Crooked by Laura McNeal Page B

a second or two, she glanced up and saw Charles departing, his pockets jammed, herding Eddie ahead of him. The doors, as if at Charles’s command, swung open before them.

8
    SNOW PEOPLE
    Outside the high school gymnasium, Amos MacKenzie stood tugging his hooded sweatshirt tight against the cold. He snugged his black and blue ski cap over his hood, looked out at the warm yellow lights of houses coming to life in the early minutes of evening, and began to regret declining a ride home in Zeke’s car. It was cold.
    Amos began to run on the downhill descent and then just kept running. He ran and ran, easy loping strides, the cold biting deep into his lungs but his body sweating and warm. It was simple and easy, moving along like this, through the dusk, under the streetlights, the rhythmic squeak of his shoes on the packed snow, and pretty soon, everything in the world—not just running— seemed simple and easy. He would go home and write Clara Wilson a letter telling her he hadn’t been the one who’d called her this morning, that it had been his so-called friend Crookshank, who had perhaps been dropped as an infant but who in any case had certain mental deficiencies, and that he, Amos, hoped that...
    Up ahead, in the thick dusk, a solid clanking sound. Two dark moving forms, some low talk, and then another thunderous
clank
. Sometimes a porch light came on, but not until the two forms had moved on. Following behind in the shadowy light, Amos could see a crushed mailbox and, up ahead, another.
    Amos couldn’t help himself. He began to follow the dark forms, slowly and quietly, pulled along by a strange combination of fear and curiosity. Amos slowed and stopped. Something had changed. There was a new silence. The clanking had stopped.
    As they turned south on Adams Street, Amos’s street, the forms—one large and hulking, the other short and compact— seemed vaguely familiar to Amos. The bat that one of them carried was aluminum, and he began tapping it on anything metal—the parking signs, a fire hydrant, a light pole—but gently, making only a muted clink, as if stealth was now part of their strategy.
    Then, as the forms passed through the circle of yellow light, they became the two people Amos hoped they weren’t. They became Charles and Eddie Tripp.
    A queasy feeling rose in Amos. He knew the Tripp brothers, or at least he knew everything he needed to know. One day after school, Eddie Tripp had taken Amos and Bruce and some others to watch his brother feed their snake. When they got to the Tripp brothers’ house, a small crowd of boys was already clustered around a large glass terrarium. The snake was a boa constrictor. The food was a live kitten. Amos was never sure what made him despise the Tripp brothers more, the fact that they’d be merciless to a small live animal or the fact that they’d led the hoots and laughter when Amos and Bruce, seeing what was about to happen, walked away from the proceedings.
    Tonight, as they clinked and loitered along Adams Street, the Tripp brothers came to a stop and huddled. Their voices were hushed and tight. They were standing in front of the Goddard place, staring at a snowman with a scarf and a tennis racket on one side of a tennis net, and a snow woman with a racket and a scarf on the other side. The Goddards were childless, middle-aged, and, Amos thought, a little nutty. They were famous in the neighborhood for their elaborate snow scenes, and Amos’s father always liked to drive the family by the Goddards’ house after a snowfall to see what was new.
    Charles looked around, and Amos instinctively stepped back into shadow. “Okay, this is it,” Charles said in a hissing whisper that carried through the cold air. His smaller brother pushed open the gate and drew close to the snow people. Charles took something out of his jacket—Amos couldn’t see what—and went off looking around on the ground