by Haven Kimmel
“Going down the river to the shack, cook up a mess of frogs,” Leroy said without preamble when he and Misty reached Cassie’s horseshoe-shaped yard.
“Build a fire,” Misty said.
Leroy had his right thumb hooked in a belt loop of his jeans, which were six inches too short, while his left hand drummed against his bird chest. He was too skinny, his face too long, he breathed through his mouth with a sound like a train in the distance. Misty stood stiff next to him but couldn’t seem to stop making noise. This happened in school, too; sometimes if the room was quiet, Cassie could hear Misty two rows over humming the theme song to a television show called Run, Joe, Run. She whistled and whispered, snapped her fingers to a hectic beat. But worst of all, Misty was driven toward sound effects, and if she’d been able to hear Cassie think of the faraway train, she would have said: Chug-a-chug-a-chug-a. A high wind: Whooooooooo. A catfight: Yowwwwwl, screeech, et cetera. Laura would have said there was no future in such behavior.
Cassie gave Misty a good hard look. Her hair was straight as a poker, cut jagged at the edges near her shoulders, and with bangs made crooked by a cowlick. Her teeth didn’t meet up right, and she smelled of trapped smoke. Her clothes, a striped shirt too big and blue pants too small, had obviously come from the charity box at the Church of Christ, and Cassie thought it no wonder Misty’s parents had decamped for points unknown.
Cassie stood, stretched herself out, then went inside for her backpack, which had been Jimmy’s long ago when he had mistakenly thought himself a Boy Scout. This was a mystery to Cassie, how the true nature of a person can be so thoroughly concealed in youth that he does humiliating things. It meant Cassie herself could do them, and later someone would hold out the offending object—a dress, a party favor, an unsent letter—and convict her. She was trying to redeem the backpack. She carried in it a Swiss Army knife, a compass, a box of waterproof matches, a second box of waterproof matches, a rain poncho, an old snakebite kit, a small flashlight, a harmonica she couldn’t play, a worn guide to dressing field injuries. Now she added a ball-peen hammer—a regular hammer was too heavy to carry—and a small box of nails; boards were always popping loose on the shack, and if she left it to the inbreds and malcontents, as Jimmy called them, the shack would fall down around their ears and they’d go right on sucking the heads off crawdaddies. She also added a second chocolate milk, knowing that everyone down at the river would want it but be afraid to ask; this was the sort of gesture that kept everyone clear about who stood where. Cassie was the person with the chocolate milk and the hammer in her hand, that was all they needed to know.
The three trudged down the road, then cut across the field on Cassie’s side, away from the infernal hum of the power lines. “Them new kids is gonna be there,” Leroy said. “Emmy Somethin’ from Kentucky, and Bobby Puck from up that Granger School that closed.”
Misty made a puck-puck-puck sound.
“I met ’em already. They was down at the river two days ago when I got there,” Leroy continued. “I says, ‘How’d you find this shack? It belongs to us and Cassie Claiborne.’ Then that Bobby Puck said something, didn’t make any sense.”
Cassie watched where she was walking, watched for the shimmer of a cottonmouth or the frightened streaking-past of a vole. She could remember when this walk back to the river seemed to take all day. If someone had asked, she would have said the water was miles from her house, but she’d learned it wasn’t even a single mile, maybe only a half. As they approached the edge of the field, she recalled an afternoon she and her parents and grandparents had taken a picnic on the bank, and as they’d reached this point, right about here, Jimmy had swung her up on his shoulders and asked, Do you smell the water? There had been only that once when they were all together here, walking this path, it was before Buena Vista had gotten sick; and Cassie could see, too, that there was hope and faith in the gesture of a picnic that had somehow gone sorely lacking. If she had tried to plan one, Laura would have scoffed, and Belle would have said she didn’t like the river, she couldn’t stand bugs, or maybe even nature itself for all Cassie knew. But whatever complaints they leveled wouldn’t have much relationship to what they meant, which was: that’s all over now.
Cassie smelled the water. As they got closer, she could hear splashing, loud talk, and laughter. A girl said, “You know you’re going to kill them.”
“I won’t! I’m making them happy!”
Leroy lifted a branch and Misty and Cassie walked under. The morning sun hit the water in patches of brilliance; some places were shaded by the tangle of trees overhead. This was a green place, and of ever changing light. The new girl was floating in the river, which was low, in a pair of blue-jean shorts and a Mickey Mouse T-shirt, her arms outstretched and her dark hair floating out behind her. A fat boy was sitting on the bank on top of a five-gallon bucket. Presumably the frogs were in the bucket, and he was making them happy.
“Hark!” the boy called out, waving at the three who were crossing the river on the old log, arms out for balance.
“That’s them,” Leroy said from somewhere behind Cassie.
“What the hell is a hark?” Misty asked, and then made a hark-hark-hark sound.
Bobby Puck was chubby everywhere, even his ankles and wrists and knees. He had a moon face and fine, wavy mouse-brown hair brushed up into a cloud over his head. Cassie could see a mother’s hand in that hair. When he smiled, his chubby cheeks rose up and nearly covered his eyes.
Cassie stepped off the log and looked at the two new kids. The river wasn’t on Poppy’s property, and she had found the shack by accident, but Jimmy would say there are in-alien-able rights that govern territory. Years she had been watching her father, sometimes in shadow, and there was plenty she knew about a gambler’s face, the reading—like lightning—of options. It all came down, she’d decided, to the size of the stake. How much you could afford to lose.
The boy on the bucket asked, “Are you Miss Cassie?” She nodded. He pointed at the girl in the water. “That’s Emmy.”
Still floating, Emmy said, “Hey, girl,” in an accent with a curve like Buena Vista’s, it gave Cassie a cold jolt. She tilted up her chin, waited a full beat.
“Hey.” Cassie turned away and headed for the shack; it had been put up and abandoned by hunters at about the time Buena Vista died, and in those two years a lot of stuff had been added to it. Cassie fairly owned it during the summer days, but at night it belonged to teenagers. Someone had dragged an old recliner in, and someone else had brought a mattress. There were pictures tacked to the wall (an elephant being hung in a town square; a toothless woman in sunglasses; a monkey scratching its butt), and lately people had started to bring in books and leave them, old paperbacks creased and dog-eared. Cassie suspected there was more to the books than the plain desire to share literature, since as a group the teenagers weren’t what her teachers would call readers.
She took off her pack, got out the hammer and nails, and walked around the outside of the shack, hammering down boards that had popped up in the last rain. The hunters hadn’t taken the time to make sure the lone cockeyed window actually fit the hole cut for it, so Cassie had chinked in the gaps with river mud. They hadn’t put up a door either, just left a hole for one and hung a sheet of Visqueen in it. When the plastic came down, Cassie cut a new piece and hung it herself, using small tacks that didn’t tear. It was important, she thought, to keep the plastic up, to acknowledge the difference between inside and out, else what use was a doorway?
“Light the small sticks, Emmy, we don’t have a lot of matches. Did you have these in your pocket when you were swimming?”
“Ooooh, I’m cold now I’m out of the water. The water’s warm.”
“There’s—I tell you, you have to light the small—”
“Did anybody bring a jacket?”
“Emmy’s asking did anybody bring a jacket or whatnot?”
Cassie stepped back and looked at the roof. It hadn’t been done the way Jimmy wo
uld have recommended. Just boards and tar paper. She tried to imagine making the walk back here with a ladder (unlikely), then tried to think of some way to bring a ladder on her bike, but there was no road, only fields and tree line, and the corn was growing higher. A ladder, a tool belt, some shingles.
Inside, someone had straightened up the books and stacked the empty Mountain Dew cans into a pyramid. A big red candle had been added. Cassie stared at it a moment. The big red candle in the shack was a mistake, as any thinking person could see, and she imagined herself flinging it hard into the river. But taking it away smacked of something Laura preached against, which was Getting Too Thick Into Events. One Never Knows, and sometimes the thing that burns is meant to burn and might be interesting to watch. This set up a jangle in Cassie, truth be told, because no one could say that the shack burnt down was a desirable outcome, or even the shack on fire, interesting as it might be. She walked around inside, periodically stooping down to pound in a nail. A puzzle, the way the nails wanted out of the wood.
“All hail Miss Misty, bringer of fire!”
“Shut up, Bobby Puck, you homo.”
“I’m not watching you kill the frogs, Leroy, I’m going over here and also be quiet about it.”
Misty said, rrrbit, rrrbit.
The book on top of the stack was called Mr. and Mrs. Bo Jo Jones. The cover was a photograph, out of focus, of a boy and girl kissing, only one of them was upside down. Mrs. Bo Jo Jones’s nose was on Mr.’s chin and vice versa. Taken in profile. She’s sixteen, he’s seventeen, a pregnant bride, and her bewildered groom … playing a grown-up game with adult consequences. Cassie picked up the red candle and sat it square on the book; this was surely nothing more than treading the edge of events. She walked outside and around back to take a look at the flat platform she’d built between two gnarled-up trees: it was the first project she’d ever finished on her own. She’d built it in case a flash flood came while they were in the shack, and she’d nailed boards into the tree trunk to make a ladder. The platform was about seven feet off the ground—it couldn’t be a biblical sort of flood. She’d come out here and measured and even drawn a diagram in a notebook, then gone back and had Poppy help her cut some tongue-and-groove boards she’d found in the corner of the garage. She climbed up the ladder and stepped on the platform, then jumped up and down. Solid. She knelt down and checked the nails, but they were all snug in, and then she ran her hands over the edge she’d sanded smooth. From here she could see the river slowly moving, and on the shoreline flashes of a white T-shirt. There was a fundamental difference between the shack and this platform, and it could be felt simply by sitting first in one and then on the other, and whatever the discrepancy was made her wonder if maybe she ought not skip putting a new roof on the shack. Below her the fire was just getting going and it smelled good; whatever kind of wood they were using smelled good. A blood scent filled the air.
“You own any guns?” she heard Leroy ask.
Bobby Puck said, “Guns? Are you talking to me?”
Sitting up here, Cassie was waiting for Jimmy but also not waiting, she had let go some. Her own house could be on fire, this was a thing she often considered, and she wouldn’t know it until she made the walk back and found the thing in ruins, the trucks and smoke and neighbors watching. She would have no first thought but many at once. Did Jimmy come home, did Laura stay planted where she was, refusing to leave, did Poppy get the dogs out, was Belle out floating around, weeping in the yard in her white nightgown? Beyond that Cassie didn’t care, there was nothing she would mourn. Who set this fire?
“Cassie?” Puck was looking up at her from the ground, she hadn’t heard him approach. “Can I come up there with you?” He had a very high voice, like a little girl’s. As he climbed the ladder, his green T-shirt came out of his shorts, and Cassie could see a white stripe of skin. She looked away. “Oh, this is rather high up,” he said, looking over the edge of the platform. “I hope it doesn’t make me dizzy. If we were at the tops of these trees we could see my house, it’s over yonder as Leroy would say, the opposite side of the river from your house, we could see my dad’s blue station wagon in the driveway and my mom’s marigolds,my dad has diabetes. He is a diabetic and never leaves the house anymore, one of his legs is gone and he is now blind.” Puck leaned forward and whispered the last word in Cassie’s ear. She turned and looked at him. Mostly she couldn’t abide people who talked too much, and under normal conditions she might have gone ahead and whaled on him. But something in him raised up a loneliness that settled over Cassie like a cloud. “At the Granger School,” he continued, holding Cassie’s eye, “I was assaulted on a regular basis by ruffians. You remind me of them. When I start at your school in the fall, I’m going to be perfectly silent, in class and everywhere else, so I just thought I’d tell you some things now, that my mom is an aide at the nursing home, and about my dad and whatnot. I don’t like sports, I’ve never gone hunting, I prefer comic books and snacks.”
“Puck? Cassie? Want some frog legs?” Emmy called from the shore.
Puck rose, brushed some dried mud from his knees, then bowed to Cassie. “Ladies first,” he said, gesturing toward the stairs with a sweeping motion, like the hands of a clock.
She was back home and on the steps by three o’clock. The day had grown hot, and hours to go yet, so she took off her swampy tennis shoes and wet socks and let her feet dry in the sun. Her gray T-shirt said NOTRE DAME WRESTLING TEAM, it was her favorite shirt. Poppy had found it at the dump, back when he used to be a dump crawler, before Laura put her foot down. Cassie missed those days, the great things he’d come home with: a miniature guitar with no strings, a set of rusty golf clubs, a plastic cereal bowl with an astronaut in the bottom. The astronaut was floating outside of and appeared to be larger than his spaceship. All such things Laura dubbed A Crime. But then Poppy came home with a Memphis Minnie album, and when he handed it to Laura, her eyes filled with tears and she turned around and went up to her room and no one saw her for a whole day, and Belle said Poppy shouldn’t have told her it came from the dump, and Poppy said, confused,Was I to lie?
Cassie’s eyes were closed and the world behind her eyelids had gone red when she heard the dogs, not Poppy’s dogs, who never ran free, but a pack that had been born that winter to a stray down the road. Born in the Taylors’ toolshed. The Taylors had no intention of keeping the puppies or of killing them or of having anything to do with them whatsoever, those were Willie Taylor’s words to Poppy exactly. Anything whatsoever. A stray who picked us out, we didn’t pick her. There were four pups, a brown, a red, a black and white, a black, and they were all hard-muscled, with coats so short they looked like leather, and heads like pigs. Cassie thought of them as the Pig Dogs. They weren’t much bigger than young pigs, either. All day long they killed. They killed chickens, ducks, cats, who knew. Once they had run up to Cassie as she walked down the road, and the head of the brown one was completely covered in blood, all the way back to his shoulder blades, still red and wet. No one could touch them. Now they ran toward Cassie with great joy, nearly bouncing, except for the black and white, who was carrying a dead groundhog in his mouth, an animal more than half his size. They were going to leave it in her yard, she could just feel it. Her opinion was that they’d started killing more than they could eat, so they were spreading the carcasses around for fun. The King’s Crossing was their game board, and they’d left something on every corner. Cassie stood up and took a menacing step toward them, and they all backed up, tails wagging. They had smart eyes, the Pig Dogs, this was one of their worst features. Cassie stomped, waved her arms, yelled Go on! Git! and the dogs turned one at a time, still sneaky and joyous, and started to run back down the road, except for the black and white, who trotted a few steps farther in and dropped the groundhog, then turned and streaked off after his brothers.
“Cassie, you still out here?”
The groundhog had barely hit the earth, and there was Belle so soon, she would take it personally
that Cassie had allowed such a thing to happen. Belle stepped out onto the screened porch, wearing a black leotard of Laura’s and an old Indian-print skirt, there was a pointedness in her voice that had arrived only in the past two years but seemed to be here to stay. All the way back in Cassie’s memory to the place it grew dark and muzzy, she saw Belle with her on a day like this, Cassie at five, Belle at seven, performing their different tasks: one her father’s girl, the other belonging solely to Laura. Cassie had her work cut out for her, no doubt about it, being the one to wait and gather clues and wander about the house studying Jimmy’s belongings and trying to capture the smell of him somewhere, in his closet, on his pillow. But Belle, maybe, and this was a thing Cassie had only begun to consider, had it a little worse, because her parent was right there and couldn’t be reached.
Laura, standing in the kitchen, having a contemplative smoke in her butter-yellow capri pants and white blouse, clothes that came from Somewhere Else and marked her. She wore not perfume or cologne but the oil from a love potion made for her by a Yoruba priestess, oil filled with rose petals and something that looked like whole clove. One brutal fight between Laura and Jimmy started when he called her a yat; Cassie had heard yak and assumed her father had been drinking until Belle explained. Bone-thin mother, shoulders slightly hunched, arms crossed loosely over her abdomen, listening to records. She made their meals but didn’t eat with them. She smiled, never lost her patience or raised her voice, it was difficult, in fact, to do anything loudly enough or close enough to her range of vision to even get her to turn her head. Bix Beiderbecke with Frankie Trumbauer’s orchestra, Singin’ the Blues. Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Sidney Bechet. One of the only things Laura loved even a smidge about living in Indiana was that one of the earliest jazz labels, the Starr Piano Company and Gennett Records, had been in Richmond. The Friars Society Orchestra had recorded there, and King Oliver, Armstrong, Bix, Hoagy. Laura knew where the building had stood in the Whitewater Gorge, and had driven the girls by it on what was a rare thing for them, a field trip.
