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
HAH
^^^^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
