Hide and Seek

So that was the business with the car, and that was the first time she

scared me.

The truth was I liked it.

Here was a girl, I thought, who didn't play by our rules- whc hardly

seemed to know them. And I guess I'd seen enough of rules in twenty

years of Dead River.

It was rules that got you where you were and more rules that kept you

there, kids turning into premature adults, adults putting in the hard

day's work for wife and more kids and mortgaged house and car, and

nobody ever got out from under. That was rule number one. You didn't

get out. I'd seen it happen to my parents. The rule said, see, your

foot is in the bear trap now and you're the one that put it there, so

don't expect to come away alive; we didn't set it up for that. The

problem was always money. The slightest twitch in the economy would

sluice tidal waves through the whole community. We were always close

to oblivion. The price of fish would change in Boston and half the

town would be lined up at the bank, begging for money.

It might have made us tougher, but it didn't. All you saw were the

stooped shoulders and the slow crawl toward bitterness and old age.

I'd moved out on my parents three years ago, when it became too hard to

watch my father come up broke and empty after another season hauling in

sardines in Passamaquoddy Bay and to watch my mother's house go slowly

down around her. They were good people,