throat.
Johnny Appleseed nodded. “Take good care of yourself, kid,” he said, and walked outside and left the door open.
There was a sliver of moon that barely lit the grass. Wrecker dropped his feet to the floor and stood in the doorway with his quilt wrapped around him like a toga. “Johnny Appleseed!”
Johnny looked over his shoulder and lifted his hand to still the boy. Wrecker stood frozen. He had the terrible, wrenching feeling that this was the last he’d see of Johnny and he wanted to run at him, bring him down, force him to stay. But he couldn’t move. Johnny was going and his hand, raised like that, meant Wrecker had to stay.
Meant good-bye.
There was the barest shimmer in the shadows. There, again: a dark shape distinguished itself from the trees and approached the small man. From every direction, dark smudges resolved into men moving silently, stealthily, toward Wrecker’s friend and surrounding him. Guardians. If Johnny went with them he would never find his way back.
Johnny stood patiently in the moonlight. He made the men wait. They waited until, at last, Wrecker lifted his own hand, and waved good-bye. And then, once more, they were absorbed into the trees.
Meg loved the water. She loved it for hours in a pan she could sit beside and stir with a wooden spoon; she loved it coming down day after night after interminable winter day to flood the yard and sop Len’s canvas tarps left hanging on the line. She delighted in the river, in the sea, in the brackish standing swamp of a lagoon where Len mucked about in waders and collected tubers for a feast. Anyplace wet was where she wanted to be. Especially in the bath, with Len’s lean economical body a prop for her own soft flesh. “The water lapped over her belly,” he sang, stitching his own words to the tune of “My Bonnie.” “The water lapped over her thighs. The water lapped over her ninnies,” Len’s voice a scratch more satisfying than the loofah he coursed over Meg’s shoulders and back, “which grew to incredible size.”
Every night they followed the same routine. Len came in from the yard or from town or dragged his weary bones home from the forest after felling trees with Wrecker and he stood at the stove and put together some concoction that would satisfy their need to eat. He flicked the switch on the propane boiler to heat the water for their bath. He unscrewed the faucet clamps he’d had to install; Meg was safe at home, days, so long as he kept her from emptying the cistern and flooding the place while he was gone. He whistled and sometimes he played the radio. Meg rearranged the lumber scraps he brought her. Some evenings she liked to lie under the table and peer up at the rough side of the planks. They ate together and Len scrubbed the dishes while Meg stood beside him with her hands in the soapy water and chased bubbles. And then they took their bath.
That morning Wrecker had found the gas tank empty on the motorbike and had to hike over to work. He was fifteen, now, and starting to fill out. Taller than Len by an inch or two and wide in the shoulders, not too narrow in the hips but every ounce of it muscle and more under his control than it had been in his gangly days. He could shoulder a wet log and walk with it, his footfalls thunderous under the weight. He swung an ax—tick, tock—like it was the second hand on the clock of the world: Paul Bunyan with a sharp blade and Len’s aging International, winch-outfitted, for his Blue Ox. Len handled the chain saw. All it would take was for the chain to break and the kid would be ribbons. Len shuddered to think of it. Wrecker was too young to work the woods, his focus not fully honed and the dangers too profound, but he was too good already to turn down. And God knows too bullheaded to boss around. He wouldn’t take no for an answer. He’d go ahead and find some straightforward way to do what he wanted.
Straightforward: that’s how he’d asked Len for a ride to the dance the high school in Fortuna was throwing that evening. Len gave him credit for that. The boy had worked through every detail. Melody couldn’t take him; the hatchback she’d bought to replace the VW when it