The Best American Mystery Stories 2014

Satan’s Kingdom by Dennis Tafoya

FROM Needle

LAROCQUE GOT A CALL when his father died. This was when he was living in the desert, in a trailer on the edge of Banning. He couldn’t remember giving out the number, but one day in December the phone rang and it was his father’s girlfriend, telling him that Henry had died of cancer. She said he had to come decide what to do about the property, the dogs. She was moving to Florida, to Del Ray. After he hung up the phone Larocque put a hand on his chest, feeling a tightness there as if she had called to tell him about a bill he owed.

He stood for a long time in the open door of the trailer, feeling the heat, watching the trucks go by on 10. After a while he began to carry his few possessions to the truck: the fan, the microwave with the taped door. He left a pile of things in the middle of the floor with a note for Jed and Marie thanking them for the use of the place and saying they should sell what they could. They were gone, visiting Jed’s son in Kanab, and the two Mexican kids whose names he had never learned were working the station, so he just stood at the edge of the broken asphalt thinking about the difference between this place and Cheshire County. Here the bright yellow and red of the desert was everywhere, even when you closed your eyes, even in a dream. He remembered New Hampshire as a wilderness of dark blue and black so that even at noon it seemed like twilight and it was hard to feel that what was happening was real.

He had liked the trailer, the descending shelf of brown dust that led to the highway, the heat that he felt held him hard against the ground. Around the lot were scattered desert plants that gave off bright, medicinal smells. Marie said that each one could cure a specific disease and was always pushing some tea at Larocque that she said would clear up his cough or stop his nightmares. She made sweet, grainy cookies and bread from mesquite and sold them from a little display Jed built in front of the station to the families on their way to Palm Springs or Marines from Twentynine Palms. The young Marines were quick and lithe and seemed to Larocque tense with the coiled and watchful energy of people capable of great violence. He wondered what he looked like to these travelers and would take pains to smile at everyone, especially the cars full of young girls heading to weekends in the desert, to parties he’d imagine in night-lit casinos he’d never seen except on television.

Jed said he liked knowing Larocque was there by the station after hours in case something happened, though nothing ever did. Days he worked landscaping for Bermudez Triangle, and after dark he sat looking out at the highway through the trailer’s open door as if from a cave and sipping White Horse. On his last night he watched a truck burning out on the highway, the police and fire trucks going by in showers of red light, and he realized that all the years he’d been in the California desert, he had been hiding.

It took him four days to get home. He stopped at a motel in Joplin off 44 and slept one night in a bed. He got breakfast in a diner and pulled a heavy coat off the rack as he was leaving. He was running out of money, wondered how fast he could sell the property, the furniture. His father had guns that would be worth something. A Lefever 10-gauge with a Damascus barrel, a prewar Marlin. He had kept them locked up against Larocque and his friends, would make a show of slapping the big padlock on the gun safe with an open hand to make it rattle.

He’d been running with Gifford Pelletier then, and would pass through his father’s house at dawn, stinking of hash oil and beer after being out all night on the roads between Keene and Manchester. He’d been big early, Larocque, wide in the shoulders and more than 6 feet at fifteen. The old man would loom over him at the table, jerk back his arm as if to hit him with the open hand that had dogged him since he was small. Larocque would cut his initials into the soft, pale underside of the pine coffee table or throw pinecones at the blue heelers Henry had been raising then.

The old man’s feints made him flinch for a while, and then one day they didn’t. He and Gifford stole the sign from the park called Satan’s Kingdom across the border in Northfield, and Larocque hung it in his room and waited for his father to say something. By then the old man was ignoring him, other than to snort like an animal at a watering hole when Larocque high-stepped through the living room with a drunk’s exaggerated care at three in the morning, his eyes red as coals. The knowledge that he was beyond his father’s control had made him feel weightless, almost nauseous, the way he thought an astronaut loosed from gravity must feel. That was one of his nightmares, flying away from the earth, the sky turning from deep blue to black at the edge of the void.

Lying in the back seat of the Le Mans in the parking lot of a Denny’s just west of Wheeling, he remembered being sixteen and driving all night, him and Gifford making wider and wider circles, 202 south to 119, west to 10. Fitzwilliam to Richmond to Winchester and up to Marlborough in the dark, and a hard white rime on the windows that shed flakes of frost onto their shoulders. Pelletier had an Italian pistol not much bigger than a pack of cigarettes that he’d take out of the glove compartment and stick in his belt. They’d walk through gas stations and Dunkin’ Donuts in the early hours, the Mr. Mike’s on 202, Pelletier sticking candy in Larocque’s pockets and flashing him the butt of the little.32, watching for the cameras. They’d try the locks on the doors of the bank in Jaffrey, a metals shop in Keene that somebody said processed gold. Pelletier would read him stories from the Union Leader about robberies in Boston, a double murder in Etna. Pelletier would put a CD in, some garage band he’d heard in Manchester, and they’d watch a young girl through the windows of a convenience store, her Wildcats hoodie riding up on her slim hips when she reached to get a pack of Marlboros. They had been trying to think of themselves a certain way. They had been working up to something.

When he got to his father’s house, there was a card stuck in the frame of the screen, a woman’s name and the seal of the county sheriff. He froze when he saw it, took it out and stuck it fast in his pocket and looked around him, as if a quarter mile down the dirt track off Peg Shop Road there was anybody watching. Behind the house the dogs keened and howled and wanted out of their pens. He went to a moldering planter at the corner of the porch and found an envelope from Henry’s girlfriend and a key to the door. There were complicated instructions about the woodstove and phone numbers for a lawyer and for people his father had known.

The dogs watched him when he came out the back door, what looked to be two shepherds, one still a splay-footed puppy, and something else he didn’t recognize with a blaze of white on its face and wolfish green eyes. They looked to his hands, his face, the house behind him. Larocque hefted a spade that had been leaning against the door of the shed and trapped it awkwardly against his neck while he picked through keys on the ring until he realized the locks hung open on the latches. He went to the youngest dog’s pen first, feeling a little thrill of fear as he opened the door. He let each one out, the dogs standing patiently until all three had been released and then running in tight circles around the yard. After a minute he let the shovel go, realizing that he had seen the dogs not as things in themselves but as some wild extension of his father’s dark will, spirits standing in for his anger and disapproval. Under his breath he said, They’re just dogs, you idiot.

He found rags and bottles of pine cleaner and Simple Green, and threw away moldering food and swept out the first floor. The gun safe had stood empty when he came in, whatever had been in there taken by the girlfriend or his cousins from Vermont. The first night he ate a can of macaroni in red sauce he found in the cupboard and watched a tape in the ancient, whistling VCR about making lures, a man with thick glasses and tufts of gray hair at his ears carving and painting crankbait bodies. When the wind picked up, he went out and let the dogs out of their pens and brought them into the house, and from the way they settled companionably on the couch he figured it was something Henry had often done. He had scoured the cabinets and found nothing to drink but some old grape juice, and he sipped at that, watching the man on the tape work in near silence, stopping to show off a stripe of vivid red, a spray of green dots. Something in the hissing and popping of the dry wood in the stove reminded him of his father’s voice.

The next morning Larocque came out of the shower and cracked a window against the steam. While he was standing there feeling the narrow blade of cold air on his arms, a sheriff’s car pulled up outside and the dogs began barking and pawing at the windows. He got dressed fast and stepped outside, pulling at his shirt and wishing for something to carry, to have something to do with his hands. It was the woman who had left the card, Carrie Milgram, and she introduced herself and shook his hand and waved at the puppy that was pushing at the screen with one long paw. She pointed at the dog, asking permission, and he nodded, so she let her out and the dog danced and pantomimed joy and prodded her hand to be stroked, which the woman did, giving each dog in turn a treat from one of her pockets.

She told him their names, pointing to each in turn. “The Belgians are Masie and Poke, the border collie is Halley. I was helping Henry train them for the county.” She explained that they paid Henry a little money to use the dogs for tracking. Search and rescue when hikers got lost on Mount Pisgah. The dogs watched her closely while she told Larocque about tracking, finding lost kids and old people who had wandered away from family outings by the lake in Otter Brook. Her face was wide and plain and open, like a girl’s, and the brown parka and gunbelt obscured her shape.

“We were all real sorry about Henry,” she said. “We took up a collection for the funeral. He was real well thought of.” Larocque nodded, not knowing what to say. “He said you were out west? A contractor, he said?”

“Oh, you know. A little, you know, just small jobs.” He had no idea what his father would have said about him, how he would have explained him, and he watched her face for some sign that she was lying or being polite, but she had the same open expression as the young dog and he thought she wasn’t much given to hiding what she thought. He nodded as if she had made some comment and felt a little dizzy, as if he were impersonating somebody, creating an identity by just standing on his dead father’s porch and having a civil conversation with somebody in authority. Somebody in a uniform. He wanted to say, Don’t you know who I am? What I’ve done? But nobody knew, nobody but Gifford Pelletier, and he figured Gifford must have run even farther away than he had, must be locked up or dead.

Carrie began to come over after her shift with the sheriff’s office. The dogs would stand up just before he heard her car, the young Belgian throwing his head like a horse. The first few times Larocque had nodded from the porch, his hands in his pockets, and then he began to follow them down the trail behind the house where she ran them through the woods. There was always something in her pockets for the dogs, and they watched her hands, her eyes. One Monday afternoon she brought a short, round man in khaki overalls gobbed with pine sap out to the house, and Larocque felt a pang, a bright flash of jealousy, until she explained that the man was a contractor looking for a backhoe operator. He shook hands with the man and felt himself standing taller. When he left, Larocque asked Carrie to have a drink with him, and she said yes.

One night when he’d been back a month he went to pick up cigarettes at Jake’s in Keene. He was standing by the glass doors looking at the beer when Gifford Pelletier walked in with a boy. Larocque watched them together, the boy a smaller, blonder version of Pelletier. His son, maybe. He could hear a conversation about ice cream, Pelletier saying it was winter and ice cream was for the summer. Larocque waited until the boy went to stand by the candy and then walked out, Pelletier turning to look at him and then back at the cashier. Larocque didn’t know what to do with himself, so he kept walking, out to the parking lot, working his keys in his hand. He was standing by his father’s pickup when a shadow fell on the truck and he turned to see Pelletier standing behind him. Larocque covered his eyes against the glare from the lights. His breath glowed white in the cold.

“I thought that was you.”

Larocque nodded. “Was that your son? That boy?”

“Don’t worry about him.” His accent had thickened, it sounded like, and Larocque was conscious of how the years in California had softened and lengthened his own speech so that he sounded to himself as if he were drawling, floating his words on the open air like balloons. They stood for a minute, Larocque feeling the cold working into his clothes, up his sleeves and down his collar. There was something threatening in Pelletier’s silence, the way he held his body canted to one side as if hiding something behind his hip. He said, “What are you doing home?”

Larocque lifted a shoulder. “Henry died.”

“Okay,” the other man said, as if that was an acceptable excuse. “Closing up the house? Selling out?”

“I don’t know.”

Pelletier nodded, his face shadowed and unreadable. “I see.”

“I thought I would, you know. Come and go. That’s what I thought when I started back.”

“Yeah? What happened?”

“I don’t know. It ain’t the same. Maybe with the old man gone it’s just a place.”

“You should think about that.” Pelletier was breathing heavily, like he was working up to doing something. Hitting him, maybe? He had on a parka that thickened his middle and a white hat with a wide brim. Larocque couldn’t help thinking that the Pelletier he had known would have knocked a hat like that off a stranger just to see it roll in the dirt.

“I’m surprised you’re still here, far as that goes. You got married?”

“Yeah, Jennifer Harrington.”

“I remember her.”

“Do you?”

He did remember her, as one of those high school girls with old-lady haircuts who seemed in all the particulars of their appearance and demeanor to be already in some henlike middle age.

Pelletier’s chest moved in and out. “Why are you here?”

“I said. I’m here because my father died. I needed a place to live.”

“Yeah? You should think about that.”

Larocque thought they were somehow having two different conversations. When Pelletier turned, Larocque climbed into the cab of the truck and drove away. He drove a wide circle to the T-Bird on West Street to get the cigarettes he’d forgotten. As he walked through the dark lot to his car, his hands were shaking and he cradled the carton in his arms like a child. The wind picked at the hem of his jacket and he whirled in place, thinking he would find somebody behind him.

A week after that Larocque was coming out of the One Stop with a bag of dog food under his arm to find Pelletier standing next to the pickup looking at the dogs. Carrie was sitting in the open door while the Belgian puppy pushed her snout under Pelletier’s stiff hand.

“I didn’t know you kept dogs.”

Carrie looked from Pelletier to Larocque, who nodded. “They were Henry’s.”

Carrie said, “They’re trackers. Find anything. Lost kids, people.” The young Belgian stood tall, looked from face to face, alert.

“Is that right,” Pelletier said, and Larocque dropped the heavy bag in the truck bed and got in beside Carrie. To Larocque, Pelletier said, “You with the police now?”

Carrie smiled, “No, he’s not, but he helps run the dogs when they’re looking for someone.”

“Looking for someone? For who?”

As he started the car, Larocque saw Pelletier’s face change, grow purple as if a hand had closed on his throat. A white vein stood out on his neck. Larocque said, “We gotta go,” and left Pelletier standing by Roxbury Street, his hands jammed in his pockets.

Carrie watched his face as they drove. “Who was that?”

Larocque shook his head. “Nobody. Don’t talk to him.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Is that so?”

He let his breath go in an agitated hiss. “He’s just somebody I used to know. He’s just…” He was conscious of her watching his face, and he felt heat spreading across his cheeks and up to his hairline. “He’s not a good guy.” He drove too fast until they reached the park around the reservoir and Carrie put her hand over his and he nodded and slowed down. He thought he’d feel safer under the white pines and balsam, but as the road narrowed he felt crowded by the looming trees. He wondered if he should have stayed in the desert, with nothing but the sky overhead, a ribbon of stars at night and sometimes the pale, bruised face of the moon.

A child disappeared, a ten-year-old girl who had been camping with her father on the Ashuelot River. He had gone to the store to get marshmallows and smokes and when he’d come back she was gone. Carrie took the dogs out, and Larocque waited with the man and a park ranger. The man told them her name, Allyson, and said they’d been driving around earlier and he’d shown the girl the covered bridge down in Winchester and he was afraid she was heading there, that she’d been fascinated by the fact of what seemed to be a house built right over the river, with a roof and a wooden floor. The man sat smoking at a picnic table and stole terrified glances at the river behind him. Larocque stood some distance away, trying to be respectful, but some secret part of him wondered if he would be blamed or accused. He said her name, Allyson Briese, to himself and wondered if that was a strong enough name to be the name of a survivor.

Carrie came back after an hour with a state trooper and said the dogs had made a wide circle back to Pine Street a half mile away. She stood with one hand on the man’s shoulder but looked meaningfully at Larocque, and when they were alone in her cruiser she stroked the dogs with a gloved hand and said the girl must have gotten into somebody’s car. She touched the dogs in turn and presented them each a piece of hot dog from a plastic bag, telling him (as she had before) about how frustrated dogs could get when they couldn’t find the person they were searching for. The tracking dogs at the towers on 9/11, she said, had felt it was their fault when they couldn’t find survivors in the collapsed buildings. A dog could take on the guilt of the people around it, she said.

That night he climbed through a confused welter of burning rubble and jutting steel, looking for the dogs. He woke up knowing he’d have the dream again, wondering what it meant that he was the one searching, digging through the ash, ruining his hands on the white-hot shards of steel looking for the dog that would save him.

Two days later Carrie met him at the house, the lights of her cruiser going and the dogs already leashed. He locked up his tools in the truck and jumped in and they were moving, the familiar landscape transformed by riding next to her, cars scattering at the intersections and people turning to watch them pass.

Carrie told him a state trooper had gone to question a man about the disappearance of Allyson Briese and they’d fought, the man struggling for the trooper’s gun and running off into the state park north of Winchester.

“Did he get the gun?”

She motioned for him to be quiet and listened to the radio chatter, otherworldly metallic pips and shrieks, alien and indecipherable, that Carrie understood but that to Larocque seemed to announce some emergency so dire that there was no way to prepare for it or survive it when it came.

They got out on 119 south of the park and walked by state police cars, ambulances, news vans. There were circles of police in military dress, wearing combat boots and helmets. The breeze rose and he walked crabwise, trying to give it his back. Men and dogs squinted into the wind, and a helicopter moved overhead, rotors pounding. Carrie held a twelve-gauge Winchester in both hands. She went to stand with a group of men who had a map spread on the hood of a car, listening to a briefing. She was serious, somber, her mouth set in a way he hadn’t seen before. Afterward she showed Larocque lines on a map and pointed into the woods, and he brought the dogs alongside the state trooper’s car. There were black bullet holes punched in the metal of the door and the windshield was shattered.

Somebody brought a paper bag over to where the dogs stood ready, and Carrie reached in with a gloved hand and took out a wide-brim white hat. She looked at Larocque and he nodded yes.

The wind died as they walked, but the sky was woven with threads of blue and black. He tried to talk to Carrie about Gifford, couldn’t think of a way to go at it. They were making their way uphill slowly through the hemlock and red oak, watching the dogs as they moved, tongues hanging. Masie was out front, running a zigzag course, and Carrie said, “She’s quartering,” showing Larocque a side-to-side motion with her hand that was the dog trying to find the scent trail. When they reached the firebreak, the radio at Carrie’s hip crackled and a voice told them to wait where they were, so Carrie stopped and opened the pack she carried to get out a plastic bottle and let the dogs drink water from her hand. Larocque sat heavily on a cracked, blackened stump and breathed through his mouth. He saw Carrie looking at him, a question in her eyes.

He said, “I was a kid when I knew Gifford. I don’t know. Not kids, but. Seventeen?” He looked into the woods ahead of them, the dark spaces between the trees. “We would drive around, talk all this crazy talk, all these things we were going to do.” He dropped his head, unable to look at her while he talked about himself. “Henry, my father. I don’t know what he ever said about me. I can’t remember anymore if I acted wrong because he hated me or if I really did wear him down with the things I did. He was just angry all the time after my mother left. So what do you do when your father thinks you’re no good? I guess I thought I’d be bad, be what he thought I was.”

She put away the water and picked up the gun and stood waiting by a mottled white rock that was like the back of some sea creature buried in the hill. He said, “I think when you’re a boy that age, maybe you just need something to be, even if it isn’t real. Every minute you’re play-acting, you know? We’d drive around breaking things, sneaking into places.” His voice got quiet. “And we had a knife. Then we had a gun.”

Carrie stood with the shotgun at port arms, as if ready to stand him off. Her face was so pale in the cold light she looked almost blue. She said, “Did you use them?”

“No, no, but…” The dogs went to stand by Carrie, and he sat alone on his stump and felt something clench inside him, some fist that grabbed his heart to be alone, separated from them just that few feet. “I think I knew something was going on. I knew if we kept going out something would happen.”

“Did you want something to happen?”

He was still. “We took a girl, we brought her out here.” He thought about how that sounded. “We didn’t take her, you know, we just came out here. We were drinking. She was drinking a lot.”

“You got her drunk.”

“We were all drunk. We started at the Pub, and then we just…”

“Did you hurt her?”

“No.” He shook his head, emphatic. His face was hot, sweat running from the hair at his collar though the day was cold and there were circles of gray snow shaped to the shadows of the rocks.

He looked over finally at Carrie, but she faced away, holding tight to Poke’s collar. “Was she afraid?” Her voice was small, thin, and it was strange how she seemed like a very young girl herself, lost in her shapeless parka and holding the outsized shotgun in her small hands.

“No. I don’t think so. We were just kids, getting drunk in the woods. She was older than us, I think. I don’t think she thought, I mean, maybe she thought we were going to fool around, all of us. Hell, I don’t know. But I could see he was thinking about it. Gifford.” He got a flash of his friend standing in the dark, a few feet away from where he and the girl sat with their backs against a tree. The girl laughing, her teeth white. Gifford had been looking off into the black woods and Larocque knew he was wondering if anybody knew where they were. “I couldn’t drink like that, like they were. I went back to the truck and passed out. When I woke up, Gifford was driving me home. He said he’d dropped off the girl at her place.” He had the thought that this was the most he’d spoken to Carrie, the most he’d spoken out loud to anyone in years, and it was just this terrible thing that he thought he’d never tell anyone.

“A couple of days later it was all over the news, the girl. That she was missing. I hid for a few days, but I didn’t know what to do. I was sitting in Lindy’s and in comes Gifford and I could see in his eyes, I could just see it. I had the papers open in front of me and he just stood there looking at me. I never saw anybody look like that. I don’t know how to say what it was like. Like his skull was coming through his skin. Like he wasn’t a regular human being.”

“Did the police talk to him?”

He had to stop looking at her, and turned to see only the trees and the rocks and the gunmetal sky. “I don’t know. I don’t know anything. I left. I moved out to California to work for my Uncle Ronnie hanging sheetrock. Ronnie went out of business and came home, but I just stayed out there and found work. If Henry hadn’t died, I’d have never come back.”

Carrie started to say something else, but then he heard her make a small noise, a grunt or cough, and turned to see Pelletier standing over her as she fell, the barrel of the pistol in his hands and the butt out, like the bell of a hammer, and one wrist clamped in a steel cuff. Larocque stumbled over the white rock to get to her and Pelletier had the Winchester pump out of her slack hands and he climbed awkwardly away onto the hump of boulder. The dogs whined and barked and the young Belgian made a noise low in his throat. Pelletier pointed the pump gun and Larocque grabbed the dog’s collar and held him down, crouching by Carrie’s body.

Pelletier said, “See? What did you think would happen?”

“You killed her.”

“Maybe,” he said. “Are you asking or telling?”

Larocque said, “That woman from the bar. And more, right? That girl at the campground, Allyson. Didn’t you?” He wanted to touch Carrie’s face but was afraid he would know then she was dead.

Gifford made a noise that might have been laughing, but his eyes were red and full. “You left. How do you know what I did?”

“I knew you. That’s why I had to go. I knew even before it happened. The things we did, it wasn’t enough for you. You were going to hurt somebody.”

“Then why did you come back?”

“I told you. Henry died. I never thought you’d still be here.”

Larocque watched Gifford’s fingers twitch on the trigger and his head swivel crazily around, searching the hill around them. “I can’t find her. The girl I took. I knew it was around here somewhere, but I can’t find it anymore.” He gestured drunkenly with the barrel of the gun. “There was the rock, the trees. Some kind of hollow where she was. It’s all different.”

It was getting darker. Gifford wiped at the sweat above his eyes and left a gritty smear. He pointed the gun at Larocque. “You can make those dogs find her.”

“It doesn’t work like that, Gifford.”

“You left me here with these things in my head. You left me here.” He lifted the gun barrel and awkwardly racked the slide, a bright green shell arcing out into the dirt. “Why didn’t you stop me? You could see what I was going to do. How could you leave me alone with that?” He was crying now. “Wasn’t you my friend?”

“I’m sorry.” Larocque did feel a kind of sorrow in that second, and his breath caught in his throat. Pelletier brought the Winchester to his shoulder and tensed. Carrie jerked upright, her eyes wide and white bark stuck to her bloody hair, and brought her hand up with her service pistol in it. Pelletier started, opened his mouth to say something, but she shot him three times and he stepped back off the rock and collapsed into the dead leaves.

Three summers later a group of young kids from a college in Boston came to shoot a movie. One of the crew was a local girl, and she asked Carrie if they’d bring the dogs and let them be filmed. Larocque came with her to stand at the pickup and drink coffee, but when they saw him getting Masie out of the truck they asked if he’d be in the film. Carrie looked at him and lowered her head to smile, and he said sure and winked at her. The director, a short, skinny kid who wore a suit jacket and vest over faded jeans, told him the movie was called Satan’s Kingdom, after the wilderness area down in Northfield, and Laroque said he knew all about it. They wanted him to stand with the dogs at the edge of the forest and pantomime fear when something came out of the woods, some horror that they would put in later through a process Larocque couldn’t understand.

They asked him to walk the dogs up and down John Hill Road and introduced him to a girl, a small, slim girl holding a birch rod who would come through the woods at him. She’d tap the rod against the trees so he would know where to look, and he was supposed to throw his hands up and yell when she reached the tree line.

He ran the Belgians up and down the narrow verge of the road, and when the girl began to tap the stick, Poke came up short and peered into the woods. The kids in the crew looked at each other and nodded their heads, and the tapping got louder, and Larocque stepped close to the dogs and looked nervously past them into the dark trees.

The tapping seemed to come from everywhere, a hollow sound that echoed in the spaces between his ribs and made the hair stand up on his neck like the quills of some startled animal, and he ran his hand over the back of his head and felt sweat at his temples.

The sound grew louder and there was a distinct rustling from the pines. Larocque backed across the road, and the kid in the vest followed him with the camera, murmuring encouragement to Larocque, or maybe to himself. Larocque tripped backing up and went down hard on his haunches. The dogs whined.

When the girl’s stick smacked the base of a telephone pole at the verge of the road, the long white rod poking from the shadow like a disembodied bone, Larocque screamed and covered his head with his hands. He dropped to his knees and sobbed, his mouth open. Masie howled, and Poke took it up, lifting his long head and closing his eyes to sing the man’s grief. A minute went by, then two, and the director stopped filming and lifted the camera away. The girl, who had emerged from the woods with a red leaf stuck in her hair, dropped her stick and crossed the road and put one hand on Larocque’s back. Without lifting his head, he put one hand on hers while his tears and spit darkened the asphalt.

After a minute Carrie reached him, helped him up, and guided him to the truck, where he sat in the passenger seat staring through the glass. No one said a word, and she gathered up the dogs and drove them home.