It

and her smile made her face radiant. ‘Yeah, you big dummy, this is how I want it. What about you?’
‘I luh-luh –love you, B –B-Bev,’ he said, and color rose in her cheeks like hasty flames.
Bill did not appear to notice. He studied the match-tails sucking out of her fist, and at length he picked one. Its head was blue and unburned. She turned to Ben and offered the remaining six.
‘I love you too,’ Ben said hoarsely. His face was plum– colored; he looked like he was on the verge of a stroke. But no one laughed. Somewhere deeper in the Barrens, the bird sang again. Stan would know what it was, Richie thought randomly.
‘Thank you,’ she said, smiling, and Ben picked a match. Its head was unburned.
She offered them to Eddie next. Eddie smiled, a shy smile that was incredibly sweet and almost heartbreakingly vulnerable. ‘I guess I love you, too, Bev,’ he said, and then picked a match blindly. Its head was blue.
Beverly now offered the four match-tails in her hand to Richie.
‘Ah loves yuh, Miss Scawlett!’ Richie screamed at the top of his voice, and made exaggerated kissing gestures with his lips. Beverly only looked at him, smiling a little, and Richie suddenly felt ashamed. ‘I do love you, Bev,’ he said, and touched her hair. ‘You’re cool.’
‘Thank you,’ she said.
He picked a match and looked at it, positive he’d picked the burned one. But he hadn’t.
She offered them to Stan.
‘I love you,’ Stan said, and plucked one of the matches from her fist. Unburned.
‘You and me, Mike,’ she said, and offered hi m his pick of the two left.
He stepped forward. ‘I don’t know you well enough to love you,’ he said, ‘but I love you anyway. You could give my mother shoutin lessons, I guess.’
They all laughed, and Mike took a match. Its head was also unburned.
‘I guess it’s y-y-you a-after all, Bev,’ Bill said.
Looking disgusted — all that flash and fire for nothing — Beverly opened her hand.
The head of the remaining match was also blue and unburned.
‘Y-Y-You jih-jig-jiggered them,’ Bill accused.
‘No. I didn’t.’ Her tone was not one of angry protest — which would have been suspect — but flabbergasted surprise. ‘Honest to God I didn’t.’
Then she showed them her palm. They all saw the faint mark of soot from the burned match-head there.
‘Bill, I swear on my mother’s name!’
Bill looked at her for a moment and then nodded. By common unspoken consent, they all handed the matches back to Bill. Seven of them, their heads intact. Stan and Eddie began to crawl around on the ground, but there was no burned match there.
‘I didn’t,’ Beverly said again, to no one in particular.
‘So what do we do now?’ Richie asked.
‘We a-a-all go down,’ Bill said. ‘Because that’s w-what w-w-we’re suh-supposed to do.’ ‘And if we all pass out?’ Eddie asked.
Bill looked at Beverly again. ‘I-If B-Bev’s t-telling the truh-truth, and s-she i-i-is, w-we won’t.’ ‘How do you know? Stan asked. ‘I-I j-just d-d-do.’ The bird sang again.
4
Ben and Richie went down first and the others handed the rocks down one by one. Richie passed them on to Ben, who made a small stone circle in the middle of the dirt clubhouse floor. ‘Okay,’ he said. That’s enough.’
The others came down, each with a handful of the green twigs they’d cut with Ben’s hatchet. Bill came last. He closed the trapdoor and opened the narrow hinged window. Th-Th –There,’ he said. ‘Th-there’s our smuh-smoke-hole. Do we h-have any kih-kih –kin –dling?’
‘You can use this, if you want,’ Mike said, and took a battered Archie funnybook out of his hip pocket. ‘I read it already.’
Bill tore the pages out of the funnybook one by one, working slowly and gravely. The others sat around the walls, knee to knee and shoulder to shoulder, watching, not speaking. The tension was thick and still.
Bill laid small twigs and branches over the paper and then looked at Beverly. ‘Y-Y-You g-got the muh-matches,’ he said.
She lit one, a tiny yellow flare in the gloom. ‘Darn thing probably won’t catch anyway,’ she said in a slightly uneven voice, and touched a light to the paper in several places. When the matchflame got close to her fingers, she tossed it into the center.
The flames blazed up yellow, crackling, throwing their faces into sharp relief, and in that moment Richie had no trouble believing Ben’s Indian story, and he thought it must have been like this back in those old days when the idea of white men was still no more than a rumor or a tall tale to those Indians who followed buffalo herds so big they could cover the earth from horizon to horizon, herds so big that their passing shook the ground