Hide and Seek (2 page)

After that day on the beach, I never saw her again. Not once. Sorry, Lyssa Jean.

Anyhow, it was not much fun sitting there after that, but I stuck it out for another hour or so, hoping she'd get up for another swim. She didn't. In the meantime Rafferty had struck up a conversation with Lydia Davis.

Now that the tourists were in town Lydia was a lot more generally available. Off-season she was just about the prettiest thing we had in Dead River and you could buy her drinks all night long at the Caribou and hardly get a smile or word out of her. She got nicer with competition around.

So I couldn't get Rafferty to leave. The dog in the honey pot He kept baring his crooked teeth at her.

I quit trying.

We had Rafferty's car that day but I figured I could probably hitch a ride along the coast road. I packed my gear, slipped on my jeans, shirt and sneakers and headed up the beach to the goat trail.

On the way I passed them. A tall, slim guy with dark skin and dark hair and as harp straight nose. And a pretty green-eyed blond, a little on the heavy side for my tastes but still very tasty, looking a couple years younger than the guy-sort of barely ripe-in her tiny yellow two-piece.

The other girl's towel was empty.

Climbing the goat trail I did a quick scan of the beach. I couldn't find her anywhere. About ten feet from the top I turned and looked again. Nothing.

"I'm up here," she said.

I almost fell right off the trail. It would have been a bad fall.

It was very matter-of-fact, though, the way she said it. As though it were obvious I'd be looking for her. As though she simply knew. I turned and saw her standing there above me, and I think I must have flushed a little, because she smiled.

I climbed the trail to the top. I watched my footing, not because I really needed to, but because, as I say, it's my habit, and because it was sort of hard to look at her directly. Bathing suit or no, I don't think I'd ever seen anybody look so naked before.

Maybe it was the fact that she seemed so comfortable in her own skin, like a kid who doesn't know about clothes much.

But there was something consciously erotic about her too and a long haul from innocence. Just in the way she stood there, flicking a green-and-white bath towel at the hawk seed hipshot.

The breeze had died down long ago.

The sun put red and brown into the still dark hair.

I have seen the Caribbean since then. Toward the end of the day the sea sparkles with light as the sun goes down, and the color is that high transparent blue that will turn gray and then finally black by nightfall. Her eyes were like that, the color of last light.

They took me in all at once, gobbled me up.

I wondered how old she was.

I think I mumbled hi.

"It was me, wasn't it?" I listened for hints of mockery in her voice.

There weren't any.

"It was you. How'd you know?"

She smiled and the lips remained full even then. She didn't answer, though.

She looked at me for a moment and I looked back and there was that nakedness again, that easy nudity. She flicked the towel. The head of a daisy shot off into the dust. She turned and walked a few steps back to a dark green Mercedes parked between Rafferty's old Dodge and a white Corvair.

"Drive me home?"

"Sure."

She climbed in the passenger side. I walked around and got behind the wheel. The keys were in the ignition. I started it up.

"Where to?"

"Seven Willoughby. You know where it is?"

"Sure. Summer place?"

"Uh-huh."

"You don't sound too happy."

"I'm not. They call me at school and tell me they've got this wonderful place lined up for the summer. I drive up and here it is.

On the way up everything has been shrinking--trees, houses, shrubs. So I wonder if I'm not shrinking too. This town's a little dull."

"Tell me about it."

pulled the car out into the road. I'd never felt the least bit guilty about not going to college. I still didn't, not exactly, but it was getting close to that.

"You do, though, right?"

I am fabulous at conversation.

"Pine Manor over in Chestnut Hill. My last year. Steven goes to Harvard, and Kimberley's with me only a year behind, and her major's French. Mine's Physical Anthropology. I'll do field work in another year if I want to bother."

"Do you?"

"So far. Sure. Why not. Don't you get bored?"

"Huh?"

"Don't you get bored around here?"

"Often."

"What do you do?"

"For a living?"

"I mean to kill the tedium."

"Oh, this and that. I see the beach a lot."

"I bet you do."

The road was narrow and twisting but I knew it blind by now, sc it was easy to keep an eye on her. There was a small patch of sane on her shoulder. I wanted to brush it off, just for the excuse to toucf her.

She sat very low in the seat. She really was in terrific physical condition. Just one thin line where the flesh had to buckle at the stomach. She smelled lightly of dampness. Sweat and seawater.

"Your car?" I asked her. "It runs pretty good."

"No."

"Your dad's?"

"No."

"Whose, then?"

She shrugged, telling me it didn't matter. "Is this your town? You've lived here all your life and all?"

"Me and my father both."

"You like it?"

"Not much."

"Then why stick around?"

"Inertia, I guess. Nothing ever came along to move me out."

"Would you like to have something come along and move you out?"

"Never thought about it. I don't know."

"So think about it. What if something did? Would you want that?"

"You want me to think about it right now?"

"You going anywhere?"

"No."

So I did. It was a hell of an odd question right off the bat like that but I gave it some thought. And while I was doing that I was wondering why she'd asked.

"I guess I might. Yeah."

"Good."

"Why good?"

"You're cute."

"So?"

"So I couldn't be bothered if you were stupid."

There wasn't much to say to that. The road wound by. I watched her staring out the window. The sun was going down. There were bright streaks of red in her hair. The line of neck to shoulder was very soft and graceful.

We were coming into town. Willoughby was just on the outskirts, the closest thing we could claim to a grouping of "better" houses.

"You'd better pull up here."

"You're not going home?"

She laughed. "Not in this. Pull up here."

I thought she meant the bathingsuit, that her parents were strict about that. It was pretty skimpy. I pulled the car off to the shoulder and cut the engine. I reached for the keys.

"Leave them."

She opened the door and stepped out.

"I don't get it. What are you going to do about the car?"

She was already walking away. I slammed the door and caught up with her.

"I'm going to leave it here."

"With keys in the ignition?"

"Sure."

Suddenly it dawned on me.

"I think you'd better tell me your name. So I know where to send them when they come for me."

She laughed again. "Casey Simpson White. Seven Willoughb, Lane. And it will be my first offense. How about you?"

"Clan Thomas. I've been up against it before, I guess."

"What for?"

"They got me once when I was five. Me and another kid set fin to his backyard with a can of lighter fluid. That was one thing."

"There's more?"

"A little later, yeah. Nothing glamorous as auto theft, though You wouldn't be interested."

I grabbed her arm. I could still feel the adrenaline churning. I couldn't help it. I'd never stolen a car before. It made me nervous.

Her skin was soft and smooth. She didn't pull away.

"Are you crazy?"

She stopped and looked me straight in the eye.

"Buy me a drink and find out for yourself."

It was my turn to laugh then. "You're underage, though, right? You would have to be."

"Just."

"Please remember you never told me that. Come on."

ffm mA^m

^^^^AH

^^^^^^AH

AH_

So that was the business with the car, and that was the first time she scared me.

The truth was I liked it.

Here was a girl, I thought, who didn't play by our rules-whc hardly seemed to know them. And I guess I'd seen enough of rules in twenty years of Dead River.

It was rules that got you where you were and more rules that kept you there, kids turning into premature adults, adults putting in the hard day's work for wife and more kids and mortgaged house and car, and nobody ever got out from under. That was rule number one. You didn't get out. I'd seen it happen to my parents. The rule said, see, your foot is in the bear trap now and you're the one that put it there, so don't expect to come away alive; we didn't set it up for that. The problem was always money. The slightest twitch in the economy would sluice tidal waves through the whole community. We were always close to oblivion. The price of fish would change in Boston and half the town would be lined up at the bank, begging for money.

It might have made us tougher, but it didn't. All you saw were the stooped shoulders and the slow crawl toward bitterness and old age.

I'd moved out on my parents three years ago, when it became too hard to watch my father come up broke and empty after another season hauling in sardines in Passamaquoddy Bay and to watch my mother's house go slowly down around her. They were good people,

and they were fools, and after a while all I could bring to them was anger.

At the time I didn't even know what I was mad about, but I knew it wasn't working. So I found myself the job at the yard and then a little two-room apartment over Brody's Hardware on Main Street, and I'd stop by the house whenever I could stand it, which wasn't often.

Every now and then I'd wonder why I didn't get out entirely. The answer was the one I gave Casey. Inertia. A tired life breeds tired decisions, sometimes none at all. I was lazy. Demoralized. Always had been.

Then Casey.

And it was wonderful to see her thumb her nose at us; it was a pleasure. I'd always been too much a part of the town to really do it right. You needed to be an outsider for that, or at least you needed one to show you how. Someone with no worries about reputations, someone whose father didn't drink with the mayor and half the cops in town, someone with no stake.

Even if I hadn't wanted her, I might have gone along for the ride.

But I did want her. As I sat in the bar that day, she was just about all I wanted. Everything else looked kind of puny and small. It was only lust, but it had very big teeth.

What I'm trying to say here is that she got me started moving toward a lot of things, things I'd been avoiding for a longtime. And I've never regretted that part of it for a minute. And I've never looked back.

Today, that part's still good.

Some of it, though.

Some of it was horrible.

And I'd better get into that right now, so I can set myself to thinking about it, getting it right. Otherwise the rest will make no sense to anybody, and I know there was a kind of sense to it, almost an inevitability, as though what happened was sure to happen given what we were together and what the town had become. It's a hard connection to make but I've got to make it. And maybe then I can just go on.

4-

The Crouch place.

The subject came up early between us, and then I guess just hung there unnoticed on the borders of her memory like a cobweb in an attic full of old toys.

Wish to god I'd seen the spider.

We were sitting at the soda fountain at Harmon's General Store because Steven had been bothering us for chocolate egg cream all day long, and we finally got tired of his gritting his teeth and hissing at us as though he had to go to the bathroom something awful and nobody would let him, so we went to Harmon's and he explained the drink to Mrs.

Harmon. A hefty squirt of chocolate syrup, a little milk, and lots of seltzer. Mrs. Harmon kept shaking her head. "No egg?"

As usual the conversation got around to bitching about how nothing ever happened here and how there was nothing to do, so I happened to mention the Crouch place and what happened when we were kids.

You may have read about the end of it if you get the Boston papers. I know the Globe carried a story on it, because Rafferty and I both kept our copies until they got yellow and dog-eared. Dead River gets so little scandal. So we read the story over and over. How the police and the ASPCA broke in, now that Ben and Mary were gone. Testimony from Mr. Harmon and Chief Peters. For a while you'd get these wacky types driving up especially, just to see the place, though there wasn't much to see.