“Ooooh, I’m cold now I’m out of the water. The water’s warm.”
“There’s—I tell you, you have to light the small—”
“Did anybody bring a jacket?”
“Emmy’s asking did anybody bring a jacket or whatnot?”
Cassie stepped back and looked at the roof. It hadn’t been done the way Jimmy would have recommended. Just boards and tar paper. She tried to imagine making the walk back here with a ladder (unlikely), then tried to think of some way to bring a ladder on her bike, but there was no road, only the fields and tree line, and the corn was growing higher. A ladder, a tool belt, some shingles.
Inside, someone had straightened up the books and stacked the empty Mountain Dew cans into a pyramid. A big red candle had been added. Cassie stared at it a moment. The big red candle in the shack was a mistake, as any thinking person could see, and she imagined herself flinging it hard into the river. But taking it away smacked of something Laura preached against, which was Getting Too Thick Into Events. One Never Knows, and sometimes the thing that burns is meant to burn and might be interesting to watch. This set up a jangle in Cassie, truth be told, because no one could say that the shack burnt down was a desirable outcome, or even the shack on fire, interesting as it might be. She walked around inside, periodically stooping down to pound in a nail. A puzzle, the way the nails wanted out of the wood.
“All hail Miss Misty, bringer of fire!”
“Shut up, Bobby Puck, you homo.”
“I’m not watching you kill the frogs, Leroy, I’m going over here and also be quiet about it.”
Misty said, rrrbit, rrrbit.
The book on top of the stack was called Mr. and Mrs. Bo Jo Jones. The cover was a photograph, out of focus, of a boy and girl kissing, only one of them was upside down. Mrs. Bo Jo Jones’s nose was on Mr.’s chin and vice versa. Taken in profile. She’s sixteen, he’s seventeen, a pregnant bride, and her bewildered groom … playing a grown-up game with adult consequences. Cassie picked up the red candle and sat it square on the book; this was surely nothing more than treading the edge of events. She walked outside and around back to take a look at the flat platform she’d built between two gnarled-up trees: it was the first project she’d ever finished on her own. She’d built it in case a flash flood came while they were in the shack, and she’d nailed boards into the tree trunk to make a ladder. The platform was about seven feet off the ground—it couldn’t be a biblical sort of flood. She’d come out here and measured and even drawn a diagram in a notebook, then gone back and had Poppy help her cut some tongue-and-groove boards she’d found in the corner of the garage. She climbed up the ladder and stepped on the platform, then jumped up and down. Solid. She knelt down and checked the nails, but they were all snug in, and then she ran her hands over the edge she’d sanded smooth. From here she could see the river slowly moving, and on the shoreline flashes of a white T-shirt. There was a fundamental difference between the shack and this platform, and it could be felt simply by sitting first in one and then on the other, and whatever the discrepancy was made her wonder if maybe she ought not skip putting a new roof on the shack. Below her the fire was just getting going and it smelled good; whatever kind of wood they were using smelled good. A blood scent filled the air.
“You own any guns?” she heard Leroy ask.
Bobby Puck said, “Guns? Are you talking to me?”
Sitting up here, Cassie was waiting for Jimmy but also not waiting, she had let go some. Her own house could be on fire, this was a thing she often considered, and she wouldn’t know it until she made the walk back and found the thing in ruins, the trucks and smoke and neighbors watching. She would have no first thought but many at once. Did Jimmy come home, did Laura stay planted where she was, refusing to leave, did Poppy get the dogs out, was Belle out floating around, weeping in the yard in her white nightgown? Beyond that Cassie didn’t care, there was nothing she would mourn. Who set this fire?
“Cassie?” Puck was looking up at her from the ground, she hadn’t heard him approach. “Can I come up there with you?” He had a very high voice, like a little girl’s. As he climbed the ladder, his green T-shirt came out of his shorts, and Cassie could see a white stripe of skin. She looked away. “Oh, this is rather high up,” he said, looking over the edge of the platform. “I hope it doesn’t make me dizzy. If we were at the tops of these trees we could see my house, it’s over yonder as Leroy would say, the opposite side of the river from your house, we could see my dad’s blue station wagon in the driveway and my mom’s marigolds, my dad has diabetes. He is a diabetic and never leaves the house anymore, one of his legs is gone and he is now blind.” Puck leaned forward and whispered the last word in Cassie’s ear. She turned and looked at him. Mostly she couldn’t abide people who talked too much, and under normal conditions she might have gone ahead and whaled on him. But something in him raised up a loneliness that settled over Cassie like a cloud. “At the Granger School,” he continued, holding Cassie’s eye, “I was assaulted on a regular basis by ruffians. You remind me of them. When I start at your school in the fall, I’m going to be perfectly silent, in class and everywhere else, so I just thought I’d tell you some things now, that my mom is an aide at the nursing home, and about my dad and whatnot. I don’t like sports, I’ve never gone hunting, I prefer comic books and snacks.”
“Puck? Cassie? Want some frog legs?” Emmy called from the shore.
Puck rose, brushed some dried mud from his knees, then bowed to Cassie. “Ladies first,” he said, gesturing toward the stairs with a sweeping motion, like the hands of a clock.
She was back home and on the steps by three o’clock. The day had grown hot, and hours to go yet, so she took off her swampy tennis shoes and wet socks and let her feet dry in the sun. Her gray T-shirt said NOTRE DAME WRESTLING TEAM, it was her favorite shirt. Poppy had found it at the dump, back when he used to be a dump crawler, before Laura put her foot down. Cassie missed those days, the great things he’d come home with: a miniature guitar with no strings, a set of rusty golf clubs, a plastic cereal bowl with an astronaut in the bottom. The astronaut was floating outside of and appeared to be larger than his spaceship. All such things Laura dubbed A Crime. But then Poppy came home with a Memphis Minnie album, and when he handed it to Laura, her eyes filled with tears and she turned around and went up to her room and no one had seen her for a whole day, and Belle said Poppy shouldn’t have told her it came from the dump, and Poppy said, confused, Was I to lie?
Cassie’s eyes were closed and the world behind her eyelids had gone red when she heard the dogs, not Poppy’s dogs who never ran free, but a pack that had been born that winter to a stray down the road. Born in the Taylors’ toolshed. The Taylors had no intention of keeping the puppies or of killing them or of having anything to do with them whatsoever, those were Willie Taylor’s words to Poppy exactly. Anything whatsoever. A stray who picked us out, we didn’t pick her. There were four pups, a brown, a red, a black and white, a black, and they were all hardmuscled, with coats so short they looked like leather, and heads like pigs. Cassie thought of them as the Pig Dogs. They weren’t much bigger than young pigs, either. All day long they killed. They killed chickens, ducks, cats, who knew. Once they had run up to Cassie as she walked down the road, and the head of the brown one was completely covered in blood, all the way back to his shoulder blades, still red and wet. No one could touch them. Now they ran toward Cassie with great joy, nearly bouncing, except for the black and white, who was carrying a dead groundhog in his mouth, an animal more than half his size. They were going to leave it in her yard, she could just feel it. Her opinion was that they’d started killing more than they could eat, so they were spreading the carcasses around for fun. The King’s Crossing was their game board, and they’d left something on every corner. Cassie stood up and took a menacing step toward them, and they all backed up, tails wagging. They had smart eyes, the Pig Dogs, this was one of their worst features. Cassie stomped, waved her arms, yelled Go on! Git! and the dogs turned one at a time, still sneaky and joyous, and started to run back down the road, except for the black and white, who trotted a few steps farther in and dropped the groundhog, then turned and