Mad River

with a thin, prairie-dried face.
    “You Butch?” Virgil asked.
    “Yeah. Kids would come in, you know, steal candy, try to steal cigarettes or comic books, or get me looking one way, and steal a
Penthouse
from under the counter. I’d catch them, and call up their parents, and that’d end that. But Jimmy . . . I never caught him because I think he was stealing
food
,” Butch said.
“He’d hang around outside until I went to get something for somebody, and then he’d slip into the store and stick something in his pants, then go on over and look at the magazines and comics. I wouldn’t see him until he was right there, and I’d be watching him like a hawk, and he’d never take anything. But I think he was stealing. And I think he was stealing stuff like Dinty Moore stew. It seemed like I’d never sell that stuff, I’d never see it coming across the counter, but at the end of the month, it’d pretty much be gone.”
    “But you hired him to work there . . .”
    “Yeah, against my better judgment. He got out of school and couldn’t catch on with anybody—not even the army wanted him—so finally I gave him a job,” Butch said. “He lasted about a month. He kept bumping heads with the other kids, and I had to let him go. I won’t tell you what he called me when I gave him the news.”
    “You afraid of him?” Duke asked.
    “No, not exactly. I never felt like he’d come after me, but I did think that there might have been a lot of reasons for him being like he was . . . but, when all was said and done, he was sort of a bad kid. Just a mean, bad kid, who liked to see other people get hurt. Like I said, he might have had his reasons.”
    “You know his old man?” Virgil asked.
    “Of course. I know everybody in town. He was grown-up Jimmy Sharp.”
    A woman said, “An asshole.”
    Somebody else said, “That’s right.”
    The crowd was getting into it now. “How about Becky?” Virgil asked.
    “Wild kid,” somebody said. “She was going to New York or somewhere, to be an actress.”
    “She was pretty,” somebody else said. “Had a face like an angel, when she was in grade school here.”
    “She ever go to New York?”
    “Nobody from here goes to New York,” Butch said. “They all come back to the Surprise.”
    •   •   •
    A WOMAN STOOD UP, jeans and a turquoise-colored blouse, with a piece of silver Indian jewelry at her neck. She’d been sitting next to a man with a long brown ponytail, and Virgil tagged them as the town liberals.
    She said, “Jimmy and Becky are like a lot of kids from here—they’ve got no hope. There aren’t any jobs here, they’re not sophisticated enough or well-educated enough to move to the big city and work there, they see all these things on TV that they can never have. They give up. We don’t give them hope. We don’t even give them anything to work with.”
    A heavyset man in a jean jacket said, “Come on, Sue. Plenty of good kids come from here. They just aren’t two of them.”
    “That’s easy for you to say, Earl. Your boys are gonna get a farm that’s worth, what, right now . . . three or four million dollars? All they have to do is drive a tractor long enough, and they’ll be rich. But most people here don’t have a farm to give to their kids. That’s what I’m talking about.”
    Virgil jumped in: “That’s all fine, but we really can’t change the culture in the next couple of days. I need to know more about these kids—what they’re like, where they’re probably going.”
    “All they ever talked about was going to Los Angeles and working in the movies,” a young girl said. “If I were you, I’d start looking around Sioux Falls or out by Mitchell. They’re probably on their way.”
    “Not if they’re driving Jim Sharp’s Chevy,” said a broad-shouldered man with oily blond hair. “The gol-darned tires on that thing won’t get them past Marshall. Jim brought it in for gas last week, and the deepest tread was the tread-wear indicators. Tires are like paper and the transmission sounds like it’s made out of rocks. Won’t get them fifty miles, unless they find new tires.”
    “Becky worked for a while over at a McDonald’s in Marshall—maybe they went there. At least she knows the city,” a woman said.
    •   •   •
    THEY TALKED FOR a few more minutes, until the people began repeating themselves, and Virgil called it off. Out on the school porch, he said to Duke, “We’ve got a couple