Femme Fatale and other stories

men’s shirts and jeans, drying on a coarse piece of rope, and three unusually calm chickens bopping toward us with herky-jerky movements. We were used to the aggressive geese that guarded the Gwynns Falls, so most of us stepped back. But Mickey was already at the threshold of the house, peering in.
    “Mickey,” Gwen called, trying to get her to stop. But now Sean was beside her, then Tim, then Go-Go. Gwen had to step up.
    Although the day was not bright, we still needed time for our eyes to adjust once inside. It was a simple room. Something—burlap—had been tacked over the windows, which accounted for the dimness. There was a chair, a small plastic tub that held dishes. A rickety pair of cabinets hung crookedly on the back wall and there was a makeshift counter—it looked like something you’d find on a church altar—piled with boxes and canisters. The cabin wasn’t neat, but some sort of order was at work. Someone was taking care of it, in a fashion. The only really messy thing in the room was a pile of rags left on a cot. These smelled, too, not like the outhouse, but of something dank and strong.
    “Who lives here?” Go-Go asked in a hoarse, awed whisper.
    “No one lives here,” Sean said. Sean didn’t like to be wrong. “Hunters use it, maybe, but you couldn’t live here.”
    “Hunters?” Gwen asked. “In Leakin Park? Is that legal?”
    “No, but that doesn’t stop some people.”
    Go-Go, with his magpie eyes, had spotted something glinting. “Look,” he said, darting toward the cot with the pile of rags, no longer perturbed by the smell. “A guitar.”
    As he crouched down to drag the guitar from beneath the cot, a hand shot out from the pile of rags and grabbed Go-Go firmly by the wrist.
    “Don’t,” the rags said.

C HAPTER S EVEN
    Sean still needs a moment to register where he is when he awakens, although
he has been staying at his mother’s house for almost a week now.
Not. Home
. This is his first conscious thought the morning after Go-Go’s funeral. He’s not at home, and home is St. Petersburg. He’s clear on that much. The first clue is the light. It is different from his bedroom in Florida, especially this time of year. He loves the light in Florida. It’s one of the few things he loves. The light, winter, and the lack of state income taxes. But this room is dark, depressing, although he’s glad for the darkness this morning. His head is so heavy, his mouth and throat feel as if they are coated with sand. Not a hangover, exactly, if only because Sean believes he never gets hangovers. Allergies, perhaps. He thought he had outgrown them, but maybe he’s just not allergic to stuff in Florida.
    So: Baltimore. So: a dark room, although it’s beginning to brighten around him. The light is gray, watery, the sheets a little grainy beneath him, as if someone has been eating here, as if these are the crumbs of crumbs of crumbs. Go-Go ate in bed, among other things. Go-Go still fouled the sheets when he was nine or ten. Their mother made excuses for him, said it was a medical condition. But the medical condition vanished when Go-Go was given the single room that, by all rights, should have been Tim’s, then Sean’s when Tim left for college. It was a narrow, dark room, not particularly desirable except for its solitary state. Besides, Tim and Sean enjoyed rooming together, talking late into the night. Go-Go, always terrified of being left out, ended up more left out than ever.
    Sean’s in a double bed, but that’s right. The twin beds in his room were replaced by a double bed when his mother decided the room needed to be at least nominally welcoming to her sons and their wives.
    Only this bed
moves
. Sways and rolls beneath him.
    But maybe that’s okay, too? At home, he has a memory foam mattress, bought because his wife, Vivian, is a light sleeper, so the movement is merely relative to what he’s used to. His mother is not someone to splurge on a mattress that was used, at most, five or six nights a year, because Tim never sleeps over, and Sean is lucky to make it home for Christmas. And when Go-Go returned home, he always chose his old room, dark and sunless and unimproved as it was.
    The bed moves again, an actual roll. Sean sits up, puts his palm against the mattress. Warm to the touch, it pulses.
    “A water bed?” he asks wonderingly, waiting to awaken from yet another banal dream. Sean has the dullest dreams of anyone he knows, assuming other people tell the