behind the bathrooms, giggling between tokes.
“I’m Scout,” said the man, hugging each of them in turn. He smelled like freshly turned dirt and unwashed armpit. Bethie made herself smile and tried to breathe through her mouth. “And the little fella’s name is Sky.”
“Well, aren’t you a cutie!” Marjorie said, clasping her hands at her chest and bending down to look him in the eye. Sky stared back at her before taking his little penis in grimy fingers, aiming, and peeing on her sandal and her bare toes. Marjorie screeched and hopped backward. Scout laughed. “I don’t think he cares for your shoes.” While Marjorie hopped off in search of a hose, Sky inserted his index finger into his right nostril, rotated it, pulled it out, and stuck it in his mouth. Bethie shuddered, burying her face in Dev’s shirt, which smelled like patchouli and her sweetheart’s warm skin.
The farmhouse’s first floor was a series of big, barely furnished rooms, with walls stained brown from woodsmoke. Bethie looked down and saw holes in the wooden floors that let her peer straight down to the basement, and the chairs and couches all looked like they had been picked up off the curb on trash day. Bethie picked her way through the living room and found the kitchen, where a woman standing over the sink introduced herself as Blue. She wore a dirty peasant blouse with red-and-gold embroidery around the neck, and jeans. She had lank dark-blond hair, bare feet, dirt under her fingernails, and the same milky skin as Sky. “I hope everyone likes pasta,” she said, her mournful voice suggesting that probably nobody did, and that she’d be in trouble for serving it. Bethie and Marjorie and Connie worked in the kitchen, helping to chop mushrooms and onions and garlic, and wash a bushel basketful of a dark green leafy vegetable that Blue told them was kale. While the pasta boiled, Bethie removed dirty dishes, books, broken crayons, newspapers, and a copy of The Hobbit from the long wooden table, and wiped off the crumbs and smears of sticky stuff underneath, and Connie brought over chipped, mismatched plates, silverware and glasses and cloth napkins. There were only seven forks, and eight of them, but Blue told them that Sky didn’t count because he mostly ate with his fingers. Bethie shuddered again, thinking of the places that those fingers had been, and hoped the little boy’s parents made him wash up before he started eating.
Over dinner, she learned that Blue’s name had once been Bonnie, and that she’d grown up outside of Cleveland and attended OSU. Scout had once been Scott, and he and Devon had been graduate students at the U of M together before, as Scout put it, “we chose another path.” Bethie also learned that Scout’s main crop on the farm wasn’t corn or zucchini but marijuana, and that there was a lab set up in the basement where he was manufacturing acid, using the recipe that he and Dev had perfected in Ann Arbor. Bethie picked at her pasta, wishing the cavernous dining room were a little more brightly lit so that she’d be able to tell exactly what she was eating, and what was a mushroom and what was a dead fly. (“Hey, it’s protein,” Scout had said, after a slightly hysterical Connie told everyone that she thought she’d swallowed a beetle.) After dinner, the guys went down to the basement. Bethie could hear conversation and laughter floating up through the holes in the floor, while the girls did the dishes. Blue explained in an apologetic tone that they were a little short on beds and blankets and pillows, and there was only one functioning toilet in the house. “ ‘Functioning’ is a little generous, babe,” Scout said, climbing up the stairs with a joint burning between his fingertips. “Honestly, if you’ve just got to whiz, the woods are a better bet.”
Bethie tried to smile as Dev took her hand. “Come on,” he said, walking her toward the backyard. “There’s a tent.” Bethie followed him out into the darkness, hearing a mosquito whining in her ear, and almost tripping over an abandoned rake. You could be home right now, with a real bed and a functioning toilet, and a summer job selling sheets and towels at Hudson’s, she thought, and tried to tell herself that this was an adventure. When they rounded the corner, she saw that the tent was wonderful, like something out of a children’s book,