Hide and Seek by Jack Ketchum Page A

huh?"
     
    "Total morons. Ben couldn't read and couldn't write. He could handle a plow and Mary could wring a chicken's neck and that was about the whole of it. Now, where do you go if you're that stupid? That's the next question. How do you manage disappearing?"
     
    "You could die."
     
    "That would be the easy way, yes."
     
    "Or just wander off. A county or two down the line."
     
    "Or you could do what my boss did and open a garage."
     
    "You could do that."
     
    He pushed the empty glass away from him and his smile was sly, a little boozy. His hands waved apparitions in the space around us.
     
    "Or maybe you just go back into the caves," he said. "And forget about us entirely. Maybe you live off fish and weeds and spend your days listening to the gulls and the wind off the sea, and you don't come out, not ever."
     
    "Jesus, Rafferty."
     

I felt a slight prickling at the base of my neck. He looked at me and the smile grew even more cagey and ironic, like a cop in a morgue uncovering a cadaver.
     
    "That doctor. I wonder if he ever heard dogs barking."
     

I decided a few days later that Rafferty's sense of humor was
    Maybe it was the tourists turning up so early this year because of the good weather-they could breed a bitter irony in you made up of easy money and bad manners, privilege and your own unquestionable need. One day I saw a fat man in sunglasses and fishing tackle and drinking eggnog right out of the carton.
     
    It was pretty sickening.
     
    Then that same day Rafferty tells me this story about some woman over in Portland who was suing an Italian spaghetti-sauce company for mental anguish because she opened a can of marinara and found a woman's finger inside a rubber glove pointing fingernail-up at her.
     
    The next day he had another one.
     
    I I j I 'j. He d read it in the paper.
     
    The body of a night watchman had been found in a hog pen at a meat-packing firm on the South Side of Chicago. It had been partly eaten by the hogs. There were hundreds of them in the pen, and the guy's face and abdomen were in pretty bad shape. But here's the kicker.
     
    His clothes were hanging neatly on a nearby fence.
     
    Rafferty made some nasty obvious comments about going after pigs in the dark.
     
    So I thought he was getting strange lately.
     

But maybe it wasn't him entirely.
     
    Sometimes I think there's something just hanging in the air, and a I most everybody reacts to it. Don't ask me why. Sometimes it's real and vital, like when JFK was shot. And sometimes it's completely unimportant, like pennant fever. Sometimes, like the recession, it goes on and on, and you get so you hardly even notice it. Maybe Dead River was getting a touch of that.
     
    And I'll tell you why I think it wasn't just Rafferty.
     
    There was us.
     
    The stealing. All the dumb, reckless things we were doing. The business with Steven. The stolen car. There was my own blind, self-destructive urgetofollowalong, no matter what kind of ridiculous thing they were into doing.
     
    There was a statue of a mounted revolutionary soldier in the town square. One night we painted the horse's balls bright red. Two nights later we painted them blue.
     
    We were sitting on the beach one afternoon, and Casey was in the water-it had grown warmer by then, though it was still too cold for me. Steve was still nursing his torn hand, so he'd stayed home that day, so there was just me and Kim sitting there alone together, watching her, and we got to talking about Steve's accident-we called it an accident now-in a boring sort of way. The stitches, when they were due out, to what degree he could flex the damn thing. We were remembering how it had been that day without ever once coming close to the heart of the thing, which was why she'd done it. We skirted that.
     
    But I guess it made her think of this other story, which I'm mentioning here because it bears upon what I was saying about something being in the air by then, something made of god knows