Maybe he’s been nabbing girls all along and getting away with it. Or else been holding off long as he can. But either way, he sees cute Tina Rutherford and goes all Hannibal Lecter on her. Then it’s all over the news and he realizes who it was, big rich family, and gets worried.” She made her hand a pistol and pointed it at her own chest. “Bang.”
“What if he didn’t take that first girl? In high school.”
“Maybe everybody thinking he did’s finally added up for him. All those years of nobody talking to him. You think he ever gets laid? Man with his rep? Maybe he finally snapped and said to himself, ‘All right, if they gone treat me this way then where’s the nearest girl?’ ”
Shaking his head. “I just don’t think he’s got it in him.”
“How you know?”
Silas took a breath. Then he said it. “Cause I used to be friends with him.”
Shaniqua appeared with the food but Angie didn’t seem to notice.
“You welcome,” Shaniqua said, leaving.
“What you mean, friends?”
“A long time ago. When I was fourteen years old…” He hesitated, looked out the window again, people and cars passing in front of the big white building devoted to the law, three floors of it.
“32?”
“When I was fourteen years old, me and my momma came to Amos from Chicago. On a bus.” From there he started to talk, things he’d never said out loud, how they’d ridden down from Joliet, how they moved into Carl Ott’s cabin, no water, no electricity, walking two miles to the nearest road, how Carl and Larry picked them up until Ina got wind of it and gave them those old coats, how the next day Silas’s mother came home in a Nova and never did say where she got it. He was still talking when Shaniqua passed by again and said, “If you ain’t gone eat that, Angie, somebody else will.”
Angie ignored her but started on the food, opening the mustard packets and squeezing them onto her plate for her French fries, chewing her hamburger slowly, sipping her Diet Coke through a straw as Silas told how, at first, he’d been shocked how quiet the woods seemed compared to Chicago, no crowds, car horns, sirens, no el train clacking by. But in the woods, if you stopped, if you grew still, you’d hear a whole new set of sounds, wind rasping through silhouetted leaves and the cries and chatter of blue jays and brown thrashers and redbirds and sparrows, the calling of crows and hawks, squirrels barking, frogs burping, the far baying of dogs, armadillos snorkeling through dead leaves and dozens of other noises he slowly learned to identify. He found he’d never seen real darkness, not in the city, but how, if you stood peeing off the cabin porch on a moonless night, or took a walk through the woods where the treetops stitched out the stars, you could almost forget you were there, you felt invisible. Country dark, his mother called it.
“I didn’t like it at first,” he said, “being down here. But after a while, after I’d got me that rifle from Larry, and after I started playing baseball, I felt like I belonged here. It’s part of why I came back, after all that time. I’d never forgot this place.”
Shaniqua came and stood over them with her pitchers. “More sweet?” she asked Silas. He nodded and she filled it. “You want another DC?” she asked Angie.
“No, thanks.”
Silas was looking back out the window, rubbing the brim of his hat. He told her about Carl and the fight with Larry as she slowly stopped eating. “After that,” he said, “me and Momma moved. To Fulsom. She’d done saved enough money for a house trailer. I went to Fulsom Middle and didn’t see Larry again till high school. By then I was playing baseball. Everybody calling me 32. Name in the paper all the time. And Larry Ott, he was just a hick that nobody liked.”
“How come?”
“He was weird. Lived so far out in the country he didn’t have any friends. Never came to ball games, didn’t go to the junior prom. Always reading his books. He used to bring stuff to school, snakes he’d catch, trying to make people notice him. I remember one time, Halloween, must’ve been junior year. He come to school with this monster mask.”
Silas hadn’t thought of this in years. It was a zombie mask with fake hair and rotting skin, made of heavy plastic and red with gore, as realistic as anything anybody had ever seen, like a real severed head. “I can see it plain as day right now,” he said. When Larry had shown up in homeroom wearing it, kids flocked him. Silas saw him by the gym, as pretty girls, cheerleaders, passed it head to head trying it on. When dumbstruck Larry got it back and pulled it over his own face again, it must’ve smelled like Love’s Baby Soft Perfume and Suave shampoo and Certs. Then another group of girls was calling Larry over. Could they see his mask, try it on? Would he bring it to the Fulsom First Baptist Church Haunted House that night? Wear it in one of the rooms?
Of course he would.
Silas had practice that afternoon, and afterward, he and M &M and other teammates rode in the back of somebody’s pickup truck over to the abandoned house on Highway 5. Larry was already there, wearing a white sheet with a hole scissored for his head, beaming. When he gave Silas an awkward wave, Silas turned his back. For the next three hours Larry had his own room in the haunted house, a room dizzy with strobe lights and littered with fake body parts, shrieks from speakers hidden among bales of hay. People streamed through all night, groups of teenagers, boys pushing at one another, couples, some with terrified children. Silas, aloof, watching it while sneaking beers from the back of the truck, keeping an eye on Larry, thinking that tonight Larry must’ve felt almost normal.
At midnight, the end, Larry came out of the house, pulling off his mask, his face red from heat, his hair plastered to his skull. He stood, waiting to be noticed, congratulated on his performance, maybe, welcomed by the group, given a beer. Cindy Walker was there, too-
“Who?” Angie broke in.
“The girl,” he said, annoyed he’d brought her up, “who went missing.”
She watched him.
“Anyway,” he went on, “when Larry come out of the haunted house, we all just kind of pretended not to see him. All of us.”
He told her how Larry stood in the floodlight for a long time. Figuring it out. The mask deflated under his arm. Finally he turned and walked down the dirt road toward the paved one. He paused at the road in his whipping sheet and waited, as if a car was coming though none was, waited a long time, and still no car came. Some of the seniors had forgotten him and were passing cigarettes and beers, but Silas watched as Larry finally crossed the road and walked into the parking lot. He stopped there, too, and took off his sheet and looked over the cars, as if selecting one to buy. He’d forgotten where he’d parked his mother’s Buick, that’s what he was doing now. In case anybody glanced over and happened to notice him and yell, “Hey, look! It’s Larry! Come back! Join the party!”
No one did, including Silas, including Cindy. And after Larry got in the car and lingered, its engine purring, Silas didn’t run after Larry as he slowly, slowly crackled through the parking lot, didn’t signal him over as he sat with his brights on, shining down the dirt driveway to where everybody looked away and kept talking, and Silas didn’t wave to him as Larry drove past them slowly, and they all watched his brake lights as they lingered through the trees, and lingered still, as if he might come back. When he was finally gone, Silas remembered, Cindy and everyone else, himself included, began to laugh.
Angle’s lips were over to the side and he knew she was thinking. “How long was it, from that night, till that girl, Cindy, went missing?”
“Couple months?”
He paused as Shaniqua appeared and cleared away Angie’s dishes. “You want more sweet?” she asked Silas.
“Naw, I’m good.”
“Thanks, girl,” Angie said. Then to Silas: “Did you ever go out with her?”
“Cindy?” Not meeting her eyes, turning his hat over on the table. Thinking
Still watching him. “Who ever accused you of being smart?”
He smiled.
“But Larry took her out?”
