were more defined when cast in the yellow light, and when he took off his shorts, followed by his boxer briefs, I could make out just enough of him to feel a familiar coiling inside of my stomach that was at once hard to handle and hard to contain.

“I’m going for a swim,” he said. “You coming?”

He turned around and dove out toward the water. His head dissolved into the knots in his shoulders and the curve of his spine was covered up with the subtle roundness of his hips followed by the length of his legs so that he was all at once thinly straight and stretched out before disappearing under the surface of the lake. I undressed and followed him before he could surface, and when I came up for air I was no longer cold or hot, but held somewhere in between. I had no sooner taken a breath when Johnny jumped on top of me and pushed my head back underwater, causing me to thrash wildly in his hands and bring about a game wherein we pitched our naked bodies against one another in an effort to hold the other down.

The sounds from the beach had grown quiet since we first arrived and I wondered if anyone could hear us wrestling, if anyone would be able to tell the difference between the sound of splashing water and the sound of my skin slapping against his skin. The longer we held each other down the more it became a contest to see who could hold his breath the longest and I wondered if maybe my lungs were larger than his even though my body was smaller. It seemed to me that the more he held me under, the more I could handle it, but if I held him under even for a second he’d start struggling. It was funny to

138 think that I could outlast him if it came down to the space in my lungs, but whether it was me that held him down or he that held me, I knew from the outset that if he really tried, I could be overpowered.

We were like this for a long while, rolling around in the same deep water, until it was evident that Johnny’s hair had lost its glow and the whole body of the lake grew dark. In the time that we had been there the sun had been covered by a thick layer of clouds and the wind had picked up so that the trees were no longer hanging with the same sluggish limp but were beginning to bend the other way and stand up tall. It was cold when we crawled out of the water, Johnny getting out first and then turning around to bend over and lift me up by the wrist. I went straight for my cutoffs knowing that I would later regret ever wearing them since my thighs were now wet and easily chafed. When I turned around to get my shirt I found my phone lying on the ground and Johnny using my shirt to dry himself off. He smiled at me, a cautionary and whimsical smile, and where I might have been provoked to attack him for using my shirt as a temporary towel on any other day, I felt that certain heaviness between us again so that I was moved to laugh it off and look away. He had no sooner handed it back to me when Sanders sprang out of the woods on his bike, unannounced. I put my shirt back on ignoring the fact that it was still inside out, and wondered how long Sanders had been there and whether or not he had seen anything.

“What are you guys still doing out here?” he asked, heaving over his handlebars as he came to a halt. It seemed like he had gone through a great deal to find us by the way he was carrying on.

I looked at Johnny, who was still standing naked next to me.

139 “We jerked off and went for a swim,” he said. “Where the hell have you been?”

“I’ve been trying to call your phone, Andy, but you weren’t picking up! The whole town’s gone crazy. My mom didn’t want me to leave but I had to find you guys.”

Johnny looked as confused as I felt, and I picked my phone up off the ground to find that I had six missed calls—four from Sanders, and two from Florence.

“One of the Laurens went missing this morning,” said Sanders, “and the other ain’t saying a word. Sheriff Cole has been going door to door all afternoon, asking people if they’ve seen her.”

“What do you mean one of them went missing? Is it Lauren?” asked Johnny, putting his shirt on and going for his shorts.

“I don’t know,” said Sanders. “People are saying all sorts of things, and my mom wouldn’t tell me anything else.”

“What do they think happened?” I asked. The sound of thunder came rolling in and I could tell it wasn’t very far off. I had been so invested in the time I was spending with Johnny that I hadn’t recognized the coming of the storm. It was growing darker by the minute, and the longer we stood there the more we ran the risk of getting caught in it.

“No one’s seen anything,” said Sanders. “Sheriff Cole woke up and found one of their beds empty and their back door had been left wide open.”

“Sounds like she got up in the middle of the night and just walked out,” said

Johnny.

“And no one knows where she could have gone?” I asked.

“My mom has an idea,” said Sanders. “She thinks it’s got something to do

Florence. That’s why I came over here as fast I could. My mom said she saw her talking

140 to Lauren a few times downtown, said she even leant her a lighter for a cigarette. Turns out her dad found the lighter in her room the other day and it caused some sort of argument between them.”

“That’s not good,” I said, “All your mom needs is one more reason to get them thinking the temps are up to no good and Sheriff Cole will want them gone.”

“Have you tried calling her?”

“No, I’ve been here with Johnny all afternoon,” I said, pulling her up on my contact list and dialing her number.

“Wait, you have her number?” Johnny asked, looking at me confused.

“She gave it to me after the drive-in,” I said, still trying to keep the details of our relationship to a minimum. There was no answer on the other end, so I tried calling again and got the same result. On the third try, I was starting to get nervous. “Guys, she’s not picking up.”

“You should probably get there as fast as you can,” said Sanders, “My mom’s convinced Florence knows something and she’s planning on heading up to the trailer park with Sheriff Cole.”

“You could have started with that Sanders,” I said, shutting my phone and quickly putting my shoes back on as a streak of lighting crossed the sky overhead. “We have to move. If we leave now we might be able to get there in time.”

“I’m not going,” said Sanders. “I’ll just end up slowing you down.”

“What about you, Johnny? You coming with me?” I asked, glad to see that he was finally dressed.

141 “I should probably stay with Sanders. He’s gonna freak out once it starts raining, and I don’t think he should be left alone,” he said, surprisingly. I hadn’t known him to be someone who would back down out of something when the stakes were so high.

“You sure?”

“Yeah, go save the girl,” he said. “We’ll meet up with you later.”

I bolted towards the parking lot in an effort not to waste anymore time. It was already raining when I got to my bike so that by the time I fumbled through the combination lock and rode off towards the main road my clothes were soaked through. It was difficult to keep my bike steady as the wind picked up. I almost tipped over several times and had to catch myself from falling by throwing my weight into the wind. By the time I reached downtown the sewers were already overflowing, the stoplights black and swinging over the road. All of the shop windows were the color of pitch, and with the exception of the barber, who was watching the storm from underneath the awning of his shop, it seemed that everyone else was either hiding in the dark or had gone home before it got worse. Instead of turning left onto Main Street, I blew through the intersection. If I was going to make it I had to stay off the main roads in case Mother Sanders and Sheriff

Cole found me on the way to the trailer park. There was no telling how long it took them to leave after Sanders came to find us, or if they had even left at all, but I couldn’t risk getting caught. More importantly, I couldn’t let them get to Florence Mae Johnson without warning her first.

I decided that it was best if I cut across the cemetery and through the junkyard to the bottom of the hill at the back of the trailer park. Even though my ride would carry me close to the Giant’s house where the Cole family lived, it would cut my time in half. As I

142 got close to the front of the cemetery, I could see several cop cars lined up in front of the enormous house, but as far as I could tell they were all empty. I couldn’t tell which one if any might have belonged to Cole, and didn’t think to put much thought into it as I turned off the road and pedaled as fast as I could across the cemetery field.

The ground was unsettled in areas so that there were several divots I had to trek across, and every time I ran over one I was splashed with more mud and water. It was an old cemetery. Aside from a couple of obelisks and a lifelike statue of the giant Anna

Swan rising near its center, a lot of the headstones were small, hidden in the dark after sinking into the ground over so many years. It was almost impossible to avoid them so that by the time I reached the other end of the cemetery, my whole body had been jarred and every muscle in my body ached.

The junkyard had been passed down through several hands over the years. Except for the undertakers who used a section of the junkyard for storage, it had been left mostly abandoned, a prison for discarded and forgotten objects. The gates were always locked and the top of the fence surrounding the property had been lined with barbed wire to keep other people from trespassing. We had been in there a number of times out of curiosity and cut off links in the fence on either side behind some overgrown shrubs so we could access it without getting caught. I was able to throw my bike over the fence easily enough as soon as I reached the fence, but struggled to find my way in from the lack of light.

After what felt like several minutes I found the opening when lightning struck overhead and slipped through, tearing a small hole in the right sleeve of my shirt in the process.

The junkyard wasn’t very large, though it seemed endless as I was walking through it. I had to keep wiping the hair out of my face so I could see where I was going,

143 and even then it was raining hard enough that I had to stop every few feet to make sure I was headed in the right direction. There was one main path that ran straight through to the other side of the fence, but I couldn’t see much more than a few feet in front of me. I wanted to run through it, run right to the other side, but it was strange how everything seemed so narrow and confined in the dark. The mountains of tires, crushed cars and scrap metal looked more like monolithic machines in the dark, and whenever lightning struck overhead, it seemed like they were coming to life, swelling with breath and creaking in the places where they stood. I tried not to think about it, keeping my head low and my grip tight on my handlebars as I made my way past. I would have been less fearful had Johnny come with me, but a part of me was glad that he hadn’t so I wouldn’t run the risk of him knowing I was afraid at all.

I knew I was more than halfway through the junkyard when I came across a pavilion full of engine parts, though they looked like decapitated heads in the dark. The last half of the lot was difficult to walk through, the ground having been broken up over time. It was more like quicksand than gravel and my legs felt heavier every time I picked up my feet to walk. I had to curl my toes in an effort to keep my shoes from falling off in the flood of mud and water.

The sky above the trailer park was cast in an off-green light from the motion- sensor lights on the property. I was surprised to find out they still had electricity when the rest of the town was cut off from it, and wondered if Johnny’s father had left them on because of the storm or if they had turned on because Mother Sanders and Sheriff Cole had already beaten me there.

144 No sooner had I thrown my bike over the fence then I heard a scattering of metal parts and what sounded like a grinding of teeth in the dark behind me. I turned around and felt the fence against my back, unable to see where the noise was coming from.

Everything seemed much darker from where I stood, the only light source now at my back, and as I waited for the lightning to strike I heard it again, a trampling of cans in the dark. I was curious to see what it might have been, to see if there was anyone else in there with me so late at night or if it was even another person at all, but terror can work its way into you as easily as any other emotion and I couldn’t fathom, not then, not by myself, looking for the source of the noise alone. Instead, I ducked through the opening in the fence and started running up the hill with my bike beside me.

There were a few times I lost balance and fell into the dirt, and I had to dig the back of my heels into the hillside to avoid falling over. Staying low to the ground, I crept up behind one of the empty trailers when I reached the top of the hill and left my bike there so that it was out of the way. As I made my way towards Florence Mae Johnson’s trailer, I hoped that I wouldn’t run into the others because I wasn’t sure what I’d say if someone asked for an explanation for why I was scrambling around in the dark. I imagined that the truth would probably stir up more unnecessary attention than needed, and was glad when I reached my destination without any distractions. I could see the driveway from the front of the trailer, and wasted no time when I recognized that Sheriff

Cole hadn’t arrived yet. Luckily the door was unlocked. I opened it and slammed it shut behind me, finding Florence sitting at her kitchen table in an off-white floral nightgown.

Forde was sitting across from her and the two of them were holding a hand of cards.

“What the hell’s going on?” Florence asked, confused and thankfully so.

145 “Listen, I don’t have a lot of time,” I said, realizing how crazy I must have looked after running inside unannounced and covered in mud from head to toe.

“I’ve been trying to get a hold of you all day and you stood me up, didn’t say a single word,” yelled Florence, throwing her cards down on the table and standing up from her seat. “What makes you think you can just come inside my home again without knocking?”

“I’ll explain everything later, but right now I need you to tell me the truth,” I said, holding my hands out between us in an effort to calm her down.

“What’s this about?” asked Forde, putting his cards down on the table and leaning forward, waiting for me to talk.

“Have you been hanging out with Lauren?” I asked.

“That girl in the blue and white dress?” asked Florence. “The one your friend was seeing?”

“Yeah, have you been talking to her?”

“I ran into her a few times while I was in town. Didn’t hang out with her or anything, just made some small talk, that’s all.”

“Did you give her a lighter?”

“Actually,” said Forde,” I gave her the lighter. She said it was for her boyfriend and I always have more than one on me. Didn’t think it’d be a big deal.”

“Shit, shit, shit,” I said, turning around and trying to get my thoughts together.

“You want to tell me what’s going on?” asked Florence. I turned around to see that her arms were crossed and her eyes were fierce and dark.

146 “That girl is the sheriff’s daughter,” I said. “She went missing earlier this morning and they found your lighter in her bedroom.”

“They can’t think that I had anything to do with it,” said Forde. “I’ve been here the whole time.”

“They’re not coming to look for you,” I said. “They’re coming for her.”

“Wait a second,” said Florence, “they’re coming here? Right now?”

“Sanders said they’d be coming, and I’m sure they’re on their way. His mother’s got something out for you.”

“What for?” she asked. “I’ve got nothing to do with that missing girl.”

“I know you’ve got nothing to do with it,” I said, walking right up to her and staring her in the eyes to make sure she understood the gravity of the situation. “It doesn’t matter what you’ve done or haven’t done. She’s already made up her mind about you because you’re one of them and she’s seen you with us.”

“One of who?”

“A carney.”

“That’s f—”

“Listen to me!” I shouted, louder than I had expected so that she took a half-step back. “She’s going to try to twist this thing so that Sheriff Cole believes you know something, whether you know it or not. When they get here, you need to do what I say or they’re gonna have your head faster than you can blink an eye.”

*

When Mother Sanders arrived with Sheriff Cole, I was sitting cross-legged on top of a plastic tablecloth laid out over Florence’s bed like a protective sheet. We only had

147 minutes to clean up my tracks on the tile floor that led from the front door to the back of the trailer, and the tablecloth was the first thing Florence grabbed from the closet so that I wouldn’t leave mud all over her bed. A thin curtain was drawn in front of the entrance to the small bedroom so that they wouldn’t be able to see me if they came into the trailer unless they were right up close to it. From where I was sitting, I could make out the silhouettes of those on the other side, and I could hear everything like I was right there in the room.

“Can I help you?” Florence asked when opening the door.

“My name is Daniel Cole. I’m the sheriff of this town. This is Rebecca Sanders.

I’d like to come inside and ask you some questions if that’s alright.”

“I was about to turn in for the night. May I ask what this is about?”

“It’s my daughter. She’s gone missing.”

“Oh my God, I’m so sorry,” she said, perhaps a bit too quickly.

“If you wouldn’t mind inviting us in I’d greatly appreciate it.”

There was a brief moment of silence while Florence took a step back and let them in. I could tell the sheriff was out of uniform and had he not introduced his position when she had answered the door she probably never would have known otherwise that he was a man of the law. Mother Sanders was right behind him, and as she crossed in front of

Florence, she pulled and tightened the scarf around her neck while holding tight to the umbrella in her hand. I could tell just by the way she moved that she was surveying the trailer for any signs that might implicate Florence in Lauren’s disappearance, as she was slow and very deliberate in her walk.

148 She refused to shake Forde’s hand when he stood to greet her. He then turned to the Sheriff and offered him a seat at the table, but he declined as well.

“I’m sorry we had to come up into your home like this. I’m sure you understand what I must be going through right now.”

“I can imagine,” said Florence. “Being the sheriff and all, you shouldn’t have to worry about your own.”

“My children are the only things I care about in this world,” he said, and I imagined his lip started quivering by the sound of his voice. “I woke up this morning to find one of my daughters sitting up in bed unable to talk, and the other one just, well…gone. The backdoor was wide open and there wasn’t a single trace of where she went off too. Now, I’ve been looking for her all day, and I haven’t any idea what could have happened, so I’m following any lead I can get right now until I come closer to finding my baby girl.”

Everyone was quiet as he walked into the dining room and leaned up against one of the cupboards. Mother Sanders was holding his hand and patting it gently while she continued to look around the trailer. Forde sat back down at the table and Florence stayed where she was over by the front door.

“I just have a few questions to ask you and we’ll be out of your hair,” said the sheriff, wiping his face on the sleeve of his shirt.

“It’s alright,” said Florence. “Take your time.”

“Here’s a picture of my girl,” he said, pulling it out of his shirt pocket and leaning over so that she could take it from him. “Her name’s Lauren. She’s fourteen, getting ready to turn fifteen next month. She looks just like her sister because they’re twins, but

149 she’s a little feistier than the other one, quick to act and not very intuitive. Now I believe you’ve had the chance to meet Mrs. Sanders, here. Correct?”

“That’s correct, officer,” said Florence, turning the photograph around in her hand and studying it before handing it to Forde. She then looked up at Mother Sanders, and said, “It’s a pleasure seeing you again.”

Mother Sanders made a noise that sounded like she had scoffed in response, but then quickly followed it up by saying, “I suppose the feeling must be mutual.”

“Now, Mrs. Sanders seems to think she’s seen you both talking to my daughter. Is this true?” asked the sheriff.

“I have,” said Florence. “She helped me out with directions once when I got turned around on my first day here. I’ve run into her a few times since then, while I was walking around downtown with my friend.”

“So you’ve both seen her?”

“Yes, sir. That’s correct.”

“Have either of you spoken to her?”

“Briefly. In passing.”

“And what about the other day? When you were standing outside the barber shop?” asked Mother Sanders, the tone in her voice suddenly cold and clear, grating as if she had smoked a pack a day for the past twenty years.

“I was getting a haircut,” said Forde. “We were coming outside, and I was getting ready to smoke a cigarette when she came up to us and asked for a lighter.”

“What would she want with a lighter?” asked the sheriff.

150 “She said it was for her boyfriend,” said Florence. “I know she didn’t seem old enough, but who doesn’t start out young trying all kinds of things they shouldn’t?”

Mother Sanders made a noise of disapproval as Sheriff Cole reached into his pocket and pulled out a blue and yellow-striped lighter.

“Is this the one you gave her?” he asked, holding it out in front of him.

“Yes sir,” said Forde. “That’s the one.”

“And where were you last night?”

“I was here, with Florence. We stayed up late watching movies and then went to sleep around midnight.”

“Is this true?” he asked, turning to Florence.

“Yes, sir,” she said. “It is. You can ask my guardian, Bill, if you need someone to verify.”

He put the lighter back into his pocket, and crossed his arms. I thought it was about to end there, because he really had nothing left to go on. The stories all matched up.

Before anyone could say anything else, however, Mother Sanders stood up straight and let go of the sheriff’s arm as she walked around him and sauntered towards me at the back of the trailer. Everything inside of me seized up so that I sat up straight. The sudden movement I made caused the tablecloth underneath me to crinkle, and I was suddenly aware of Mother Sanders’ shadow growing larger on the other side of the curtain.

“Ma’am, may I ask what you’re looking for?” asked Florence, in an attempt to draw her attention back to the center of the trailer.

151 Mother Sanders pivoted on her heels, so that the back of her dress was pressed up against the curtain. I looked down to see the folds in her ankles underneath it, and held a hand against my mouth in case she’d catch wind of the sound of my breath at her back.

“I’m just taking a good look around,” she said. “You can never really be too curious about your surroundings. I find some of your decorations or, rather, the lack thereof rather peculiar.”

“Well, what do you mean?” asked Florence.

“Don’t you have any personal items in here? Everything is so dull and white,” she said, running her finger along the top of the bathroom door and then holding it under her nose as if to check for a familiar scent.

“I’m not sure what my sensibilities have anything to do with the current conversation,” said Florence.

“You can tell a lot about a person by how they choose to represent themselves.

White doesn’t really look good on you.”

“What are you trying to say?”

“Young man,” said Mother Sanders, leaning over to get a good look at Forde and ignoring Florence’s question. “What did you say your name was again?”

“My name is Ford, miss.”

“Forde, answer me something, since you’re the only personal thing I’m seeing in here besides a handful of dusty old books—are the two of you dating one another?” she asked.

152 “I apologize Ms. Sanders, but that has anything to do with the sheriff’s daughter,” said Florence. The tone in her voice had changed just enough so that I could tell she was pushed to her limit.

“It has everything to do with Sheriff Cole’s daughter,” said Mother Sanders, stepping forward so that they were face to face for the first time. “I know how young girls are these days, getting involved in all sorts of things they shouldn’t be getting involved in. It’s a shame when someone like you comes strolling through town threatening to demean the innocence of our children.”

My heart was beating so loud in my chest that I was surprised no one else could hear it.

“I don’t know what you’re implying Ms. Sanders, but I think I’d like you to leave.”

“Darling,” said Mother Sanders, “I’m implying that you’re a harlot masquerading in the body of an innocent girl. You can’t be trusted.”

“Ms. Sanders, I think that’s enough,” said the sheriff. At the same time, Florence stormed over to the door and held it open.

“I believe we’re done here,” she said.

Sheriff Cole rubbed his forehead with one of his hands, and then turned to walk towards the exit. “It’s been a long day and we’re all a little wired,” he said. “If the two of you say you know nothing about my daughter, then I’m sure you know nothing about it.”

“Thank you,” said Florence. “At least someone in here has some sort of decency.”

“Ah, ah, ah,” said Mother Sanders. “I’d watch that twisted tongue of yours, child.”

153 “We’ll be leaving now,” said Sheriff Cole sternly, motioning for Mother Sanders to make her exit first. She followed his lead, but not without a certain sluggishness and a backwards glance that felt like she was looking right at me through the curtain. “If either of you hear anything, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with me,” he said, handing them both business cards before disappearing outside.

I stayed in hiding until I could no longer see their lights in the driveway, and when I came out Florence Mae Johnson was pacing the whole length of the trailer from one end to the other.

“Can you believe that shit?”

“Calm down,” said Forde.

“She had the audacity to come into my home—”

“But we’re in the clear.”

“—and call me a whore when she doesn’t know anything—”

“It’s going to be okay.”

“—I swear to God if I ever—”

“FORGET ABOUT HER FLORENCE!”

Forde had to grab her shoulders to hold her still, and I was surprised by how aggressive he could be when he raised his voice. She was shaking, and when she looked over his shoulder at me I thought she was about to cry.

“He’s right,” I said. “Forde’s right. She’s got nothing on you, not now anyway. I doubt she’d try to take it any further. She’s just trying to get under your skin.”

“But what about the girl,” said Florence. “What about her?”

154 The three of us just stood there, looking at one another, needing answers and finding none. That’s when the realization started to sink in—a girl I knew, and a girl

Johnny loved, was nowhere to be found and most likely nowhere safe.

155 CHAPTER IX

CONVICTIONS

If our town hadn’t been divided before, it sure as hell was divided once news got around that Lauren Cole was missing. It wasn’t even a full twenty-four hours before all sorts of rumors started going around about the cause of her disappearance, the largest being that someone was out to get the Sheriff. Of course that was ridiculous, considering that Sheriff Cole had no more enemies than Mother Sanders had friends. He was a cop; he did his job well; there wasn’t much more to it than that. It didn’t stop people from hoping for some kind of a ransom note to turn up though because that kind of a thing would mean that she was still alive, and more honestly, that there would be something more substantial for people to talk about.

We each had our own suspicions as to what happened, most of which led to the possibility that she just ran away from home. But considering that their family life was no worse than average and that Lauren was one of the popular kids in school, there was nothing legitimate about her desire to run away. They even took Jack in for questioning the afternoon she was discovered missing, but it turned out that was nothing more than a dead end since he had been home all night with his parents and had the proof to show for it. Regardless, the possibility of him sneaking out after dark wasn’t beyond any of us, and it didn’t stop us from talking about it behind closed doors.

156 If she hadn’t run away, the other assumption of course was that the temps had something to do with it, and it was a theory fully supported by none other than Mother

Sanders herself. It was just a few days away from the start of the carnival. Everything had already been set up. The people who had always appreciated the festival were growing increasingly excited, making it a nightly routine to come out to the park and see all the rides go through their practice runs while they were all lit up. Once news got around that the sheriff’s daughter was missing and that the temps might have had something to do with it, those people suddenly found they had a lot more to worry about, and the people who had never been fond of the festival had more reason to be up in arms about it. It was the perfect storm, one which couldn’t have been avoided. All eyes had been turned on the temps, and Florence was the brunt end of the attention.

Johnny, Sanders, myself, and Forde had joined her on a trip into town the morning after she had been accosted at the trailer. I couldn’t tell you how many cars slowed down, how many people turned their heads and stared at us. When Forde walked up to the counter at the Dairy-Mart and asked for a pack of Newports, the guy behind the counter hardly looked at him and kept his eyes on Florence the whole time, like she would have pulled a gun out from under her skirt at any minute and would have robbed him in cold blood. Forde had to snap his fingers to get the guy’s attention, and even as we were walking out of the store we could feel his eyes at our backs. We were on our way back to the trailer park when we decided it was best if they didn’t go into town without one of us with them as an escort. If they were seen with someone they recognized, then perhaps more people would feel more comfortable around them; or at least, that was the idea.

157 While everyone in town was speculating over the cause of Lauren’s disappearance, Sheriff Cole was doing everything he could do to find a solution in as fast a time as possible. The newspaper put it on the front page; the local news stations and radio stations covered it every hour on the hour. Sheriff Cole and a few other officers were even going door-to-door to every house in town, carrying boxes of pictures and mementos of his daughter in case it would jog someone’s memory of seeing her in the short time she had been gone. Lauren’s face was on every light pole and building in town by the end of the second day with a promise for a monetary reward. The news of her disappearance was everywhere; no one could avoid it if they tried.

Johnny and I were gathering wood at the back of the trailer park on the afternoon of the third day when we heard an air horn go off at the front of the property. We turned around to see all the temps coming out of their trailers, cradling their kids, holding onto doors. We couldn’t see what they were staring at right away, but there was a steady murmur in the air and a certain stillness in everyone who was standing in front of us that made me feel like it was better if we hadn’t been there at all. Against my better judgment,

I started to walk passed the temps, and Johnny followed me.

Standing there at the bottom of the drive were a handful of people from town carrying pickets and talking amongst themselves. There were ten, maybe twelve, most of which I recognized. The clerk from the Dairy-Mart was there, with a few deacons from

Sanders’ church and what I recognized as one or two county officials. I was surprised

Mother Sanders wasn’t front and center, but I had no doubt she had something to do with organizing the little troupe’s venture out onto uncharted territory.

SAVE THE GIRL, read one poster.

158 GOD HATES FREKS, read another.

And they hoisted them above their heads like rifles.

Florence came out of her trailer and made for a full sprint, and it was everything

Johnny and I could do to hold her back without letting her run head first into the crowd, tearing their signs to shreds.

“Go on! Get out of here,” she yelled, while we held her arms back. “Leave us alone!”

“Florence, it’s okay,” said Bill, coming up from behind us and placing a hand against Florence’s back. “Boy’s, you can let her go. She’ll be fine.”

We did as he said, and turned around to see Jolene and Marjorie approaching; crackling their knuckles in the palms of their hands, a dish towel over one’s shoulder, a toothpick in the other’s mouth.

“I’m not going to be fine, Bill,” said Florence, nearly knocking me in the side of the head as she turned around to face him. “These people,” she said, pointing at them,

“these people have no right to come up here; not today, or any other day!”

“But they do,” he said. “They’re angry. They’re scared. We’ve faced things like this before.”

“You’ve faced things like this before,” she said. “I’ve never had to.”

And suddenly it was Florence on her own, the divide already great at her back between the people in the town, and the divide thickening between her and her own people.

I was about to say something, intervene in some way, but one of the protesters yelled out, “GO BACK HOME!” and every chance of that happening went right out the

159 window. Suddenly every one of the temps were walking towards the drive in one massive wave, with Florence at the head. Everyone was shouting, struggling to be heard over everyone else, until the two sides came together like two oceans converging—the temps pushing them out; the towns people keeping them in. Sampson stayed by us, holding us to our ground by pressing his hands down on our shoulders. I didn’t see Forde, or any of his brothers, and figured they were at the park working on some last minute project.

Johnny and I looked at one another, and when he nodded at me, I knew he was ready to fight like hell if he had too. It was a fight I was willing to be a part of. Before either of us could shake Bill off and head towards the crowd, a loud crack rang out over all the commotion. Everyone ducked their heads, clutched their own, and turned to find

Johnny’s dad standing outside of his trailer door in a wife-beater with a metal drum between his legs and a baseball bat in his hand pointed towards the sky.

“You all listen up and you all listen good and hard,” he yelled, never once moving to lower the bat. “I don’t give two rotten hells what you make of what happened to that little girl, but this is not the place for you to figure your shit out! You either walk off this property and leave these people alone, or I’ll chase you out of here myself.”

Johnny laughed out loud and stopped when his father turned his head and looked at him with as serious an expression as I’ve ever seen. Posters were lowered right away, and the townsfolk walked backwards down the drive while the temps held their ground.

Before Johnny’s father went inside, Florence ran up to him and told him she was thankful for what he had done.

“Look, sweetheart,” he said as he kicked the metal drum out of his way and opened the door behind him. “I don’t care if you had something to do with that girl or

160 not. I didn’t do it for you or any of your people. I’m tired, and I can’t sleep in there with all this racket going on. I don’t owe you nothing, and you better hope something like this doesn’t happen again or you’ll all be out on your asses.”

And just like that, Johnny’s dad was gone, having done his good deed for the day and finding no reason to linger.

“You mean to tell me he actually threatened to hit people with a bat?” my father asked, after having told them the whole story later that night over dinner.

“Someone had to get rid of them,” I said. “They weren’t just going to walk away.”

“I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. That man is dangerous. And I certainly don’t want you spending time up there while those people are in town.”

“Those people?” I asked, sitting back in my chair ready to defend them if I had to.

“What your father means,” said my mom, “is that you don’t want to get caught up in something like this. The whole town has gone crazy! And it’s no wonder. That poor girl has gone missing…”

That poor girl. Everyone kept calling her that.

“…and before you know it, people are going to start doing irrational things. We don’t want you getting involved. Besides, it’s not exactly safe for you to be out of doors on your own right now, running all over town.”

“Guys, I’ll be fine. I can take care of myself.”

“You’re fourteen. You’re not invincible,” said my mom, as she took our plates from the table and placed them in the kitchen sink. She grabbed a dish towel and dried her hands off as she stood at the counter. Her eyes were glazed over, like she wanted to

161 take it back after she had said it but was trying to come to terms with the fact that no, I was not invincible and never would be.

“I think you worry too much,” I said.

“We worry because we’re your parents,” said my dad. I turned to see him staring at me over the rim of his glasses. He was trying not to smile. “It’s our job to be assholes.

You’ll learn to appreciate it someday.”

“But you don’t honestly think the temps had something to do with it, do you?”

“You don’t think it’s strange that they no sooner show up in our town that a young girl your age goes missing?”

“They’ve been coming for years, and no one’s ever gone missing before,” I said.

“It’s just terrible timing, is all.”

“Maybe you’re right,” he said, taking his glasses off and putting them on the table between us. “It doesn’t change the fact that they’re not like us.”

“You ever think that’s a good thing?” I asked. “You ever think that maybe it’s not them, but someone in town who kidnapped that girl? I heard somewhere that ninety percent of all accidents happen within five miles from home.”

“Maybe that has everything to do with bad luck. With a few exceptions, these are good people,” he said, slouching in his chair as if there was an argument that had been won.

“And what if you can’t trust the people you see everyday?” I asked, sizing him up and matching the same slouch.

“It’s a good thing, you know, this meeting they’re having at the town hall tomorrow night,” interrupted my mom, now leaning on the counter, chin in hand, staring

162 at the two of us still sitting at the table. “There’s going to be a whole lot of tension in one room, but maybe that’s what this town needs.”

“There’s a meeting?” I asked, turning around in my seat. “Meeting for what?”

“Well, the whole town’s coming together to talk about the details of the missing girl,” she said. “Sheriff Cole has a few announcements to make.”

“Finally,” my father said, “maybe we’ll have some stability around here.”

*

We stood outside—Johnny, Sanders, and I—wearing ties around our necks and dress slacks, waiting for the temps to arrive. It was a slow, muggy night. The air was thick. The sun had already lowered behind the tallest buildings so that the sky looked like it was on the brink of catching fire and we were all going to be burned. We pulled at the collars around our necks and tugged at our clothes as we switched balance between one foot and the other, trying to keep calm, trying to stay cool. We wanted to make sure we looked our best when we walked into the building as personal escorts for our friends. The temps had been personally invited by Sheriff Cole the morning of. He said that since they were going to be an important part of our annual festivities it was only natural for them to know what kind of environment they would be living in. He made it sound like we were all headed to war, and having them on hand meant there would be more soldiers for a good cause, or something like that.

Everyone was filing in to the town hall, keeping their eyes locked on us as they walked past. A few stopped to ask if we were coming inside, but we’d wave them off without saying anything. When Old Man Gordon came by, he went out of his way to walk around us, keeping ten feet between us at all times like we were rabid animals that

163 had escaped our cages and were now thirsting for blood. I was almost positive that the twisted look on his face was nothing more than left over aggression after ransacking his shop, and I thought perhaps he was going to charge us in some way or try to run us off like the last time. Instead, he kept his distance like everybody else, while Johnny and I locked eyes with his. The truth was that we all had bigger things to worry about.

When I had arrived with my parents, I found Sanders sitting outside waiting for me. They went in to grab a seat and Johnny showed up alone not long after. I should have known his dad wasn’t going to come with him, but I guess Johnny called his mom to tell her about all the things that were going on while she had been away on business. She had said something along the lines that nothing ever changes no matter how much time she spent away from home, and I thought it was strange. I had never left and even I knew something was changing. It was in the very air and we were all breathing it in. In just a few short days, doors were being locked that had never been locked before. Windows were being closed at night to shut out the sounds of passing trains. You could even see it in their eyes whenever they came out in the morning to grab their papers—darting back and forth, fingers twitching, robes clutched tightly as they scanned their lawns and streets for signs of unforetold dangers. It was like a veil had been thrown over our town almost overnight, and we found ourselves waking in a place that was no longer familiar. People were afraid.

Forde’s truck pulled up in front of the building a few minutes before the meeting was to get started. I had been thinking that maybe they weren’t going to show, that maybe they thought it was best to keep themselves out of the town’s watchful eyes. If they hadn’t come it would have looked suspicious and people would have seen it as a sign that

164 maybe they did have something to do with Lauren’s disappearance. I was thankful, to say the least, when they showed up.

Forde was driving and Florence was sitting next to him in the cab, while Jolene,

Marjorie, Bill, and Sampson sat in the back, holding onto the sides of the truck with white-knuckled hands. All of them were dressed in black. When Florence stepped out of the truck I was surprised to find her in heels, with matching gloves that went up to her elbows and a black oversized hat that hid her face when she wasn’t looking directly at you.

“You guys look like you’re heading to a funeral,” Johnny said, as they descended from the truck all at once.

“It was Florence’s idea,” said Bill, who used Sampson’s shoulder to brace himself as he stepped down out of the truck bed. He straightened up, pulling tight on his suit jacket, and made sure to fix his hair which had been drawn back in a small ponytail. “It might as well be a funeral, shouldn’t it? The whole town wants us gone, and there’s a girl missing. Just felt appropriate, I guess.”

Florence stopped right in front of me and smiled. Her eyes were like tiny white pearls underneath the brim of her hat.

“What do you think?” she asked. “Not too much, is it?”

“Not at all,” I said. “If you’re trying to make a statement, I think you definitely hit the mark.” I felt Johnny’s eyes on me, watching me from the side. I wasn’t sure what he thought of me as I stood there with my mouth unhinged, trying not to draw much attention to the fact that I found her attractive, and it wasn’t something we really had time

165 to talk about since the afternoon at the lake when he discovered that her and I had been talking in secret.

“Thank you. It was my momma’s dress,” said Florence, curtseying as I would imagine her mother might have done. “I figured if we were heading to the chopping block, we might as well look dressed for the part.”

“How hungry are they for blood?” asked Jolene, stepping to the front with her hands on her hips. She was all in black too, except for the tie-dyed bandanna she wore on her head. “We walking into a room full of cannibals or what?”

“I’m sure they’re nice people,” said Marjorie, taking up a spot next to her sister.

“They’re just riled up, is all. I say we go in there and show them we’re not who they think we are.”

“They’ll be gunning for you, that’s for sure,” I said, turning to face the town hall and leading the way. “The only one you really have to worry about is Mother Sanders’.

She’s the only one liable enough to actually take things to a whole other level.”

“From the sounds of it, she’s not one who can be bested,” said Bill.

“She’s something wicked, that’s for sure,” said Forde, who had taken up a spot behind Sanders. Sanders looked at him over his shoulder, as if he was surprised to hear the familiar accusation coming from someone new. “Sorry man,” he continued, “I know she’s your mom and all, but she’s made things pretty difficult.”

“It’s alright. I’m used to it,” said Sanders, scuffing his shoes on the concrete as we walked.

Everyone reached out to lay their hands on Sanders like they were giving him some sort of blessing. It was refreshing to see it happen and to see him smile. When we

166 reached the front doors, I turned around to face everyone with my hand held firmly on the door handle. As I looked from one face to another, it became clear that we were all holding our breath, unsure of what we would come up against once we were inside.

Sanders looked terrified, and even Johnny, whose eyes seemed darker than in recent months, had a furrowed brow. It was possible we had nothing to worry about and that the whole thing would just blow over, but given the response from some of the people in town and given Mother Sanders’ immediate inability to rationalize any situation, the three of us were prepared for the worst.

We led the way into the large conference room where the meeting was being held.

I was surprised to find that it looked more like a courtroom with a raised platform and a podium at the far end. There was a table on the left side where Sheriff Cole was in uniform and already seated facing the crowd. He was framed by the American flag and the state flag of Ohio, and his wife was sitting beside him. He was holding on to a glass of water with both of his hands while she kept her head down, but I immediately noticed the large red circles around her eyes where she had rubbed away at the skin after crying so much over her missing daughter. I looked for Loretta then and couldn’t find her, figuring they had left her at home with someone they trusted in order to spare her the trauma.

The room was split into two halves so that there was a main aisle leading from the entrance all the way to the other end of the room. Everybody on both sides was talking so loudly that not one conversation could be heard or understood above the rest. It was like taking refuge in the middle of a small courtyard during a terrible storm, only there’s all these wind chimes of different shapes and sizes and they’re all blowing around making

167 their own music, fighting to be heard over all the rest. It was incredible how everyone knew everybody else but never went out of their way to talk to anyone about anything until you put them all in one room and forced them to sit with one another in close quarters. Even Old Man Gordon was smacking his lips excitedly as he waved his hands through a series of exaggerated gestures to the people sitting on either side of him.

The only seats still vacant were in the front of the room, behind a row of six police officers and two local news reporters waiting to hear details about the case. As we started walking down the main aisle, the conversation stopped and everyone turned their heads to watch us as we passed by them. My parents were seated near the middle of the room and left a seat open for me, but instead of turning down the aisle and leaving the rest of my group, I continued walking, giving them nothing more than a nod. My father looked like he was about to get out of his chair as I walked past, but my mom was quick to put a hand on his knee and whisper something in his ear to keep him seated.

We were almost to the front when I felt Sanders tugging on my arm, and turned to see what had him so riled up. It had been almost a month since we’d seen Jack Chance.

He was sitting next to his parents, and his brother, Bryan, was sitting next to them too. I had to admit that he looked good, given the damage Johnny had done to his face. It wasn’t nearly as swollen as I thought it would be, and I thought perhaps that his parents, upon seeing us, would become outraged. Instead, there had been no recognition in their eyes and they sat still with the same vacant expression as everyone else in the room. They must have bought whatever story they were told, but it was clear Jack and Bryan hadn’t forgotten the truth. Bryan sank a little lower in his chair as we passed by their row, and

Jack was seething. Behind them I saw Kyle and the Hulk, hunched over the seat and

168 trying not to look in our direction. I could only imagine how Johnny must have felt, but I was too nervous to turn my head and look at him. Instead, I made sure to make a mental note to say something to him later when a better opportunity presented itself.

We no sooner sat down in the second row, than Mother Sanders came out from a side room carrying a pitcher of water. She made for the table where Sheriff Cole was sitting and refilled his glass, then set the pitcher on the table and walked behind it to rest her hands on his wife’s shoulders. The two women looked at one another and smiled, and

Mrs. Cole patted her hand as one might do when an old friend drops by to pay their respects after someone has suffered a great loss. When Mother Sanders looked up, her whole expression changed and her eyes went directly to Florence, who was sitting beside me to my right. It was no longer warm, but stern and decisive. I met her gaze head on, daring her to say or do anything that might shut down the meeting early. As she studied each of our faces, ending last on her own son’s, it was evident that she wasn’t going to give up without a fight. As she approached the podium, her lips cracked open wide in a smile and it felt like all the air had been sucked out of the room. Florence sighed, and

Forde, who was sitting on the other side of her, put his hand on her knee to stop it from shaking.

“I’m so glad you could all make it here tonight. For some of us, it’s been far too long since we last occupied the same space; for others, tonight marks the very first time. I welcome each and every one of you with the same gratitude. I can only wish that it would have happened under far better circumstances,” she said, pausing then to frown as if on cue and looking down on us again in the second row, her brow furrowed, her cheeks sucked in. “There’s no doubt that some of you may have heard the rumors. While most of

169 them have certainly been outlandish, so to speak, there is some truth to them. You see, after working closely with Sheriff Daniel Cole over the last few days and after speaking with Mayor Thompson, who sadly could not be here tonight due to an illness, I have decided to call together this meeting so that we might come to terms with the evil that is in our midst.”

A murmur started to rise in the room as everyone turned to the people sitting around them, questioning each other and whispering about their own secret accusations. I thought it was strange for our own mayor not to be present for such a meeting, and wondered how much of what Mother Sanders had said was true. Regardless of his whereabouts, it was Mother Sanders who was steering the ship that night and not the mayor of our town. I wasn’t surprised.

“Before I turn the microphone over to Sheriff Cole, I would like to make something very clear,” she said, as she raised a hand to silence the room. It took a moment, but the hushed whispers stopped and everyone, including those of us who would rather cut out our own eyes, looked up and waited patiently for her to speak. “Nothing this tragic has ever happened in our town, not since the fire burned down the dance hall in the 60s. The fire had been started out of ignorance after a boy thought it was a good idea to break into the building after hours and light up all these candles to show off for some girl. It took one wrong step for the whole place to go up in flames. It’s a miracle no one was hurt that day or that the fire was contained. But it was a day this town looked into the face of danger and survived and today we find ourselves there again for all the same reasons.”

“What is she talking about?” Florence whispered out of the side of her mouth.

170 “Your guess is as good as mine,” I said, leaning over a few inches so that our conversation was kept hushed.

“We are strong but we are ignorant,” continued Mother Sanders. “Many of us have lived here all our lives, raising our children on the same traditional beliefs on which this town was founded, but we have forgotten a very important fact. Behind every door there lurks a devil, and where there are devils there are those who will unleash hell on our very doorsteps whenever the mood strikes them.”

“Here we go,” said Johnny as he cracked his knuckles and leaned forward in his chair.

“We have been under attack,” she said. “While we were sleeping in our homes, praying for the well-being of our children, a young girl went missing in the middle of the night. It’s now been four days since Lauren Cole vanished.”

I didn’t like the way she said it. It made it sound like Lauren had evaporated into thin air or that she had been sucked through the roof by some UFO. It made her disappearance seem like an accident, as if she had been misplaced like a set of keys and everyone had forgotten to make copies.

“I will let Sheriff Cole be the one to disclose the information regarding the case, but I ask each and every one of you here tonight to take precaution. Because there is a storm coming, and your children are not safe.”

When Mother Sanders stepped away from the microphone there was a brief moment of silence, which was then interrupted by Mrs. Wright when she started clapping. A few others joined in, though I couldn’t tell if they meant to or if they were simply trying to cope with the awkward situation of a one-man applause, but Mother

171 Sanders, with a wave of her arm, humbly walked away to sit beside Cole’s wife while he stepped up to the podium.

“Good evening,” he said, lifting his head to survey all the people who had gathered in the room to hear him speak. One of the news reporters took a couple of photographs from her seat, which caused Mother Sanders to glare at her whenever the flash went off, but Cole stood tall without ever paying notice to it. His bottom lip started quivering though, and I tried to imagine what it must have been like to stand up there and face the people you were sworn to protect in a moment of desperation. Because he was desperate. He was out of options.

“It was just after 7 a.m. on Thursday morning that my 14-year-old daughter,

Lauren Cole, was discovered missing. There had been no signs of forced entry, or any sign that an intruder had been in our home, but my other daughter of the same age,

Loretta, was discovered sitting upright in her room in a state of shock. She has since been unable to speak or supply reasons for her sister’s disappearance, and is currently undergoing severe psychological treatment.”

“So it’s true,” said Johnny, nudging my leg with his. I turned to find him staring at me, with a new light of excitement in his eyes. “You think she knows what happened?

She’s got to, right?”

“Makes sense,” I said. “What else would cause someone to be in a state of shock like that?”

“I don’t know,” he said, “but it’s got to be something awful. Wonder what sort of crazy experiments they’re doing. Probably electrocuting her brain or some shit.”

“They don’t do that anymore,” I said, trying to keep my voice quiet. “It’s illegal.”

172 “How do you know?”

“I don’t know. Saw it in a movie once and then read about it online.”

“Would y’all hush up,” Florence said, leaning forward and holding a finger up to her lips.

“Sorry,” I said, leaning back into my chair.

“We’ve been going door to door to find out anything we could in regard to my daughter’s whereabouts. Unfortunately, as of tonight, there have not been many leads,”

Cole said, pausing to lift his glass and take a sip of water. “We are asking that if anyone knows anything, sees anything, hears anything, that they come directly to me or any one of these officers sitting up here in the front row. We are doing everything we can, and we ask that you do the same as well.”

Everyone started clapping again to show their support. Even Mother Sanders, who used Cole’s wife as a resting place for her hands, let go for a moment to join in. I looked at Jolene and Marjorie, who were sitting across the aisle beside Sampson and Bill. The two of them, though identical, couldn’t have been more different. Marjorie was sitting on the edge of her seat with her legs crossed, sitting up straight, prim and proper, clapping with more enthusiasm than anyone else in the room. Jolene on the other hand wasn’t clapping at all, but slouching in her chair with her arms crossed. I noticed Bill was saying something in her ear, and judging by the scowl on her face, she didn’t approve of whatever it was.

“Now, in order to ensure the safety of our citizens and the people of this town, we will be taking precautionary measures by putting into place a temporary curfew, effective

173 immediately. Starting tomorrow, no one under the age of 18 without an adult chaperone will be allowed out of doors past 6 p.m.”

Everyone started talking all at once, stirred in their seats.

“Can they do that?” asked Sanders.

“It’s like my father always says,” said Johnny, putting a hand on both of our shoulders and drawing us close to him, “‘If they want something bad enough, they’ll take it from you.”

“You’ve got to be shitting me,” I said, without realizing that I had said it loud enough for everyone to hear. I didn’t want to turn around to see the look on my parents’ faces, especially my father’s, but from the sound of it the other kids in the room were experiencing the same emotional response. It was the worst thing that could have happened to any of us because we lived for the summer. We only had a set amount of summers left in in our lives before we would no longer be allowed to have three months of freedom, and with the onslaught of high school just out of reach, this removal of our right to exist outside of our homes was a direct threat to our livelihood. My eyes travelled back and forth between Cole and Mother Sanders, and while I understood it was Cole who was setting this law into motion I knew deep in the pit of my gut that it was Mother

Sanders who had planted the idea into his head. It was written all over her face, smeared across her mouth in a wicked smile.

Cole made a point of thanking me directly for my enthusiastic response before turning back to the audience. “Our officers will be patrolling the streets throughout the night, driving through neighborhoods to make sure nothing is out of the ordinary,” he

174 said. “We don’t want you to have to worry about anything. We are here to keep you safe, your children safe, and this town safe. If any minor is found out of doors past curfew, they will be taken home and the parents will be fined.”

“Come on, Sheriff, you can’t be serious.”

The intake of breath in the room was enough for it to sound like a small rush of wind. This time, it wasn’t me who spoke, and when I turned around to see who it was I was surprised to see my own father standing while my mother tugged on the sleeve of his shirt.

“I’m sorry to interrupt,” he said, looking around the room nervously, still wearing the suit jacket he wore to work that morning. “I’m always one for discipline, but you can’t expect us to keep our children locked inside every night.”

“I beg your pardon, sheriff,” said Mother Sanders as she approached the podium and politely took the microphone out of Cole’s hand. “I don’t mean to put my two sense in here, but I’m curious why you think you can’t lock your children in doors, Mr.

Allman? It’s perfectly possible.”

I looked from Sanders’ mom to my dad, and in the few seconds I had looked away from him, my father had grown from being annoyed to noticeably angry. He was standing with his arms crossed, leaning on his left foot the way he would whenever he would scold me at home. My mother’s hands were no longer holding onto his sleeve, but they were in her lap, and she was looking forward, eyes glazed, with a tight-lipped mouth.

“I know it’s possible, I just don’t think that it’s right,” he said. “These are kids we’re talking about here. On a nice day, I can hardly keep my son at home if I tried. You

175 can’t expect me to lock him up in his room to keep him from going outside with his friends.”

“Can’t you?” asked Mother Sanders, as she tilted her head and spoke into the microphone out of the side of her mouth. “You should be able to control your own children.”

“Control them?” he asked, laughing nervously as he looked around the room and realized probably for the first time since he stood that all of our eyes were on him. “I don’t want to force my son into doing the right thing,” he said. “I want him to want to do the right thing. So if you don’t mind Ms. Sanders, with all due respect, I’d appreciate it if you’d keep your parenting advice to yourself.”

I turned to look at Sanders, to see if I could register how he was feeling as our parents were pitted against one another in a small battle of good and evil. He winked at me from behind his glasses, as if to say, ‘They’re not crazy, they’re just concerned”, and I smiled back at him with relief.

Sheriff Cole took the microphone back from Mother Sanders before she could respond, and my father sat back down in his chair.

“My daughter was taken from me, Mr. Allman,” he said, spitting out the words like he had been waiting all this time to expel them out of his mouth. “I don’t care what you believe about raising your own children, but I,” he said, holding up his index finger,

“I will make sure something like this never happens again.”

“So she was taken?” asked an elderly woman in the audience, someone I had only recognized in passing. “Your daughter; she was kidnapped?”

176 It’s a silly way to phrase it; kidnapped. I hated that more than I hated “that poor girl.” It felt so sudden, so infinitely permanent. It was such an ugly word that when spoken out loud in that meeting, no one dared to move or turn their heads or even make a sound. Everyone just stared at Sheriff Cole as he held the microphone under his chin with both hands, his arms shaking with tension.

“Yes,” he said, flatly. “My daughter did not leave. She did not run away. We have reason to believe—I have reason to believe—that someone took her.”

One of the reporters in the front row saw this as an opportunity to stand and ask pointblank if she thought his daughter was still alive. Without giving him a single moment to process the question or to even respond, Mother Sanders took back the microphone and stared down at the reporter.

“Of course she’s alive! What kind of question is that?” she snapped. “We are proud people and we will persevere. Have some respect.”

“I’m sorry,” Florence said out loud, still seated with her legs crossed and her hat on, never once moving to stand. “I don’t mean to interrupt, but I’m sure she didn’t mean it like that.”

Mother Sanders’ face grew a dark shade of red as she turned to look at Florence.

Johnny, Sanders, and I leaned towards the opposite end of the row as we watched the two of them staring at one another, waiting for one of them to implode. I could have sworn the air in that room grew ten degrees hotter the minute Florence spoke up in opposition of

Mrs. Sanders, and the very paint on the walls started to crack and peel overhead. On the other side of the aisle, Bill looked ready to stand and defend her if she needed it at any moment, while Marjorie looked horrified and Jolene looked on with a grin.

177 “I’m sorry, did you say something?” asked Mother Sanders.

“I was just—I was just saying that I’m sure the nice lady up there didn’t mean it the way you thought she did,” said Florence.

“And what would you know,” asked Mother Sanders, “about what other people mean?”

“I don’t profess to know anything, ma’am. I just think that maybe it sort of came out wrong, is all.”

“I don’t think you’re in a position to decide what other people mean,” she said, the scowl in her face deepening with every word that followed so that the skin around her mouth seemed to hang off the bone. “Most of us have lived here our entire lives and we have shaped this town into what it’s become. Outsiders, like yourself, don’t appreciate what that means. That’s why your kind aren’t welcome here.”

“Our kind?” Florence called back, easily mimicking the degree of venom Mother

Sanders used when she had said the phrase. I looked at Johnny with eyebrows raised, and we both knew without saying a word that things were about to go south for everyone involved. “What do you mean by our kind?”

“The kind that never puts down roots,” she said, walking towards the end of the stage while Cole remained where he was with his arms behind his back, eyes glued to the back of her head. “We know our neighbors. We greet them everyday on our lawns, we invite them into our homes for coffee, we stand in each other’s weddings and we hold on to each other when our loved ones die. We give birth to our children in the same rooms our mothers gave birth to us. We nurture our children, and then we send them off into the

178 world so that at the end of their lives, our children will find their way back to us because our town is there home.”

The more she talked about our town the more nauseous I became until I started to gnaw on the inside of my cheek to avoid from throwing up. All around me, people were whispering. It was a slow and steady thrum, a whistling of voices that continued to rise.

People were starting to stand up, to see if they might be able to assess the situation better if they were on their feet.

“You, on the other hand,’ she continued, “what legacy do you have? Do you carry it with you hidden in one of your boxes in the back of a wagon? Do you have it tacked to the inside of one of your tents so that you’re reminded of it when you’re performing your tricks in some town you barely know the name of? Or do you cart it around and drag it behind you in the mud, with your dogs and the ruined clothes off of your children’s backs?”

“You have no right—”

“You deceive everyone—”

“You can’t just—”

“You deceive everybody who comes to watch you play, girl,” said Mother

Sanders, interrupting her for the second time in a voice so soft and thorough that it was frightening. Florence stood when she was interrupted the first time and then through off her hat so that Forde had to catch it in his hands when she interrupted her again. Jolene was standing on her feet now too, while Bill held tight to her elbows so she wouldn’t charge the stage. Marjorie was at her back, smiling at the crowd of people behind them and apologizing for her sister’s anger. And Sampson was cracking his knuckles so loud

179 that I could hear it from way on the other end of the room, while the four of us—Sanders,

Johnny, myself and Forde—sat silent and shocked as the scene unfolded in front of us.

The police officers were standing as well, their backs to the stage in some haphazard line of defense, and Cole’s wife, who had previously been sitting at the table, had now gotten out of her seat and kissed her husband on the cheek as she disappeared into the side room from where Mother Sanders made her debut at the beginning of the meeting. As for Cole, he stood still and silent, staring out at the front entrance as if he was ignorant to what was happening in front of him.

Before Mother Sanders could carry on, Florence stepped out into the middle of the isle, and looked up at her with her shoulders pushed back, as if ready to charge the stage when necessary.

“Tell me,” said Florence, standing so perfectly centered in the middle of the walkway, “what have I done to deceive?”

Mother Sanders scoffed.

“What haven’t you done? You come strolling in here from off the street with all of your people like a pack of stray dogs, wearing all black like you’re in some kind of a coven, and you think there wouldn’t be a single soul here who wouldn’t question your motives?” she asked.

“I haven’t done anything wrong,” said Florence, looking from one side of the room to the other, as our entire row looked to her for support. There were some in the crowd too, nodding their heads in agreement, though those numbers were few. “We are kind. We are performers. We’re here just as much out of tradition for this town as we are here for our wellbeing. This isn’t about us, or this festival; don’t you understand? We

180 have nothing to do with Cole’s missing daughter,” said Florence, now turning full-circle to see Mother Sanders head on again.

“Oh, I understand all too well,” said Mother Sanders, her eyes glazing over as she continued to talk in a devised and steady rhythm, making sure each syllable of each word hit home, hit us in the chest, hit us all hard and heavy. “Evil begets evil, and whosoever deals with the devil will have demons nipping at their heels. You’ll find no sanctuary here because you brought it in with you. You carried it in through the back door and you unleashed it!”

“I’ve done no such thing.”

“Maybe not directly,” continued Mother Sanders, “but your presence here has done nothing more than call attention to all the horrors that lurk outside of our doors and on the edges of town. Evil surrounds you, and evil followed you here; and like a thief who takes what he can in the middle of the night, evil snuck in and stole a child while she slept, and that evil is you.”

“Enough of this horseshit already,” yelled Johnny, standing up so fast the chair underneath him tipped over and hit the ground with a loud bang. “I didn’t come here for no church lesson.”

“You hush your mouth, young man!” yelled Mother Sanders, her finger pointing at him and then wavering between the three of us kids. “You see?” she yelled into the microphone, addressing everyone else in the room. “Don’t you see, how she’s poisoned our children? She was seen talking to Lauren Cole hours before she went missing—”

“She asked for a lighter!”

“—And then the girl disappears that same night—”

181 “—a coincidence—”

“—and now my own son and his friends sit in the same row as this witch, this defiler of youth, this eater of children!”

“Let me at the old bitch!” yelled Jolene, who finally managed to struggle her way out of Bill’s arms and made way towards the center isle. Florence turned and grabbed her shoulders, holding her back from the stage, while everyone in the room stood up, outraged at one thing or another, so that everyone was yelling. I looked over just in time to see Jack staring at me, a hand raised and running horizontally across his scrawny neck as if to say, “You’re all dead, Andrew, and they’re coming for your heads.” I wanted to cross the room and pummel him right there, but then I wouldn’t have been any better off.

Instead I stepped out into the aisle, and yelled at the top of my lungs for everyone to shut the hell up.

The silence that followed was deafening, and the looks on my parents’ faces, as they stood there, arms raised above their heads and mouths hanging open in mid-shout just like everyone else, gave me the overwhelming feeling that I was now standing somewhere in which it was impossible for me to come back from.

I turned around to face Mother Sanders again, for the second time in weeks, only this time she wasn’t dragging me across the lot by my ear. Instead, she was forced to hear me out, to give me the floor, to hear whatever it was I was going to say next because all eyes were on me.

“We’re leaving,” I said, turning to make sure that Johnny and Sanders would follow me when I went out the door. “We’re escorting them back to the trailer park. All this nonsense ends here.”

182 “No, it doesn’t,” said Florence, as she let go of Jolene and took a step forward to stand by me. “It’s not going to end, as long as this psychotic woman has a mouth to speak and a tongue to wag.” She turned, and I followed her gaze to see Bill shaking his head slowly from side to side, his eyes watering. She paused a moment, while everything remained still, and then turning back to Mother Sanders, she said, “We’re leaving in the morning.”

“What do you mean, you’re leaving?” I asked. My throat felt like it had suddenly swelled to twice its normal size and I was running the risk of losing the ability to breathe on my own.

“Don’t try to make this into one of your things,” said Florence, as she distanced herself from me. “We had a meeting and talked about it before we came. We decided that if there couldn’t be an agreement, then we’d just let ourselves out.”

I was going to protest, but I saw the way Johnny was looking at me from behind her, like he pitied me in some way for wanting her to stay. So, I stood in my place, and bit my bottom lip so that I wouldn’t feel the need to say anything else about the matter.

Perhaps there would be another moment besides this, another opportunity to disclose the way I was feeling before they got back on the road. But this wasn’t it. It never was.

“You’re not going anywhere,” said Sheriff Cole without the help of the microphone.

“You can’t keep us here,” said Florence. “We’ve made our decision.”

“It’s not your decision to make,” said Sheriff Cole. He reached underneath the podium and pulled out a plastic bag, and from inside the bag he withdrew a black book, the same one Florence had been reading the morning before we went out to the drive-in.

183 Grimm’s Fairy Tales. He held it up in the air in front of him for everyone to see it like some sort of prize, and it was weather-worn and tattered at the edges; a corner of the front cover had been bent; the pages had been speckled with mud. “Does this belong to you?” he asked.

The whole town turned and looked at Florence, as she remained silent, raising a hand to cover her mouth.

“It was found,” continued Sheriff Cole, “thrown in a ditch not far from the drive- in where you were reportedly seen with two of your young escorts. Tucked inside the front cover of the book was one of my daughter’s hair bows.”

Another uproar ripped through the room, as Johnny, Sanders and I looked at each other, confused by the implications Sheriff Cole was making. I turned to look up at

Florence and could tell by the look in her eyes as she stared forward at the stage that she had already made up her mind, that she was going to confess ownership of the book and by relation confess to a much larger crime. But just as soon as she was about to step forward and accept the fate that was presenting itself, Forde stepped forward in her place.

“It’s my book,” he said. “I leant it to your daughter. I let her borrow it. It’s mine.”

Suddenly it was like a floodgate had been opened and there was a swarm of people all around us. The cops rushed forward to detain Forde so that they could take him in for questioning while the temps pulled Florence away by her arms and legs to keep her from telling the truth. Mother Sanders stood at the edge of it all licking her lips and hovering over the crowd on the stage while my parents scrambled over chairs to get to us.

Somewhere in the mess and the mayhem, Jack and his boys were hunting us with hearts so vicious you would have thought they would get away with murder. But in the midst of

184 it all, at the very center of it, the three of us stood still, taking it all in with open arms and standing as tall as monsters, waiting for the swarm to subside.

185