In the dime store in downtown Bainesville, among the racks of Marvel Comics and tufted troll keychains and capsules of glow-in-the-dark worms, I felt like a freak. It figured I should feel like a monster in the podunk town where Mom finally settled after she had taken my brother Dillon and me from the house in Fall City. At least we were near enough to Seattle there that even the kinds of guys who played on the football team and wore their letterman’s jacket while they played Tempest or Missile Command had shoulder-length hair. Mom took us so far out that everyone still wore buzz cuts. They didn’t even have their own arcade; instead, so many people lined up to play Donkey Kong at the truck stop that, unless you had inherited one of the quarters lined up along the plastic rim of the machine, you had no way of getting a turn with Mario.
It was the Sunday before the first day of school and I was waiting at the dime store to meet Wendy. Her mother ran the orchards for my mother’s old college friend Ray Burke. He was the reason Mom came out here in the first place. He owned everything out here. As soon as we arrived, he shipped my brother and me off to work in his apple orchards, I figure so that he could get more time alone with Mom. I don’t think he realized he didn’t need to go to all that much trouble to bag her.
Right before Wendy showed up, I watched this guy wearing a blue flight jacket and black boots. He had been sitting at the counter, drinking black coffee, eating a donut, and reading the paper. And he was just my age. I dug around in the bottom of my pocket and bought myself a paper and sat at the counter. The old guy who ran the place turned from the grill where he flipped hash browns and omelets. “What’s it going to be?”
“Glass of milk.”
The guy looked up from his paper. He glanced at me. I felt my ears burn under my long strands of hair just like they did when I used to ride my old motorbike through the winter sleet, and I made up my mind right then to cut all my hair off, even if Wendy said she loved my hair. “No one around here,” she said, “has hair like your hair, except me. But not even my hair is as soft as your hair.” She let me lay my head in her lap, and I’d just lie there under the apple trees while she stroked my hair and pulled on my sideburns. In the diner, drinking my glass of milk, trying to make out what the hell was going on in the world through the paper, I wanted to have short hair and a real job and be just like these hicks way out where it looked like Mom had finally settled down.
The guy snapped his change down on the counter, folded his paper exactly in half, flipped it under his arm and started walking like he had places to go. I paid for my milk. When I got outside, the guy was halfway down the block. He popped open the door to an old Mustang. Like I said, he was just around my age, and he had a car, and when he started it, he backed right out and then was on his way to wherever he was going.
Wendy was coming down the sidewalk. She had walked by that guy and he hadn’t even glanced at her. He just kept walking to his car. I noticed how dumpy Wendy could look sometimes. She had on this black and red plaid skirt and gray wool sweater that had started to unravel in places, leaving a few crazy fibers sticking out here and there like an old wicker laundry basket.
“Hi, Milton,” she said. She leaned over and kissed me on the lips right there on the street and I thought, Jesus, I guess this is all right. But as we walked over to the Burger Hut, I couldn’t get over the idea of how controlled this guy had been, drinking his coffee, reading his paper, minding his own time and driving his own car.
The one thing that really put me off about Wendy was that her mother, who everyone called Momma Eileen, hated my mother and my brother Dillon, and I’m sure that she wasn’t too fond of me. My mother lived in Mr. Burke’s best rental house, and because she was a friend of Mr. Burke, Momma Eileen always asked me questions about my mother, like “When is your mother going to get out of this place? Is it true your mother knew Mr. Burke back in the sixties?”
Momma Eileen seemed as old as anyone I’d ever seen. Along her jaw, tissue hung in loose sacks, like sandwich bags filled with water. Beneath the leather cord necklace that pressed a turquoise amulet to the base of her neck, her skin turned as smooth and white as a freshly made bed. Stringent gray hair had long since pushed out most of her brown hair. Each strand lay stark and almost transparent in the younger hair. Instead of growing old all over, she had started to lose this or that part like a cheap stereo at the end of its warranty.
Her denim dresses had been sewn from worn Levi’s jeans. Sometimes she wore a dress that had been made from a huge flag she had stolen from the Idaho potato baron, J. R. Simplot, during the only hippie march and riot that Boise ever had. She and six other flower fags had yanked Simplot’s fifty-by-eighty-foot flag down, and from the fabric they had made twelve dresses and four shirts. Four days later, they wore them in the Moscow Riot, where every Idaho hippie was busted.
Momma Eileen worked as the foreman of Mr. Burke’s upper orchard. She lived in a mess of buildings at the top edge of the field, where the mountain started to rise. Her place had been bunched together, a silver trailer camper welded to the side of a yellow school bus. Once painted rainbow colors, the enamel now flaked from the metal.
She wasn’t a total hermit, but pretty close. She lived with her three daughters. The oldest daughter, Wilma, believed that her father had been Abbie Hoffman. The middle daughter, Wanda, claimed that her father was Donovan, who I had never heard of, but one night Wanda played me some of her supposed father’s records and he sounded folksy and annoying and I didn’t know how to get her to turn him off, seeing as how he was her father. Wendy, the youngest daughter, didn’t know or really care who her father was, but she told me while we were working apples in late September that if she had to pick a father it would be Mahatma Gandhi. “Momma would have to have used frozen sperm, because he died so long ago.” I found Wendy so completely wonderful that when she told me this I fell to the dusty, straw-covered earth and rolled away, laughing so hard I started to cry.
Wendy and I worked in the lower field. Our foreman, Mr. Gidican, liked his crew to work for fifty-five minutes and then take a five-minute break. After work, Wendy brushed her long braid of hair back behind her. She leaned down to help me up. Her wrists, thin and muscular, sprung taught as I yanked her hand. I grabbed her soft upper arm and pulled her down to the ground. “Thanks,” I said, “for helping me up.” I kept laughing. I jumped and I hauled her up, but she kicked me in the round fat behind my shin. I howled and followed her down to the road, where I jumped on the bus back to town.
Momma Eileen had caught my brother Dillon. She had never liked him, anyway, because he talked all the time. The poor bastard should get a job as a talker because that’s all he does, and it’s a pity because for all that talking he doesn’t think one bit. A week before, toward the end of the day, Dillon had been picking up windfall apples. He didn’t rest at all that day, like he needed to, and then an hour before we had to go down the hill to get on the bus, he took a break. He lay under a tree and fell asleep. Gidican usually came around to check on our crew an hour before closing. He had checked us almost every day since we had started. For all Dillon and I knew this was some sort of rule written down somewhere. It didn’t take brains to tell you not to mess with the rules, written or not. But Dillon, because he hadn’t taken his breaks, because he hadn’t had his water, lay down, his work boots crossed over one another, his hands folded over his stomach. Along came Gidican. He yanked Dillon up by one arm and slapped him in the face, giving him a bloody nose. Lucky Dillon didn’t get anything broken. “Don’t you sleep on my shift, you spoiled punk. Go to the house and talk to the foreman.” Dillon, still being stupid, went to the big house. He lifted the brass knocker where we got paid by Momma Eileen, instead of going to the front where Mom’s old college chum, Burke, might have found him. Then Gidican would have really caught it and Dillon would probably have scored a great job in the packing plant in downtown Bainesville. When Momma Eileen opened the door, she just stared at him holding his Old Faithful of a bleeding nose. “You all right?”
“Can I speak to Mr. Burke?”
“He’s not in. Why don’t you come inside and I’ll get you a bandage.” She poured Dillon a straight shot of vodka from the bottle she kept in the rafters. She told him it was medicine and he should drink it down in one gulp. Dillon gulped it down and howled. “What was that?”
“Medicine.” She went to get Mr. Burke, leaving Dillon on the bench. He sat there getting woozy and wondering why his nose wasn’t hurting anymore. Mr. Burke came downstairs to find my brother completely toasted and with a broken nose. He called my mother and told her that he couldn’t have this kind of disruption out in the orchard. “It’s dangerous.”
+
Wendy stood on an old wooden chair, green with mold, reaching her hands up into the faint sunlight that arced through the shadows under the cedar trees. She brought me here to show me the face she and her sisters had found at the top of the mountain, back in the canyons behind the town. The face, covered with moss, had been poured from concrete. About the size of a car tire, the wind-rubbed cheeks and flat nose looked like a fat man or woman who had just told a dirty joke; the lips curled back, exposing pebble teeth. Wendy chanted as she swayed on top of the chair. I sat on the dry cedar tree needles and listened, and if I felt like joining in I could, but as I sat on the pitchy ground, looking up at her half singing, I started to sing a song my father used to play whenever he played a song. He owned a guitar but this was the only song he ever sang with it:
You got to walk that lonesome valley,
You got to go there by yourself,
Ain’t nobody here can go there for you,
You got to go there by yourself.
Wendy stopped rocking on the chair then and hunched down to listen to me. “Where’d you learn that?”
“The radio.”
“They don’t sing songs like that on the radio.”
“Sure they do.”
She tackled me and forced my head into the prickly bed of leaves.
“Tell me.”
“No.” She rolled away from me and looked up at the swaying cedar tree branches. The stand of trees lay at the bottom of a gully. Below us the stream fed a river, and down the river the orchards started. We had all today. Tomorrow we started school. I didn’t want to go, but I also wanted to go because Wendy was just a grade ahead of me and I could see her every day in her school clothes instead of the ragged jeans and plaid shirt she wore in the orchards.
“What are you wearing to school tomorrow?” I asked.
“Same thing I always wear on the first day, some dress Momma made this summer. She orders fabric from someplace and sews with the Singer, a new dress in the latest style.”
“A handmade dress couldn’t possibly be in the latest style,” I said, sort of offhand, not really thinking about the effect this would have on her, but Wendy sat up and jumped onto the chair. Sometimes I’d do something, just haul off and hit my brother and I wasn’t sure why I’d done it. It’s the stuff I don’t mean to do that really gets me in trouble. She raised her hands in the air, closed her eyes, and just rocked back and forth.
“What are you doing?” I asked her. I brushed the needles out of my hair and looked up at her. She barely breathed; she held her eyelids so wrinkled they looked like apples left on a windowsill.
“Quiet,” she said.
“I’ve been quiet.”
“Sssh.”
I looked at her long, pale arms raised into the air. I could see the faint map of purple veins underneath her skin. A light blue layer of hair covered her arms. When she hugged herself, her long, knotted fingers left indents in her fleshy upper arms. Like her mother, her hands had already aged years faster than the rest of her. Because she wore a long-sleeved shirt working in the orchard, her old hands stopped at her wrists.
After a long while, she mumbled. “I wish, sometimes, that I was a dryad, one of those tree spirits, because I would like to just be the space right here, where I’m hanging, and feel the sunlight come down against me, and in the wintertime, the snow would fall around the outside of me. Deer would come inside me and paw the ground at my roots and eat the lichen growing on my bark.”
“I wouldn’t want you to be a tree because someone would cut you down.”
“No one would even want these trees, they’re small and worthless.”
“You want to be a worthless tree?”
“I just want to float here, in the middle of this field, with a stream running through my roots, watching the clouds float on by and the winters come and go, and I’ll just grow old and old and strong.”
“That’s what you’re doing now.”
“I’m sixteen years old. I’m at my peak already and I’ve just started life. It’s all downhill from now. My eyesight’ll start to knock out soon and I’ll need glasses like Wilma. One day I’ll be like Momma. I’ll just have stories from the one or two years when I was at my peak. If I were a tree, my peak would be so long it would be stupid to call it a peak. It would just be the way I am.”
“That’s cool,” I said. I kicked the bottom of her chair and she tumbled into the mattress of rotting needles and leaves. I jumped at her and grabbed a handful of the soft, cold skin on the back of her thigh.
She kicked me off her and pulled her dress straight and smiled at me. “Come on,” she said, and skipped out into the full sunlight of the field. I followed her, blinking in the hot light, not really able to see anything, just the stark whiteness of the billowy clouds and the hard shadows of the stand of cedar trees.
+
At school the next day, I went to the bathroom to primp before I found Wendy, when this thing happened. The bathrooms in a new school have always been the one thing that stand out to me, maybe because I’ve been cornered in so many of them; maybe because it’s in the bathroom, in front of the sinks and mirrors where the boys comb their hair and talk and smoke, that I feel completely outside their lives. Though the stories are familiar and I’ve been involved in some of their plots in the past, the names are always different, and in this bathroom, listening to these boys talk, I didn’t know that John had driven off the canyon road, that Jerry’s girlfriend was pregnant, that Jason’s band had broken up after his mother found out that they were playing taverns.
It could also be the closeness these school bathrooms forced on us. The toilet stall doors had been removed, and sitting on the toilet, staring blankly out at the line of guys primping, I found myself reading and rereading the graffiti. I found that Wilma, Wendy’s older sister, was the school’s resident slut. “For all your vacuuming and sucking needs call Wilma Denty.”
“Excuse me,” I said, trying to step past a short guy in a plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He wore an Ortho baseball cap; its tall peak made him almost normal size.
“Back of the line, shit-for-brains.”
“Please, I just need to wash my hands, fuck-sneeze.”
The guys in residence at the sinks started to laugh. The noise ricocheted off the urinals. Ortho pulled a switchblade-handled comb out of his pocket, the kind that I had carried around with me in fourth grade. The other fourth graders weren’t impressed then.
“Jesus, man,” I said. “I didn’t mean to incite you into a fucking killing frenzy.”
“You’re a smart-ass, you know that?”
“I must be, seeing as I have shit for brains.” I waited for him to flick the comb open.
The bathroom door opened. “Sorry, didn’t mean to intrude.” He closed the door.
Ortho flicked the lever and a long black comb jumped out of the handle. He made a face at me and turned back to the mirror, swept off his cap, and combed his hair, as if he didn’t even notice me. “You fucking get out of my bathroom before I brutalize your ass.”
I grabbed the back of his oily head, and just as the door opened again, I brought Ortho’s skull down into the porcelain sink. “There’s a fight!” someone yelled outside the bathroom. Ortho’s neck buckled over the wide ledge so that I could bounce his nose on the aluminum drain casing. But the spigot caught on his forehead, digging through his skin and cracking on his skull. His arms flopped against the drainpipes, and the other guys in the room just backed away from the line of sinks. I pulled him back and dropped him to the tiles. I rinsed the blood down the drain, dispensed the gritty school soap into my hands, and washed the hair oil from my hands.
My mother believed in cleansing violence. She thought that Bonnie and Clyde was a positive example of bloodshed, as if there were something redeeming in Bonnie and Clyde bonding over Tommy guns. I believed, however, that I was brought to my most violent acts, I mean the kind people would think noteworthy, when I couldn’t even think and everything happened to me without leaving any imprint at all. I spent the rest of the day comfortable that I would be pulled out of class. I listened to my history teacher tell us the rules of her class. “I do not tolerate foul language.” The language arts teacher told us the rules of his class. “This is not a collaborative class. If I catch you cheating, you will flunk.” In PE, I couldn’t find a gym partner, and because we had an odd number of boys I got to have a locker all to myself. It was only my first day and I had stepped into that total freak zone occupied by the mumblers and pants-pissers, the outer margin of outcasts who just can’t, for whatever reason, deal with the other kids. A noticeable gap followed me around in the hallways and I knew this fear couldn’t be good. And I was never pulled from class, and I never saw Wendy.
+
After school, I went around to the stores and warehouses in Bainesville, filling out job applications so that I could have a job and be a normal kid. At the sporting goods store, I met Mr. Breathe. A sign written with black Magic Marker was propped against a stuffed deer and a line of fishing poles in the front display window. It read: “Help needed now. Inquire within only if you can start immediately.” The sign had yellowed and curled. A spider had spun a line from one edge of the sign up to the deer’s antlers, and little knots of dead flies hung from the web like dusty Christmas lights. Mr. Breathe sat in a gigantic swivel chair behind the back counter. Behind him, he had almost every bullet for every rifle made after 1880. They were in long drawers, with the caliber and a small drawing printed on the front. Above the wall of bullets, he had a roll-down metal grate. Mr. Breathe wore a red, geometric Navajo sweater. His head was connected to the sweater by a long, curly, red beard that broke into two forks over his stomach. “I’ll help you,” he said to me when I first stepped into the store, walking down the aisle packed with tents, raincoats, rubber rafts, and tent spikes.
“I’m here to apply for the job.”
“Job?”
“The sign, ‘Ask Inside’?”
Mr. Breathe swiveled and stepped free of his chair. He took a step. The plop of his boot sole sounded like a dropped phone book. Then he took another step forward. Once he had cleared the narrow area behind the counter he hurried to the front of the store. “That’s not my handwriting.”
“I didn’t put it there,” I said.
Mr. Breathe began to chuckle. “No. I didn’t believe you did. There’s a spiderweb on it. Anyhow, a young man like yourself shouldn’t be working.”
“My family needs the money.”
“You’ve got kids?”
“A mother and a brother.”
“I’m not about to give you a job if all you’re looking for is to put wide tires on your car.”
“Did you just open?”
“Just open? Stop. Smell.” We stood in the middle of the store, under the fluorescent lights, on the Formica tiles, and breathed in the ancient odor of mothballs, long-gone fish, curing venison, and gun oil. “This is not the smell of a store that has just opened. I’ve been the sole proprietor of Breathe Sporting Goods since 1964.”
“Are you hiring?”
“On principle I work alone. Call me a hermit businessman, if you will. But I’m a businessman first. What can you do?”
“You name it, I’ve done it and would like to do it again. I’ll earn you so much money, you’ll have to start a chain store just to keep up with the business.”
“I do need something, but I don’t think a kid like you, with school and all, would enjoy it.”
“Anything.”
“Can you worm? I’ll pay you two cents a worm, up to a thousand worms a day.”
“Earthworms?”
“Nightcrawlers. Are you up for that?”
“Only if you can use a million worms a week.”
“Twenty bucks for a thousand worms.”
“And a real job in a month?”
“And a chance to get hired into the sporting goods business, sure.”
We shook hands and I walked off Main Street, down a back alley, and kept to the alleys because I was afraid Ortho and his friends would be looking for me after school. I didn’t know them, though I’d been living in the valley since the summer and had met many people working in the orchards. But all the people I worked with had gone south or to big cities for the winter.
+
At Momma Eileen’s trailer, I knocked on the door until Wendy flung it open. “What?”
“I have a new job.”
“Yeah?” She came down the steps and then went back inside the bus and closed the door. I waited on the steps for a long time, and finally she came out with hot caramel apples and her jacket. “How was your first day of school?”
“I’ve got a normal job,” I said.
“Yeah, doing what?”
We ate our apples and walked up the road. “Do you know where I can find nightcrawlers?”
“Fishing? Are you going fishing?”
“I need to find an earthworm orgy. To get a job at Breathe Sporting Goods I have to come up with a thousand earthworms a day.”
“Oh yeah, that’s a normal job, Milton. Anyway, they’re all dead.”
I stopped in the middle of the road and took a bite of my caramel apple. I rolled the crisp chuck of apple in my mouth until the soft caramel skin pulled off.
“It’s okay, I’m kidding, numbskull, I know where some are.” We walked to the shed were Momma Eileen kept her tools, a shovel, a spade, and a ten-gallon paint drum. I followed Wendy across the pasture and then through the thin pine trees to a field that rolled down to a pool of water where a stream came down the hill. Young pine trees spread over the pasture, sticking up out of the wild grass. At the far end, just before the land suddenly jutted up toward the top of the ridge, tottered a dilapidated shack. Wendy walked to the middle of the field and planted the shovel, where she left it sticking up. “Here you are, worm heaven. We used to keep some cows here, and this whole field has so much decomposing cow shit that I bet it’s seething with worms.”
I dug a clod of damp, black soil from the ground, held together with long, yellow grass roots. Just under the sod, dozens of fat nightcrawlers wiggled their heads in the air. I banged the clod against the bucket, filling it with loose bits of earth, gravel, and earthworms. Soon, I had a five-foot square of churned-over earth and more than my quota of worms.
“Do you count them?” Wendy asked me. She hunched down beside the full bucket. She pushed on the side of it with the ball of her hand. “How do you plan on taking this back down?”
“I can lift it,” I said. I tried, though, and the bucket’s wire snapped off. We left the bucket in the field and went to get the wheelbarrow at Momma Eileen’s shed. In the fading daylight, we returned to the field to find hundreds of nightcrawlers dangling over the edge of the bucket, their elastic bodies stretched down into the ground. I held my breath and then scooped up their sticky, rubber-band bodies into the bucket. “How many do you think escaped?”
Wendy said, “Guess how many earthworms are in this new Oldsmobile, and you can take it home.”
I heaved the bucket up from the bottom and set it in the wheelbarrow and began the long walk toward Breathe Sporting Goods store. As we walked out of the hills, past the first houses, a Mustang passed us with its lights on. We walked past the city houses. I think Wendy and I were sort of happy with our catch for the day. I felt this strange sort of energy with her, as if she would help me, no matter what. I had forgotten all about her absence during the school day. Now we were carting out nightcrawlers, right out of the hills, like gold, and we’d get twenty bucks.
Outside the Breathe Sporting Goods store, the Mustang sped past us, running a red light. Wendy raised her eyebrows. “That was James Dorn.”
When we walked inside, Mr. Breathe sort of slumped off his stool and sauntered around the end of the counter. “Back so soon?”
“Yes, Mr. Breathe. I have a thousand earthworms, I think.”
“You think? How many do you have?”
“To be honest, I have no idea.”
“Guess,” Wendy said, still on her joke. Mr. Breathe didn’t get it, but he was smiling. He came back with a box full of plastic cups with lids that already had holes cut them. “It is six o’clock now. Put fifty worms and a little dirt in each cup, and I’ll put you two on the payroll.”
“Great,” I said.
“Not me,” Wendy said.
She watched me as I sorted the earth and dropped the wriggling worms into the cups. After an hour, I had sixteen of them full and had cheated a little so that I could get the sixteenth full enough that Mr. Breathe wouldn’t notice.
“Great,” Mr. Breathe strolled around the table. “Clean up this mess, and I’ll cover the remaining two hundred worms and pay you your twenty bucks.”
Wendy smiled at me. As soon as we were out of the store, she twirled around. “Who knew?”
“Who knew what?”
“That we could get so much money for so little work?”
“I did the work, that’s why.”
“For twenty bucks, I’d do the work.”
As soon as we stepped out of the store, the red Mustang pulled up and two guys from the bathroom hopped out. “Hey, Wendy,” one of them said. “How’s Wilma?”
“Are you going to come peaceful or are we going to have to hunt you down?” one of the guys said.
I looked between them to the guy wearing the flight jacket at the wheel of the Mustang. He looked straight into my eyes. I had to look away because I could never stare someone down when I’d stacked the odds so heavily in my own favor. Three against one? I smiled and started to run. I heard them behind me, and then they stopped. “Come back, shit-for-brains, or we’ll beat the shit out of your girlfriend.”
I still ran.
I would be a liar if I said I was not afraid of getting beaten up. My knees had that funny electrical feeling like I got when I used to jump off the tallest trestle over the Snoqualmie River. I mean, there is that fear, but it never stopped me from doing anything. I would get thrashed, fine. I ran because I was afraid of what I might do to them—I mean, if things got out of hand and they weren’t able to grab my arms and hold me down quickly enough. There was all kinds of crap, branches and garbage cans, the kind of stuff I might get a hold of once I lost it. I could kill someone. So I ran and looked like a coward. My dad always told me that if I got into a fight, I should run to the police station. “It’s not your job to beat people up,” he said. I always thought he was a little retarded for thinking like this, but in a way I sort of understood now.
After I passed through the alley, I hurled myself across a vacant lot next to the barbershop. Then I hid between two Dumpsters at the Burke Co. Building. I don’t know. I had been beaten up enough as a young kid and I don’t think I wanted any more of it. How often did I have to get beat up?
Minutes later, the two guys ran out into the middle of the vacant lot and then looked around. The guy driving the car must’ve grabbed Wendy, but they knew her and I didn’t think they would actually hurt her.
While I waited at the Dumpster it started to rain, and then, hours later, I began to walk back to Momma Eileen’s house, to see if Wendy had come home. I watched for the two guys. It was almost completely dark along the road. As I came up the steep side of the hill, I heard a car coming, and I climbed down into the pitch-dark pasture on the side of the road. I waded into the rushing ditch and up onto the soggy ground. The car lights filled the air with a silvery glow and all around me I saw earthworms wriggling out of the ground. I had never really thought about earthworms before. I supposed they were in the ground and as common in the earth as bugs are in the air. But I didn’t really think about them when I walked over the ground. And there were hundreds of them under there, wriggling and living their worm lives. I remembered from school that an earthworm had both sex organs. I supposed it must be lonely to have both and to be blind. You’d have children for whom you’d be both the mother and father, children you’d never seen.
The car turned down the road and I hurried up the hill. At the top of the hill, I could see the Mustang parked in front of the trailer. One of the boys who’d chased me was sitting in the front seat and Wendy was in the other seat and Momma Eileen and Wilma were standing under the porch light, holding up a gigantic umbrella that wasn’t doing any good because the rain was blowing down sideways.
“He’s just a loser I hang out with,” I heard Wendy say. “I didn’t know what he did.”
“If he can do something like that,” Momma Eileen said. “I don’t think I want you hanging around him.”
“And his breath always smells,” Wilma said. The guys in the car laughed. I wiggled back into the bank and listened to them.
“He just left me standing in front of that store, running like a coward,” Wendy said. “I thought he had more fight in him than that.”
“He’s a vicious coward and we won’t rest until he’s taken down,” one of the boys said.
“Hell, yes,” one said.
I slid down the slope and I felt empty. All around me I could hear the rain falling in the darkness and I knew that seething in the ground were hundreds of thousands of earthworms. I didn’t want anyone to see me. I didn’t want to exist. I wanted to be with Wendy in that stand of cedar trees, just her and me and the sunlight and wind pushing through that space, just the two of us, growing old, old and strong.
————————-
This is part five of the eleven stories in The Remains of River Names, a novel in linked stories. The book will appear this month on Necessary Fiction. Of the collection, The New York Times Book Review wrote, “Briggs has captured the America that neither progressives nor family-value advocates want to think about, where bohemianism has degenerated into dangerous dropping out.” The book will be re-released in a new edition from The Publication Studio this fall.