Mad River

told Duke, “They’re okay on their own, good with chores and so on, and wouldn’t hurt a flea, really good kids, but they’re probably scared to death. We told them today not to go out and not to let anybody in, because of these crazies. . . . I’m going to walk up there on the lawn and see if they’ll come out to me.”
    Schmidt had been at a co-op and heard about the ruckus from a neighbor, picked up his wife from her job at the phone company, and had driven out as quickly as they could.
    Duke told them he couldn’t be responsible if they got hurt, and told them to stay well back down the lawn until they determined that there was nobody in the house but the children.
    Schmidt immediately violated that, walking straight up to the front porch, while one of Duke’s deputies yelled at him not to go so far; Duke said, “All that media’s gonna be laughing at us, if all we’ve got is a house full of retards.”
    Virgil said, “You know what Ronald Reagan said about that.”
    Duke: “What’s that?”
    “Fuck ’em.”
    Duke disapproved. “I don’t allow my men to use that kind of language.”
    “Good thing I’m not one of your men,” Virgil said. “Look at that: they’re coming out.”
    Four kids came out of the house, all boys, maybe ten to fourteen, the two tallest ones trying to explain to Schmidt what they’d done, the smaller ones crying as they looked at the circle of cars and trucks around them. Schmidt and his wife tried to calm them down, and the carnival packed up and in a half hour had gone away.
    Shrake, sitting on the fender of Boykin’s patrol car, said, “Well, that was enlightening.”
    “Another day on the job,” Virgil said. “Let’s get going.”
    They stopped in Arcadia to pick up Cokes and went back to work; they quit at six o’clock, having cleared an area of about five miles by five. If they’d worked another couple of hours, they would have found Welsh and Sharp, huddled in the old dead man’s house at the top of the hill.
    But then, working in the dark, they might have gotten themselves killed.
    •   •   •
    BECKY AND JIMMY were still hiding in the farmhouse, working their way through the bags of junk food that Becky had brought back from the convenience store. The night had been rough, with Jimmy’s leg pulsing with pain. Becky rationed the pain pills, hoping to keep the pain at least bearable until they could get out of the area.
    Jimmy said he couldn’t move yet, and when he woke in the morning, and she washed his leg down, it seemed to her that the wound was starting to smell funny; and not in a ha-ha way. Some blood was still seeping into the bandage, but there was now a massive clot in place, and she was careful not to disturb it as she washed around the edges of it. The edges were yellow and puffy, but when she tentatively pried at them, she got blood instead of pus. She sprayed on a lot of the Band-Aid antiseptic, and re-bandaged it.
    Jimmy said, “You know, you would have made a good nurse.”
    She said, “Thanks,” and she really appreciated the thought.
    •   •   •
    THEY SPENT THE DAY in front of the television, watching the search. The TV people kept them up to date on the area where the hunt was going on, and while it wasn’t far away, it wasn’t close enough that they felt threatened. They had no hint of Virgil and his crew, who were much closer.
    They talked about what they were going to do. Jimmy thought when they got better, they’d get in the old man’s truck and head south. He’d once been to Missouri with his old man, and there was some rough country down there, where they might get lost for a while. He’d grow a beard and get some overalls so he’d look like a farmer, and when things had quieted down, they’d head farther south.
    He’d decided they wouldn’t go to Cuba or South America because the people there spoke Spanish. They’d go to Australia, he decided, because they spoke English there, and clicking around the TV channels, they came on a National Geographic special about Australia that made the whole place seem so neat that Becky got all excited and cried at the prospect. “Maybe I
could
be a nurse, in Australia,” she said.
    Jimmy hadn’t looked at any more of the pornos, maybe because of the pain, or maybe because he was embarrassed by them, and when Becky steered the conversation around to their future relationship, he seemed happy enough to talk about it.
    Becky asked, “You like me,