But one overcast day, we walked so far that some of us began to wonder how we could ever get back by dinnertime. It was one of those gray-green days that feels deliciously poignant after so much summery perfection. Rain threatened, but it was an empty threat. The air was moist, heavy, yet not unpleasant. We walked for what felt like hours. Gwen struggled at the end of the line. She was the least athletic of us and fat to boot. Over hill, over dale, she sang in a soft whisper, and the rest of us picked up her song, although we all found it mystifying. We weren’t clear on what dales were, much less the “case-ons” that kept rolling along. Gwen must have learned the song from her father, who was old, in his fifties already. We sang absentmindedly, glad for the sound of our voices. If we had taken time to contemplate how queer this was, we would have stopped. But not even Tim, sixteen at the time, uttered his favorite insult: This is so gay. We just kept marching and singing, singing and marching.
Over hill, over dale … Mickey was in front, but it was the Halloran boys who began to piece together the landscape, who saw the connections. “That’s Suicide Hill,” they said, shocking Gwen, because our favorite sledding spot was far enough that we drove there as a special treat. It was not particularly dangerous, just very long and straight. We crossed the road and walked along the stream. No one said anything, but we could all tell that everyone felt relieved at finding a recognizable landmark. We weren’t lost, after all. No one would have to cry uncle, admit to being worried about how far we had gone. Mickey began to walk faster, as if she knew where she was headed, running up and over a small hill, then disappearing from view.
“Hey,” she called back to the rest of us. “Do you know about this?”
“This” was a house, a log cabin set back in a thicket of trees. If it were in a book, it would have been charming, the kind of primitive dwelling that makes girls want to play dress-up and pretend they are living in the olden days. But this place—it was dirty. And it smelled. Not of woodsmoke and apples, but of, well—it had a bathroom smell, very strong. Go-Go held his nose, and the rest of us wanted to do the same.
“It’s the outhouse,” Sean said. “This place has no indoor plumbing.”
“Does someone live here?” Gwen asked.
“Not now,” Sean said. Always confident, always the one with the answers. Not even Tim contradicted him back then. “Maybe once, but you wouldn’t be allowed to live like this now. There are rules about how you have to live, zoning and things. You have to have a bathroom.”
“Then how do you explain the chickens?” Mickey asked. “And the laundry on the line?”
There was an assortment of clothes, men’s shirts and jeans, drying on a coarse piece of rope, and three unusually calm chickens bopping toward us with herky-jerky movements. We were used to the aggressive geese that guarded the Gwynns Falls, so most of us stepped back. But Mickey was already at the threshold of the house, peering in.
“Mickey,” Gwen called, trying to get her to stop. But now Sean was beside her, then Tim, then Go-Go. Gwen had to step up.
Although the day was not bright, we still needed time for our eyes to adjust once inside. It was a simple room. Something—burlap—had been tacked over the windows, which accounted for the dimness. There was a chair, a small plastic tub that held dishes. A rickety pair of cabinets hung crookedly on the back wall and there was a makeshift counter—it looked like something you’d find on a church altar—piled with boxes and canisters. The cabin wasn’t neat, but some sort of order was at work. Someone was taking care of it, in a fashion. The only really messy thing in the room was a pile of rags left on a cot. These smelled, too, not like the outhouse, but of something dank and strong.
“Who lives here?” Go-Go asked in a hoarse, awed whisper.
“No one lives here,” Sean said. Sean didn’t like to be wrong. “Hunters use it, maybe, but you couldn’t live here.”
“Hunters?” Gwen asked. “In Leakin Park? Is that legal?”
“No, but that doesn’t stop some people.”
Go-Go, with his magpie eyes, had spotted something glinting. “Look,” he said, darting toward the cot with the pile of rags, no longer perturbed by the smell. “A guitar.”
As he crouched down to drag the guitar from beneath the cot, a hand shot out from the pile of rags and grabbed Go-Go firmly by the wrist.
“Don’t,” the rags said.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Sean still needs a moment to register where he is when he awakens, although he has been staying at his mother’s house for almost a week now. Not. Home. This is his first conscious thought the morning after Go-Go’s funeral. He’s not at home, and home is St. Petersburg. He’s clear on that much. The first clue is the light. It is different from his bedroom in Florida, especially this time of year. He loves the light in Florida. It’s one of the few things he loves. The light, winter, and the lack of state income taxes. But this room is dark, depressing, although he’s glad for the darkness this morning. His head is so heavy, his mouth and throat feel as if they are coated with sand. Not a hangover, exactly, if only because Sean believes he never gets hangovers. Allergies, perhaps. He thought he had outgrown them, but maybe he’s just not allergic to stuff in Florida.
So: Baltimore. So: a dark room, although it’s beginning to brighten around him. The light is gray, watery, the sheets a little grainy beneath him, as if someone has been eating here, as if these are the crumbs of crumbs of crumbs. Go-Go ate in bed, among other things. Go-Go still fouled the sheets when he was nine or ten. Their mother made excuses for him, said it was a medical condition. But the medical condition vanished when Go-Go was given the single room that, by all rights, should have been Tim’s, then Sean’s when Tim left for college. It was a narrow, dark room, not particularly desirable except for its solitary state. Besides, Tim and Sean enjoyed rooming together, talking late into the night. Go-Go, always terrified of being left out, ended up more left out than ever.
Sean’s in a double bed, but that’s right. The twin beds in his room were replaced by a double bed when his mother decided the room needed to be at least nominally welcoming to her sons and their wives.
Only this bed moves. Sways and rolls beneath him.
But maybe that’s okay, too? At home, he has a memory foam mattress, bought because his wife, Vivian, is a light sleeper, so the movement is merely relative to what he’s used to. His mother is not someone to splurge on a mattress that was used, at most, five or six nights a year, because Tim never sleeps over, and Sean is lucky to make it home for Christmas. And when Go-Go returned home, he always chose his old room, dark and sunless and unimproved as it was.
The bed moves again, an actual roll. Sean sits up, puts his palm against the mattress. Warm to the touch, it pulses.
“A water bed?” he asks wonderingly, waiting to awaken from yet another banal dream. Sean has the dullest dreams of anyone he knows, assuming other people tell the truth.
“I know,” replies a woman’s voice, with a little throb of Baltimore in it. Aye knoah. “I’m such a cliché. The swinging flight attendant and her water bed.”
Mickey—McKey—is standing across the room, her back to him as she fashions her long dark hair into some kind of upsweep. She is wearing a navy dress, and even in the pale light of what Sean realizes now is very early morning,