The Venging by Greg Bear

She was a year older than I but acted as if she were grown-up. She was a good six inches taller, and I could beat her if I got in a lucky punch, but no other wayso her power over me was awesome. But we were usually friendly. "Where you been?" she asked, like a mother. "Somebody tattled on you," I said. Her eyes went doe-scared, then wizened down to slits. "What're you talking about?' "Somebody tattled about what you did to Mom's sunglasses." "I already been whipped for that," she said nonchalantly. "Not much more to tell." "Oh, but I know more." "Wasnot playing doctor," she said. The youngest, Sue-Ann, weakest and most full of guile, had a habit of
    telling the folks somebody or other was playing doctor. She didn't know what it meantI just barely didbut it had been true once, and she held it over everybody as her only vestige of power. "No," I said, "but I know what you were doing. And I won't tell anybody." "You don't know nothing," she said. Then she accidentally poured half a pitcher of lemonade across the side of my head and down my front. When Mom came in I was screaming and swearing like Dad did when he fixed the cars, and I was put away for life plus ninety years in the bedroom I shared with younger brother Michael. Dinner smelled better than usual that evening, but I had none of it. Somehow I wasn't brokenhearted. It gave me time to think of a scary story for the country-colored woman on the rock. School was the usual mix of hell and purgatory the next day. Then the hot, dry winds cooled and the bells rang and I was on the dirt road again, across the southern hundred acres, walking in the lees and shadows of the big cottonwoods. I carried my Road-Runner lunch pail and my pencil box and one booka (31 of 197) handwriting manual I hated so much I tore pieces out of it at night, to shorten its lifetimeand I walked slowly, to give my story time to gel. She was leaning up against a tree, not far from the rock. Looking back, I can see she was not so old as a boy of eight years thought. Now I see her lissome beauty and grace, despite the dominance of grey in her reddish hair, despite the crow's-feet around her eyes and the smile-haunts around her lips. But to the eightyear-old she was simply a peculiar crone. And he had a story to tell her, he thought, that would age her unto graveside. "Hello, boy," she said. "Hi." I sat on the rock. "I can see you've been thinking," she said. I squinted into the tree shadow to make her out better. "How'd you know?" "You have the look of a boy that's been thinking. Are you here to listen to another story?" "Got one to tell, this time," I said. "Who goes first?" It was always polite to let the woman go first, so I quelled my haste and told her she could. She motioned me to come by the trees and sit on a smaller rock, half-hidden by grass. And while the crickets in the shadow tuned up for the evening, she said, "Once there was a dog. This dog was a pretty usual dog, like the ones that would chase you around home if they thought they could get away with itif they didn't know you or thought you were up to something the big people might disapprove of. But this dog lived in a graveyard. That is, he belonged to the caretaker. You've seen a graveyard before, haven't you?" "Like where they took Grandpa." "Exactly," she said. "With pretty lawns, and big white-and-grey stones, and for those who've died recently, smaller grey stones with names and flowers and years cut into them. And trees in some places, with a mortuary nearby made of brick, and a garage full of black cars, and a place behind the garage where you wonder what goes on." She knew the place, all right. "This dog had a pretty good life. It was his job to keep the grounds clear of animals at night. After the gates were locked, he'd be set loose, and he wandered all night long. He was almost white, you see. Anybody human who wasn't supposed to be there would think he was a ghost, and they'd run away. "But this dog had a problem. His problem