The Collection

some girl taken it? But, almost instinctively, I threw it back on top of her panties and hur­ried over to her bed, where I quickly grabbed a magazine and leaned back, pretending to read.

The door opened, and I looked up.

The dresser drawer was still open.

I'd forgotten to close it.

Steph noticed immediately. She looked at the drawer and looked at me, but I smiled, feigned innocence, pretended not to see, and she smiled back and surreptitiously closed the drawer.

She walked across the room and sat next to me on the bed. 'I forgot to tell you,' she said. 'I'm going to have to cancel out on next Saturday.'

'Why?'

'Something came up.'

I threw aside the magazine. 'But we've been planning to go to Disneyland for months.'

She put an arm around me. 'I know, but my mom and a few of her friends are having, like, a picnic, and I have to

go.'

My mouth was suddenly dry. I tried to lick my lips. 'Where?'

'Griffith Park.'

'Can I go?'

She shook her head. 'I'm afraid not. It's only for us girls

this time.'

'I won't-'

'No.' She smiled, reached over, tweaked my nose. 'Jeal­ous?'

I looked at her, looked at the closed drawer, thought for a moment, and shook my head. 'No,' I said slowly. 'No, I

guess I'm not.'

'The next weekend we'll do something special. Just us.

'Like what?' I asked.

'You'll see.'

'You have something planned?'

She nodded.

'Okay,' I said.

We kissed.

 Skin

I've always loved the roadside attractions that seemed to' proliferate in the desert Southwest during the 1960s. When I was a child, my parents would stop at those that had some sort of historical significance, but the gross ones, the tacky ones, the ones that promised the things I really wanted to see were off limits. I'd obtain brochures and pamphlets for these tourist spots at the hotels where we stayed, but that was as close as I'd come to them.

I'll go there myself when I grow up, I thought.

But by the time I grew up, most of them were gone.

'Skin' is an homage to those sorts of ancillary va­cation destinations. I couldn't shake my parents' in­fluence completely, though. The house in 'Skin' is historically significant. And the family in the story should not have stopped there.

The brown-and-white sign at the side of the road was small, and even though he was wearing his contacts, Ed could not read what it said. He slowed the car as they approached. 'What's it say?' he asked Bobette.

'It says 'Historical Landmark. Chapman House. One Mile.''

Ed turned toward the kids in the back. 'Want to stop?'

'Okay,' Pam said.

Eda shrugged noncommittally.

'We're stopping.' Ed drove slowly, allowing the other cars and trucks on the road to pass him, until he saw another brown-and-white sign, identical to the first. He turned off the highway onto the narrow, barely paved road which ran in a straight line across a grassy meadow to the forest on the other side.

'Here we come!' Pam said. She unbuckled her safety belt and began bouncing up and down in her seat.

Bobette, hearing the click of the belt, looked sternly at her daughter over the headrest. 'Young lady, you put that back on right now.'

'I was just-'

'Right now.'

Pam rebuckled her seat belt.

The road continued in an unwavering line, going through the front line of trees and into the forest before finally widening into a closed cul-de-sac in front of a small brown one-room cabin. The cabin was not log but appeared to be made of wood, with a sod roof. One open window and door faced outward.

'All right,' Ed announced. 'Hop out. We're here.'

It had been several hours since they'd eaten lunch at a Burger King in Cheyenne, and all of their legs were cramped and tired. Pam and Eda jumped about, crunching gravel beneath their tennis shoes, while Ed stretched loudly, groaning. Bobette stood in place, exercising isometrically. They had gotten so used to the artificially cooled air in the car that they had not realized how warm it was outside. The

temperature was well into the nineties, and there was no wind. Above them, the sky was blue and cloudless, and from the bushes they heard the constant buzz of cicadas. 'I hope they have a bathroom here,' Bobette said. Ed grinned. 'There're plenty of bushes.' 'Very funny.'

'And we have empty Coke cups in the car.' She shook her head. 'You're sick.' They moved across the small dirt lot toward the cabin, Ed leading the way. He stopped before another sign, this one mounted on a platform of cemented stones. ' 'The Chapman House,'' he read aloud. ''Built in 1896, the Chapman House is believed to be the oldest extant skin dwelling in Wyoming.'' He frowned. 'Skin dwelling?' He walked to­ward the cabin, the others following. This close, he could see that the cabin was not made from wood as he'd origi­nally assumed but was made from tanned animal hides stretched taut across a wooden frame. In places, the skin had been stretched thin, lending it a translucent quality, and he could see in the direct sunlight a network of spiderweb veins stretching across the wall.

Bobette shivered. 'Gruesome.'

Ed shrugged. 'I suppose building supplies were scarce in those days. Who knows? Maybe they didn't have the right tools to use traditional materials.'

'There's a wooden frame,' she pointed out. 'And there doesn't seem to be any shortage of wood or stone around

here.'

'Come on, let's go inside.'

'I'd rather not.'

'Come on.'

'I'll wait here.'

'Suit yourself.' He turned to the girls. 'You two coming?'

'Yeah!' Pam said excitedly. She and Eda followed him through the low doorway into the cabin. It was dark inside. The one door and window faced east, and while they proba­bly let in plenty of light during the morning, they let in very little now. Across one wall ran a low bench, also made from animal hide, and in the center of the room was a low pit for fires. The floor was dirt.

They should have been excited, they should have been having fun, they should have at least been interested, but somehow all those emotions left them when they passed through the doorway. Pam and Eda's bubbly conversation died almost immediately, and his own curiosity gave way to a feeling remarkably close to dread. There was something heavy and claustrophobic about the air in the cabin, some­thing undefinable which made all of them feel uncomfortable and ill at ease. He found himself staring at a small round patch of light-colored skin sewn into the wall near the window.