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
much to see.
All they did see was an old, ramshackle two-story house on Winslow
Homer Avenue- a tiny dirt road on the outskirts of town that ran all
the way back to the sea. It sat on a three-acre plot of land, the
front yard and the forest beyond long since combined and climbing the
broken stairs to the gray, weathered front door. Vines and creepers
everywhere. Out back, a narrow slip of land sloped to the edge of a
cliff, below which was the ocean.
Never once did I see them as a boy. Ben and Mary Crouch had
disappeared into the dank interior of that house long before my time. I
heard rumors, though. We all did. Talk among our parents that led us
to think there was something "not right" about Ben and Mary. Beyond
that good parents wouldn't go, not with the kids around. But
it was enough. Because later there were more rumors, which we
ourselves created.
How they ate children and lived inside huge cocoons spun from the flesh
of babies. How they were really living corpses, vampires, witches,
zombies.
The usual thing.
Once, when I was ten, three of us got up the nerve to run around to the
back of the house and peer into their garbage.
They lived completely out of cans.
There was not a piece of paper wrap or frozen-food box or ash red of
lettuce anywhere. Just cans. Canned fruit, canned peas, carrots,
onions. Canned meats and tuna from S. S. Pierce. And every can had
been wiped or washed so that it was spotless. I can't tell you why
that odd bit of cleanliness upset us so. But it did.
There was dog food- also canned- and lots of it. We counted five
separate bagfuls.
Everybody knew they kept dogs, though how many dogs was a matter of
conjecture. But it wasn't just two or three. The place had an
unmistakably doggy smell to it. The stink of unwashed fur and dog
shit. You could smell it yards away. But there were no neighbors
around to complain. Not for miles. Just a forest of scrub pine and
brambles out of which the house seemed to rise as though out of a
tangled green cloud, moving densely back to the sea.
We looked into the garbage and peeked through the basement window. It
was much too dark to see in there. But Jimmy Beard swore he saw
something sway and move in the darkness.
We did not argue. We ran. As though the stories we'd made up were
true. As though hell itself could come pouring out of there.
And I can feel my hackles rise as I write this, remembering how it felt
that day.
Because maybe, in a way, we were right.
Here's what made the papers:
I was thirteen I think when the police came and opened up the place.
It was a delivery boy from Harmon's who had called them after a month
went by with all the cans piling up unopened, untouched, on the porch
and no slip in the mailbox with his payment.
,
the delivery boy, and one of the cops came very close to losing his
hand. Because behind the door there were twenty-three dogs. And all
of them were starving.
They sealed the house up again and called in troops. The next day half
the town was out there, me and Rafferty included. It was quite as how
Six policemen and Jack Gardener, the sad old drunk who was our dog
warden, and six or seven guys in white lab jackets from the ASPCA in
Machias dumping whole sackfuls of dog food into the house through a
punched-in hole in the front kitchen window, then settling back,
waiting, while the snapping sounds and the growling and howling and
eating sounds wore away at everybody's nerves.
Then when it was quiet again they moved in with nets and stun-pistols.
And I had my first look inside the place.
I couldn't see how they'd lived there. Once the house had been
somebody's pride. I remember being told it was a hundred years old or