It

been like that on the last day, after Belch saw the bitch running down Kansas Street toward the Barrens. He remembered that, oh yes, he remembered that clearly enough. When you got kicked in ht e balls, you remembered it. It had happened to him again and again that summer.
Henry struggled to a sitting position, wincing at the deep dagger of pain in his guts.
Victor and Belch had helped him down into the Barrens. He had walked as fast as he could in spite of the agony that griped and pulled at his groin and the root of his belly. The time had come to finish it. They had followed the path to a clearing from which five or six paths radiated like strands of a spider-web. Yes, there had been kids playing around there; you didn’t have to be Tonto to see that. There were scraps of candy-wrapper, the curled tail of a shot– off roll of Bang caps, red and black. A few boards and a fluffy scatter of sawdust, as if something had been built there.
He remembered standing in the center of the clearing and scanning the trees, looking for their baby treehouse. He would spot it and then he would climb up and the girl would be cowering there, and he would use the knife to cut her throat and feel her titties nice and easy until they stopped moving.
But he hadn’t been able to see any treehouse; neither had Belch or Victor. The old familiar frustration rose in his throat. He and Victor left Belch to guard the clearing while they went down the river. But there had been no sign of her there, either. He remembered bending over and picking up a rock and
8
The Barrens / 12:55 P.M.
heaving it far down the stream, furious and bewildered. ‘Where the fuck did she go?’ he demanded, wheeling toward Victor.
Victor shook his head slowly. ‘Don’t know,’ he said. ‘You’re bleeding.’
Henry looked down and saw a dark spot, the size of a quarter, on the crotch of his jeans. The pain had withdrawn to a low, throbbing ache, but his underpants felt too small and too tight. His balls were swelling. He felt that anger inside him again, something like a knotted rope around his heart. She had done this.
‘Where is she?’ he hissed at Victor.
‘Don’t know,’ Victor said again in that same dull voice. He seemed hypnotized, sunstruck, not really there at all. ‘Ran away, I guess. She could be all the way over to the Old Cape by now.’
‘She’s not,’ Henry said. ‘She’s hiding. They’ve got a place and she’s hiding there. Maybe it’s not a treehouse. Maybe it’s something else.’
‘What?’
‘I . . . don’t . . . know!’ Henry shouted, and Victor flinched back.
Henry stood in the Kenduskeag, the cold water boiling over the tops of his sneakers, looking around. His eyes fixed on a cylinder poking out of the embankment about twenty feet downstream — a pumping– station. He climbed out of the water and walked down to it, feeling a sort of necessary dread settle into him. His skin seemed to be tightening, his eyes widening so that they were able to see more and more; it seemed he could feel the tiny hairs in his ears stirring and moving like kelp in an underwater tidal flow.
Low humming came from the pumping-station, and beyond it he could see a pipe jutting out of the embankment over the Kenduskeag. A steady flow of sludge pulsed out of the pipe and ran into the water.
He leaned over the cylinder’s round iron top.
‘Henry?’ Victor called nervously. ‘Henry? What you doing?’
Henry paid no attention. He put his eye to one of the round holes in the iron and saw nothing but blackness. He exchanged eye for ear.
‘Wait . . . ‘
The voice drifted up to him from the blackness inside, and Henry felt his interior temperature plummet to zero, his veins and arteries freezing into crystal tubes of ice. But with these sensations came an almost unknown feeling: love. His eyes widened. A clownish smile spread his lips in a large nerveless arc. It was the voice from the moon. Now It was down in the pumping-station . . . down in the drains.
‘Wait . . . watch . . . ‘
He waited, but there was no more: only the steady soporific drone of the pumping machinery. He walked back down to where Victor stood on the bank, watching him cautiously. Henry ignored him and hollered for Belch. In a little while Belch came.
‘Come on,’ he said.
‘What are we gonna do, Henry?’ Belch asked.
‘Wait. Watch.’
They crept back toward the clearing and sat down. Henry tried to pull his underpants away from his aching balls, but it hurt too much.
‘Henry, what — ‘ Belch began.
‘Shhh!’
Belch fell obligingly silent. Henry had Camels