“They’ll find out!” Mandy wailed.
“Who’ll find out?”
“Mom and Daddy will!”
“They won’t! Who’s gonna tell ’em? The gas-station owner? You think we left a trail of toilet paper he’s going to follow from his station to here? And he’s gonna call the sheriff and say lock up those Johnson girls, boys, they stole my toilet paper!”
“Yes!”
Together they turned to gaze — one of them with pride and cunning, the other with pride and trepidation — at the small hill of hay that was piled, for no apparent reason, in the shadows of a far corner of the barn. Underneath that pile lay their collection of six rolls of toilet paper — a new one filched from their own linen closet, and five partly used ones (stolen one trip at a time and hidden in their school jackets) from the ladies’ bathroom at the gas station in town. Tess’s plan was for the two of them to “t.p.” their neighbor’s house that night, after dark. Tess had lovely visions of how it would look — all ghostly and spooky, with streamers of white hanging down from the tree limbs and waving eerily in the breeze.
“They do it all the time in Kansas City, jerk,” Tess proclaimed.
“And I’ll bet they don’t make any big deal crybaby deal out of it.”
She wanted to be the first one in her class to do it, and she wasn’t about to let her little sister chicken out on her. This plan would, Tess was sure, make her famous in at least a four-county area. No grown-up would ever figure out who had done it, but all the kids would know, even if she had to tell them.
“Mom’ll kill us!”
“Nobody’ll know!”
“It’s gonna rain!”
“It’s not gonna rain.”
“We shouldn’t leave Flopper!”
Now they looked, together, at the baby bull calf in one of the stalls.
It stared blindly in the direction of their voices, tried to rise, but was too frail to do it.
“Don’t be a dope. We leave him all the time.”
Mandy sighed.
Tess, who recognized the sound of surrender when she heard it, smiled magnanimously at her sister.
“You can throw the first roll,” she offered.
In a truck stop in Emporia, Mel Brown slopped up his supper gravy with the last third of a cloverleaf roll. He had a table by a window.
As he ate, he stared with pleasure at his bike outside. If he moved his head just so, the rays from the setting sun flashed off the handle bars. He thought about how the leather seat and grips would feel soft and warm and supple, the way a woman in leather felt, when he got back on. At the thought he got a warm feeling in his crotch, too, and he smiled.
God, he loved living like this.
When he was hungry, he ate. When he was tired, he slept. When he was horny, he found a woman. When he was thirsty, he stopped at a bar.
Right now Mel felt like not paying the entire $5.46 for this lousy chicken-fried steak dinner and coffee. He pulled four dollar bills out of his wallet and a couple of quarters out of his right front pocket and set it all out on the table, with the money sticking out from under the check.
Mel got up and walked past the waitress.
“It’s on the table,” he told her.
“No cherry pie?” she asked him.
It sounded like a proposition, so he grinned as he said, “Nah.” If you weren’t so ugly, he thought, I just might stay for dessert.
“Come again,” she said.
You wish, he thought.
If they called him back, he’d say he couldn’t read her handwriting.
Her fault. No wonder she didn’t get a tip. Smiling, he lifted a toothpick off the cashier’s counter and used it to salute the man behind the cash register.
“Thanks,” the man said.
“You bet.”
Outside, Mel stood in the parking lot and stretched, shoving his arms high in the air, letting anybody who was watching get a good look at him. Nothin’ to hide. Eat your heart out, baby. Then he strolled over to his bike and kicked the stand up with his heel. He poked around his mouth with the toothpick, spat out a sliver of meat, then flipped the toothpick onto the ground. He climbed back on his bike, letting out a breath of satisfaction when his butt hit the warm leather seat.
Mel accelerated slowly, savoring the surge of power building between his legs.
Jane Baum was in bed by 10:30 that night, exhausted once again by her own fear. Lying there in her late aunt’s double bed, she obsessed on the mistake she had made in moving to this dreadful, empty place in the middle of nowhere. She had expected to feel nervous for a while, as any other city dweller might who moved to the country. But she hadn’t counted on being actually phobic about it — of being possessed by a fear so strong that it seemed to inhabit every cell of her body until at night, every night, she felt she could die from it. She hadn’t known — how could she have known? — she would be one of those people who is terrified by the vastness of the prairie. She had visited the farm only a few times as a child, and from those visits she had remembered only warm and fuzzy things like caterpillars and chicks. She had only dimly remembered how antlike a human being feels on the prairie.
Her aunt’s house had been broken into twice during the period between her aunt’s death and her own occupancy. That fact cemented her fantasies in a foundation of terrifying reality. When Cissy said,
“It’s your imagination,” Janie retorted, “But it happened twice before!
Twice!” She wasn’t making it up! There were strange, brutal men — that’s how she imagined them, they were never caught by the police — who broke in and took whatever they wanted — cans in the cupboard, the radio in the kitchen. It could happen again, Janie thought obsessively as she lay in the bed; it could happen over and over. To me, to me, to me.
On the prairie, the darkness seemed absolute to her. There were millions of stars but no streetlights. Coyotes howled, or cattle bawled.
Occasionally the big night-riding semis whirred by out front. Their tire and engine sounds seemed to come out of nowhere, build to an intolerable whine and then disappear in an uncanny way. She pictured the drivers as big, rough, intense men hopped up on amphet-amines; she worried that one night she would hear truck tires turning into her gravel drive, that an engine would switch off, that a truck door would quietly open and then close, that careful footsteps would slur across her gravel.
Her fear had grown so huge, so bad, that she was even frightened of it. It was like a monstrous balloon that inflated every time she breathed. Every night the fear got worse. The balloon got bigger. It nearly filled the bedroom now.
The upstairs bedroom where she lay was hot because she had the windows pulled down and latched, and the curtains drawn.
She could have cooled it with a fan on the dressing table, but she was afraid the fan’s noise might cover the sound of whatever might break into the first floor and climb the stairs to attack her. She lay with a sheet and a blanket pulled up over her arms and shoulders, to just under her chin. She was sweating, as if her fear-frozen body were melting, but it felt warm and almost comfortable to her. She always wore pajamas and thin wool socks to bed because she felt safer when she was completely dressed. She especially felt more secure in pajama pants, which no dirty hand could shove up onto her belly as it could a nightgown.
Lying in bed like a quadriplegic, unmoving, eyes open, Janie reviewed her precautions. Every door was locked, every window was permanently shut and locked, so that she didn’t have to check them every night; all the curtains were drawn; the porch lights were off; and her car was locked in the barn so no trucker would think she was home.