Poppa gathered up his things, even though they weren’t near done. He threw everything carelessly into the back of the pickup. Then they were driving slowly down the street, following a distance behind the family. Poppa smiled, waving to folks as they called out to him—the old lady from Orchard Street, the owner of the hardware store, Mr. Jenkins. Everybody knew everybody in The Hollows.
The family walked a while, and finally all piled into one of those big, expensive cars. It was shiny and blood red. They were like a television family, too perfect. They weren’t real. Especially the girl with her round cheeks and pretty mouth, golden hair. She was like a doll.
“You know how much one of those things cost?” asked Poppa. Bobo didn’t answer.
“You could feed a village in Africa for a year,” he went on.
Poppa couldn’t care less about villages in Africa. He just hated rich people, people who thought they were smart because they had money and lived in the city. People who came in from outside and bought land that they had no business buying and built big new houses that didn’t belong in The Hollows.
He followed them out of town. Poppa wasn’t worried about being noticed. Normal people didn’t think about being followed. And Poppa’s truck made him invisible; no one ever noticed them. The family drove slowly, then sped up, then slowed down again like they were looking for something. Finally they turned onto a drive that led to one of those new big houses.
Poppa kept driving, silent, his jaw working. He wore a faded blue baseball cap over his tangle of white and gray hair, which he pulled back into a ponytail when he was working. With his free hand, he twisted at the bottom of the full beard that was the shape and color of a gnarled old tree branch. Bobo knew just what he was thinking. Bobo was thinking about her, too. That little doll of a girl, that crooked smile that was pretty anyway. She wasn’t the first little girl Poppa had noticed.
They went back to work after that, worked until the sun started to get low in the sky. Doing what needed doing, then collecting cash at the end of each job.
Poppa liked to think of them as living “off the grid.” We don’t exist, he always said. They lived in a house that Poppa’s poppa had built with “his own two hands” on property that had been in his family since The Hollows was settled. They didn’t have a phone, or a computer, or a television. There was a generator and a fuel tank on the property, so there were no dealings with the electric company. In the winter, when the snows came, the roads became impassable except for Poppa’s snowmobile. He could get into town if he needed to; but mainly they didn’t need to. They worked hard all spring and summer, and in fall stocked the food cellar. And Poppa liked to hunt.
Up way back in the woods, there were other people like them. Folks who lived off the land. They lived in houses that didn’t have a street address; they hunted, fished, and gardened for their food. They schooled their children, not just with books, but by teaching them how to survive like the men and women who first settled The Hollows. They buried their own dead. The townies called them hill people. But Poppa said that the people in the hills, they were “true descendants of our founding fathers.” The Hollows belonged to them.
New Penny cried at first, but not like the others. The others whimpered quietly, went limp with fear, obeyed right away, got used up and discarded. But New Penny, she screamed, she raged and fought. There was a something deep inside her that couldn’t be touched. Even when she had decided to be good, there was a wild sparkle in her eyes. Bobo liked her better than the others, even though she made more trouble. A lot more trouble.
But Momma and Poppa were getting tired of her now. She had been there longer than anyone. There had been another, too. But she was gone.
Poppa was angry about the man with the Bimmer, as Poppa called it. Poppa was skinny, so skinny that you could see the shelf of his collarbone and the dip behind it. His knees were rocks in a sock, elbows hard as hammers. But he was strong. He didn’t need any help lifting the stranger into the trunk of his car. There was a neat black suitcase in there, which Poppa took. He searched the stranger’s body, lifted his wallet from his pocket.
“There’s nearly five hundred dollars in here,” Poppa said, pocketing the cash. Bobo wondered if that would make him less angry at New Penny. But it didn’t seem to. In fact, it just seemed to make him more agitated.
“Real estate man,” he said. Though how Poppa knew that, Bobo couldn’t be sure. Maybe because all the new rich people up here were either buying, selling, or tearing down what was already here and building something new. “Developer.”
Up here that was the dirtiest word. Developers came up all the time, finding their way where locals from town wouldn’t even dare to go. These strangers offered big money for land, never understanding that the folks who lived here were part of the land. They could no more sell it than they could sell the skin off their bodies.