of matches. I blocked out the thought of my mother’s terror and her scramble for the car. I imagined how far away the attacker had to have gone to fetch the matches, in order not to run back in time to catch her.
My mother had gotten up and bolted through the doorway, down the hill to her car. Her attacker would have walked down the opposite side of the hill, to the north, not to have seen her. I walked the way he must have gone, through the grass to that barbed-wire fence. I lifted the top line and side-legged through. Another fence line led down through the heavy tangle of birch and popple to the lake. I followed that fence all the way down to the edge of the lake and then kept walking to the water.
He must have had a stash somewhere or maybe another car—one parked near the beach. He’d gone back for more matches when his got wet. Probably, he was a smoker. He’d left behind extra matches or a lighter. He followed that fence down to the lake. He’d reached his stash. Heard the car door slam. Ran back up to the round house and after my mother. But too late. She’d managed to start the engine, stomp on the accelerator. She was gone.
I continued walking, across the narrow sand beach, into the lake. My heart was beating so hard as I followed the action in my understanding that I did not feel the water. I felt his overpowering frustration as he watched the car disappear. I saw him pick up the gas can and nearly throw it after the vanishing taillights. He ran forward, then back. Suddenly, he stopped, remembering his stuff, the car, whatever he did have, his smokes. And the can. He could not be caught with the can. However cold it was that May, the ice out but the water still freezing, he’d have to wade partway in and let water fill the can. And after that, as far out as possible, he had surely slung the water-filled tin and now, if I dived down and passed my hands along the muddy, weedy, silty, snail-rich bottom of the lake, there it would be.
My friends found me sitting outside the door of the round house in full sun, still drying off, the gas can placed in the grass before me. I was glad when they came. I had now come to the understanding that my mother’s attacker had also tried to set her on fire. Although this fact had been made plain, or was at least implicit in Clemence’s reaction at the hospital and my father’s account of my mother’s escape, my understanding had resisted. With the gas can there before me, I began shaking so hard my teeth clacked. When I got upset like that, sometimes I puked. This hadn’t happened in the car, in the hospital, even reading to my mother. Maybe I was numbed. Now I felt what had happened to her in my gut. I dug a hole for the mess and covered it with a heap of dirt. I sat there, weak. When I heard the voices and bikes, the drag of Cappy’s braking feet, the shouts, I jumped up and started slapping at my arms. I couldn’t let them see me shaking like a girl. When they got to me I pretended it was the cold water. Angus said my lips were blue and offered me an unfiltered Camel.
They were the best cigarettes you could steal. Star’s man usually smoked generics, but he must have come into some cash. Angus slipped them from Elwin’s pack, one at a time, so he would not get suspicious. For this occasion, he’d taken two. I broke my cigarette carefully in half and shared with Cappy. Zack and Angus shared the other. I dragged on the end until it scorched my fingers. We didn’t speak while we were smoking and when we were done we flicked the shreds of tobacco off our tongues, the way Elwin did. The gas can was a battered dull red with a gold band around the top and the bottom. There was a long, crooked spout. Written in thick black script across a flame shape, bright yellow with a blue center and a white dot in the center of the blue, there was a scratched logo: CAUTION.
I wanna get him, I said to my friends. Watch him burn. They were also staring at the can. They knew what it was about.
Cappy picked a splinter off the broken door and stabbed the ground with it. Zack chewed a piece of grass. I looked at Angus. He was always hungry. I told him I’d brought sandwiches and fished the bag out of my pack to divide them up.
First, we unstuck the bread slices carefully from the peanut butter. Next we tucked in my mother’s famous little crunchy pickles. Last, we closed the sandwiches back up. The pickle juice salted the peanut butter, cut the stickiness so you could swallow each bite, and added just the right hot, sour bite to the nuts. After the sandwiches were gone, Angus drank most of the pickle brine and put the hot red pepper in his mouth. Cappy took the dill and chewed the end of the stalk. Zack looked away—sometimes he was fastidious, and then he would surprise you.
We passed around the water jar and then I told them I had thought of how the attack had happened. Here’s how it went, I said without blinking. He did it here. I tipped my head back to the round house. He did it, then he wanted to burn her inside the place. But his matches got wet. He went over the hill and down toward the lake for dry matches. I told them exactly how my mother had escaped. I said I’d thought that the attacker must have kept some of his stuff in the woods, and that I’d followed the fence posts to the lake and then out into the lake to where he’d sunk the can. I said that he was probably a smoker because he’d gone after the extra matches, or maybe he’d had a lighter. He had to have left something in the woods. If he’d left a pack of stuff out there, he’d maybe even slept out there. He could have smoked, dropped a butt. Or field-stripped the cigarette the way Whitey did, rolling away the threads of the filter, forming the end of the paper into a tiny ball. What we’d look for would be threads, tracks, any foreign material, anything at all.
We all nodded. Looked at the ground. Cappy raised his head, stared at me evenly.
Make it so, he said. Starboy?
Okay, said Angus, whose nickname that was, let’s see what we get.
What we got was wood ticks. Our reservation is notorious for them. We made a grid of the woods, crisscrossed the area from the fence going south along the lake about thirty feet. In the spring, when you hit a tick hole, which is where a huge bunch have hatched, they swarm you. But they swarm slow. You can shake some off but you can’t really crawl them off. We were crawling through tick hole after tick hole.
Zack yelled once, panic in his voice. He jumped up and I could see a few flung off him onto Angus and into Cappy’s shiny hair.
Shut up, you baby! said Angus. Fleas are a hell of a lot worse.
Yeah, fleas, said Zack. Remember when your mom flea-bombed your place and forgot you were inside?
Oh man, they shut the whole place up and flea-bombed the hell out of it, said Angus, squinting at what looked like a bit of plastic wrap, then tossing it. Forgot I was asleep in the corner and left me there overnight. All the fleas jumped onto me for safety and I was only four. They had one last drink of blood and died in my clothes. It was lucky they didn’t suck me dry.
They sucked your brain dry, said Zack. Look what you threw at me. He pinched a matted condom by the edge and swung it back and forth. It had obviously been there through the winter. Older kids made fires on the beach.
I held out the bread bag and Zack dropped in the petrified condom. And then we found dozens more and so many beer cans that Angus brought them to a rock and started crushing them to take back and redeem. What looked from a distance like leafy new undergrowth actually hid a dump. There were countless cigarette butts. The bread bag quickly filled with condoms and butts. There were also candy wrappers and old balls of toilet paper. Either the police did not consider this area relevant, or they had just given up.
People are disgusting, said Zack. This is way too much evidence.
I knelt on the ground with the bread bag. Ticks were crawling all over me. I said we should quit and drown the ticks in the lake. So we left the woods and stripped down on the beach. The ticks were mainly still in our clothes and not many were attached yet, except that Angus had one stuck on his balls.
Hey, Zack, I need some help!
Oh, fuck you, said Zack.
Cappy laughed. Why don’t you let him stay on till he gets really big? They’ll call you Three Balls.
Like Old Man Niswi, I said.
He really had three. It’s true. My grandma knows, said Zack.
Shut up, said Cappy. I can’t take hearing about your grandma doing it with a three-balled man.
We were in the water now, splashing around diving and mock-fighting. We’d been so hot and sweaty and itchy it felt wonderful. I reached down to make sure no tick had gotten me where that one had got Angus. I went underwater and stayed as long as I could. When I came up, Zack was talking.
She said they tapped against her ass like three big ripe plums.
Your grandma says all kinds of things, said Cappy.
