“He pulled his sheet up over his face like an Arab and stared at me with his mouth wide open. Then he looked back over his shoulder at the path, as if the real me might come along at any second. I felt like pegging another rock at his stupid face, but instead I marched up to him. He was shaking his head from side to side. Jim Dawg, he whispered, what happened to you? By way of answer, I hit him a good hard knock on the breastbone. What’s the matter? he wanted to know. After you left me, I say, I fell down a hill and ran into Eddie Grimes.
“That gave him something to think about, all right. Was Grimes coming after me, he wanted to know? Did he see which way I went? Did Grimes see who I was? He was pulling me into the woods while he asked me these dumb-ass questions, and I shoved him away. His sheet flopped back down over his front, and he looked like a little boy. He couldn’t figure out why I was mad at him. From his point of view, he’d been pretty clever, and if I got lost, it was my fault. But I wasn’t mad at him because I got lost. I wasn’t even mad at him because I’d run into Eddie Grimes. It was everything else. Maybe it wasn’t even him I was mad at.
“I want to get home without getting killed, I whispered. Eddie ain’t gonna let me go twice. Then I pretended he wasn’t there any more and tried to figure out how to get back to Meridian Road. It seemed to me that I was still going north when I took that tumble downhill, so when I climbed up the hill on the other side of the creek I was still going north. The wagon-track that Dee and I took into The Backs had to be off to my right. I turned away from Dee and started moving through the woods. I didn’t care if he followed me or not. He had nothing to do with me any more, he was on his own. When I heard him coming along after me, I was sorry. I wanted to get away from Dee Sparks. I wanted to get away from everybody.
“I didn’t want to be around anybody who was supposed to be my friend. I’d rather have had Eddie Grimes following me than Dee Sparks.
“Then I stopped moving, because through the trees I could see one of those grease-paper windows glowing up ahead of me. That yellow light looked evil as the Devil’s eye—everything in The Backs was evil, poisoned, even the trees, even the air. The terrible expression on Dr. Garland’s face and the white smudge in the air seemed like the same thing—they were what I didn’t want to know.
“Dee shoved me from behind, and if I hadn’t felt so sick inside I would have turned around and punched him. Instead, I looked over my shoulder and saw him nodding toward where the side of the shack would be. He wanted to get closer! For a second, he seemed as crazy as everything else out there, and then I got it: I was all turned around, and instead of heading back to the main path, I’d been taking us toward the woman’s shack. That was why Dee was following me.
“I shook my head. No, I wasn’t going to sneak up to that place. Whatever was inside there was something I didn’t have to know about. It had too much power—it turned Eddie Grimes around, and that was enough for me. Dee knew I wasn’t fooling. He went around me and started creeping toward the shack.
“And damndest thing, I watched him slipping through the trees for a second, and started following him. If he could go up there, so could I. If I didn’t exactly look at whatever was in there myself, I could watch Dee look at it. That would tell me most of what I had to know. And anyways, probably Dee wouldn’t see anything anyhow, unless the front door was hanging open, and that didn’t seem too likely to me. He wouldn’t see anything, and I wouldn’t either, and we could both go home.
“The door of the shack opened up, and a man walked outside. Dee and I freeze, and I mean freeze. We’re about twenty feet away, on the side of this shack, and if the man looked sideways, he’d see our sheets. There were a lot of trees between us and him, and I couldn’t get a very good look at him, but one thing about him made the whole situation a lot more serious. This man was white, and he was wearing good clothes—I couldn’t see his face, but I could see his rolled up sleeves, and his suit jacket slung over one arm, and some kind of wrapped-up bundle he was holding in his hands. All this took about a second. The white man started carrying his bundle straight through the woods, and in another two seconds he was out of sight.
“Dee was a little closer than I was, and I think his sight line was a little clearer than mine. On top of that, he saw better at night than I did. Dee didn’t get around like me, but he might have recognized the man we’d seen, and that would be pure trouble. Some rich white man, killing a girl out in The Backs? And us two boys close enough to see him? Do you know what would have happened to us? There wouldn’t be enough left of either one of us to make a decent smudge.
“Dee turned around to face me, and I could see his eyes behind his costume, but I couldn’t tell what he was thinking. He just stood there, looking at me. In a little bit, just when I was about to explode, we heard a car starting up off to our left. I whispered at Dee if he saw who that was. Nobody, Dee said. Now, what the hell did that mean? Nobody? You could say Santa Claus, you could say J. Edgar Hoover, it’d be a better answer than Nobody. The Model T’s headlights shone through the trees when the car swung around the top of the path and started going toward Meridian Road. Nobody I ever saw before, Dee said. When the headlights cut through the trees, both of us ducked out of sight. Actually, we were so far from the path, we had nothing to worry about. I could barely see the car when it went past, and I couldn’t see the driver at all.
“We stood up. Over Dee’s shoulder I could see the side of the shack where the white man had been. Lamplight flickered on the ground in front of the open door. The last thing in the world I wanted to do was to go inside that place—I didn’t even want to walk around to the front and look in the door. Dee stepped back from me and jerked his head toward the shack. I knew it was going to be just like before. I’d say no, he’d say yes, and then I’d follow him wherever he thought he had to go. I felt the same way I did when I saw that white smear in the woods— hopeless, lost in the midst of death. You go, if you have to, I whispered to him, it’s what you wanted to do all along. He didn’t move, and I saw that he wasn’t too sure about what he wanted any more.
“Everything was different now, because the white man made it different. Once a white man walked out that door, it was like raising the stakes in a poker game. But Dee had been working toward that one shack ever since we got into The Backs, and he was still curious as a cat about it. He turned away from me and started moving sideways in a straight line, so he’d be able to peek inside the door from a safe distance.