Chapter 37

1

There were ball tryouts again after school. Coach put up posters around the hall, as well as a few roster lists for early cuts after the first round. But Croak didn’t care. Something about that part of his life didn’t matter right now. He figured he was really only at school because Pug wasn’t home when he stopped by in the morning, the tape in his backpack and his heart thundering inside his chest with the realization that what Pug had here, what he had with his mom opening the door and Chels looking up at Croak from her perch near the couch, her eyes droopy and exhausted, would soon transform the Hopson house into something similar. He didn’t consider how the Nelsons would change as a result; he didn’t consider what Mrs Nelson might have known, even as she stood at the front door, smiling at him, calling him Cory and calling Pug Horace, oblivious of what he knew and oblivious of the little world the boys had discovered in Reedy Creek. Something about that secret fascinated him. Something about having that knowledge, having something an adult wasn’t privy to, made him feel powerful.

            Talk at school was about the murders. From what Croak heard down the halls, the kids had already turned Ned Stevenson into something of a bogeyman. “You stay out after curfew, Ned will be right behind ya to slit your throat. He ain’t even got a knife. He uses his teeth. He filed them into fangs. That’s what I heard.” “Oh yeah, I heard Ned uses his police badge to cut out your eyes cause then you’re blind to the law.” “I heard Ned’s a cannibal. I heard the bodies they found, they just weren’t that tasty, otherwise he would have stored them in a freezer. He didn’t like them so he just left them where they’d be found. Like he’s playing a game or something. Playing with his food.” “I heard Ned used to kill puppies when he was a kid. Saw a shrink and everything. Should have locked him up, but they couldn’t cause he was too young.”

            The rumors were batting around like whizzing insects. Croak didn’t know anything about Ned, but he understood what the students were saying was something of a one-upmanship game kids played, and that their fictions weren’t even about Ned but about their own imaginations. Because the reality was, a council hid in the darkness of this town and watched you, and they decided whether or not you should live. That was the gist of it. As far as Croak was concerned, Ned was just that: a bogeyman, a fiction. What adults might call a scapegoat. He wouldn’t correct anyone, because most of the people talking were older than he was. Plus, the rumors are what makes this place interesting for them. That’s why scary movies are such big hits. Because people like to talk about bad things and bad people. The worse the better. Shit, folks are still yammering on about Hitler.

            “Hey Chris,” Croak said to a short kid with a buzz cut and a mole on his jaw. Had he joined the foursome for ball over the summer, Croak figured his nickname would have been Spot, Mole, or, if Danny had his say, Melonoma. “You seen Pug around?”

            Chris only tucked a textbook into his locker, its inside decorated with pics of his trip to Disneyland: standing in the concourse leading to Space Mountain, and another with Mickey Ears by the Haunted Mansion. “Nope. You hear about the curfew? My pops said it’s like martial law or something. Not sure what that means, but he wasn’t impressed.”

            Croak only feigned a smile. He was sitting on the juiciest information of his life. Something he couldn’t wait to express. But the Fenway Four was breaking under the tension of Reedy Creek’s sickness. Danny didn’t come to grampa’s memorial, Adam was sort of losing his mind, and now Pug was AWOL. Chris only gave him a blank look and took off, tucking his binder against his chest.

            Randy?

            His big brother was just down the hall, wearing a dark hoodie and stowing his bag in his locker, looking pensively from side to side. As if he carried some sort of secret. Croak was surprised to see him. Excited. He hustled toward Randy, aware that if he was caught, a teacher would chastise him for running in the halls. Even though he is the way he is, the stranger across from your bedroom, you still love him. You do. And what you’re doing, what you’re holding in your bag. It’s an answer for him just as much as it’s an answer for you. That was true. No truer than the fact that he missed Randy. And he knew mom missed him too.

            “Randy!” Croak reached his brother and he only turned toward him, his eyes sort of lost. Wandering. “You okay, man? Mom said…I overheard you took off…”

            Randy only stopped and leaned against his locker after slamming the door. He didn’t look like he’d showered. His nose wasn’t as swollen, but his eyes were still pretty bruised. And sunken. Distant. “That all she said?”

            “Well…I guess. She misses you. I do, too.”

            “Don’t get faggy on me.” He reached up as if to ruffle Croak’s hair but stopped himself. “I ain’t staying here long. What do ya want?”

            Croak thought about the tape in his backpack. The answer. “Look, Randy, I’m not sure I know what you want to hear. I don’t. But…but I found something out. Something that might…will fix us.”

            Randy only arched his brow.

            “Mom…what if she’s dating so she can find the right guy for us? You know. What if what she’s done here, the guys she’s met, what if it was so we could be normal?”

            “That a line of bullshit she’s trying to sell you?”

            “No, Randy. I…she didn’t tell me anything. I found…I saw her. With a guy. And she was, she was truly happy. I know it. I could see it in her eyes. And this guy, this guy’s a family man, a real family man. Good values, ya know. He’s just…good. And he can fix us. He can make us normal again.”

            Randy smiled. It teetered on the precipice of laughter, and then his eyes darkened. Croak knew the look. It was the way any big brother looked when anger was setting in. “This sounds like a line mom might feed you to get me back home. She even tell you why I left?”

            Croak was silent. He heard the tremor in Randy’s voice. Heard the flicker of madness.

            “I didn’t think so. Because what she’s doing, Cory, who she’s found, it ain’t for us. That bitch is as selfish as a toddler with a bucket of toys and you can fucking tell her I said that. She’s not fixing anything. Nothing. Not you, not me. You want to know why she really brought us here, Cory? To this shit hole? It wasn’t so we might be normal. It’s because the guy she loved, the guy that left her, that left us, found something better. Found someone better, and now he’s got his own thing, his own family, and she likely knew it. She likely knew all about what dad did, that he didn’t like what he had with us and he decided to get something better with someone else, have new kids with someone else…because mom couldn’t fucking hold onto him.” Randy slapped the locker with his palm and the sound echoed down the hall. A couple of students looked their way and probably saw something in Randy’s eyes they didn’t like. Croak discovered the same thing. What he saw in his brother’s eyes was a dullness, like the edge of a used blade.

            “What are you talking about?”

            “We were never normal. Never. We were never good enough for him, so he went out and did it again. A make-over. A do-over. Whatever the fuck you want to call it. We didn’t size up, and mom, she never got over it, I don’t think. She doesn’t give a shit about us. This is about her. This is on her. Dad wanted a do-over, and she’s looking for the same thing. But not for us.”

            Croak’s stomach felt hollow. He wasn’t sure what Randy was talking about. He wasn’t. But beyond the muted glaze he recognized in his brother’s eyes, he saw something else. Something that just appeared, like fog on a window when you breathed on it. Pug would know, wouldn’t he? He would. Because he said he saw something similar. Saw something like this on Chels, and even though you believed him when he told you, you didn’t exactly process it; it was like agreeing to something you didn’t understand only to end the conversation or change it.

            Randy stood staring at his younger brother, his hair greased in ropes, some sticking up where he likely fell asleep, and some plastered down to his pasty forehead; his hair was black and dripped like wax down his face, but it turned into something else by his mouth. The follicles that ended near his brow turned into insects, little trails of ants or beetles, small but industrious, their skittering legs pelting Randy’s skin with the tapping sound of thousands of legs, the hallway light reflecting in minor curved beads over their obsidian thoraxes as they climbed in and out of his open mouth, up into one nostril so that Croak could see their vague outlines in his skin and over the bridge of his nose, and out through his eyelid to the bristled curl of hair and down his pocked cheek. Over and over again in a circuit, fluid and dynamic, but unrecognizable. Randy didn’t know they were there. He didn’t bat them away; he didn’t blink them out of his eye or spit them out of his mouth. They were something only Croak could see.

            “Randy…your…face…”

            Randy only blinked and stood up straight. “Mom can have her little do-over,” he finally said, looking at Croak curiously for a moment when he realized his brother was staring at him strangely. “She just needs to know it was her fault. You can even tell her, if you’re up to it. I just wish she never chose the Creek, Cory. This place rejected me the moment I set foot in it.”

            “No it didn’t, Randy. You…you made that choice. You just…you gave up.”

            He took Croak’s shoulder for a moment and squeezed it. He shared a slight smile. “Dad’s gonna wish he wasn’t such a coward, Cory. I’m going to make him regret what he did to us. That’s what big brothers are for.”

            Croak would see him one more time. By then the bugs would make sense.

2

This life was a lie. Yes. But knowing that, coming to terms with it, didn’t somehow make it easier to swallow. He figured it was like going behind the scenes at Disneyland, of seeing and becoming aware that those talking birds or pirates weren’t what they seemed at first glance, but a circuit of pistons and moving parts, of one effect hidden under the magic of another. He listened to the garage door open, and he listened to his dad back down the driveway; he imagined what the man might have planned for the day, and then considered that maybe he didn’t want to know. That he already knew too much, and knowing was so goddamn suffocating. He felt sick. He’d gone downstairs and told his mom he was ill. That it was his stomach. She’d done the usual test of his temperature, holding the back of her hand to his forehead, and though she said everything felt normal she must have seen something in his eyes, something she took for sickness without understanding it was actually the power of the truth that had turned him, that suggested there was honesty in his tone. A truth she may not have been aware of. And so she grabbed her purse, looked at her watch, and figured she’d make it to the General for opening, assuming they finally cleaned up the crime scene to make the place profitable again. And if that didn’t work, she’d head over to the clinic and scrounge up whatever meds the good doctor would proffer based on a mother’s observation.

            He was alone in the house. And he was in his parents’ room. Aware as he walked in that Grimwood could see him. That the camera above the bed was burning a mark in his back. I’ve done what you asked of me. I left those sick pictures at the house with the ramp. So please, leave me alone. Your Shine, your Force, it’s making me sick. He went to his dad’s side of the bed, to his night table where there was a lamp and an alarm clock, an old glass of water set on a coaster and a paperback novel with a page leafed to mark his spot. Something by a writer named James Patterson. Danny picked up the book and opened it. There was nothing inside but words. Like something Pug might one day write. He didn’t know what he thought he might find, but like a nice pair of loafers on a homeless man, he figured the thing was just decorative, something burying a deeper secret. Maybe you thought you’d open the book and find the pages carved out, that you’d find a key or something, to a safe or a deposit box, and every answer about your dad would be there. Everything you’ve ever wanted to know. He opened the drawer in the night table and found paper, receipts, another coaster, Vaseline. But nothing dangerous. Nothing intriguing. Nothing that might pin the truth to what Grimwood showed him, to what he’d seen out in the boonies of this town where the derelicts lived. Maybe a part of him had hoped the gun was in the drawer, and that when he pulled it out he would only remark on how light it was because it was just plastic, fake, another kind of illusion. That everything he’d accused his father of since learning of the lie was just another smokescreen. Danny checked under the bed, crawling around the perimeter, fitting his fingers under the mattress, checking behind the headboard. But his mother kept a tight ship. She did, in spite of missing the camera just above where she slept, something he could see even when he didn’t want to. And he wondered if maybe she had seen it as well, that she’d seen it but a part of her had forgotten about it, had erased any accusation that somebody would be spying on her; and maybe the power that carried that sort of suggestion was the Force holding Reedy Creek together even as it rotted in the shadows of an organization spilling so much innocent blood.

            Danny stood up and looked at the camera. “Where’s the proof? Where is the fucking proof?” He wanted to cry. Wanted to, thinking about a young Eddie Hilton slicing his father’s belt and then watching him shimmy down his jeans so that the pallid contour of his bare ass contrasted against the scum of a dumpster that had likely smelt to high heaven of shit, but in the end he didn’t. He looked at the phone, expecting Grimwood to call, expecting some sort of answer, but the house was just silent.

            He went into the closet, feeling his mom’s dresses brush against him, smelling the freshly ironed and starched shirts in the back. His father kept a shelf in here, something he’d never been inclined to look at because of the nature of his work and the boredom it inspired. Each shelf was lined with binders catalogued by fiscal dates: Tax Returns 1980-81, and so forth, written precisely on little cards inserted into clear slots. The binders were black and non-descript, and Danny suddenly thought of what Grimwood told him. That his father’s life as an accountant was a lie now. That he was never transferred to Reedy Creek. So maybe, like the tapes Pug found in his own dad’s closet, the tapes that read General Conference or some other Mormon claptrap but contained a few hours of titty flicks he’d remembered laughing at when he first watched, never once considering how evocative and clever porn could be with their wordplay (Romancing the Bone or ET the Extra-Testicle), these binders were cover stories. He doubted his mom would ever leaf through the binders, and the sheer confidence his father displayed in knowing that fact was the result of their all being located here, tucked nicely under his father’s pleated pants and dress shirts. Danny pulled out the first binder and leafed through it. He saw receipts, he saw bank ledgers, streams of numbers analyzing costs of operations at a firm called Hedley Corp., yearly budgets and payroll taxes. He put the binder back, a part of him happy now and another unimpressed. He wasn’t sure which part was right. Not yet. He looked at the binder labelled for 1987-88. The year the Greenfields moved to this shithole from New York. If your dad isn’t working professionally for anybody here, then why would he be holding a corporate binder? He didn’t know, but he did at the same time. He did, because one’s secrets were best kept under the veil of what others believed to be real. Danny took the binder and opened it. Inside he found pieces of paper at the front, on what his father had printed or copied numbers; they looked exactly like the pages he’d leafed through in the first book, and for that reason he knew they were wrong. They were false. Behind them he found plastic sheets with baseball cards. Danny looked at them all, organized in rows and resplendent in their historicity. An Ernie Banks 1954 Topps rookie card, the young Cubs shortstop smiling back at him, its corners sharp and precise; Pete Rose’s 1963 Topps, perfectly centered and mint; Lou Gehrig standing at the plate mid-swing on a cherry 1933 Goudey; and Hank Aaron’s young mug from the same ’54 set as Banks, before he would chase and overcome Ruth’s homerun record. All categorized in this binder next to empty slots where cards had once been stored. And likely sold. Because his father had put stickers on the plastic of each insert, on which he’d written a suggested value; Danny knew the value wasn’t a result of the hobby’s stock ticker, but what his dad might ask for the card from Buddy, or whomever he might sell it to in an effort to keep his family afloat. There were dozens of expensive cards inventoried in here. If he added the cumulative cost of each, he thought he was holding a hundred thousand-dollars in this binder. He looked at the shelf, at the next book, its sticker reading PERSONAL INCOME/TAX, and he somehow knew that was the golden ticket. He looked at the Hank Aaron once more, remembering what Eddie Hilton had said about blacks taking over the national pastime. He grabbed the other binder and realized it was wedged into the rack more, and when he finally did jar it loose, a box fell out with it, landing with a thud on the carpet. The sound was heavy. That’s what you think it is, isn’t it? He thought so.

            He got down on his knees, setting the Personal Income binder next to his foot, and he took the lid off the re-appropriated shoebox. There was no gun. There were bullets. A couple dozen or so. But there were photos. Stacks of them, mostly bundled by elastic bands. Danny pulled out one of the piles and flipped through them quickly, understanding immediately what he was seeing; they were of a man named Eddie Hilton, but not as he looked now. These were as he looked ten or fifteen years ago, with a little less weight around the middle and a little more hair on top. These are just a few years removed from the surveillance you watched. When you saw what happened to your father to inspire this chase. Danny thought most of these photos were in New York, taken by a young man who’d been tormented to the point of obsession; he saw Eddie taking out the garbage, saw him walking casually down the street or talking to a girl or sitting on the steps of some Brownstone with a hot dog in one hand and a cola sitting next to him, all of the photos candid and none where he was looking at the camera, acknowledging that he was the subject of some odd portfolio shoot. Maybe your dad wanted power over him in some other way, like taking somebody’s photo without his knowing is like stealing a part of his soul, like keeping it and doing with it whatever you want. There’s a level of control in that idea, and if your dad wanted to create a version of the world where he had the power or control to assert his will over this man, then maybe he succeeded in doing so through photography. Kind of like what a writer does with words. He thought that was mostly wishful thinking. Because he found a few photos that his father, or somebody, had written on with black felt: one, of a dumpster filled with trash bags, said DUMPING SPOT?, and another of the Hudson said LEAVE CINDER BLOCKS HERE. He imagined it was a note about where his father could leave blocks in advance, blocks meant to anchor down a body tossed into the river. Danny suddenly hated the quiet in this house. Hated being alone and so immersed in his father’s madness. Into what Eddie did to him, and what he did to himself as a result.

            He checked another pile of photos and saw Eddie here in Reedy Creek. He saw pictures of his blue Ford, of the man sitting to a plate of eggs in the Diner, of the man ordering in Mr Sub where Robert Wilson once stood requesting the Meatball Supreme, and smoking a cigarette in the Secondary’s parking lot, gazing out at the field, perhaps imagining a pit at the foot of the diamond where he could bury the niggers and Jews. Danny picked up one of the bullets out of the box and stared at it for a long time. That’s what your father’s chosen to do with his life. He’s taken what’s happened to him, and we both know what happened is horrible—beyond horrible—but he hasn’t grown past it. Maybe he’s built a life with you, your mom, but he’s held onto his past, onto this, and he’s turned it into something not just dangerous but maniacal, because once you begin drowning in the bad memories, those good ones you tried to make to help you forget will start converging with the bad until everything you are can only be defined by what’s inside the box you hide from others.

            The doorbell rang and Danny dropped the bullet. It rolled around the carpet and stopped at the edge of the shoebox. Danny quickly tucked the box away and set the Personal Income binder around it, wedging it into the slot, careful that everything was as he found it. He was sweating. He could hear the tattoo of his heart.

            He opened the front door and Pug was standing on the front porch, his bike sprawled out on the front lawn.

            “You’re alive.”

            “What’s that supposed to mean?”

            “It means we had no clue what the hell was going on with you, Danny. Not one. You don’t pick up the phone. We were supposed to go to grampa’s service. All of us. Together. Because that’s what he would have wanted. You didn’t come. That’s a dick move.”

            “Jesus, Pug…just, Jesus. This is a bit much, don’t ya think?”

            “No, man. I don’t. We’re friends. Hell, I came here cause I knew Adam wouldn’t. His mind’s not there, Danny. He could have used you. You can talk sense to him. Not like we can. He really listens to you…and he would have after he spoke at the memorial. It was so hard on him. He’s a mess. I was relying on you being there. We’re a team. I thought you knew that.”

            “I do,” Danny blurted, defensively, his mind still on that shoebox.

            “Then you would have been there. Then you would have gotten your shit together and…and done what was right.”

            “Pug, you don’t have a fucking clue what’s happening. To me. To my family.”

            “No?” Pug smiled, but it was sad and almost condescending. “Let me wager a bet here and guess this has everything to do with Grimwood.”

            Danny felt his face pall and his hands relaxed. He wished he’d brought down at least one of the bullets with him. Just to carry something.

            “The moment you used me as your billboard to tell the guy we wouldn’t help him was the moment you started breaking splinters off this group. But that’s not true either. No, it was the moment you threw the pitch Adam hammered into the woods. That started everything, and you’ve sulked like a…like a bitch since.”

            Danny shoved Pug and he nearly fell back down the stairs. Pug’s eyes widened and he adjusted, bracing his legs and clasping his thumbs beneath the straps of his backpack.

            “Eat shit, Pug. You’re talking out of your ass.”

            “You broke an oath. A promise. You might as well have pissed on grampa’s grave.”

            “You broke the same oath then, didn’t ya, Pug? Because I bet you went down and ferried your soul to Grimwood just as well as I did. But I bet he didn’t show you…” Danny bit his lip and thought about the shoebox, thought about that alley in a version of New York that had haunted him since he’d been to the farmhouse, since, as Pug so aptly pointed out, he threw Adam a pitch the guy nailed into the shadows. “I bet he didn’t show you your dad’s a liar, a con man…I bet he didn’t break your goddamn perfect little family. Because he did mine. So I don’t need your judgment. Reedy Creek’s already offered enough of that.”

            Pug stepped forward timidly. He wasn’t offering an olive branch, but he was taken aback, cautious. And maybe now he understood there was hurt. That he’d opened something with his accusations.

            “No. No, just leave. You came here to piss on me. And you did. I’m just…I’m done, Pug. Whatever we had, it’s fake. I’m not even supposed to be here, and I don’t think I will be here for long. My dad…he’s being watched by Adam’s dad’s fucking council for his crimes, and we both know what that means. We do. It’s all over the paper, isn’t it? So maybe I didn’t want to console Adam when I knew what his dad was planning to do to my family. So fuck your judgment!”

            “Danny…”

            “No, Pug. No. I loved grampa. Still love him. But this place just takes. Reedy Creek takes. And it’s taking my soul. Yours too. I know you can feel it. Because you came here to fight. You would have never done that before. Never.”

            “Danny…we’re here to save Reedy Creek. That’s…what I believe.”

             “Then we’ll see who’s right when this place burns.”

            Danny shut the door on Pug, who stood on the porch for a moment, waiting. Believing perhaps that this was a joke. A practical joke. That the Fenway Four was too strong to break. Perhaps he did once believe that. But the truth was, Pug had come to Danny’s looking for an altercation.

            Pug had woken up that morning understanding this was Reedy Creek’s last day, and he’d wanted to fan the flames.

3

What should have been good news suddenly didn’t matter anymore. Not to Pug. He got to school just as homeroom was letting in, and he’d seen the try-outs roster pinned up on the bulletin board. For a kid who was used to being left out, to being excluded, Reedy Creek had given him the friendship of three guys who suddenly made him better. Made him cooler. And his name was on that list, right by Croak’s, right by Danny’s, and about twelve slots below Adam’s. Coach was interested in making him the catcher.

            So why did he feel so sick?

            Because you know what’s going to happen. Not what, no, not exactly, but you have a feeling you know when. And when is soon. Grimwood told you when is very soon, and that the signs would make sense once you saw them.

            He wondered if the signs would be like the bugs. The bugs infesting Chels; the bugs swirling around Adam’s mom’s chest, like the remainder of something that had once been stronger. He wasn’t sure he understood that thought, but another part of him figured it carried merit. And this morning. This morning when you saw Ange in the kitchen. For just a second you saw them again. They were faint, like the wisp of dying campfire smoke, but you saw them, those bugs, gliding with indifference across her throat, circling her neck like some obscure jewelry. Or would the signs be like the feeling that carried him to Danny’s house, that feeling like electricity, pulsing and frothing, needing to express itself, needing to explode; the feeling like he wanted to see something bad happen, something he could not control, but something he could watch, be outside of.

            Danny and Adam weren’t in homeroom. Croak only grinned when he saw him come in, and a part of Pug was thankful for that. The Fenway Four was halved like some cataclysmic disaster, leaving the land split in two distinct parts.

            “Thank God. I thought I’d have to go at this alone.”

            “You’re okay?”

            Croak frowned for a moment. His books were on his lap. “Why? You expecting something to happen?”

            “I don’t know anymore. Danny’s pissed at me, Croak. Like, verifiably upset. He pushed me. Nearly fell down the stairs.”

            “Jesus. Why?”

            “Because I went to talk to him. Like we said we should. About ditching grampa’s memorial. He had other stuff on his mind.” He thought about what Danny had said. That what they had here, what the four of them had made, was false.

            “Look, Pug. I’m glad you decided to show up at least. We’ve gotta talk. I…I’ve gotta show you something. You have to see it to believe it.”

            “What is it?”

            Mrs Napolitano walked into the class. She appeared flustered, like she had something else on her mind. Croak would understand why that was. He could see in her eyes the realization that somebody was watching them. Somebody knew about her and the principal. She dropped off her case on the table. Pug saw something in her hair, something moving around, and he only looked away. Croak leaned forward. “After homeroom. Let’s go to the AV room.”

            Pug only nodded and half-listened to the teacher. His mind was so far away now he didn’t know how he would ever retrieve it. He knew he had to see Buddy the Collector, because he knew Buddy’s name was on a list that made him a candidate, like Wendy Golding; he knew he would have to warn Buddy, and he knew the guy wouldn’t believe a word. Maybe not until he told Buddy he knew about his drives out to the veterans’ estates, that he knew Buddy moonlighted as an appraiser and that he marketed his services to seniors as an expert of all things antique. He even had a business card, something Buddy had made up at a print shop in Davenport under his nom de plume, Gary Ackerman, Chief Appraiser at Ackerman Collectibles & Antiques. He even served as a consignment broker. But nothing about this part of his life was legit. Nothing. He took what he could fleece from these old people, convincing them the deal would only benefit them and that he couldn’t believe he was shelling out this much money for a worthless Superman comic or pre-war ball card, because he was good at playing the victim. Maybe his targets saw in him the sort of personality that was used to mean-spirited jokes or comments, used to laughter when his back was turned, and he’d taken that familiarity to worthlessness to become poor at sales, to suffer at the hands of one-sided deals. So he would walk away with a pristine copy of Action Comics #1, with a crisp picture of a superhero holding a car over his head, for as little as a couple hundred dollars, only to turn around as Barry “Buddy” Powell and sell it at auction for twenty times the price he paid; he was very successful at conning the farmers, the ones who might have collected as kids and maybe buried cards or their pop culture drivel in the barn only to find it many years later wondering if there was some value to it. And there always was. Always. Sometimes Buddy even broke into these barns and looked around himself. Sometimes he drugged old women and broke into their homes to have a looksy. Pug had seen the footage; he’d seen the fat man tiptoeing around a cluttered office or bedroom, opening drawers, checking under beds and inside vents. Because he was a man addicted to valuables. He drugged and stole, and Grimwood told him the council was keeping tabs. He wasn’t entirely certain Buddy’s life was one that deserved saving, but maybe that wasn’t up to him.

            After homeroom Pug went with Croak to his locker.

            “I saw my brother.”

            “He was here?”

            “It was fucked up, Pug. You know what you said you’ve been seeing on Chels…the bugs? I think I saw them on Randy.”

            Pug watched Croak fiddle around with his books. He looked at the inside of his locker door and saw a picture of the four of them from the summer. From before. Croak and Danny were standing, Croak with his ballcap on backwards and Danny in his Guidry shirt, the sleeves rolled up; Adam was on his knees next to Pug, the bat on the ground between them, and Chels at his heel with her tongue wagging. He remembered that pic. He remembered grampa taking it with the Polaroid as he tried focusing it, standing in the grass outside what they’d weed-whacked in Fenway. The same Polaroid that would frame his sisters.

            “Where?”

            “Here,” he touched his face. “Under his eyes, but like…going into his mouth and nose. It was so…gross. Like I could hear them, I could see them under his skin. What does it mean?”

            Pug only shrugged. He knew what he thought it was on Chels. Lymphosarcoma. But he’d seen the bugs everywhere now. An infestation of them. He even just saw them in Mrs Napolitano’s hair, climbing in and out of her roots and making themselves known, digging into her scalp in rows and skittering the way they did on that kid he saw in the hall, the older kid named Oliver (or so one of the girls hollered when she saw him), the one with bugs at the base of his skull, treading through his hairline and up and down the knotted contour of his vertebrae.

            “You think it’s like Chels? Like, maybe she has something that Randy caught?”

            “No. I don’t think so,” Pug said. But maybe that wasn’t true. Maybe they’d each caught something. The same sickness currently tearing Reedy Creek apart. Every illness had symptoms. Maybe their symptom was seeing the actual disease. Seeing the parasite.

            Croak pulled out a videotape he’d stuffed between his books, and he held it under his arm. “I bet I’m just seeing shit. Since you even said anything about the…about the bugs, I figured Randy running away, and, ya know, getting beat up and everything, I’m just seeing some darkness on him because I remembered what you said. Seeing the way I feel on him. If that makes any sense.”

            “Does to me,” Pug lied. “What’s that?”

            “Come on,” Croak smiled. “It’s the best news I’ve gotten since meeting you guys.”

4

The AV room was dark. It wasn’t something the school kept locked up during the day. Kids were in and out of the room, teachers too, at all hours to borrow VCRs and TV sets, because sometimes the curriculum needed a little boost. Those were always the best days. When instead of listening to the teacher drone on and on about Shakespeare or Middle English, he or she would just throw in a tape, sit back with his or her feet up, while the kids turned off their brains to watch some stupid movie of the week, or something filmed in the 50s teachers continued to pretend was relevant. Croak flipped on the lights and walked down the aisle to one of what he figured were the perma-monitors, already plugged into the back wall and sitting on a fixed stand with a Sony VHS player hooked into its back.

            “While Randy’s got these fucking bugs on his face, Pug, he’s talking about do-overs. Saying my dad left my mom for a do-over.”

            “What does that mean?”

            “It means my bro thinks my dad started again. Thought he messed up with us, and moved on to try again.”

            “Is that true?”

            “Randy seems to think so. So much so that I saw bugs in his mouth. Didn’t bother him much, but it was sick, Pug. It was disgusting.” Croak held Pug’s stare for a moment and then patted his palm with the cassette.

            “What is that?”

            “It’s my do-over, Pug.” He turned the monitor on and watched the screen flicker. It lit his face for a moment, and Pug thought he saw something in Croak’s eyes, another sign maybe. It wasn’t madness, no, but it wasn’t normal either. “We came to this place because we needed the change. Randy thinks my mom’s selfish. I don’t see it that way. Maybe she’s doing this for herself, but can you blame her? If my dad really did leave her to start again, how do you think she would feel? To be, ya know, just…cast aside. Like nothing. This fixes everything that’s broken, Pug. This. It’s my answer. What I’ve been waiting for. I saw what you had and I wanted it.”

            “What are you talking about, Croak?”

            Croak pressed play and Pug saw a bedroom. Footage similar to what they’d all watched since the end of summer, when they found a box of tapes and Pug cautioned them about breaching the sanctum that was Robert Wilson’s privacy; that damned footage from Grimwood’s never-ending network. It wasn’t Pug’s parents’ bedroom, he knew that, but he saw his father, sitting on the edge of the bed, his shirt unbuttoned and opened to his garment; the man’s belt was undone, but his pants were still on.

            “What is this?”

            Pug watched the woman step into frame. The woman that wasn’t his mother. She was far too thin, wearing only her bra now, her pants slowly revealing the nape of her lower back. She stepped onto Pug’s father’s lap, straddling him, sitting face to face with the man as he looked now, this woman who was not his wife leaning in to kiss him, to stroke her right hand through his hair and pull his head closer. And his father kissed her in return, her face pivoting to offer the man her ear, and Pug saw who it was. He saw the woman, and Croak watched with a sort of comic grin, the madness in his eyes intertwined with hope.

            “Don’t ya see, Pug? My dad never wanted me. My bro doesn’t want me anymore either. They made their choices. This is my do-over. This. My mom brought us to Reedy Creek so we’d be normal again.”

            “Jesus…” Pug whispered. He watched as Croak’s mom pushed his father down on his back, as she crawled forward and kissed him again, one hand going for his pants, for his zipper. He could not close his eyes.

            “We’re going to be brothers,” Croak said, smiling. “Like we always were. But now it will be real. Now it will be normal.”

            He kept saying that word. Normal. It didn’t mean anything. Not to Pug. Not now. He thought only of what Danny said, that his own perfect family was broken now. That Grimwood had showed him some truth that tore Danny apart. That destroyed his conception of normal. And maybe that was the sign. That gave him the right to be upset, because it hadn’t hit Pug yet. He saw Croak’s mom take off her bra with a simple reach around of her arm and quick flick of her fingers. He watched the side of her breast heave, saw his father cup it with exploring fingers, and Pug clenched his fists.

            “Where did you get this?”

            “This is why we met, Pug. This.” He was watching his mother, half-naked, not ashamed of what he was seeing.

            “Where the fuck did you get this?” Pug’s voice turned into a scream and the madness in Croak’s eyes, that lingering solemnity of normalcy, or what he believed it to be, turned to stark concern. “We all saw him…we all did…We all broke the promise because Adam went to him and made it okay. My God…” You weren’t his special spy. Were you? He wanted this to happen. Grimwood wanted you to break. It was a strange thought, but it was strong and persuasive, because he realized the great machine working to power Grimwood’s experiment sounded a lot like the string of Reedy Creek itself breaking, the vibratory thrum of something far too tense finally snapping as the town it was holding stretched apart. Became loose in its seams. Maybe that was you. The four of you. Maybe that’s what you were. The strings.

            “He always knew what I wanted, Pug. He did. He’s magic. He spoke to me from the TV. Like I told you. Now I’m going to have a daddy and a new brother. A do-over brother. You, Pug. You.” Croak moved toward Pug while he watched his father’s pants dangle over the side of the bed, and the woman on top of him pulled the sheets over them both, masking what they were doing.

            “No…” Pug whispered. “No!” It was a scream now. And he took whatever it was Danny felt, that intense rage that had him lashing out on the front porch, and he cold-cocked Croak in the mouth; he felt his friend’s lip explode against his knuckles, felt the obstinate jut of his teeth and bone, and the give, the give as Cory jerked back with an oomph.

            “We aren’t brothers,” Pug nearly stuttered. He’d never hit anyone before. Never. But it felt great. Refreshing. And maybe that’s what Grimwood wanted. Maybe he fed on that feeling like some sick vampire. “This,” he said, looking at the footage, looking at what his father was doing, at the man’s virtuous profile shattering like a brittle mirror, at the hypocrisies of his lectures that went beyond his pornography, that attacked and destroyed the very moral fabric of his fucking soul. “This…this breaks everything I have. This breaks my family to give you yours.”

            Croak had stumbled back against the table and only held his jaw. His mouth was bleeding, his eyes watering. Pug couldn’t tell if they were tears. “Pug…” he whispered.

            “You’re so fucking selfish. You and your mother. The whore. Like everybody said she was.” Pug pressed stop on the Sony and ejected the tape, the snow on the screen reflecting on his face, giving him the veneer of insanity.

            “I thought…I thought you would be happy,” Croak said. And now Pug knew they were tears in Cory’s eyes. “If I helped him…he said he would fix everything…”

            “He lied,” Pug said. He turned to leave the AV room. To leave his friend. To shatter what was left of the foursome, to listen to that thrum deepen until it was gone for good. Until Reedy Creek was left to the chaos.

            “We were going to be brothers!” Cory screamed.

5

He walked into his house when the premonition struck him. It was something he’d soon see more of. He might not have known that then, but the corners were starting to peel away from the base to reveal the gurgling shadows of what might have breathed and pulsed beneath Reedy Creek. He thought of a geyser as he walked; he thought of the build up, the tremors one felt as the liquid pressure exerted an incredible force through the ground, and he thought of the chute of water rocketing into the sky. That sort of power was contained beneath their feet. And it could explode at any time.

            Pug saw bugs in endless trails on Main Street, marching this way and that, some even turning to look at him, to regard him as he rode his bike; if this had been a cartoon, like something from Warner Bros., he figured a few of those roaches might have doffed tiny fedoras to him, but they looked real and precise. The insects were in the trees, and they were flying in the sky, choking the autumn haze to an ink black clot of whorls, and he could hear the batting of their wings. He could hear the hum that was like the undercurrent of the generator or machine that kept Grimwood’s project separate from the Creek’s grid. They’re not really there. You’re seeing things. Because you’ve got it in your head that this is the end. He closed his eyes as he rode and when he opened them again the bugs were gone, the sound was gone. But he could still feel them. He could still feel the heat of those wings batting, the moisture of their bodies resonating on the brim of the atmosphere, and he knew what he wasn’t seeing now was still somehow present. That his feelings weren’t wrong.

            He knew what he had to do when he got home. He let his bike roll and topple onto the front lawn when he hopped off and ran up the front steps, shakily retrieving his key from his pocket and fumbling with it as he aimed for the keyhole. He could see the bugs burrowing into the hole, around his fingers, and just as soon as he blinked they were gone, but he could still feel them nipping at his skin, at his fingertips. It’s this place, isn’t it? That’s what’s doing it. That’s what’s on the tape. That’s what’s driving people crazy. The sickness of this place. 

            “Horace? What are you doing home?”

            His mother had come tepidly in from the kitchen. She was still in sweat pants and her hair was pulled back into a messy ponytail. Pug was scared he’d see the insects on her, that he’d see them plugging her eyes, turning them into pulsing sockets, but she appeared normal. And for the moment so did Chels, who slowly came by her side and looked up at him, her chestnut eyes once so adoring now the tone of spoiled milk.

            “Mom…you need to pack. And you need to get Ange and Wendy.”

            “What? What are you talking about?”

            Pug opened his backpack and pulled out the tape Croak had showed him. His knuckles hurt now, and they were starting to swell. He wasn’t sure if Croak had been blinded by the sickness as well, if he had contracted the same disease he’d seen infesting so many now, but he knew his crazy insistence to steal Pug’s family for his own, to rip apart his mom and dad so Croak’s whorish mother could find some semblance of normalcy in a world that had shorn her of its traditions was born of a bubbling longing he had expressed many times in the past. Pug remembered his conversations with the boy down the street, about his abusive older brother and about his workaholic mother and the father who left them high and dry; this kid lived in a world provided to him by television, losing himself to the Keatons and Huxtables and Seavers, because in that world, in that ideal place dreamed up in sitcoms, one might find reprieve from what the world could take from you. And he found his respite in TV, didn’t he? He said so himself. That the anchor from Davenport spoke directly to him when the power went out…that…that perhaps the same machine that keeps Grimwood’s project chugging had somehow connected to Croak’s busted television set to transmute some sort of message from which he could glean a modicum of hope. And you’re holding that hope now, aren’t you? And his hope is your nightmare. Because there’s always give and take. Always.

            “Horace?”

            He was snapped out of his thoughts. His mom was looking at him strangely, her face stark white. He looked down at the tape in his hands. He’d practiced what he might say, repeating it over and over again as he rode home. Trying desperately to ignore the intermittent sightings of those bugs, the bugs he’d seen under the postman’s hat, in the sky like nightfall, or collecting in gleaming globules in his homeroom teacher’s hair. But he understood there was a threshold as wide as a chasm between adulthood and childhood. Convincing his mother of what he believed would be as difficult as stumping Danny about baseball. But she believes some funky shit. And maybe that’s where the lingering residues of childhood still persist past the chasm of accountability and responsibility; it lurks in some Organized Religion node tucked so deeply into the brain it is hard to turn off. Because she believes she can’t drink coffee. Hell, your friends’ folks all drink the stuff and aren’t afraid of burning in hell. She lives by the Word of Wisdom while her husband is gallivanting behind her back…There is certainly a level where what you think of the world can be reconciled with what she thinks. You just have to strike that nerve. You do. He thought that nerve was in his hands. And he was so mad now he didn’t care what that might mean. Because his father betrayed them.

            “Mom…you’re not going to believe me. I know that. I think…I know I’ve come to terms with it…”

            “Horace, are you sick?” She went to feel his head but he backed away.

            “Mom. Listen.”

            She recoiled. There was something in his voice. Something commanding and resolute. He could see that recognition in her eyes, watching his usual timidity fall to shambles at his feet.

            “This place…Reedy Creek. It’s sick. I don’t know if you can feel it. I don’t know if you can see it. But I can.” He looked down at Chels. His dog. His best friend. “Chels is dying, mom. Of something called Lymphosarcoma, but that’s only what the vet knows to call it, because…because I bet he doesn’t have a clue. And I bet you already know that. That you got a call telling you some bad news, but no real sense of an answer. I can see it on her. I can see her sickness. Like…like ants eating their way into her, through her eyes, through her nose. I can see it.”

            “My gosh…” she whispered. “Horace…what…”

            But he wouldn’t let her finish. “Chels doesn’t have cancer. No, it’s this place. It’s rotting and she is just…just collateral.” It was a word he didn’t know he held in his arsenal, but it was right. The bugs, the symptoms, they were all collateral or side effects of what was happening. “The vet won’t believe me. And I don’t think you do either. I get that. You’re my mom. You’re an adult. And what I’m saying now, it’s…it’s crazy. But I believe it. And I bet you believed some crazy things once upon a time, and I bet you wished somebody listened to you back then. I’m asking that you believe me now, mom. Chels is dying. She won’t last till the weekend. I know that…I know that and it kills me to say. But it’s this place. Reedy Creek is ripping apart, and it’s ripping us apart. We have to leave. We have to get Ange and Wendy, we have to pack up what we can, and we have to leave and never look back. Because it’s like what you always tell me, about the Second Coming…what we have, what we own, it doesn’t matter, as long as we have each other. You told me that. None of this matters. None of it. If we…if we leave now, if you go to the school and grab the girls, if you do that, I promise we will be okay. Do you…do you believe me, mom? Do you?”

            “I…” she wiped her eye with the back of her finger, her voice choked behind her quivering lips. “You write stories, Horace. You have a vivid imagination. You…” Chels looked up at her and whimpered, and Pug wondered if maybe, for just that second, his mom could see what he could. The bugs. All of them. The chittering. “Where will we go? And your father…he would never just pick up and leave. This place has been good to him.” She looked at the foyer, at how grand their new home was. “It’s been good to us.”

            “Smoke and mirrors, mom. That’s what we do. We buy things to forget bad stuff is happening in the world. It’s why we have so much. Why we have a CD player, TVs, why we have an electric blender, a microwave, a dishwasher, why we have two cars. Because we’ve stuffed our home with stuff to divert us from what could happen and what is happening. We can’t look away anymore, mom. This place…it’s…evil.”

            His mom audibly swallowed, and he wondered if a part of her had shared similar thoughts. Moving here wasn’t a blessing. Not at first. His mother was upset to leave her roots. He knew that. But she supported her husband. And this place took him away. “Horace…you’re not well. I can tell. We can…we can take you to the clinic.”

            “Fine. Take this, mom. You won’t like it. You won’t. But adults always need proof. This is what Reedy Creek takes. This is what it’s left us with. It wants you to react. It wants your anger. It needs it, I think. And this will help. But I hope you choose to believe me.” He held out the tape and waited for her. With something like impatience in his eyes. “I have something I need to do.”

            She took the tape from him, her eyes confused, her fingers trembling. “Where are you going? Horace…where…” Her stutters strangled the rest of her sentence and she stood in front of him, mute, only holding the tape, not yet understanding what might be on it.

            Pug opened the door. He thought he might hear the skittering bugs in the sky but it was only the wind. And he could only exhale in gratitude. “I need my own answers. I think…I’ve earned a right to know.” It was the last thing he said when he shut the door, leaving his mother standing in the foyer with Chels at her feet, the cassette loosely pinched between her fingers. She thought it felt somehow wrong, like a damp towel, and when she finally looked down at it and decided to watch it, she thought it was like taking a lighter to a stick of dynamite.

6

The tape was dynamite. And she’d lit it. Even after Horace warned her. In his own way.

            This was the explosion.

            But she couldn’t deny there had been suspicions. Brenda Nelson, once Brenda Skye (a name she didn’t want to lose but gave up without hesitation when Norm had gotten down on bended knee with a rock far greater than his student debts might have implied he could afford), had gotten into the car and backed out of the garage before the door was all the way up. She heard the crunch of the overhead crease outwards around her Ford, but she carried on, ignoring the garage door as it stared back at her with the mangled likeness of a snaggletooth on an otherwise pretty little girl. Because Brenda had seen signs. It was only natural to avoid those things that inferred what you’d built and what you curried might someday disappear. It’s her. The pretty thing down the street. Avery. Cory’s mother. It had to be her. Because you saw something even then, when you first met her during the barbecue. You sensed something unnatural about how Norm played with the introduction; you sensed not just a history there, but a playfulness that was part excitement and part role-playing. That sort of jealousy was inherent to the female gene. Her own mother was privy to those allotted worries, and she’d certainly had a few of her own when her father, a traveling salesman, was trapped in some winter storm and had to spend the night at a seedy motel. At the time Brenda wasn’t aware of what her mother was feeling, or what her suspicions might be, but now, now that she’d seen the tape—the tape Horace had somehow found or had been given or…hell, she didn’t know—she understood those initial feelings were concrete, that her gut instinct wouldn’t trick her. Because she watched that woman, that Avery, and she had for some time. The cute little thing down the street. The one who sometimes walked in front of an open window on the second floor wearing only a bra, and her pert little tits and tight tummy reminded Brenda of what she used to have, what she gave up in her pursuit of a family. And then she’d be reminded that Avery, pretty little Avery, whom Horace had adamantly stated was the most beautiful mother on the block (without the remorse or understanding that he’d omitted his mom from the top spot), had actually given birth to two kids and had kept a figure that had Brenda gauging herself in the mirror when she knew she was alone. You never grew out of those insecurities, no matter how many times you told your son he wasn’t fat, that he’d soon grow out of it, or how many times you told your daughters that puberty was inconsistent, and one’s chest developed when one’s hormones decreed. She could look her kids in the eyes and tell them their vanity was just subject to the judgments inherent to youth, and she could do it with a straight face. When she was alone, she’d strip down and stand in front of the full length mirror in her closet, and she would look at the stretch marks on her stomach, she would move and tuck in her tummy, squeeze it, lift her breasts and watch them fall back on the heft of her gut like wilted petals, and she’d wonder what Norm actually saw when he looked at her; she would wonder if marriage somehow transformed the idealism of beauty to render it null and void, if it blinded a husband to the ample opportunities outside the home. Opportunities like Avery Hopson. When she watched the tape, a gradual understanding had come upon her. Everything she had ever wondered, every thought she had ever had about herself and her own misgivings, was suddenly validated and confirmed the moment she saw her husband with Avery, with her in a way he hadn’t been with Brenda for many years now.

            Horace was right. What was on that tape, it wanted her anger. It fed on it. Because that’s all she had to give now.

            “Norm…you bastard…” she’d whispered when she saw her husband with the other woman. The prettier woman. “YOU ASSHOLE!” Chels yipped when Brenda raised her voice, balling her fists, and she’d pulled out that tape and decided she would act. That she would have to. And maybe her boy was right. Maybe this place was bad, because it was only bad news here, wasn’t it? The murders, the crooked cop serial killer going around town with all the random chaos of a bogeyman, poor Chels and whatever mystery bacteria Dr Langford had discovered that still had him puzzled. And now this. Her husband the cheat. Reedy Creek wasn’t a good place.

            She drove up Main, her vision blurred between what she remembered watching and the road ahead; her memory was haunting her. She drove through a red light, one of the few traffic lights in the Creek, and only vaguely heard the honk to her side that was Oscar from Up the Creek pulling into the intersection. She wouldn’t see him holding up his middle finger, nor would she have cared. She came to the plant at the town’s bookend, its stacks billowing dark smoke, and she could see in those tufts the very strain being put on Reedy Creek, cloaking it, and she wondered if that was what Horace had been talking about. That he’d seen the effluence of this factory as it pelted the world southward with its charcoal ash, and with the combination of his precocity and imagination, he turned what was being churned at this place into a sickness choking this entire town. To the point where dogs were getting sick and husbands were cheating. Now you’re going crazy.

            “But crazy’s good,” she whispered. “This bitch hasn’t seen crazy. This asshole hasn’t seen crazy.” She pulled up to the security station into the lot and rolled down her window. The guard inside set down his copy of the Post and smiled down at her.

            “G’day, ma’am. Can I help you?”

            “I’m actually Norm Nelson’s wife. He works Chemistry inside. Not sure you’d call him a big wig, but he’s pretty close to Bob Arnold.”

            The man inside the booth was cute and taut, his eyes a clear blue and his jaw squared and sharp. She wondered what he saw when he looked at her. Would he fuck her? Would he? Her body trembled at the thought. If it was okay for Norm, if what they believed, if their marriage, made eternal in the Provo Temple, was so easily breakable, couldn’t she express her concerns with their salvation in the arms of so young a man?

            She shook away the thought and the man was only smiling. He was being polite, nothing else. “No problem, ma’am.” Ma’am, like he thinks you’re ninety years old. You hag. “I’d just ask that you sign in at the front desk. Guy named Clarence works up there. I can buzz if ya like. Visitors just park over there, to the right.” He pointed and Brenda saw the striations in his arms, the muscles.

            She smiled, thanked him and drove forward. When she parked she waited a moment. To let rationality take hold. She clenched the steering wheel and stared at herself in the rear-view. “You’re okay. You’re not okay,” she whispered. Which one was it? She couldn’t decide. Maybe even allowing herself that discussion was proof enough she still had some control. She opened the door and went inside the plant; its lobby was grand, like something out of Chicago or New York, one of those mid-century skyscrapers, with an escalator cleaving through what looked like an open solarium awash in the autumn glow, rows of corn grown in rugged tusks through the dirt with what looked like the replica of some olden-days scarecrow propped on driftwood, a fake crow or raven (she never knew which was which) propped on its outstretched arm staring toward the front booth where Clarence sat. She signed in with the older man. She could tell he didn’t find her attractive. Usually men like that would oggle. Maybe even catcall under their breath. But he was indifferent. And she felt that urge claw at her again, leaving her feeling hollow.

            She was directed to the escalator. She knew where she was going. She’d been here a few times before. Norm had given her the tour. “It’s fantastic here. The way they brought the farm atmosphere in here. It’s like something out of Disney,” he said, and she agreed. Even now she supposed that was true. She watched the scarecrow as she ascended above it, the crow or raven motionless, its eyes just glass buttons but gleaming in this space. When she came to the second landing, she went to the site map mounted to the wall, something written on opaque glass beneath the PURE ETHANOL rubric, and she found the HR Department and followed the map to the string of offices or cubicles. She caught slight glances of her reflection in the plate glass to her side; she saw the baggy sweats bunched at her ankles and above her sneakers, the Adidas jacket lazily tossed over an old shirt she used when hunched over the oven or under the toilet. Of course the guy in the booth didn’t want you, Brenda ol’ gal. Because you’re a mother now. You’ve disappeared as a sexual object. The moment you had kids was the moment you became something other than a woman. She came to another receptionist’s desk and, after kindly requesting a meeting with the intended, just looked at the pretty thing behind the table, her breasts so supple and showy without being obvious, her lips plump and her hair so thick and braided over her shoulder. Just wait, darling, one day some asshole will get down on his knee and then you’ll just turn into a factory and that, all of that tightness, it will loosen like a rubber band stretched one too many times. And then presto, security guards don’t check you out anymore and your husband fucks the girl down the street. The receptionist picked up the phone, spoke for a moment, looked at Brenda questioningly, and then hung up. “Wait just a moment, ma’am.”

            Again with the ma’am. I hope you get fat you bitch. She only smirked as she waited. She heard the tap of shoes and Brenda could only close her eyes and face the opposite hallway. Would something in her snap? Would it? She’d read about women who’d come unhinged on their unfaithful husbands. Women who were otherwise so appeasing and refined, feminine, suddenly withdrawing from sanity with a raised knife and an intent far removed from their usual soft touch.

            “Mrs Nelson?”

            Brenda turned and saw Avery. Beautiful. Every bit as much as the version of her on that tape, the version of her that was still sexual, that was still tantalizing and erotic, that could forego the inspections of a body that hadn’t yet slipped. She could feel her nails biting into her palm and thought she might bite so deeply into her lower lip that she’d taste blood.

            “Hello Avery,” she said, feeling composed now. “I’d ask a favor of you.”

            The woman she watched straddle her husband and writhe her hips from side to side, gyrating with the endurance of a gymnast, only cocked her head and her beautiful eyes furrowed and her pert lips puckered. Perhaps she heard something in Brenda’s tone, something not all there. “A favor, Mrs Nelson? I’m just…well, incredibly busy, you know, being at work. I…”

            “It will only take a moment. And please. Call me Brenda. Mrs Nelson should be your name.”

            Avery’s face, so pretty and demure, contorted itself into something of a delayed shock that drained the color from her cheeks. She knows. Yes, that face said she knows as if Joan Collins herself had written it there in her lurid prose. Avery only looked at the receptionist, who was pretending not to listen, and then slowly nodded her head. “Brenda…I’m sorry, can we have this…conversation somewhere in private?”

            “Of course,” Brenda replied. “That was the intention. I know exactly where we can have this chat.”

7

“Brenda…I wasn’t expecting…” And then he saw Avery enter his office with her. And Brenda watched the crestfallen reaction of one who figured, right at that moment, that he’d been caught, that something wasn’t right. She closed the door behind her, just as Norm’s secretary tried to bustle through the tangle of bodies to warn him, to say he had unexpected visitors. The girl taking Norm’s calls, the one who often answered the phone when Brenda called the plant to speak to him, was young and spritely and tight, her skirt hugging deftly to her shapely thighs, and Brenda understood her husband had surrounded himself with beauty. He didn’t need her.

            “This is fun,” Brenda said. “That’s what this is meant to be. No reason to get your panties in a bunch, Norm.”

            He only looked at her. At her smile, awkward and crooked. She hadn’t put on make-up, hadn’t slathered on lipstick; those were church ornaments, she often thought. Not for around the house. “I don’t understand…what are you doing here, Bren? And…Ms Hopson, right?”

            She looked at the family photo on his desk. Horace and the girls, Chels, and of course Brenda with Norm’s hand in hers. She could see the sparkle of her ring, the diamond catching the flash, and she always loved how obvious it was, how plainly conspicuous that symbol would remain inside the frame. But it was a lie, wasn’t it? “Can the bullshit, Norm.”

            “What?”

            Brenda grabbed Avery by the arm and pulled her into the room; she felt how frail the woman’s wrist was, how thin she was. “I want to watch. I want to see what I’m not for you, Norm. I want to see why I can’t measure up.”

            “Brenda, what are you—”

            “I want to watch you fuck her,” Brenda nearly screamed over her husband’s stammering voice. Looking at him now, seeing him beyond the virtues of what she thought they shared, she saw a middle-aged man with the showings of grey in his hair and the jut of a paunch over his slacks. Behind him there was a window looking over the parking lot and the rest of Reedy Creek beyond.

            “Mrs Nelson, Brenda, this is highly—”

            Avery wouldn’t be able to finish. Brenda grabbed her by the back of the neck and shoved her toward the table, nearly heaving her petite body over the oak and spilling Norm’s Macintosh to the floor by his waste bin. She made an oomph noise that was highly pleasing to Brenda.

            “Brenda, what’s gotten into you?” Norm said, standing, his face flustered. He’d taken off his blazer and hung it on the coat rack by the window and shelves with his science books. He was wearing a short-sleeved collared shirt, and Brenda could see the lines of his garments; they were deliciously ironic and inappropriate now.

            “I want to see why I’m not enough.”

            “You’re mad.”

            “I want to watch you fuck her the way you used to fuck me.”

            She could see some form of the truth in his eyes. He didn’t look at her with disapproval but with a latent indifference that answered any question she would ever think to ask. Maybe that’s what men are. They take you when you’re young and supple, and they make you fat and haggard, and then they want to do it all over again because they get bored. She’d never considered herself one of those feminists she often read about, those man-haters, the ones who went beyond bra-burning to the sort of political and sexual revolution that had them disavowing men in general.

            “Norm…call security,” Avery whimpered. Brenda could hear the fear in her voice.

            “No…no. I…come on Brenda. What is this about? You’ve come to my office and you’re…you’re accusing me of…of what exactly?”

            Avery stood up and turned to her. “Brenda, I don’t know what you’re—”

            She hated the sound of her voice, that cute little bitch who paraded herself around in the negligee of one who understood and embraced her innate sexual attraction, who the women on the block believed was some sort of phenomenon in the community, a single attractive mother, one who’d been seen around with countless men since she settled here. Brenda balled her fist and thought of the two of them, of Avery and her husband, in this office, in this goddamn office, swiping aside the papers on Norm’s desk so she could climb on top of him, hiking up her dress, squatting in her high heels on the oak surface, and Brenda was certain if she looked right now she could find the dimpled pocks in the table where her shoes pressed into the wood. She punched Avery in the mouth. She felt the woman’s lip split. She heard the woman muffle something, and then she fell back against the table, that same table Brenda had seen on the tape, her hair spilling over her brow. Brenda turned and looked at the ceiling behind her; there was a camera or lens, or something she assumed Norm had never seen.

            “Brenda!” Norm blurted. He went to Avery to make sure she was okay, checking her lips with his fingers. She was bleeding. Brenda had hit her with her wedding ring. The woman’s blood was smeared on her diamond. She heard a knock on the door and that pretty little secretary asking if everything was okay.

            “Why wasn’t I enough?” Brenda whispered, breathing in and out, finding some semblance of order now, of clarity and rationality. “I gave you three children. A family. Why wasn’t I enough?”

            Norm went to say something. He opened his mouth. And then he closed it.

            “If you…if you wanted to fuck her, to be with her, why were you such a coward to do it behind my back?”

            “Bren…I…the stress of this…”

            “No,” Brenda countered. “No excuses. I understand. I have eyes. Your little bitch is a pretty thing. But is she pretty enough to rip apart our family? Is she?”

            Avery was crying. She did not look at Brenda. Couldn’t. And right now Brenda was thankful for it. She was gracious Avery didn’t look at her because she would have to hit her again. She would leave that perfect little face scarred if she had to. The secretary was knocking on the door still. But she didn’t matter. No. She did not. What mattered was this, was honesty.

            “It was…I don’t even know what to say. It was wrong. It was…forbidden. And I, I liked it.” He was ashamed of what he said. She could see that. She wouldn’t let herself cry. No. Not here.

            She only exhaled. “Horace knows. There’s a tape of you. A camera in your office, Norm. In your office. Did you not know?”

            He looked confused for a moment. Being caught was one thing, but learning how was another. Because being unfaithful took a certain level of propriety, of knowing one’s surroundings, and if he didn’t even know about a camera how could he have succeeded?

            “Our kids were dating,” Brenda said. “What if…what if they were serious? What if they grew to love each other? Would you have stepped aside to let them have their relationship, or would you have both selfishly enjoyed each other in the shadows? What you thought was the shadows.” She pointed at the camera in the ceiling and Norm looked up at it. At the little black lens he might have seen many times as he sat and daydreamed. And he probably had. But a second thought was not worth giving. “Congratulations, Avery. You’ve broken our home. Like you broke your own.”

            Avery was silent, nursing her lip. It was already beginning to swell.

            The secretary continued to knock. Brenda wanted to turn around and rip the door off the hinges and take the little thing by her pretty hair and drag her around the office by it.

            “It’s okay, Karen. It’s okay,” Norm said. “Brenda…anything I say right now…anything, it will be a lie. I know that. And you do too. Because…because I didn’t think I would hurt anybody…”

            “You didn’t think you would get caught. But your son knows. He knows what kind of man you are.”

            Norm shut his eyes. He was crying. She could see that.

            “Everything you’ve ever told him. Everything you are, it’s bullshit. You can have each other. We’re leaving.”

            The phone rang now. Norm looked down and quickly picked up the receiver only to drop it in its cradle.

            “I am taking the kids, and we are leaving Reedy Creek. Horace thinks this place is evil. And I think…well, I am starting to believe him.”

            “Brenda, please…”

            “I watched you fuck her,” she said, “I watched you be with her the way you used to be with me. I watched that. And you still came home to kiss me goodnight and tell me you love me.”

            The phone rang again. Norm stared at Brenda when he picked up the receiver, “Please, Karen, it’s not a good time,” he said, and then he fell silent. Still staring at what would soon be his ex-wife. “Yes…please, transfer him. Transfer him.”

            She saw something on his face. Something she would always recognize on him. She saw it when Horace broke his leg when he was a kid on the cubs camping trip in Zion National Park; he’d gotten the call then, and the earnestness on his face, in his eyes, removed any semblance of drama for the time being. Brenda knew something was wrong. She did.

            “What is it, Norm? What?”

            He swallowed. He was sitting on the edge of his desk. He looked like a father right now. “Angela,” he whispered, his eyes bleared with a tear that would soon fall the expanse of his cheek. “She’s…she’s had an accident. She was taken to the ER in Davenport.”

8

He went to the shed first. Because Grimwood had left that particular doorway opened to him. For access, the man had said. If he was a man. Is he? Pug didn’t know. He thought about everything that had happened in Reedy Creek. Everything that was still happening. He thought about what he and his friends had turned Grimwood into in their dreams. The bogeyman. And there had to be a partial truth to that; he was one side of a war. Pug wasn’t sure for how long the war had been fought, but he understood it was something that had been ongoing for a long time. That Reedy Creek was a new battleground, and that it was sick because of it. Yes, these were feelings. Precocious musings. But as a writer, an aspiring writer, one who might one day write about this place, write about the town with the living and breathing apparatus underground that had nodes everywhere and watched, like some incredible ocular octopus, he had the creativity and the imagination to piece elements of life together like a puzzle to assemble a string of narratives that carried certain plausibilities.

            He left his mom with the tape, wondering if she might watch it. Wondering if she would see just what his dad was capable of behind closed doors. Because everybody had secrets. In the end he was wrong. The man underground wasn’t using the secrets to blackmail; he was using them to create a conflict. To throw sugar in the gas tank. And for each favor accepted, Pug thought the Creek was stretching that much thinner. Fading almost. He went to the shed and opened the padlocked door. Because that’s what he was supposed to do. He didn’t hear them when the door was closed. But when he did finally swing the door open to the sunlight, exposing the interior of what was supposed to be a stairway to the special place under everything, he found only the perimeter shelves, the generator, the hedge clippers and weed whackers. But he could not see these things. He couldn’t see the generator against the back wall, even though he knew it was there. He could see its vague shape, its outline. Covering everything, and gleaming now, their carapaces like beaded onyx in some glittering mine, were the roaches and ants and flies, climbing over one another, their legs chittering with the scrambled shuffle of so many in so tight a space, and he could hear them hissing. He could hear their little voices, not as they spoke to each other, but as they spoke to him: will you die here will you die with us will you die poor boy or will you leave or will you depart?

            He quickly shut the door, feeling them bulge against the plywood, feeling the wood bow against his hand like that cool effect in the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland that had him going to sleep with his bedroom door open. They streamed out from under the door, through splits in the clapboard, out of the soffit and over the eave, spilling out of the trough and falling to the charred grass in thuds. Pug hopped on his bike and rode without looking back. If he did he was almost certain he’d just see the shed’s contour under the batty hump of bugs. The walls might even cave in under their weight, sending out burrs of smoke that would carry the insects closer to him.

            Are you going mad? Are you?

            “No,” Pug whispered, pedalling faster and faster. “The town is going mad. Not me. Cause I know now. I think I do.”

            He rode across the field that skirted by the Secondary. He saw a couple of guys under the bleachers smoking. He rode by the diamond and he knew he would never play ball there again. Never. It was a sad thought, but it was also a relief to know he would leave this place. That once his mom watched that tape, watched what his father had done, that she would gladly pack their bags and high-tail it; he hit Woodvine where Robert Wilson took his last cruise in that Audi, and he saw bugs trailing the burned rubber stamped on the road leading toward the pole, each tracing the ideographic signature of those worn treads as the man stomped on the brakes only to realize the line had snapped. Those bugs collected in a clotted stump on the surface of that pole, and Pug knew they were looking at him. Maybe even directing him. He died here his soul is here he watches still he died in the war and more will die so many will die. Their hisses were articulate. Like the voices he used to believe he could hear in the vents when the furnace was on at his house.

            Pug veered into the arcade under the flayed pines that had once seemed so welcoming. Now they were the haunting specters of what once had been. What time could do to a place that had been abandoned. He rode into Fenway and the field was covered in bugs. The flowers they’d laid at home plate were buried beneath the subfusc mat of insects, and he could hear them crunching beneath his tires; he could feel them pulling at him, whistling through the spokes, trying to slow him. As if he were riding through a marsh. You were one of the strings keeping this entire town together. Like stitches over a wound. And now it’s festering. He thought that was true. And he’d have a thought, an important thought that Adam would have later, one that was likely inspired by the authorial self that was a planted seed in his mind: if you were one of four sutures holding closed a wound, then maybe it starts here, right here, in the place you made after you followed Lazarus.

            He came to the edge of the field where the deadfall banked into the woods. He climbed off his bike and tossed the BMX over the tangled branches, climbing down after it faster than he ever had, leaving behind the crawling and mewling field, those hisses, and pedalling again through the narrow corridors of the strange forest where no animal nested. They once did. Yes. Before the farmhouse put in new windows. The forest was teeming with life. Maybe there was still life in here when you played ball. When you made the field something magic.

            He came to the spot that was once marked by a single crow. The line Chels wouldn’t cross when he first brought her here. They invited you here, didn’t they? The council. When they asked you to set up the cameras, they unknowingly invited you and they didn’t even know. They didn’t even know what they’d done, because they were so confident in what they were doing in this town.

            The farmhouse stood proud against the horizon north, where cornfields stretched into what looked like forever. Pug set his bike against the tree, under a camera whose wire was shorn and hung unassuming against the bole. And he walked across the clearing. The animals didn’t come here to die. They came here and died. That’s the difference.

            Grimwood was sitting in a chair on the front stoop. He had a glass of lemonade, and a second sitting on the old table next to the rocker. He only crossed his legs when he saw Pug approach the steps.

            “Hello my boy,” he said, tipping the glass to his lips and clattering the ice cubes inside. “Wendy Golding lives.” He smiled.

            Pug took the lemonade when it was handed to him. It cooled his hand, and though a part of him quenched it, wanted it, another forced him to set it back on the table. “I saw what you gave Croak.”

            “Did you?”

            “My father, Mr Grimwood. How could you do that to me? I thought we were friends.”

            “Of course we’re friends, Pug.”

            “Friends don’t lie to one another. They don’t go behind each other’s backs. And they don’t…they don’t break up one family to try and fix another. You…you used me…and you used them, and you pulled us all apart. Danny, Croak…you broke us! We were special and you fucking broke us!”

            Grimwood exhaled and set his glass of lemonade down next to Pug’s. “One takes down a fence board by board. Your work for me proved a point. So did theirs. I think I’ve expressed it quite well to my opponent. We all have an opponent, Pug. Even me.”

            Pug arched his brow. “I…I think I know who you are.”

            “Do you?”

            “What you are. Even if I don’t believe it. But maybe I don’t have to…not to make it real.”

            Grimwood wiped his brow with a kerchief he had in his breast pocket, pushing back the brim of his fedora to show a mostly baldpate.

            “I see them everywhere. The bugs. I think I know what they are too.”

            “You are a clever boy, Pug. One who wishes to tell stories for a living must be clever. It takes a wily mind to concoct stories, and if you’ve put it all together here, then I’m glad things have happened the way they have.”

            “I’m not immune, am I? Even though I helped you. I’ve seen those bugs on people. Lots of people. They don’t see them or feel them. Does that make me sick or them sick? Is it worse to see or not to see?”

            “This place is like a coastal town watching a tidal wave on the horizon. Most haven’t looked yet, but when they do, they will notice the sickness like you have. And by then they will only watch and wait. That’s all they can do. What’s coming isn’t about preparation. No. There are always casualties in war. You know, I think I liked you best, Pug. You won’t be here when it happens, I hope. And it will happen.”

            “What?”

            “That wave will hit Reedy Creek,” Grimwood answered.

            “The council invited you here, didn’t they? Without even knowing it.”

            “You are not immune here. But you are out there.” He hitched his thumb north, toward the window behind him, and the cornfields that stretched on and on in a golden wave. “I suspect you will be in Davenport soon. As your friend, Pug, and I do not have many, I’ve extended you the courtesy of letting her live. Remember that when you write of this one day. And you will, I assume. Something needed to happen to define the edge of madness.”

            Pug closed his eyes. He thought of the dream he had. The dream the first night they were brought to the farmhouse by Lazarus; he dreamed that Grimwood had asked him to kill Angela for smoking weed, and he handed Pug a knife to do it, to bring the swish of the blade across her throat so she could not utter a scream of protest. And that dream bubbled up again right now. Or a different form of it. Like he could see it in Grimwood’s pupils, gesticulated in the lit bead of his eye that looked like a beetle’s carapace. “Angela…” he whispered.

            “She will live because of you. That’s my olive branch. But in the course of all you’ve done here in Reedy Creek, the repercussions of one act like blackmailing your sister to date a boy she detests can lead to the scathing conclusion of another. The edge of madness could even find its tipping point in puppy love.”

            “What have you done?”

            “You said so yourself, I was invited here.” Grimwood finished the last of his lemonade and set the glass of ice cubes back on the table. He stood up and leaned on the railing over the clearing. Pug watched a deer stagger into the yard, its spotted pelt like freshly fallen snow. Its eyes, her eyes, regarded them both on the stoop, and they seemed calm. Not afraid. “They find me, even if they aren’t looking for me. I suppose that is the meaning of inevitability.” The doe came to the stoop and pressed her nose through the railing. Grimwood got down on his knee and touched her moist nose. “You should go, Pug. There is still time for you.”

            Pug did leave. He rode back through the woods from where he came, so worried about his sister. Knowing something was wrong. Knowing because Grimwood had somehow extended that power to him here. He did not see the doe lie down in that clearing. Maybe he didn’t want to because it would remind him of Chelsey. But the doe did lie down, and she looked up at that old house and saw the sky reflected in its windows. She saw eternity.

            She knew she would find peace here.