"Do they have any more moonshine?" Clayton asked, sputtering a laugh.
"I think it's . . . it looks like a chick."
"Well, then, we know she's got jugs, anyway."
They fell to the ground, again laughing uproariously, and in the process they dropped the earthenware jug and it cracked apart on the protruding root of a large elm tree. "Oh, shit," Sean said as the moonshine spilled out and sank into the earth.
"Guess we gotta go back to Grogo's bar and grill and get some more." Clayton giggled.
This was funny also, and they were sitting on the mossy ground wiping tears of mirth from their eyes when they heard the crunch of feet upon twigs and they looked up.
"Well, well," Clayton said. "Sarah Sarah quite contrarah."
Sean was again struck by a thunderbolt of merriment. "Sarah Sarah quite contrarah!" he cried, short of breath from laughter.
Sarah Ostlich placed her balled fists upon her hips and glowered down at them. "Dead drunk and sitting in the dirt. How appropriate!"
"Yeah, 'sgreat down here." Clayton nodded. "Pull up some leaves and join us." He gazed at the chest beneath the loose sweater and thought, Smaller tits than Lydia's, but I bet they don't flop around so much when she's on her back.
"You're disgusting," she spat.
Sean laughed. "We try."
"I'm looking for my sister," Sarah said in a school-marmish tone vaguely reminiscent of her father. "Is she visiting with those two . . . persons?" Had the last word been a dire imprecation, it could not have been more disparagingly said.
"Yeah, she's there," Sean said. "One of your sisters is, anyway. I can't tell which one. They look alike." More laughter.
She turned to go on, but then spun around and demanded, "Just what did you think you were trying to do at the town meeting today? Was that supposed to be some sort of big joke, causing all that trouble? And how dare you bring those radicals with you and force Daddy to let them disrupt everything like that?"
Clayton got to his feet. "Careful, careful. Your sister is stuck on Peter, in case you haven't noticed."
"My sister is an idiot. They both are. Neither of them has enough sense to avoid men like you."
She looks real athletic, he thought, grinning at her. Bet she could bump and buck for hours. "Yeah? And what do you know about men like me? Or about any men at all, for that matter?"
She harrumphed. "Enough to know a good-for-nothing bum when I see one."
"You're so mean, Sarah." He chuckled. "Hasn't Lydia told you anything good about me? Don't you know that I'm great in bed?" Bet that little cunt of hers is tight as a drum.
"You're disgusting," she repeated. "And stop trying to change the subject. That factory is important to this town, and—"
She was not expecting his sudden lunge. It took her a few moments to realize what was happening before she began to kick at him, but by that time he had already pulled the sweater up over her head and had torn open her blouse.
Sean was watching them stupidly, as if the scene unfolding before him were on a movie screen, unreal and staged. "Uh . . . Clay?"
Sarah screamed as he bore her down with him onto the cold forest floor, and he put all his weight into the forearm with which he pressed her wrists down into the dirt as his free hand pulled up her bra. He squeezed one of her breasts roughly and then shoved his hand between her legs.
Sean blinked. "Uh . . . hey, uh . . . Clay . . ."
Sarah's screams were shrill and piercing, but they did not carry far through the thickly wooded forest. Her face displayed a rapid succession of emotion, from shock to rage to fear, as Clayton's hand worked its way between her thrashing thighs, tore off her underpants, and then thrust upward into her vagina. She kicked and bit and tried to roll away from him, managing at last to free her hands and begin to sit up, but Clayton shoved her roughly back onto the ground. He did not see the jagged tip of the small rock that protruded from the mossy forest floor, nor did he hear the dull thud as the back of her head struck it.
All he knew in his intoxicated, libidinous frenzy was that she had suddenly stopped struggling. He opened his fly to pull out his engorged member, hopped on top of her, and pushing her legs apart, worked his way into her motionless body and began pounding into her mercilessly. "Like . . . a . . . fucking . . . drum . . ." he cried.
Sean felt a sudden, terrified sobriety as he jumped to his feet and shouted, "Clay! What the hell are you doing?"
He cackled. "I'm fuckin' me another Ostlich sister."
Sean's hands twitched as if his mind were commanding them to move without telling them what to do, and then he saw the red pool spreading out upon the leaves beneath Sarah's head. "Clay . . . Jesus Christ, Clay!" He grabbed Clayton by the shoulders and pulled him off the girl, causing him to fall roughly back onto the ground, and then stared down at her, stared at the motionless chest, stared into the open, lifeless eyes. "I think . . . I think you killed her!"
Clayton had scraped his penis on the teeth of his zipper as he fell backward, and he was examining the bruise with concern. "What?"
"She's dead!" Sean's eyes went wide with horror. "Holy shit, man, she's dead! You killed her! Goddamn it, Clayton, she's dead!"
Clayton stumbled forward and looked down at the body. He wiped his forehead with a shaking, sweaty palm, and muttered, "Oh, shit."
"Oh, no," Sean whimpered. "Oh, no, no! I'm on one-to-five probation! I can't get mixed up in something like this!"
"You!" Clayton screamed. "You! What about me?"
"Well, fuck you anyway!" Sean screamed back.
"Why the hell did you do this? What the fuck's the matter with you?"
"Wait a minute, wait a minute, lemme think, lemme think." Clayton pressed his hand to his mouth and shut his eyes. Sober up, damn it, he ordered himself, sober up, straighten out. At last he said, "Look, nobody saw us. Let's just take the body and hide it of in the woods—"
"We are of in the woods, you asshole!"
"Okay, okay, so we move her someplace else and like cover her up with leaves. There's nothing to connect us with this."
"What if somebody heard her?"
"Nobody heard her. Dorcas is still back with those crazy old men, and that's gotta be a mile back. There ain't nobody else around here, not for miles."
"But people'll miss her. They'll know something's wrong."
"So what? Who cares? As long as they can't connect this to us, what difference does it make?"
Sean tried to think. "Okay. Okay. Let's do it." He took her arms and Clayton took her legs and they carried her for a few minutes before Sean said, "Hey, man, I don't even know where we are. Let's just dump her, okay? Let's just get out of here, okay?"
"Yeah, yeah, yeah, start collecting leaves."
As they piled the dead foliage upon the dead body Sean started to cry. "Oh, Jesus, Jesus."
"Will you shut up?" Clayton yelled. "Listen to me. This is important. We're gonna go back to the trailer—"
"Take me to the thruway. I'm hitching home. I ain't staying around here." He was throwing the wet leaves madly at the corpse.
"All right, all right, goddamn it, I'll take you to the thruway. All we did was take Dorcas and those freaks back to the Sweet place, hung out for a few minutes, and then we left."
"But that means we would have met her in the woods!"
"For Christ's sake, will you shut up and listen? We didn't meet anybody, we didn't see anybody. We just went back to car, I took you to the thruway, and then I went back to the trailer. You got that?"
"But—"
"Damn it, Sean, you got that?"
"Yeah, yeah, okay."
"Okay." He stood back and looked at the oblong pile of leaves. "Now let's get out of here. . . ."
Clayton's unpleasant reminiscence was broken by Rebecca. She emerged from the trailer and walked over to him, asking softly, "Clay? Did you and Sean really do it? I mean, honest? You killed Sarah?"
"Goddamn it, Becky," he said almost angrily, "it was a fucking accident,
for Christ's sake. It could have happened to anybody. It wasn't my fault, honest to God!"
She nodded slowly, desperately wanting to believe the best of her brother. "But what about Grogo and that old yogi? How could you let them get—"
"What the fuck was I supposed to do?" he spat. "Tell everybody the truth and get lynched myself? Would you want Sean to get sent up the river to Attica?" He paused for a moment. "There wasn't anything I could do."
"You kind of led them right to her, though, didn't you?"
"I had to," he said defensively. "Look, the next day when I sobered up I realized that we left that broken moonshine jug right near where we hid Sarah's body. Our fingerprints were all over it. I had to make sure that a whole lot of people saw me find the jug, saw me pick up the pieces. Don't you get it? I had to be able to explain what my fingerprints were doing on the jug, just in case, you know?" He rubbed his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. "It never occurred to me that they'd connect her body to Grogo. The whole thing . . ." He sighed. "The whole fucking thing just got out of hand." They lapsed into silence and then Clayton said, "Look, I better go hide our dope, just in case the cops have a search warrant or something."
"Good idea," Rebecca muttered. How could you, Clay? How could you?
Fifteen minutes later Rebecca was standing atop the roof of the trailer, peering off into the darkness of early morning. "Here they come," she called out.
"The police?"Clayton asked.
"Yeah, Al and company," she replied, climbing down the ladder. "Good timing. You finish hiding the dope?"
"Yeah, I think I got all of it. I put it in a plastic bag and ditched it in the woods."
"Good. Hey, Lydia," she shouted. "You ready?"
"Yeah, I'm ready," Lydia replied as she walked out from the trailer. She had twisted her long hair into impromptu braids and had wiped her face clean of makeup. This, coupled with a conscious effort at poor posture, made her the spitting image of her twin sister.
Clayton nodded. "Okay, let's not fuck up here. This is for keeps." They walked down the path from the trailer, each with a beer bottle in hand, and waited as the police car pulled up. Alex was a short distance behind in his old Buick.
Two state troopers emerged from the car, and one of them smiled disarmingly as he approached Clayton and asked, "You folks waiting for us?"
Clayton returned his smile. "No, sir. Just taking in the stars and having a friendly beer." He extended the bottle to the trooper. "Want a slug?"
"No, thanks. On duty." The trooper laughed softly. "It's pretty cold to be out taking in the stars, isn't it?"
Clayton shrugged. "My grandfather was Norwegian."
The trooper smiled again. "Mind if we have a look around?"
Again Clayton returned the smile. "Got a warrant?"
"Arrest him, arrest him!" Alex was shouting as he got out of his car and ran toward him. "They're using drugs, all of them. Take Dorcas to the hospital, test her blood, you'll see, you'll see. And he's a murderer, he murdered Sarah Ostlich!"
The second trooper's face wore no smile as he said to Clayton, "Mr. Brown has made some very serious accusations against you, boy."
Clayton tried not to appear visibly affected. "Indeed."
The trooper nodded. "Indeed."
"Let me tell you what happened." Clayton sighed. "We were sitting in his bar having a few drinks, and out of the blue he started yelling at me for having long hair and not being in the army and stuff like that."
"You goddamn liar!" Alex screamed, and ran at Clay. Both troopers grabbed him and held him back.
"You see?" Clayton said casually. "He's violent, and very excitable."
"He also says he heard you confess to the murder of Sarah Ostlich, the young woman who was killed around here a few months ago."
"He better calm down and watch what he says," Clayton replied, looking at Alex. "We don't want a lynching, because lynching is murder, and murderers spend the rest of their lives behind bars."
The first trooper frowned. "Nobody's talking about lynching anyone, son." He did not understand the oblique communication that had just taken place as Clayton reminded Alex that any renewed investigation of the incident in the woods would bring everything to light and would land Alex and many other townspeople in the prisoner's dock. Alex swallowed hard and bit his tongue. He had been so eager to destroy Clayton that he had forgotten the ramifications of his actions. He was silent as the trooper asked, "What about it? Did you say something along those lines?"
"Of course not." Clayton laughed. "That's Sarah's sister Dorcas over there. Ask her if I said anything about killing her sister."
Lydia tried her best to act like Dorcas as she stammered, "Mr. Brown must have imagined that, Officer. I've been with Clayton all night, and he never said anything like that."
One of the troopers walked over to her. "We've met, twice I think."
"We have?"
"Yes, when your mother . . . when she died a few years ago, and when your father filed the missing person's report on your sister."
On both occasions Lydia had absented herself from the Ostlich home and Dorcas had been with her father. "Oh, yes, of course," she said. "I remember you now."
"Mr. Brown says you were having some sort of drug problem in his bar."
"I had too much to drink, I guess," she said. "I don't drink very often, and, well, I like don't know my limit, you know?"
He nodded. "May I speak to you in private?"
"Sure." She shrugged nervously.
As he led Lydia off to the police car he said to his partner, "Keep those two away from each other."
"Don't worry about me, Officer," Clayton said ami-ably. "Just keep an eye on old Ivan here." He grinned at Alex, who glowered back at him.
The policeman spoke to Lydia in quiet tones, and her replies were equally soft. When they walked back to the others a few minutes later, she was smiling broadly and winked at Rebecca. The trooper had wanted to see if she was in fact overdosing or having a reaction to a drug, and despite the alcohol and residual LSD in her system, she had comported herself well; indeed, the stale smell of beer on her breath lent credibility to her story. The trooper had come to believe that the entire incident resolved itself down to the natural animosity between a young hippie and a middle-aged redneck, exacerbated by Saturday-night drinking. He motioned for Alex to follow him back to the cars.
"There's nothing we can do here, Mr. Brown," he said. "No laws seem to have been broken, and we can't just arrest them without cause."
Alex exploded at him. "Goddamn it! I know what I see and hear!"
"I know, I know," he replied soothingly, "but I think you should just try to forget whatever it was that happened in your bar tonight, whatever you thought you heard. Just go home, Mr. Brown, and forget the whole thing. And keep them out of your bar from now on, if you want to." The two policemen entered their car. "Good night, now." They started the car and drove away.
Alex looked at Clayton's smiling face. "I guess I won the game, Al," Clayton called out. "Drinks are on you." Alex did not reply. He spun around to walk quickly back to his own car and then began to drive back toward the town.
"Okay, Clayton," Lydia said as he rejoined her, "I helped you and Sean get your asses out of the sling, though God knows why I bothered."
"You wanted to keep Dork from being locked up in the happy home, that's why," he replied.
"Maybe so," she conceded. "But I want to know exactly what happened to Sarah. And don't try to bullshit me."
"Give me a break, will you?" he replied. "I already told you it was an accident. She fell down, hit her head on a rock. I tried to cover it up because I just didn't want Sean to get in trouble."
"You coulda told somebody," she insisted as she unwound her braids. "For Christ's sake, Clay!"
"I'm sorry, honest I am," he said, his voice soft and sincere. "I know we made a mistake, trying to keep out of trouble like we did, but we were both afraid that Sean would end up in prison. Look, we didn't reall
y do anything, you know? The whole thing was one long, screwy, terrible coincidence. Can't you try to understand?" He turned to his sister for support.
Rebecca nodded and then sighed. "Yeah, I guess I understand, Clay. You guys were like victims of circumstances." She and Clayton looked at Lydia, expecting her to agree with Rebecca's assessment. It was obvious from the expression on her face that her faith in his word was less than solid.
They turned at the sound of an approaching car, and Clayton waved as Sean and Dorcas drove up and got out of the jeep. "Cops just left."
"Yeah, I know," Sean said. "I drove around for a while like you told us, but I've been waiting down near the road, watching to see if the cops were gonna stay or leave."
"Everything's okay," Rebecca said, and then turned to Dorcas. "How are you feeling?"
"I'm all right." She sighed. "I guess I really made a mess of things."
"No harm done," Clayton said cheerfully. "Everybody else got away okay?"
"Saw Doug's van heading for the thruway," Sean replied. He tried to light a cigarette, but his hands were trembling like leaves. "Saw Russell's VW, too, off on the roadside. He got a flat tire."
You stop to help him?" Rebecca asked.
"No. Why should I? Fuck 'em all. It was Peter and Russell who started all the trouble, remember, them and that goddamn fucking son of a bitch Alex."
"Hey, calm down." Clayton laughed. "You're acting like you're gonna have a stroke or something."
"I almost did," he spat. "That stupid bastard. I feel like breaking his fucking neck. Do you realize what he almost did to me?"
"Yeah, yeah," Clayton said. "We've heard the probation-officer-state-pen rap before." He yawned. "This has been a hell of a day. I think I'll fall out."
"I want to go home," Dorcas said quietly.
"Wait until tomorrow, Dork," Lydia suggested. "Let's all just go inside and have a few beers, maybe smoke some grass. . . ."
"I want to go home," Dorcas repeated firmly.
"Okay, I'll drive you home," Rebecca offered. "No sweat."
Lydia and Clayton began to walk toward the trailer, and Clayton called out, "Hey, Sean, you coming?"
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