They started west toward the vacant building. Alongside the road the old man’s house in the lot adjacent to their own house was quiet and pale as usual, behind the overgrown bushes and the tall ragweed, and there was no sign anywhere of the old man himself.
When they were in front of the empty house at the end of the road they stopped to study it and everything around it. The broken-down neglected locust trees, shaggy barked, the overgrown yard, the dead sunflowers grown up everywhere with their heads loaded and drooping, everything dry and brown now in the late fall, dust-coated, and the sunken house itself diminished and weathered, with the front door swung open carelessly and the windows broken out over the years, and the sole square intact window in the attic bearing a fly screen that was turned down loose from one corner in a way that looked peculiar, like it was sleepy-eyed.
What you waiting on now? the boy said.
Nothing. We’re just looking at it.
I’m going in.
There were tracks still showing at the road edge, where the car had been parked, and shoe prints in the dirt where the two high school boys and the girl with them had climbed in and out of the car. Ike and Bobby were bent over inspecting the tracks.
I’m going, the boy said.
You wait, Ike said. You have to follow me. They stepped around the footprints and entered the lot through the weeds on the path and climbed onto the porch, the old boards dry as kindling and absolutely paintless, and passed through the open door. A broken chair stood in the middle of the room like something crippled that the last tenants had left behind because it couldn’t keep up, and high up on the north wall the plaster was stained by long runs of rainwater. The chimney showed a soot-blackened hole where a stovepipe had vented into it, and on the floor were yellowed newspapers. Also old cigarette butts and sharp pieces of green-looking glass. A rusted can.
They done it in here? the other boy said.
Ike and Bobby looked around the room.
She was in the bedroom, Ike said.
Let’s see that, the boy said.
They moved into the next room. The mattress lay on the bare floor with the candle stubs fitted into the beer bottles on either side. The jar lid still had her cigarette butts, the ends of them stained red from her lipstick. The army blanket was spread out on the mattress. Ike and Bobby moved across the room toward the window through which they’d seen the girl and the two high school boys taking use of her in the night, and leaned out and noted the trampled grass where they themselves had stood in the night, watching.
The other boy knelt next to the mattress. I guess she bout screamed her head off, he said.
Ike looked at him. Why?
Cause that’s how they always do. Holler their heads off when they take it in the *. On account of how big it is and how much they like it.
The two brothers studied him with suspicion. Where’d you ever hear something like that? Ike said.
That’s the way they do.
That’s a lie. I don’t believe that.
It don’t matter what you believe.
Well, she didn’t do any of that, Ike said.
She was just on her back, Bobby said. She was just laying on her back looking up and waiting for him to quit bothering her.
Sure, the other boy said. All right. He bent over the rough army blanket and put his face to it and sniffed and raised his eyes dramatically.
What’s that? What are you doing now? Ike said.
Smelling if she’s still here, the boy said.
They watched what he was doing, his antics. He was holding parts of the blanket up to his face and shifting it about, sampling it. They didn’t want him to be acting in such a way in this room. They didn’t approve of it.
You better stop that, Bobby said.
I’m not hurting nothing.
You better leave that alone, Bobby said.
You better stand up from there, Ike said. You quit that.
The boy made a face as if the blanket were too dirty to touch, and he dropped it. He reached and pulled out one of the candle stubs from the throat of a beer bottle. Then I’ll just take me one of these, he said.
You leave them alone too, Ike said.