Leroy and Misty sent up the alarm in all God-fearing normal people. God-fearing normal people meant nothing to Cassie, who would happily take their names and kick their asses, as Jimmy was fond of saying. The only way to be safe in the world, as Jimmy would have said, was to be the person other people feared, this is the law of the jungle and among all thinking organisms, and just because we have been given the capacity to imagine it might not be so, or to hope there might be another, more enlightened way to live, is no reason to deny that it is so. Trouble, he liked to begin a story by saying, it is widely known.
“Going down the river to the shack, cook up a mess of frogs,” Leroy said without preamble when he and Misty reached Cassie’s horseshoe-shaped yard.
“Build a fire,” Misty said.
Leroy had his right thumb hooked in a belt loop of his jeans, which were six inches too short, while his left hand drummed against his bird chest. He was too skinny, his face too long, he breathed through his mouth with a sound like a train in the distance. Misty stood stiff next to him but couldn’t seem to stop making noise. This happened in school, too; sometimes if the room was quiet, Cassie could hear Misty two rows over humming the theme song to a television show called Run, Joe, Run. She whistled and whispered, snapped her fingers to a hectic beat. But worst of all, Misty was driven toward sound effects, and if she’d been able to hear Cassie think of the faraway train, she would have said: Chug-a-chug-a-chug-a. A high wind: Whooooooooo. A catfight: Yowwwwwl, screeech, etcetera. Laura would have said there was no future in such behavior.
Cassie gave Misty a good hard look. Her hair was straight as a poker, cut jagged at the edges near her shoulders, and with bangs made crooked by a cowlick. Her teeth didn’t meet up right, and she smelled of trapped smoke. Her clothes, a striped shirt too big and blue pants too small, had obviously come from the charity box at the Church of Christ, and Cassie thought it no wonder Misty’s parents had decamped for points unknown.
Cassie stood, stretched herself out, then went inside for her backpack, which had been Jimmy’s long ago when he had mistakenly thought himself a Boy Scout. This was a mystery to Cassie, how the true nature of a person can be so thoroughly concealed in youth that he does humiliating things. It meant Cassie herself could do them, and later someone would hold out the offending object—a dress, a party favor, an unsent letter—and convict her. She was trying to redeem the backpack. She carried in it a Swiss army knife, a compass, a box of waterproof matches, a second box of waterproof matches, a rain poncho, an old snake bitekit, a small flashlight, a harmonica she couldn’t play, a worn guide to dressing field injuries. Now she added a ball-peen hammer—a regular hammer was too heavy to carry—and a small box of nails; boards were always popping loose on the shack, and if she left it to the inbreds and malcontents, as Jimmy called them, the shack would fall down around their ears and they’d go right on sucking the heads off crawdaddies. She also added a second chocolate milk, knowing that everyone down at the river would want it but be afraid to ask; this was the sort of gesture that kept everyone clear about who stood where. Cassie was the person with the chocolate milk and the hammer in her hand, that was all they needed to know.
The three trudged down the road, then cut across the field on Cassie’s side, away from the infernal hum of the power lines. “Them new kids is gonna be there,” Leroy said. “Emmy Somethin’ from Kentucky, and Bobby Puck from up that Granger School that closed.”
Misty made a puck-puck-puck sound.
“I met ‘em already. They was down at the river two days ago when I got there, “ Leroy continued. “I says, ‘How’d you find this shack? It belongs to us and Cassie Claiborne.’ Then that Bobby Puck said something, didn’t make any sense.”
Cassie watched where she was walking, watched for the shimmer of a cottonmouth or the frightened streaking-past of a vole. She could remember when this walk back to the river seemed to take all day. If someone had asked, she would have said the water was miles from her house, but she’d learned it wasn’t even a single mile, maybe only a half. As they approached the edge of the field, she recalled an afternoon she and her parents and grandparents had taken a picnic on the bank, and as they’d reached this point, right about here, Jimmy had swung her up on his shoulders and asked, Do you smell the water? There had been only that once when they were all together here, walking this path, it was before Buena Vista had gotten sick; and Cassie could see, too, that there was hope and faith in the gesture of a picnic that had somehow gone sorely lacking. If she had tried to plan one, Laura would have scoffed, and Belle would have said she didn’t like the river, she couldn’t stand bugs, or maybe even nature itself for all Cassie knew. But whatever complaints they leveled wouldn’t have much relationship to what they meant, which was: that’s all over now.
Cassie smelled the water. As they got closer, she could hear splashing, loud talk, and laughter. A girl said, “You know you’re going to kill them.”
“I won’t! I’m making them happy!”
Leroy lifted a branch and Misty and Cassie walked under. The morning sun hit the water in patches of brilliance; some places were shaded by the tangle of trees overhead. This was a green place, and of ever changing light. The new girl was floating in the river, which was low, in a pair of blue-jean shorts and a Mickey Mouse T-shirt, her arms outstretched and her dark hair floating out behind her. A fat boy was sitting on the bank on top of a fivegallon bucket. Presumably the frogs were in the bucket, and he was making them happy.
“Hark!” the boy called out, waving at the three who were crossing the river on the old log, arms out for balance.
“That’s them,” Leroy said from somewhere behind Cassie.
“What the hell is a hark?” Misty asked, and then made a harkhark-hark sound.
Bobby Puck was chubby everywhere, even his ankles and wrists and knees. He had a moon face and fine, wavy mouse-brown hair brushed up into a cloud over his head. Cassie could see a mother’s hand in that hair. When he smiled, his chubby cheeks rose up and nearly covered his eyes.
Cassie stepped off the log and looked at the two new kids. The river wasn’t on Poppy’s property, and she had found the shack by accident, but Jimmy would say there are in-alien-able rights that govern territory. Years she had been watching her father, sometimes in shadow, and there was plenty she knew about a gambler’s face, the reading—like lightning—of options. It all came down, she’d decided, to the size of the stake. How much you could afford to lose.
The boy on the bucket asked, “Are you Miss Cassie?” She nodded. He pointed at the girl in the water. “That’s Emmy.”
Still floating, Emmy said, “Hey, girl,” in an accent with a curve like Buena Vista’s, it gave Cassie a cold jolt. She tilted up her chin, waited a full beat.
“Hey.” Cassie turned away and headed for the shack; it had been put up and abandoned by hunters at about the time Buena Vista died, and in those two years a lot of stuff had been added to it. Cassie fairly owned it during the summer days, but at night it belonged to teenagers. Someone had dragged an old recliner in, and someone else had brought a mattress. There were pictures tacked to the wall (an elephant being hung in a town square; a toothless woman in sunglasses; a monkey scratching its butt), and lately people had started to bring in books and leave them, old paperbacks creased and dog-eared. Cassie suspected there was more to the books than the plain desire to share literature, since as a group the teenagers weren’t what her teachers would call readers.
She took off her pack, got out the hammer and nails, and walked around the outside of the shack, hammering down boards that had popped up in the last rain. The hunters hadn’t taken the time to make sure the lone cockeyed window actually fit the hole cut for it, so Cassie had chinked in the gaps with river mud. They hadn’t put up a doore either, just left a hole for one and hung a sheet of Visqueen in it. When the plastic came down, Cassie cut a new piece and hung it herself, using small tacks that didn’t tear. It was important, she thought, to keep the plastic up, to acknowledge the difference