Hide and Seek

But maybe it wasn't him entirely.

Sometimes I think there's something just hanging in the air, and a I

most everybody reacts to it. Don't ask me why. Sometimes it's real

and vital, like when JFK was shot. And sometimes it's completely

unimportant, like pennant fever. Sometimes, like the recession, it

goes on and on, and you get so you hardly even notice it. Maybe Dead

River was getting a touch of that.

And I'll tell you why I think it wasn't just Rafferty.

There was us.

The stealing. All the dumb, reckless things we were doing. The

business with Steven. The stolen car. There was my own blind,

self-destructive urgetofollowalong, no matter what kind of ridiculous

thing they were into doing.

There was a statue of a mounted revolutionary soldier in the town

square. One night we painted the horse's balls bright red. Two nights

later we painted them blue.

We were sitting on the beach one afternoon, and Casey was in the water-

it had grown warmer by then, though it was still too cold for me. Steve

was still nursing his torn hand, so he'd stayed home that day, so there

was just me and Kim sitting there alone together, watching her, and we

got to talking about Steve's accident- we called it an accident now-in

a boring sort of way. The stitches, when they were due out, to what

degree he could flex the damn thing. We were remembering how it had

been that day without ever once coming close to the heart of the thing,

which was why she'd done it. We skirted that.

But I guess it made her think of this other story, which I'm mentioning

here because it bears upon what I was saying about something being in

the air by then, something made of god knows what and disgorging itself

on Dead River.

Kim was only a little girl at the time, she said.

There was a family living next door to her who had a teenage daughter.

An only child. Not a pretty girl or terribly smart either. Sort of

ordinary. A little unfriendly and sullen.

Anyway, for her birthday- her seventeenth- her parents gave her two

presents, a car and a Doberman puppy. Probably, Kim said, she was

unpopular at school, and the one gift- the car- was to