about it. See, all Ben knew was farming, and he was pretty bad at
that. But there was no possibility of either of them doing anything
else for a living. So somebody came up with the bright idea of having
the town pay off the mortgage. It was only a little over a thousand.
And they figured it would cost them a whole lot more than that just in
bookkeeping and whatnot to keep them on the dole for thirty, maybe
forty, years than it would to pay off and let them keep the place.
"But the upshot was that somebody got cheap about it, I guess, so the
proposal was turned down. And it looked like Dead River was going into
the social welfare business for a while. Very exciting. But then, of
course, Ben and Mary disappeared and saved everybody the trouble."
"Imbeciles, huh?"
"Total morons. Ben couldn't read and couldn't write. He could handle
a plow and Mary could wring a chicken's neck and that was about the
whole of it. Now, where do you go if you're that stupid? That's the
next question. How do you manage disappearing?"
"You could die."
"That would be the easy way, yes."
"Or just wander off. A county or two down the line."
"Or you could do what my boss did and open a garage."
"You could do that."
He pushed the empty glass away from him and his smile was sly, a little
boozy. His hands waved apparitions in the space around us.
"Or maybe you just go back into the caves," he said. "And forget about
us entirely. Maybe you live off fish and weeds and spend your days
listening to the gulls and the wind off the sea, and you don't come
out, not ever."
"Jesus, Rafferty."
I felt a slight prickling at the base of my neck. He looked at me and
the smile grew even more cagey and ironic, like a cop in a morgue
uncovering a cadaver.
"That doctor. I wonder if he ever heard dogs barking."
I decided a few days later that Rafferty's sense of humor was
Maybe it was the tourists turning up so early this year because of the
good weather- they could breed a bitter irony in you made up of easy
money and bad manners, privilege and your own unquestionable need. One
day I saw a fat man in sunglasses and fishing tackle and drinking
eggnog right out of the carton.
It was pretty sickening.
Then that same day Rafferty tells me this story about some woman over
in Portland who was suing an Italian spaghetti-sauce company for mental
anguish because she opened a can of marinara and found a woman's finger
inside a rubber glove pointing fingernail-up at her.
The next day he had another one.
I I j I 'j. He d read it in the paper.
The body of a night watchman had been found in a hog pen at a
meat-packing firm on the South Side of Chicago. It had been partly
eaten by the hogs. There were hundreds of them in the pen, and the
guy's face and abdomen were in pretty bad shape. But here's the
kicker.
His clothes were hanging neatly on a nearby fence.
Rafferty made some nasty obvious comments about going after pigs in the
dark.
So I thought he was getting strange lately.
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
make her more popular, while the other gift was to console her if it
di~ glitllove,hepupp,
Both her parents had jobs, so the dog was home alone most of the time
during the day, and Kim remembered the girl's car roaring into the
driveway each afternoon at three-thirty and the girl racing up the
steps while the dog barked loudly and scratched at the screen door.
Then there would be a lot of jumping and squealing and hugging, which
even as a kid Kim found pretty disgusting. And finally there would be
a very big puppy tearing crazily around their own and
This happened every day.
Then one day there was none of it. The girl came home and there was no
barking and no scratching at the door. Just silence. Kim was playing
in the yard as usual and noticed that something was wrong. They'd
gotten pretty used to the dog by then. So she watched. The girl went
inside.
A few minutes later the girl came out holding the puppy and raced for
the car. She put the dog inside and quickly drove away. That was all
Kim saw. The rest she heard about later.
When the girl got home the puppy was in the kitchen, choking. There
was something caught in the throat. So she bundled it up and drove to
the vet. The vet took a look at the dog and told her to wait outside.
She did, for a while. But then the waiting started to get to her so
she decided to drive on home, and asked the nurse to call her when the
doctor was through.
She was only in the house a few minutes when the phone rang. It was
the vet. He said the dog was all right and asked her if she was home
alone. She said she was. He told her to get out of the house right
away, to go stand on the lawn or on the street. The police, he said
would be over right away.
She was not to ask questions. She was just to leave as fast as