"Not really. Not so far. I want to be a doctor. I"ll like it a lot better when I can start my pre-med courses."
A blonde G.o.ddess who was going to be a doctor. I decided not to tell her about my plans for communty college.
"They look so immature, don"t they?" she said.
"Yeah."
"You see that puking contest?"
"Yeah."
"I"m going out with this neurologist. He thinks that boys don"t mature until they"re in their mid-twenties." She looked at the people around the campfire. "They"re also into some pretty terrible stuff."
"Drugs?"
"Drugs, and violence."
"The fights I saw tonight weren"t much."
"Not fights. I went into the woods and I saw this boy hit this girl right in the face. I said something to them but they ran away. The Homecoming Queen. I think my sister said her name was Cindy."
"He hit her in the face?"
"Yes, and hard, too."
She drained her paper cup. "Well, I"d better see if I can talk my sister into going home. I don"t know why I agreed to come out here in the first place. There wasn"t anybody worth meeting."
She blessed me with a smile, and was gone.
I spent the rest of the night looking for Cindy Brasher. I couldn"t forget what Sharon had told me about Myles. .h.i.tting her in the face. Then the two of them running away.
By eleven o"clock, the wind was getting so cold that everybody starting packing up and heading back. Even the guys in the never-ending puking contest had started to look cold.
Josh wasn"t back. I was tired and the wind was getting to me. I decided to water some more foliage in the woods. Maybe when I returned, Josh would be there and ready to go.
A lot of the leaves were gone this time of year so the moonlight was bright and strong. I found a big boulder and walked behind it and peed. I was feeling the beer just enough to get that melancholy feeling alcohol always gives me. There was something lonely about the way steam rose off my p.i.s.s as I peed against the rock. I heard a nearby animal in the undergrowth and sort of envied him. It would be nice not to have deal with the human world sometimes.
I was on my way back to the dying bonfire when I heard the crying. I recognized it right away for what it was and I guess I probably knew who it was, too.
Off-trail was an old line-shack that the electric company people had probably used sixty, seventy years ago when they were stringing wire out here in the boonies.
Now it was all tumbledown, all busted windows and jagged boards.
She sat in the doorway of it, her face in her hands. She wasn"t crying hard, it was just a kind of soft, exhausted grief.
She heard the dead leaves crunch beneath my feet and looked up.
"Oh," she said, "hi."
"Hi."
She sniffled and wiped the tears from her eyes with cute little red mittens. I found everything about her cute and fetching and overwhelming. I"d never felt this before and it scared me. It was like driving a car at 200 miles an hour and all of a sudden the steering goes out and then the brakes go out, too.
"You"re Josh"s brother."
"Yeah."
"I"m Cindy Brasher."
"The Homecoming Queen."
She laughed. "Big deal, huh?"
"It is a big deal."
She kept her right hand mitten under her eye. When she took it away, I saw why. She had a shiner, and a good one, and it was turning big and ugly already.
"Hey," I said, "what happened?"
"Oh, I tripped and fell down."
"You did, huh?"
"Yeah."
"You should get some ice on that."
"Ice helps?"
"Helps a lot. If you get it on soon enough."
"Maybe I will."
In two more steps I was next to her and then before I knew what I was doing, I knelt down beside her and touched my finger to her eye.
"Wow," I said. "You really hurt yourself. You got a headache?"
"I had a little one, I guess."
I couldn"t believe that I was touching her this way.
"You"re really gentle. Your hand, I mean."
"Thanks."
"I really like gentle things," she said. There was a dreamy, far-off quality to her voice now, as if she were addressing not me but somebody else.
"Hey a.s.shole, what the h.e.l.l"re you doing?"
Before I could even turn around to see him, David Myles had grabbed the back of my coat and lifted me up off the ground and started shaking me.
"Just because you"re Josh"s a.s.shole brother doesn"t cut any s.h.i.t with me, you understand?"
By now, even though I was shaking, I"d gathered myself enough to kick him sharply in the shin. He cried out and released me when my heel met his shin bone. I turned to face him. He was protecting himself, but I got him a nice solid one right on the nose.
Then she was between us, screaming for us to stop, shouting to Myles that it was all her fault, and frantically pushing me away.
"Just get out of here," she said. "I shouldn"t have been talking to you. This is all my fault."
"I ever see you touching her again, jerk-off, you"re going to be very, very sorry. You understand?"
He wanted another go at me and I guess I wanted another go at him, too. Our dislike of each other was immediate and profound. But she was still screaming to keep us apart.
And then they were gone. I stood in the silver moonlight thinking of how tender and warm her cheek had felt to my touch. I was back in that car again, 200 mph and no brakes. Out of control.
"You have a good time?" Josh said.
"Yeah."
He looked over at me.
"Yeah, you sound like it. Two fights in one night, huh? My brother the bad-a.s.s. Who would"ve thought?"
"You"ve got some nice friends."
"A lot of them are just silly-a.s.s little kids." He grinned at me. We had the top down and were freezing our b.a.l.l.s off. It was some kind of macho rite. We were going maybe 80 mph. "You got the hots for Cindy Brasher, huh?"
"You"re full of s.h.i.t."
"Hey, man, it"s all right. Lots of guys have the hots for Cindy. Just watch out for Myles. He"s going to come back for round two."
"Yeah," I said. "I kind"ve figured he might."
"Well, brother, I got some bad news for you," Josh said.
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. Most guys at that school, I can kick their b.u.t.ts without breaking a sweat. David Myles, I couldn"t kick his b.u.t.t if I had a gun and he had his hands tied behind his back. He"s a real animal. He"s a lot tougher when he isn"t as drunk as he was tonight."
"How come she goes out with him, anyway?"
He shrugged. Questions about psychology didn"t seem to interest him much. "Who knows? Maybe she"s nuts. She had some kind of breakdown last year. Ended up in the bug house. Had those treatmentsa"riding the lightning they call it."
"Electro-shock?"
"Yeah."
"Wow. That"s bad s.h.i.t."
"Tell me about it," Josh said. "Young girl like that, pumping all that voltage into her."
I could barely stand to think about it. Couple guys in the Army had ridden the lightning. It was pretty bad. I just kept thinking of Cindy Brasher, her body dancing around as they shot her up with electricity.
Twenty minutes later, we pulled up in front of our house. Josh didn"t cut the lights.
"You going somewhere?" I said.
"Brother of mine, I"ve got some sweet young p.u.s.s.y waiting for me. And I"m in a hurry to get to it."
It was funny to me again, me being older and more experienced in many ways. But somehow Josh was senior and I was junior.
"Well, I may still be up when you get home."
He grinned. "Don"t count on it."
Richard Mitch.e.l.l, KNAX-TV: "One thing the folks at home should understand about this execution today, Paul, is that they"ve rehea.r.s.ed it three times a day for the past three days. And I mean, rehea.r.s.ed it with a stopwatch. The warden says that if everything goes right, the whole thing should take fifty-five minutes. This is counting from the time the prisoner is brought over to the death house to the time the medical examiner p.r.o.nounces the prisoner dead. The warden wants to make very sure that this operation goes smoothly."
Tape 11-D, August 6; Interview between Risa Wiggins and her client in the Clark County Jail.
A: So you definitely heard thisa"thing?
C: Yes, definitely.
A: It spoke to you.
C: You"re just like that other b.i.t.c.h, you don"t believe me, do you?
A: I don"t like being called names. That"s one reason Susan quit the case.
C: I heard the f.u.c.king alien, all right? It really exists and it really f.u.c.king spoke to me, OK?
CHAPTER FOUR.
A freak snowstorm hit two weeks later.
I watched it falling past the front windows of Schroeder"s department store. Schroeder"s used to be the place that most people bought everything, from their TV sets to their school clothes. It was a four-story building packed with just about everything you could think of. They"d given extended credit to the farmers who could only pay when the crops came in, and they"d given the men and women who worked out at the vulcanizing factory a special 10% discount because of a bargain they"d struck with the union.
That"s how things used to be.
Out here now, the chains have pretty much changed everything.