Follow Me (14 page)

She kept watching as a girl in the center of the half circle laid out cards one by one, faceup, Sally guessed, for no one
reached to turn them over. The girl continued distributing the cards. And then she laid a card in front of one of the boys
and stopped, leaning back with a motion that indicated her job was finished. The group made a noise in unison that reminded
Sally of the murmur of the Tuskee. It was an expression that combined calm with wariness and expectation.

The card must have been significant. The group waited for the boy to do something. He was supposed to stand up and dance a
stupid jig — was that it? Or he had to kiss a girl he didn’t like. As his penalty for receiving whatever card had been dealt
him, he was supposed to do something ridiculous or dangerous. He had to make a fool of himself. He had to pull down his pants
or eat dirt or leave the game altogether and go home for the night.

Sally considered all these notions while she stared at the boy. He sat close to the light, facing the window, but he was too
absorbed in his predicament to notice Sally there. She could see that he was pale, slighter than the other boys, though tall,
with dark welts of acne on his cheeks and blond bangs that he should have had trimmed weeks before. Sally thought he might
have been older than the others, maybe sixteen or seventeen, and yet he seemed weaker, more vulnerable, maybe because of the
card he’d just been dealt or maybe because that’s just the way he was.

“Go on,” one of the girls urged.

“We’re waiting,” a boy said.

“We don’t have all night.”

“Chicken.”

“Bawk, bawk.”

The couples had stopped their smooching and were sitting up, watching the game along with the rest of the group, waiting for
the boy to do whatever he was supposed to do. The song playing on the radio had a sorrowful melody, Sally thought, though
she couldn’t make out the words. She felt sure that whatever the boy did would have an awful finality to it. Though she wanted
to look away, she went on staring. As he reached to retrieve something on the ground, she wanted to shout out a warning, yet
she kept quiet. And when she saw the pistol in his hand, she wasn’t more surprised than she would have been if she’d been
dreaming the whole scene.

It was similar to a dream, inevitable and natural and illogical. A slanting light shone from the lantern; the radio crackled
its song; the river splashed; the crickets chirped; the tension made breathing impossible; the air was so thick that the boy
could hardly lift his arm, raising the gun to his head in an attenuated motion, the effort exhausting him, drenching him in
sweat, the heat of fear turning his pale skin into melting wax.

Far away, a dog barked, the sound urging duty, like snapping fingers —
do it, do it!
Slowly, slowly. As gradual as the light of the rising sun stretching across the ground toward the halfway point where fate
was waiting.

Strength of life. Set me upon a rock of stone. Mark what is done amiss. The awful stupidity of man. A girl dealing cards.
A boy pressing his finger against a trigger.
Do it, do it!
Click. Silence.

Um, what just happened?

Nothing. Nothing ever happened in this dingy backwater. The chamber of the gun was always empty. Life was always unremarkable.
One day after the next, nothing worth remembering, not even this stupid game played by boys and girls so bored that they didn’t
care whether they woke up the next morning. Yawn.

Sally couldn’t contain her outrage. “If that’s not the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen!” she cried out. “You are all a bunch
of lunatics.” She liked that word:
lunatics
. “Crazy lunatics! You all should be locked up. Every last one of you. Get out of here, go on home,” she ordered, shaking
her fist as she leaned across the sill.

The kids stared at her with frozen expressions that mixed shock and dismay and humiliation. The boy with the pistol was the
first to move, raising his arms as though in surrender. And the girl who had dealt the cards jumped to her feet and grabbed
the gun, pointing it at Sally.

“Put that down,” Sally ordered.

“Aw, Belle, sure, it’s all in fun,” said another one of the girls enigmatically. “But still —”

Ding.
That was the sound the bullet made as it glanced off a beam near the window before it crackled into a brick in the wall opposite.
Sally was too startled to duck. She stood there numbly, wondering if she was understanding correctly: Did the girl named Belle
nearly kill her?

“Oh my God,” Belle exclaimed, shaking the pistol before she dropped it, as though it had burned her hand. “Oh, my God. Oh,
no. I didn’t… I thought… I thought… I thought it wasn’t loaded!”

Sure,
was the unsaid response from the group.
Yeah, right. Like we believe you.

“Mole!” cried another girl.

Mole was the idiot who’d pointed the pistol at his head and pulled the trigger. Mole was the poor sucker who’d been dealt
the fateful card; Mole, pale, sweat-drenched Mole, had folded forward from the position he’d been sitting in and was sprawled
over his bent legs, lying facedown on the grassy floor of the mill, looking as if he’d been dead for a week.

Watching the whole scene through the window, Sally put two and two together: a pistol had been fired, ding, and a boy had
been shot. He was dead, of course. What else was she supposed to think? She climbed over the sill and rushed toward him, though
not out of any sense that she could insert herself into this part of the disaster and come to his rescue. Rather, she went
to him because she thought that either by accident or on purpose he’d put himself in the path of the bullet, preventing it
from striking her.

Yet by the time she reached him, he was propped up by the arms of one of the girls, panting, then breathing deeply, then shaking
his head, shaking away the fright of it all. Well, then he hadn’t been shot, it appeared. He had merely collapsed in a dead
faint. The idea of a fainting boy made Sally laugh aloud. But seeing the shine of embarrassment in his eyes, she changed her
response to a forced solemnity.

“Are you all right, Mole?” the girl named Belle asked.

“Are you all right?” Sally echoed.

“I didn’t mean… gee, Mole…,” Belle faltered.

“You could have killed him,” Sally scolded, feeling a need to clarify Belle’s responsibility in the affair.

“We checked first, didn’t we, Mole? Didn’t we? We all did, isn’t that right?” Belle pleaded for support, turning to the rest
of the group. “The gun wasn’t supposed to be loaded,” she said. The others nodded and murmured agreeably.

Sally decided that she deserved as much sympathy as Mole, the fainting boy. “You could have killed me,” she said.

“Who are you, anyway?” Belle asked.

Before she could answer, Mole said, “You could have killed her.” His tone was surprisingly reasonable, as if he were offering
a simple observation. Sally was impressed. “You could have killed both of us,” he said. “Both of us with one bullet.” Sally
was even more impressed. The fainting boy was turning out to be unexpectedly keen, with a calm, convincing authority. Sally
liked the feeling of having come through a dangerous experience together. They both could have died with terrible abruptness,
killed by the bullet that wasn’t supposed to be in the gun. Then they never would have eaten another meal or seen the sun
rise again or even, if this were a possibility, gotten to know each other. Instead, here they were alive, looking into each
other’s eyes, both of them searching for a clue that would tell them something about their prospects.

When the fainting boy felt strong enough to stand, the party ended. They all went home, Belle up front holding the pistol
like a dead rat by its tail, Mole leading Sally by the hand through the darkness along the rocky path to the street. “Careful,”
he kept saying. His hand was clammy, the fingers spidery and strong. When he looked at her, his eyes seemed to widen more
than was physically possible, with the pale skin at the corners folding into ruffles. Sally judged him to be no older than
fifteen or sixteen and because of that she felt superior to him, the same way she felt superior to her younger brothers. And
yet she liked being led by him along the path. It stirred in her a feeling of trust that was as unfamiliar as it was immediate.

“Of course,” he’d said with a laugh after she’d told him her name. Of course she was Sally Angel. A name must suit its subject,
and Sally Angel suited her. Dropping from the sky like that — she would be forever associated in his mind with the miracle
of his survival.

And why was he called Mole? “Such a funny name,” she said. No, she corrected, she didn’t mean funny, “not like funny-funny.
Just funny,” she explained limply. Mole laughed at her and then with her when she joined in. He told her that his full name
was Martin Oliver Langerton, and Mole was what his family had called him from the start.

Sally asked him about the game back at the mill. He said that it was meant to be a harmless game. “Still,” he mused, if the
gun had fired… if his hand had slipped and the gun had fired…? He didn’t want to think about it. He didn’t want to imagine
himself dead. He wasn’t dead. He was alive, truly alive, and to prove it, look.

He whooped as they broke through a screen of brambles and stepped onto the road. Then he lifted her in his arms, spun her
around, and set her back down. The fainting boy was turning out to be bursting with giddy spirit. “You’re swell to come along
like that,” he said in gratitude. “You’re a real nice gal,” he added. And, more solemnly, with a touch of awe, he murmured,
“You’re…,” and then he paused for a long interval, searching the night sky for the right word. “A peach,” he declared.

Sally flinched, as if she’d caught a splinter in her toe. She was, by his estimate, a peach. Wasn’t that kind of noncommittal?
Well, she told herself, it was a start. She’d found at least the possibility of something more.

They headed toward the block of buildings on Main Street, and Sally motioned with her free hand to indicate that the Barge
was her destination. But as she approached the tavern, she began dragging her feet, making each step more sluggish than the
last, slowing nearly to a standstill in an effort to give the boy named Mole ample opportunity to say what she wanted to hear.
And when they’d reached the door and he still hadn’t asked if he could see her again, she asked him.

The next evening, as Sally stood at the mirror in Gladdy’s front hall fixing her hatpins, she said coldly, “I won’t be at
the Barge tonight. I’m going out.” She was surprised that Gladdy didn’t ask,
Out where?
for she’d been prepared to reply,
Out for a walk.
Gladdy didn’t ask her if she was going out alone. Sally didn’t say,
Yes,
though the truth was
no.
Gladdy, already four ounces into her bourbon, didn’t seem to notice or care that Sally had trimmed her hat with blue freesias
and baby’s breath from her weedy garden. Stirring her drink with her finger, she’d spent the last hour reminiscing about long-ago
summers when she used to chase the iceman’s cart down Volner Street in Amity. Those carefree, hazy days, before the war, before
both her marriages went sour, before she’d seen the truth about men… She’d trailed off with “If I’d known then what I know
now,” and by the time Sally was at the mirror, she’d fallen into a reflective silence. When Sally said good-bye and headed
out the door, Gladdy didn’t try to stop her. Other than lifting a pinkie to wave as Sally left the house, she remained absorbed
in her own thoughts and her bourbon, leaving her guest to drift away without bothering to ask when she planned to return.

Sally had been excited about meeting Mole that evening, but Gladdy’s indifference threatened to put her in an ugly mood. She
could have disappeared for good, and Gladdy Toffit wouldn’t have cared. No one would have cared. Ever since she’d left home
to work for the Jensons at the age of twelve, it had been far too easy to run away and leave behind all that was familiar,
or walk, like this, thump thump thump, down the porch steps and along the brick path, closing the gate behind her, making
sure the latch clicked before she ambled through the cool summer twilight.

But of course she wasn’t going away for good. She wasn’t even going away. She was just going to meet a local boy who’d shown
an interest in her. This was how she probably would have spent many of her evenings back in Tauntonville, if she’d been allowed
to grow up gradually, day by day, in an ordinary fashion — stepping out like this to meet up with an ordinary boy, a boy named
Mole, who, thankfully, knew nothing about her past.

And there he was at the end of the street, leaning against the hood of a car, resting on his elbows and blowing smoke rings.
He waved at her with the hand holding the cigarette, scattering sparks as the ash dropped off. She waved back, pleased to
find him waiting right where he’d promised to be.

When she reached him, he grabbed her hand and shook it vigorously, as though he were sealing a business deal. She laughed
loudly and abruptly but stopped when she saw the blush splotching his cheeks. He was easily mortified. She squeezed his hand
to convey her pleasure at seeing him, and he cheered up, offering her a cigarette and waving his lighter with a flourish before
extinguishing it with a loud click.

“Mr. Mole,” she said in a husky voice, after exhaling smoke in a long, slow stream.

“Sally Angel.” He pronounced her name slowly, as if he were reading it from a list.

“Where shall we walk to, Mole?” she asked.

“Walk?”

“Aren’t we going on a walk? It’s a real nice evening.”

“I thought —”

“You don’t want to walk?”

He looked uncertain. “If you want to walk, we can walk. But, well, okay, let’s walk.”

“Is something wrong?” By then she’d slipped her arm around his and locked elbows. They were walking along the side of the
street, stepping around puddles left behind by a thunderstorm that had blown through that afternoon. Now, with the sun below
the horizon, the sky was brilliantly clear, a dark, shining topaz.