Bag of Bones 25 страница

“It’ll sound crazy. ”

“No it won’t. Believe me. ”

“She said the house was dangerous. ” For a moment the words just hung there. Then I asked, “Did you get here first? ”

“Uh-huh. ”

“And waited outside? ”

“Yes. ”

“Did you see or sense anything dangerous? ” There was a long pause. At last he said, “There were lots of people out on the lake—speedboaters, water-skiers, you know how it is—but all the engine-noise and the laughter seemed to kind of. . . stop dead when it got near the house. Have you ever noticed that it seems quiet there even when it’s not? ” Of course I had; Sara seemed to exist in its own zone of silence. “Did it feel dangerous, though? ”

“No, ” he said, almost reluctantly. “Not to me, anyway. But it didn’t feel exactly empty, either. I felt. . . fuck, I felt watched. I sat on one of those railroad-tie steps and waited for my sis. Finally she came. She parked behind my car and hugged me. . . but she never took her eyes off the house. I asked her what she was up to and she said she couldn’t tell me, and that I couldn’t tell you we’d been there. She said something like, “If he finds out on his own, then it’s meant to be. I’ll have to tell him sooner or later, anyway. But I can’t now, because I need his whole attention. I can’t get that while he’s working. ’” I felt a flush crawl across my skin. “She said that, huh? ”

“Yeah. Then she said she had to go in the house and do something. She wanted me to wait outside. She said if she called, I should come on the run. Otherwise I should just stay where I was. ”

“She wanted someone there in case she got in trouble. ”

“Yeah, but it had to be someone who wouldn’t ask a lot of questions she didn’t want to answer. That was me. I guess that was always me. ”

“And? ”

“She went inside. I sat on the hood of my car, smoking cigarettes. I was still smoking then. And you know, I did start to feel something then that wasn’t right. As if there might be someone in the house who’d been waiting for her, someone who didn’t like her. Maybe someone who wanted to hurt her. Probably I just picked that up from Jo—the way her nerves seemed all strung up, the way she kept looking over my shoulder at the house even while she was hugging me—but it seemed like something else.

Like a. . . I don’t know. . . ”

“Like a vibe. ”

“Yes! ” he almost shouted. “A vibration. But not a good vibration, like in the Beach Boys song. A bad vibration. ”

“What happened? ”

“I sat and waited. I only smoked two cigarettes so I don’t guess it could have been longer than twenty minutes or half an hour, but it seemed longer. I kept noticing how the sounds from the lake seemed to make it most of the way up the hill and then just kind of. . . quit. And how there didn’t seem to be any birds, except far off in the distance.

“Once she came out. I heard the deck door bang, and then her footsteps on the stairs over on that side. I called to her, asked if she was okay, and she said fine. She said for me to stay where I was. She sounded a little short of breath, as if she was carrying something or had been doing some chore. ”

“Did she go to her studio or down to the lake? ”

“I don’t know. She was gone another fifteen minutes or so—time enough for me to smoke another butt—and then she came back out the front door. She checked to make sure it was locked, and then she came up to me. She looked a lot better. Relieved. The way people look when they do some dirty job they’ve been putting off, finally get it behind them. She suggested we walk down that path she called The Street to the resort that’s down there—”

“Warrington’s. ”

“Right, right. She said she’d buy me a beer and a sandwich. Which she did, out at the end of this long floating dock. ” The Sunset Bar, where I had first glimpsed Rogette.

“Then you went to have a look at the softball game. ”

“That was Jo’s idea. She had three beers to my one, and she insisted. Said someone was going to hit a longshot homer into the trees, she just knew it. ” Now I had a clear picture of the part Mattie had seen and told me about.

Whatever Jo had done, it had left her almost giddy with relief. She had ventured into the house, for one thing. Had dared the spirits in order to do her business and survived. She’d had three beers to celebrate and her discretion had slipped. . . not that she had behaved with any great stealth on her previous trips down to the TR. Frank remembered her saying if I found out on my own then it was meant to be-que sera, sera.

It wasn’t the attitude of someone hiding an affair, and I realized now that all her behavior suggested a woman keeping a short-term secret. She would have told me when I finished my stupid book, if she had lived. If.

“You watched the game for awhile, then went back to the house along The Street. ”

“Yes, ” he said.

“Did either of you go in? ”

“No. By the time we got there, her buzz had worn off and I trusted her to drive. She was laughing while we were at the softball game, but she wasn’t laughing by the time we got back to the house. She looked at it and said, “I’m done with her. I’ll never go through that door again, Frank. ’”

My skin first chilled, then prickled.

“I asked her what was wrong, what she’d found out. I knew she was writing something, she’d told me that much—”

“She told everyone but me, ” I said. . . but without much bitterness. I knew who the man in the brown sportcoat had been, and any bitterness or anger—anger at Jo, anger at myself—paled before the relief of that. I hadn’t realized how much that fellow had been on my mind until novq.

“She must have had her reasons, ” Frank said. “You know that, don’t you? ”

“But she didn’t tell you what they were. ”

’gkll I know is that it started—whatever it was—with her doing research for an article. It was a lark, Jo playing Nancy Drew. I’m pretty sure that at first not telling you was just to keep it a surprise. She read books but mostly she talked to people—listened to their stories of the old days and teased them into looking for old letters. . . diaries. . . she was good at that part of it, I think. Damned good. You don’t know any of this? ”

“No, ” I said heavily. Jo hadn’t been having an affair, but she could have had one, if she’d wanted. She could have had an. affair with Tom Selleck and been written up in Inside ’ew and I would have gone on tapping away at the keys of my Powerbook, blissfully unaware.

“Whatever she found out, ” Frank said, “I think she just stumbled over it. ”

“And you never told me. Four years and you never told me any of it. ”

“That was the last time I was with her, ” Frank said, and now he 35O didn’t sound apologetic or embarrassed at all. “And the last thing she asked of me was that I not tell you we’d been to the lake house. She said she’d tell you everything when she was ready, but then she died.

After that I didn’t think it mattered. Mike, she was my sister. She was my sister and I promised. ”

’gkll right. I understand. ” And I did—just not enough. What had Jo discovered? That Normal Auster had drowned his infant son under a handpump? That back around the turn of the century an animal trap had been left in a place where a young Negro boy would be apt to come along and step into it? That another boy, perhaps the incestuous child of Son and Sara Tidwell, had been drowned by his mother in the lake, she maybe laughing that smoke-broken, lunatic laugh as she held him down? You gotta wiggle when you wobble, honey, and hold that young ’un way down deep.

“If you need me to apologize, Mike, consider it done. ”

“I don’t. Frank, do you remember anything else she might have said that night? Anything at all? ”

“She said she knew how you found the house. ”

“She said what? ”

“She said that when it wanted you, it called you. ”

At first I couldn’t reply, because Frank Arlen had completely demolished one of the assumptions I’d made about my married life—one of the biggies, one of those that seem so basic you don’t even think about questioning them. Gravity holds you down. Light allows you to see. The compass needle points north. Stufflike that.

This assumption was that Jo was the one who had wanted to buy Sara Laughs back when we saw the first real money from my writing career, because Jo was the “house person” in our marriage, just as I was the “car person. ” Jo was the one who had picked our apartments when apartments were all we could afford, Jo who hung a picture here and asked me to put up a shelf there. Jo was the one who had fallen in love with the Derry house and had finally worn down my resistance to the idea that it was too big, too busy, and too broken to take on. Jo had been the nest-builder.

She said that when it wanted you, it called you.

And it was probably true. No, I could do better than that, if I was willing to set aside the lazy thinking and selective remembering It was certainly true. I was the one who had first broached the idea of a place in western Maine. I was the one who collected stacks of real-estate brochures and hauled them home. I’d started buying regional magazines like Down East and always began at the back, where the real-estate ads were. It was I who had first seen a picture of Sara Laughs in a glossy handout called Maine Retreats, and it was I who had made the call first to the agent named in the ad, and then to Marie Hingerman after badgering Marie’s name out of the Realtor.

Johanna had also been charmed by Sara Laughs—I think anyone would have been charmed by it, seeing it for the first time in autumn sunshine with the trees blazing all around it and drifts of colored leaves blowing up The Street—but it was I who had actively sought the place out.

Except that was more lazy thinking and selective remembering. Wasn’t it?

Sara had sought me out.

Then how could I not have known it until now? And how was I led here in the firstplace, full of unknowing happy ignorance?

The answer to both questions was the same. It was also the answer to the question of how Jo could have discovered something distressing about the house, the lake, maybe the whole TR, and then gotten away with not telling me. I’d been gone, that’s all. I’d been zoning, tranced out, writing one of my stupid little books. I’d been hypnotized by the fantasies going on in my head, and a hypnotized man is easy to lead.

“Mike? Are you still there? ”

“I’m here, Frank. But I’ll be goddamned if I know what could have scared her so. ”

“She mentioned one other name I remember: Royce Merrill. She said he was the one who remembered the most, because he was so old. And she said, “I don’t want Mike to talk to him. I’m afraid that old man might let the cat out of the bag and tell him more than he should know. ” Any idea what she meant? ”

“Well. . . it’s been suggested that a splinter from the old family tree wound up here, but my mother’s people are from Memphis. The Noo-nans are from Maine, but not from this part. ” Yet I no longer entirely believed this.

“Mike, you sound almost sick. ”

“I’m okay. Better than I was, actually. ”

“And you understand why I didn’t tell you any of this until now? I mean, if I’d known the ideas you were getting. . . if I’d had any clue. . . ”

“I think I understand. The ideas didn’t belong in my head to begin with, but once that shit starts to creep in. . . ”

“When I got back to Sanford that night and it was over, I guess I thought it was just more of Jo’s “Oh fuck, there’s a shadow on the moon, nobody go out until tomorrow. ” She was always the superstitious one, you know—knocking on wood, tossing a pinch of salt over her shoulder if she spilled some, those four-leaf-clover earrings she used to have. . . ”

“Or the way she wouldn’t wear a pullover if she put it on backward by mistake, ” I said. “She claimed doing that would turn around your whole day. ”

“Well? Doesn’t it? ” Frank asked, and I could hear a little smile in his voice.

All at once I remembered Jo completely, right down to the small gold flecks in her left eye, and wanted nobody else. Nobody else would do.

“She thought there was something bad about the house, ” Frank said. “That much I do know. ”

I drew a piece of paper to me and jotted Kia on it. “Yes. And by then she may have suspected she was pregnant. She might have been afraid of. . . influences. ” There were influences here, all right. “You think she got most of this from Royce Merrill? ”

“No, that was just a name she mentioned. She probably talked to dozens of people. Do you know a guy named Kloster? Gloster? Something like that? ”

“Skuster, ” I said. Below Kia my pencil was making a series of fat loops that might have been cursive letter l’s or hair ribbons. “Kenny Auster.

Was that it? ”

“It sounds right. In any case, you know how she was once she really got going on a thing. ”

Yes. Like a terrier after rats.

“Mike? Should I come up there? ”

No. Now I was sure. Not Harold Oblowski, not Frank, either. There was a process going on in Sara, something as delicate and as organic as rising bread in a warm room. Frank might interrupt that process. . . or be hurt by it. “No, I just wanted to get it cleared up. Besides, I’m writing. It’s hard for me to have people around when I’m writing. ”

“Will you call if I can help? ”

“You bet, ” I said. I hung up the telephone, thumbed through the book, and found a listing for R. MERRILL on the Deep Bay Road. I called the number, listened to it ring a dozen times, then hung up. No newfangled answering machine for Royce. I wondered idly where he was. Ninety-five seemed a little too old to go dancing at the Country Barn in Harrison, especially on a close night like this one. I looked at the paper with Kia written on it. Below the fat/-shapes I wrote Kyra, and remembered how, the first time I’d heard Ki say her name, I’d thought it was “Kia” she was saying. Below Kyra I wrote Kito, hesitated, then wrote Carla. I put these names in a box. Beside them I jottedjohanna, Bridget, andjared. The fridgeafator people. Folks who wanted me to go down nineteen and go down ninety-two. “Go down, Moses, you bound for the Promised Land, ” I told the empty house. I looked around. Just me and Bunter and the waggy clock. . . except it wasn’t.

When it wanted you, it called you. I got up to get another beer. The fruits and vegetables were in a circle again. In the middle, the letters now spelled: lye stille As on some old tombstones—Godgrant she lye stille. I looked at these letters for a long time. Then I remembered the IBM was still out on the deck. I brought it in, plonked it on the dining-room table, and began to work on my current stupid little book. Fifteen minutes and I was lost, only faintly aware of thunder someplace over the lake, only faintly aware of Bunter’s bell shivering from time to time. When I went back to the fridge an hour or so later for another beer and saw that the words in the circle now said ony lye stille I hardly noticed At that moment I didn’t care if they lay stille or danced the hucklebuck by the light of the silvery moon. John Shackleford had begun to remember his past, and the child whose only friend he, John, had been. Little neglected Ray Garraty. I wrote until midnight came. By then the thunder had faded away but the heat held on, as oppressive as a blanket. I turned off the IBM and went to bed. . . thinking, so far as I can remember, nothing at all—not even about Mattie, lying in her own bed not so many miles away. The writing had burned off all thoughts of the real world, at least temporarily. I think that, in the end, that’s what it’s for. Good or bad, it passes the time.

I was walking north along The Street. Japanese lanterns lined it, but they were all dark because it was daylight4right daylight. The muggy, smutchy look of mid-July was gone; the sky was that deep sapphire shade which is the sole property of October. The lake was deepest indigo beneath it, sparkling with sunpoints. The trees were just past the peak of their autumn colors, burning like torches. A wind out of the south blew the fallen leaves past me and between my legs in rattly, fragrant gusts. The Japanese lanterns nodded as if in approval of the season. Up ahead, faintly, I could hear music. Sara and the Red-Tops. Sara was belting it out, laughing her way through the lyric as she always had. . . only, how could laughter sound so much like a snarl? “White boy, I’d never kill a child of mine. That you’d even think it! ” I whirled, expecting to see her right behind me, but there was no one there.

Well. . . The Green Lady was there, only she had changed her dress of leaves for autumn and become the Yellow Lady. The bare pine-branch behind her still pointed the way: go north, young man, go north. Not much far ther down the path was another birch, the one I’d held onto when that terrible drowning sensation had come over me again. I waited for it to come again now—for my mouth and throat to fill up with the iron taste of the lake—but it didn’t happen. I looked back at the Yellow Lady, then beyond her to Sara Laughs. The house was there, but much reduced: no north wing, no south wing, no second story. No sign of Jo’s studio off to the side, either. None of those things had been built yet. The ladybirch had travelled back with me from 1998; so had the one hanging over the lake. Otherwise-“Where am I? ” I asked the Yellow Lady and the nodding Japanese lanterns. Then a better question occurred to me. “When am I? ” No answer. “It’s a dream, isn’t it? I’m in bed and dreaming. ” Somewhere out in the brilliant, gold-sparkling net of the lake, a loon called. Twice. Hoot once jr yes, twice jr no, I thought.

Not a dream, Michael. I don’t know exactly what it is—spiritual time-travel, maybebut it’s not a dream. “Is this really happening? ” I asked the day, and from somewhere back in the trees, where a track which would eventually come to be known as Lane Forty-two ran toward a dirt road which would eventually come to be known as Route 68, a crow cawed.

Just once. I went to the birch hanging over the lake, slipped an arm around it (doing it lit a trace memory of slipping my hands around Mattie’s waist, feeling her dress slide over her skin), and peered into the water, half-wanting to see the drowned boy, half-fearing to see him.

There was no boy there, but something lay on the bottom where he had been, among the rocks and roots and waterweed. I squinted and just then the wind died a little, stilling the glints on the water. It was a cane, one with a gold head. A Boston Post cane. Wrapped around it in a rising spiral, their ends waving lazily, were what appeared to be a pair of ribbons—white ones with bright red edges. Seeing Royce’s cane wrapped that way made me think of high-school graduations, and the baton the class marshal waves as he or she leads the gowned seniors to their seats. Now I understood why the old crock hadn’t answered the phone.

Royce Merrill’s phone-answering days were all done. I knew that; I also knew I had come to a time before Royce had even been born. Sara Tidwell was here, I could hear her singing, and when Royce had been born in 1903, Sara had already been gone for two years, she and her whole Red-Top family.

“Go down, Moses, ” I told the ribbon-wrapped cane in the water. “You bound for the Promised Land. ”

I walked on toward the sound of the music, invigorated by the cool air and rushing wind. Now I could hear voices as well, lots of them, talking and shouting and laughing. Rising above them and pumping like a piston was the hoarse cry of a sideshow barker: “Come on in, folks, hurray, hurr-ay, hurr-ay! It’s all on the inside but you’ve got to hurr-ay, next show starts in ten minutes! See Angelina the Snake-Woman, she shimmies, she shakes, she’ll bewitch your eye and steal your heart, but don’t get too close for her bite ispoy-son! See Hando the Dog-Faced Boy, terror of the South Seas! See the Human Skeleton! See the Human Gila Monster, relic of a time God forgot! See the Bearded Lady and all the Killer Martians! It’s on the inside, yessirree, so hurr-ay, hurr-ay, hurr-ay! ”

I could hear the steam-driven calliope of a merry-go-round and the bang of the bell at the top of the post as some lumberjack won a stuffed toy for his sweetie. You could tell from the delighted feminine screams that he’d hit it almost hard enough to pop it off the post. There was the snap of. 22s from the shooting gallery, the snoring moo of someone’s prize cow. . . and now I began to smell the aromas I have associated with county fairs since I was a boy: sweet fried dough, grilled onions and peppers, cotton candy, manure, hay. I began to walk faster as the strum of guitars and thud of double basses grew louder. My heart kicked into a higher gear. I was going to see them perform, actually see Sara Laughs and the Red-Tops live and on stage. This was no crazy three-part fever-dream, either. This was happening right now, so hurr-ay, hurr-ay, burr-ay.

The Washburn place (the one that would always be the Bricker place to Mrs. M. ) was gone. Beyond where it would eventually be, rising up the steep slope on the eastern side of The Street, was a flight of broad wooden stairs. They reminded me of the ones which lead down from the amusement park to the beach at Old Orchard. Here the Japanese lanterns were lit in spite of the brightness of the day, and the music was louder than ever. Sara was singing “Jimmy Crack Corn. ”

I climbed the stairs toward the laughter and shouts, the sounds of the Red-Tops and the calliope, the smells of fried food and farm animals.

Above the stairhead was a wooden arch with WELCOME TO FRYEBURG FAIR WELCOME TO THE 20TH CENTURY printed on it. As I watched, a little boy in short pants and a woman wearing a shirtwaist and an ankle-length linen skirt walked under the arch and toward me. They shimmered, grew gauzy. For a moment I could see their skeletons and the bone grins which lurked beneath their laughing faces. A moment later and they were gone.

Two farmers—one wearing a straw hat, the other gesturing expansively with a corncob pipe—appeared on the Fair side of the arch in exactly the same fashion. In this way I understood that there was a barrier between The Street and the Fair. Yet I did not think it was a barrier which would affect me. I was an exception.

“Is that right? ” I asked. “Can I go in? ”

The bell at the top of the Test Your Strength pole banged loud and clear. Bong once for yes, twice for no. I continued on up the stairs.

Now I could see the Ferris wheel turning against the brilliant sky, the wheel that had been in the background of the band photo in Osteen’s Dark Score Days. The framework was metal, but the brightly painted gondolas were made of wood. Leading up to it like an aisle leading up to an altar was a broad, sawdust-strewn midway. The sawdust was there for a purpose; almost every man I saw was chewing tobacco.

I paused for a few seconds at the top of the stairs, still on the lake side of the arch. I was afraid of what might happen to me if I passed under. Afraid of dying or disappearing, yes, but mostly of never being able to return the way I had come, of being condemned to spend eternity as a visitor to the turn-of-the-century Fryeburg Fair. That was also like a Ray Bradbury story, now that I thought of it.

In the end what drew me into that other world was Sara Tidwell. I had to see her with my own eyes. I had to watch her sing. Had to.

I felt a tingling as I stepped beneath the arch, and there was a sighing in my ears, as of a million voices, very far away. Sighing in relief?.

Dismay? I couldn’t tell. All I knew for sure was that being on the other side was dif-ferent-the difference between looking at a thing through a window and actually being there; the difference between observing and participating.

Colors jumped out like ambushers at the moment of attack. The smells which had been sweet and evocative and nostalgic on the lake side of the arch were now rough and sexy, prose instead of poetry. I could smell dense sausages and frying beef and the vast shadowy aroma of boiling chocolate. Two kids walked past me sharing a paper cone of cotton candy.

Both of them were clutching knotted hankies with their little bits of change in them. “Hey kids! ” a barker in a dark blue shirt called to them. He was wearing arm-garters and his smile revealed one splendid gold tooth. “Knock over the milk-bottles and win a prize! I en’t had a loser all day! ”

Up ahead, the Red-Tops swung into “Fishin Blues. ” I’d thought the kid on the common in Castle Rock was pretty good, but this version made the kid’s sound old and slow and clueless. It wasn’t cute, like an antique picture of ladies with their skirts held up to their knees, dancing a decorous version of the black bottom with the edges of their bloomers showing. It wasn’t something Alan Lomax had collected with his other folk songs, just one more dusty American butterfly in a glass case full of them; this was smut with just enough shine on it to keep the whole struttin bunch of them out of jail. Sara Tidwell was singing about the dirty boogie, and I guessed that every overalled, straw-hatted, plug-chewing, callus-handed, clod-hopper-wearing farmer standing in front of the stage was dreaming about doing it with her, getting right down to where the sweat forms in the crease and the heat gets hot and the pink comes glimmering through.

I started walking in that direction, aware of cows mooing and sheep blatting from the exhibition barns—the Fair’s version of my childhood Hi-Ho Dairy-O. I walked past the shooting gallery and the ringtoss and the penny-pitch; I walked past a stage where The Handmaidens of Angelina were weaving in a slow, snakelike dance with their hands pressed together as a guy with a turban on his head and shoepolish on his face tooted a flute. The picture painted on stretched canvas suggested that Angelina—on view inside for just one tenth of a dollar, neigh 36O bor—would make these two look like old boots. I walked past the entrance to Freak Alley, the corn-roasting pit, the Ghost House, where more stretched canvas depicted spooks coming out of broken windows and crumbling chimneys. Everything in there is death, I thought. . . but from inside I could hear children who were very much alive laughing and squealing as they bumped into things in the dark. The older among them were likely stealing kisses. I passed the Test Your Strength pole, where the gradations leading to the brass bell at the top were marked BABY NEEDS HIS BOTTLE, SISSY, TRY AGAIN, BIG BOY, HE-MAN, and, just below the bell itself, in red: HERCOLF. S! Standing at the center of a little crowd a young man with red hair was removing his shirt, revealing a heavily muscled upper torso. A cigar-smoking carny held a hammer out to him. I passed the quilting booth, a tent where people were sitting on benches and playing Bingo, the baseball pitch. I passed them all and hardly noticed. I was in the zone, tranced out. “You’ll have to call him back, ” Jo had sometimes told Harold when he phoned, “Michael is currently in the Land of Big Make-Believe. ” Only now nothing felt like pretend and the only thing that interested me was the stage at the base of the Ferris wheel. There were eight black folks up there on it, maybe ten. Standing at the front, wearing a guitar and whaling on it as she sang, was Sara Tidwell. She was alive. She was in her prime. She threw back her head and laughed at the October sky.

What brought me out of this daze was a cry from behind me: “Wait up, Mike! Wait up! ”

I turned and saw Kyra running toward me, dodging around the strollers and gamesters and midway gawkers with her pudgy knees pumping. She was wearing a little white sailor dress with red piping and a straw hat with a navy-blue ribbon on it. In one hand she clutched Strickland, and when she got to me she threw herself confidently forward, knowing I would catch her and swing her up. I did, and when her hat started to fall offi caught it and jammed it back on her head.

“I taggled my own quartermack, ” she said, and laughed. “Again. ”

“That’s right, ” I said. “You’re a regular Mean Joe Green. ” I was wearing overalls (the tail of a wash-faded blue bandanna stuck out of the bib pocket) and manure-stained workboots. I looked at Kyra’s white socks and saw they were homemade. I would find no discreet little label reading Made in Mexico or Made in China if I took off her straw hat and looked inside, either. This hat had been most likely Made in Motton, by some farmer’s wife with red hands and achy joints.

“Ki, where’s Mattie? ”

“Home, I guess. She couldn’t come. ”

“How did you get here? ”

“Up the stairs. It was a lot of stairs. You should have waited for me.

You could have carrot me, like before. I want to hear the music. ”

“Me too. Do you know who that is, Kyra? ”

“Yes, ” she said, “Kito’s mom. Hurry up, slowpoke! ”

I walked toward the stage, thinking we’d have to stand at the back of the crowd, but they parted for us as we came forward, me carrying Kyra in my arms—the lovely sweet weight of her, a little Gibson Girl in her sailor dress and ribbon-accented straw hat. Her arm was curled around my neck and they parted for us like the Red Sea had parted for Moses.

They didn’t turn to look at us, either. They were clapping and stomping and bellowing along with the music, totally involved. They stepped aside unconsciously, as if some kind of magnetism were at work here—ours positive, theirs negative. The few women in the crowd were blushing but clearly enjoying themselves, one of them laughing so hard tears were streaming down her face. She looked no more than twenty-two or -three.

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