LITMIR.BIZ

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students’ singing faltered a little, and the room seethed with excitement.

      Mr. Koenich raised his hickory stick and nodded to his burly teaching assistant. The class stopped singing, and the students whispered and nudged each other, stirring uneasily in the places. The assistant rubbed one thick hand against his black leather jacket, pushed himself off the high stool where he sat dozing, and quickly fetched his shotgun from the corner of the room.

      “Only fire at them if they attack the school,” Mr. Koenich ordered. “Students! Lie flat on the floor. Keep still, and stop your fussing about. Toby! Get away from that window!”

      “But, sir, my dog’s out there. I’ve got to fetch him inside.”

      “You’ll do no such thing. Lie down with the rest of the students and keep your mouth shut. Your dog can take care of himself.”

      Toby stretched his body on the floor, closing and unclosing his fists in sheer frustration. A pretty girl lay down next to him and began to stroke his left arm and shoulder.

      “Don’t take no mind, Toby. Ranger will hide out from them all right.”

      “They’ll kill him if they see him, that’s the problem.”

      “Two motorcycles!” the teaching assistant reported from the window. “It’s a couple of the Reardon boys. They’re buzzin’ in and out the schoolyard. Just having some fun, I guess. Just passing through.”

      The younger children, laughing and calling out to each other, were wriggling and writhing on the floor, imitating the roar of the engines and making jokes about the Reardons. Only a few of the older ones, who knew something about the biker family, seemed frightened. Toby wanted desperately to look out the window. The walls of the room shook and vibrated. Suddenly, the roaring subsided, and in the silence, in quick succession, they heard two gunshots.

      “Now, now,” Mr. Koenich mumbled. “We don’t want any of that. Just ride your damned Harleys out of town, boys. Go off somewhere else for your target practice.”

      “That dog’s out there. That’s what they’re shooting at!” reported the assistant.

      Toby jumped to his feet and sprinted across to the window.

      “Get away from there!” Mr. Koenich sprang across the room and made to grab him, but Toby eluded him, and pressed his face against the window pane.

      “They’re leaving!” the assistant told Toby. “Look, they’re heading straight out of town.”

      “They’d better!” Toby said grimly. “If they hurt Ranger, I’ll kill them. I’ll kill them both!”

      There was a murmuring behind him; the students were getting up. The crisis was over, but one of the class jokers shouted from the far corner.

      “Why you gonna kill them, Toby? Gonna give your daddy a little more burying business?”

      “Never mind that stuff,” Mr. Koenich warned the boy, but the class was already breaking up in laughter.

      “There goes Toby, back to the homestead,” a wiry, scruffy ten-year-old shouted. “How’s your old man? Still burying all those corpses in the woods?”

      Toby turned angrily on his skinny, sneering antagonist, then seemed to think better of it. He shrugged his shoulders, fumbled with the door latch, and at last shoved it open. Cold air struck his face. He shivered, and walked across the porch to the rickety steps.

      He cupped his hands around his mouth. “Ranger!” he shouted. When nothing happened, he put his fingers to his lips and whistled loudly. A sharp, clear, and penetrating sound that all his classmates always envied.

      He waited, but the dog didn’t come.

      “Go see your crazy father! Go see Old Shovelbeard!” a girl called out.

      “Old Talby’s got a bone shop!” jeered another.

      But Toby was hardly listening. He whistled again, and then stood waiting, gazing up and down the deserted road. Fear possessed him, the sinking, sickening feeling that permeates your mind and soul when you begin to assume the worst.

      Mr. Koenich had come out on the steps. He put an arm around the boy’s shoulder and told him, “Don’t pay them any mind, Toby. Look, he’s coming after all! The Reardons didn’t do him any harm.”

      A great black Labrador had sprung out from behind a nearby building and was racing straight for the school steps.

      Toby ran forward, grabbed the dog, and hugged it. He bent down, stroking Ranger’s smooth brow and back.

      “It’s gettin’ real late, boy,” Toby whispered. “We’ve gotta get back to old Talby.”

      Toby heard voices and shuffling steps, and felt the presence of his teacher and many of the students behind him milling around on the porch and watching him. But he didn’t turn around. He moved off quickly, while Ranger sprinted back and forth, running circles around him. They hurried down the rutted road, followed it past the shabby fields, then slowly climbed the hill and entered the deep woods.

       CHAPTER TWO

      That was not the last time, at the end of the school day, that the taunts of his classmates would scald him. To escape them, the boy would cut away from the road at the old quarry, cross the fields through Froats’s barren apple orchard, and enter the forest that grew thick at the boundary of his father’s almost impenetrable acres.

      There he would come to the pool that lay between the giant boulders, stopping to look at his own image in the voiceless water.

      If he had looked clearly, from a greater height or a different time, he might have discovered himself: a boy of about seventeen, tall and thin, with golden wavy hair and blue eyes of a deep sad intensity. But from where he gazed down he could see only the masks: the face of a pilot, an athlete, a daredevil rider or soldier, each of which floated there for an instant, then dissolved in a blur of pure light and shadow.

      Slowly he would go on, up the narrow trail between the pines, toward the “homestead,” as every-body called it, toward the small cabin in the clearing at the top, the cabin with a sagging roof and rotting foundations, the clearing strewn with wood his father had pillaged from the ruin of the sugaring shack. He would stop a minute and watch a black squirrel scurry out of the open trunk of the Chevrolet, its tail brushed red with rust from the rotten guts of the machine. Then he would listen for sounds coming out of the deep woods that spread away on all sides of the homestead, half-afraid he would hear the roar of the Reardon gang’s motorcycles, the guns of the hunters, or his father’s shovel at work somewhere near — burying a dead animal, or perhaps a human corpse left over from one of the skirmishes in the maple grove.

      Mostly, if it were summer, the cabin would be empty, the door standing half-open, and, as the boy came near, Ranger would bound out to greet him, a few burrs stuck in his short coat, and would paw and scratch at the old canvas bag in which the boy carried his schoolbooks and pencils.

      Inside, it was dark, and the red eye of the fire, in all seasons, would gleam on the oilcloth, and light up the faded photographs hung in old frames on the rough walls, or glitter across the rows of beer bottles his father had found in the woods and stacked everywhere in pyramids around the cabin. Then the boy would listen until he heard the nuzzling and bleating of the goats through the window. He would fetch himself a mug of milk and dip into it a crust of stale bread, and sit reading the pamphlets that had been left in the cabin long ago, when people still believed that things could be made better. They were little folders of cheap yellowing paper telling about the end of the world, how Jesus Christ would save every believer, and how the earth would be a paradise at last, when all the wicked had been exterminated by the power of a wrathful God.

      And then he would feel upon him the eyes of the dead in the photographs, his mother’s most intensely of all. Those blue eyes he had never forgotten — though the old snapshots had curled and faded. And the gazes of vanished relatives haunted him too. People he

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