American Elsewhere - By Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,57

left to report it to… I guess Macey will have to do.”

For a moment Helen stops digging, and looks up. Though the fence around their yard is tall, from here she can see over the top and down into the valley. After years of living in this house, she can see why their yard is such a popular thoroughfare: it’s the lowest and most accessible point between the wooded slopes and the rest of the town. Anything out in the woods would naturally wander this way when trying to get to Wink. And what’s out in the woods, Helen thinks, has never really understood the concept of private property very well.

At the bottom of the mesa is one barren, treeless canyon that her eye lingers on for a long while. Of course it had to be that one, she thinks. It couldn’t have been one of the little ones. It had to be the biggest. That is just my luck.

How I hate this house.

She turns around to face her husband. “No,” she says. “We are not reporting this. Not about him, anyway. Now are you just going to stand there? Or are you actually going to do anything?”

“My back’s hurt,” he says, defensively.

“Oh, it’s always your back.” She returns to filling in the hole. “Or your knee. Or your ankle.”

“I have joint problems,” he says. “It’s genetic.”

Helen scoffs.

After a while, Darrel says, “It came right up and stood in the yard. Why would it ever do that, I wonder?”

“I expect it was doing what everyone else is doing,” says Helen.

“And what’s that?”

She lays the spade aside and starts smoothing over the dirt with the rake. Soon she’ll have to lay sod out, and keep it soaked, but in time it should all be patched up, and no one will have any reason to think anything strange has happened here at all.

Helen says, “Coming to get a look at the new girl.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

It’s a bad night, Joseph can tell. He can tell by how the trees begin to devour the sun, and the way the stars stab through the soft blue sky and shine down just a little too brightly. It’s in the way the wind rubs its back on the pines, and they bend a little more than they should. It’s even in the way his family’s chandelier lights the dinner table: the light is flat and lifeless, like it’s cast from a neon light filled with the powdery remains of trapped insects. It makes the food look like gruel and gives skin the look of parchment.

On nights like this, his family knows, you get your day done as fast as you can, and then you go to bed. It’s not enough to just stay indoors. You don’t even want to be awake. Being awake attracts attention, which you definitely don’t want.

But awake is exactly what Joseph is, as he lies in his bed and stares at the ceiling. He tries to ignore the shadows dancing across the blinds in his bedroom window. He tries not to think of Gracie, and her cool touch and saddened eyes. She seems so much sadder these days, and since Mr. Macey caught them he hasn’t dared contact her. And he tries not to think of what could be happening out there, among the buttes and bluffs around Wink, or in its darkened streets and alleys, or in the playground at the elementary school. Tonight is most definitely a bad night. One of the worst in a while.

He freezes, and sits up in bed a little. Was it his imagination, or was there a tap at his window? He soon realizes it wasn’t his imagination, because there’s another tap, this one much louder. Then a soft pitter-pat as something rains against his window, like sand…

He stands up and walks to his window, but does not open his blinds. They glow slightly from the streetlight outside. He sees something dark fly up and strike the glass on the other side, and there’s another tap.

Someone’s throwing things at the glass, he thinks. Or are they being tossed by the wind?

Joseph reaches toward the blinds, but hesitates. He has never heard of someone’s window being tampered with at night… that’s not how things are supposed to go. But what if it’s known that he’s awake? What if this is how his crime is addressed? Maybe this is how it happens…

But Joseph throws caution to the wind, and he takes one slat of the blinds and lifts it