Obedience

When she came out of the bathroom the kid was standing there. He had on a big coat, too heavy for this time of year, and his white hair was long and in his eyes. He had been younger in the photos she had seen: a school picture with his smile gapped by missing teeth, and then later, with his mother and father and younger siblings in a family shot.

“What do you want?” she asked.

The boy continued to look at her. He was sizing her up, trying to gauge her intent.

“That name you said before,” he said. “That girl.”

“Polly?”

“Yeah. I know who she is.”

37

His name was Paul. They took him to the Cale Community Park, which had been his destination anyway. He said that some friends were meeting there. School, to him, was just a waste of his time. None of it mattered. The teachers sucked, and he got picked on all the time by the jocks. He was a frail kid, tiny in that big jacket, and Mary could see how he would be a favorite of the bullies at Cale Central. She had gone to Holy Cross in Louisville, and even at that Catholic school there were kids like Paul, kids who were the brunt of jokes, too scrawny to take up for themselves. Kids who had become bitter toward the system, and toward any adult. Paul’s clothes, his look, his face, even, asked the question: Why don’t you help me? Why didn’t you help me?

“My grandparents live in the house where that girl lived,” Paul told them. “Dea

“You’re lucky you didn’t get shot,” Mary said.

“Oh, Papa wouldn’t shoot anybody,” the boy said. “His shotgun isn’t even loaded. Anyway. Tony told me his older brother went to school out at Bell East with this girl who looked just like Dea

I know exactly how you feel, thought Mary.

“Well, one day me and Tony were bored and we decided to go out to Bell City to try to find out about this girl. This woman, I mean. We asked around, and someone said she was living down on Rattlesnake Ridge with some guy. Her family had left Bell City, but Polly hadn’t liked it so she came back. This was just down the road from that old bar, the Wobble I

“Of course I thought it was Dea

“I don’t recommend it,” Brian said bitterly. “It’s boring.”

“So anyway, it blew over. We never did go back there to that house in Bell City. We were too scared to. My mom and dad got a letter from someone, a real heated thing, saying we had opened up old wounds that should have never been opened. It wasn’t too long after that that someone started that rumor about Dea

Mary looked at this scrawny boy, trying to register what he had said. Some girls played te

The car. A red Honda.

Mary knew that they would have to return to Bell City to find the house Polly had stayed in when she returned to Bell City with her red car. The car would not be there, of course-not now. But this is where they needed to go, Mary knew that much. Once again, they were being led. The kid lit a wrinkled cigarette, and the smoke caught in the wind and trailed away across the field off to their right.

A car pulled up then, an old Bondo’d Mustang that was packed with kids who looked just like Paul except for the white hair. He said good-bye and piled in the car, and the kids disappeared down a little dirt road into the heart of the park.

“Where now?” asked De

38

The house on Rattlesnake Ridge was easy to see. It was just up the hill from the Wobble I

The house was dilapidated and probably empty, but De

“Let’s go down the hill to the bar,” Brian said. Mary shrugged. They didn’t have anything better to do.

There were no cars parked at the Wobble I

“What the hell?” De

Mary felt that constriction in her heart again, just as she had at the Collinses’ yesterday. Things were begi

“Let’s go to the back,” Brian said. They went around the building. The back doors were locked, too. When they looked inside, it was the same thing. Emptiness. No tables, no bar stools. Nothing except the floorboards and the bare walls.

“What should we do?” Mary asked. She was feeling an anxiety like she had never felt. It poured down on her, opened her up from the inside out. She felt every notion of the world, every lick of the wind and every beam of heat from the sun. The spin of the planet, too, under her feet. She felt it, all of it, and in a strange way it was exhilarating.

“Hey!” someone shouted from up on the hill.