Hide and Seek (8 page)

Big hole. Said it looked as though somebody'd been whacking away at it with a sledgehammer. He couldn't figure it. Said the doc was a pretty weird guy. But he could understand him wanting it patched up again.

The draft was fierce."

"In the basement?"

"Sure. Palmer says that in a couple of places the foundation's sitting right beside some open spaces in the seawall. Tunnels. Erosion or whatever. Said that whole stretch of coast is honeycombed with 'em. So you open up one of those spaces and the wind runs right in from the sea. Anyway, he closed it up. I told him about our little excursion out that way when we were kids."

"I still don't get it. The draft was what scared him? What was he, afraid of summer colds?"

"Jimmie says he doesn't really know what it was. Maybe he was afraid the whole house was going to slide down into those tunnels someday. You know, the way they go out in California. But that cellar is sunk in solid rock. He had no problem there. No, hecouldn'tfigure what it was."

"Ben and Mary's ghosts."

"Could be."

"You sound like you've got more."

"I do. Did you know they were imbeciles?"

"You mean crazy?"

"No. Imbeciles. It's a pretty ugly story, actually. It seems that when the bank called in that mortgage money they had a town meeting about it. See, all Ben knew was farming, and he was pretty bad at that. But there was no possibility of either of them doing anything else for a living. So somebody came up with the bright idea of having the town pay off the mortgage. It was only a little over a thousand.

And they figured it would cost them a whole lot more than that just in bookkeeping and whatnot to keep them on the dole for thirty, maybe forty, years than it would to pay off and let them keep the place.

"But the upshot was that somebody got cheap about it, I guess, so the proposal was turned down. And it looked like Dead River was going into the social welfare business for a while. Very exciting. But then, of course, Ben and Mary disappeared and saved everybody the trouble."

"Imbeciles, huh?"

"Total morons. Ben couldn't read and couldn't write. He could handle a plow and Mary could wring a chicken's neck and that was about the whole of it. Now, where do you go if you're that stupid? That's the next question. How do you manage disappearing?"

"You could die."

"That would be the easy way, yes."

"Or just wander off. A county or two down the line."

"Or you could do what my boss did and open a garage."

"You could do that."

He pushed the empty glass away from him and his smile was sly, a little boozy. His hands waved apparitions in the space around us.

"Or maybe you just go back into the caves," he said. "And forget about us entirely. Maybe you live off fish and weeds and spend your days listening to the gulls and the wind off the sea, and you don't come out, not ever."

"Jesus, Rafferty."

I felt a slight prickling at the base of my neck. He looked at me and the smile grew even more cagey and ironic, like a cop in a morgue uncovering a cadaver.

"That doctor. I wonder if he ever heard dogs barking."

I decided a few days later that Rafferty's sense of humor was

Maybe it was the tourists turning up so early this year because of the good weather-they could breed a bitter irony in you made up of easy money and bad manners, privilege and your own unquestionable need. One day I saw a fat man in sunglasses and fishing tackle and drinking eggnog right out of the carton.

It was pretty sickening.

Then that same day Rafferty tells me this story about some woman over in Portland who was suing an Italian spaghetti-sauce company for mental anguish because she opened a can of marinara and found a woman's finger inside a rubber glove pointing fingernail-up at her.

The next day he had another one.

I I j I 'j. He d read it in the paper.

The body of a night watchman had been found in a hog pen at a meat-packing firm on the South Side of Chicago. It had been partly eaten by the hogs. There were hundreds of them in the pen, and the guy's face and abdomen were in pretty bad shape. But here's the kicker.

His clothes were hanging neatly on a nearby fence.

Rafferty made some nasty obvious comments about going after pigs in the dark.

So I thought he was getting strange lately.

But maybe it wasn't him entirely.

Sometimes I think there's something just hanging in the air, and a I most everybody reacts to it. Don't ask me why. Sometimes it's real and vital, like when JFK was shot. And sometimes it's completely unimportant, like pennant fever. Sometimes, like the recession, it goes on and on, and you get so you hardly even notice it. Maybe Dead River was getting a touch of that.

And I'll tell you why I think it wasn't just Rafferty.

There was us.

The stealing. All the dumb, reckless things we were doing. The business with Steven. The stolen car. There was my own blind, self-destructive urgetofollowalong, no matter what kind of ridiculous thing they were into doing.

There was a statue of a mounted revolutionary soldier in the town square. One night we painted the horse's balls bright red. Two nights later we painted them blue.

We were sitting on the beach one afternoon, and Casey was in the water-it had grown warmer by then, though it was still too cold for me. Steve was still nursing his torn hand, so he'd stayed home that day, so there was just me and Kim sitting there alone together, watching her, and we got to talking about Steve's accident-we called it an accident now-in a boring sort of way. The stitches, when they were due out, to what degree he could flex the damn thing. We were remembering how it had been that day without ever once coming close to the heart of the thing, which was why she'd done it. We skirted that.

But I guess it made her think of this other story, which I'm mentioning here because it bears upon what I was saying about something being in the air by then, something made of god knows what and disgorging itself on Dead River.

Kim was only a little girl at the time, she said.

There was a family living next door to her who had a teenage daughter.

An only child. Not a pretty girl or terribly smart either. Sort of ordinary. A little unfriendly and sullen.

Anyway, for her birthday-her seventeenth-her parents gave her two presents, a car and a Doberman puppy. Probably, Kim said, she was unpopular at school, and the one gift-the car-was to

make her more popular, while the other gift was to console her if it

di~ glitllove,hepupp,

Both her parents had jobs, so the dog was home alone most of the time during the day, and Kim remembered the girl's car roaring into the driveway each afternoon at three-thirty and the girl racing up the steps while the dog barked loudly and scratched at the screen door.

Then there would be a lot of jumping and squealing and hugging, which even as a kid Kim found pretty disgusting. And finally there would be a very big puppy tearing crazily around their own and

This happened every day.

Then one day there was none of it. The girl came home and there was no barking and no scratching at the door. Just silence. Kim was playing in the yard as usual and noticed that something was wrong. They'd gotten pretty used to the dog by then. So she watched. The girl went inside.

A few minutes later the girl came out holding the puppy and raced for the car. She put the dog inside and quickly drove away. That was all Kim saw. The rest she heard about later.

When the girl got home the puppy was in the kitchen, choking. There was something caught in the throat. So she bundled it up and drove to the vet. The vet took a look at the dog and told her to wait outside.

She did, for a while. But then the waiting started to get to her so she decided to drive on home, and asked the nurse to call her when the doctor was through.

She was only in the house a few minutes when the phone rang. It was the vet. He said the dog was all right and asked her if she was home alone. She said she was. He told her to get out of the house right away, to go stand on the lawn or on the street. The police, he said would be over right away.

She was not to ask questions. She was just to leave as fast as possible.

They found her waiting on the front lawn, walking in circles, confused and worried. Two squad cars emptied four officers into her house.

Upstairs, hiding in her father's closet, they found a man with ashirt wrapped tight around a bleeding index finger. Or what was left of it.

I guess the dog had proven itself a good watchdog but a clumsy eater.

He'd taken the intruder's finger off at the knuckle and swallowed it whole. And that was what was lodged there in his throat.

"I'm supposed to believe that?"

"Absolutely."

Two finger stories in one week, I thought.

"If you don't believe me, ask Casey. The girl used to babysit for her brother."

"Her brother."

I guess I jumped on that one a little.

"Sure. You ... you knew about her brother, didn't you?"

"Yes and no."

She knew she'd made a mistake. I watched her get more and more uncomfortable, trying to figure how to handle it. Finally she said, "Well, you can ask Casey about Jean Drummond. She'll tell you."

"-r , I,

Talk to me about her brother, Kim.

She considered it. I had the feeling that there was something there she thought I ought to know. I knew she liked me. I remembered her warning about Casey over Cokes that day. Loyalties, though. They die hard.

"I'd ... rather not. That's Casey's business."

"Not mine? Not even a little?"

"I didn't say that."

"So? Should I ask her about it, Kimberley?"

She paused. "Maybe you should. I don't know. It depends.

"On what?"

"On how well you need to know her, I guess."

"Suppose that's a lot?"

She sighed. "Then ask. Ask her for god's sake. Jesus! I can't hold your goddamn hand for you."

She stood and walked away from me into the shallows. As far as I knew it was the first time she'd gone into the water all summer. I called out to her.

"You won't like it."

She turned around and looked at me. She spoke quietly. "Neither will you."

The opportunity to ask her about her brother came along two nights later.

I think I remember everything there is to remember about that night.

The smell of fresh-cut grass on her lawn, the warmth of the air its exact temperature-the scent of the hair moving toward me and then away on the flow of breeze through the open windows as we drifted along in the car, the feel of damp earth under me later and the smell of that too, the long empty silences, crickets, night birds, her awful shallow breathing.

I remember every bit of it, because that night put all the rest in motion. And the next day was Saturday, and the next night was Saturday night. And I've never looked at Saturdays the same way since. Maybe you'll find that hard to believe. But you weren't there.

You don't carry it around with you like a sackful of cinders.

Like I say, you weren't there.

I'd taken the day off again and this time the boss wasn't happy with me at all. I was "ill" again. McGregor wasn't stupid. You only had to look at Casey once or twice to know what was keeping me away.

I was endangering the job. I didn't care.

We drove to Campobello for the day to see the Roosevelt summer home. We were the only ones there, so the guide gave us

special attention. Steven, whose hand was still wrapped in bandages, found it all a bit hard to take.

"There's an awful lot of wicker."

He was right as far as I was concerned. Nice house, big, but otherwise nothing special. The guide was a lot more impressed than any of us were. But that was her job. She was a nice old woman and you didn't want to insult her. Except for Steve, who kept wandering off impatiently by himself, we followed her and nodded attentively.

It was a relief to get outside, though.

"Thank god," said Steve as we piled back into the car. "How do tourists stand themselves, anyway?"

"They still believe in education," Casey said.

Steve nodded. "Self-improvement."

"History."

We stopped for a drink at the Caribou on the way home. Hank always served us, though I'm sure he knew they were underage. I suppose he needed the business.

It was still early and the after-work crowd hadn't arrived yet, so we had the place nearly to ourselves. Steve played some Elvis and Jerry Lee on the jukebox. All the drinks were the usual-scotch with beer back for me, Bloody Marys for Casey and Steve and a tequila sunrise for Kimberley. We finished one round and ordered another. And that was when the disagreement started.

We'd planned to drive to Lubec that night to listen to a local band there, one Kim happened to like. Steve and I were agreeable. But Casey hadn't committed herself. And now it turned out that there was a movie she wanted to see over in Trescott. It was nothing to me either way, but Steve got annoyed with her.