Aerie InternationaL - Missoula County Public Schools

her thigh. But I guess I was biting her lip and maybe I was grabbing
a little too hard, see, you know how excited I get sometimes, and she
pushed me off and wiped her mouth and said, No, Honeybee, that’s not
what we’re doing, and I realized we were sliding around on something
uncomfortable. She lifted up a canvas sheet and lit up a flashlight and
shined it on a bunch of metal canisters.
I said, This doesn’t make much sense to me, and she said, This is the stuff
Maloney uses to kill the bees; his house is
right there, and I said, I don’t follow,
but by then I figure she’d already
left me behind, in her head at least.
She pulled her skirt up over her
head, but not in any way that I liked,
because she was wearing black
sweats underneath. She whipped out
this black knit cap and slid it over
her face, and every bit of that brickcolored
hair disappeared. It wasn’t
two seconds before she had gloves
and a ski mask on me, too. As we walked up to his house, it seemed to
me that it didn’t look like the house of anyone evil. River walked around
and looked in all the windows until she found the bedroom, and she
jimmied the window open real quiet. She walked over to me and handed
me the canisters and said, He’s in there asleep, throw them in, and I said, No, I
can’t… your walk is different, and she said, What are you talking about? and then
she said, Never mind, just throw them in. You want me, don’t you? Throw them in.
Even in the dark, even through the slits in her mask I could see those
green eyes, so I figured there was some hope. I pulled the tabs on the
bombs and started throwing them in, one by one. Those things don’t
explode, you know, they just fog up the place, so we had to stand there
for a long time and wait. I started getting nervous. We have to stop it, I
said, he’s asleep and he’ll just breathe it in until he’s dead. She said, Shut up, and
not much after that the upper half of Bill Maloney exploded out of the
open window, red-faced, drooling, wheezing, sputtering. River grabbed
my arm and said, Let’s go, but I didn’t follow her. I looked straight into
the face of Bill Maloney as he hung there. I don’t know who he reminded
me of, maybe Wayne or my own father, maybe the coach or Professor
Whitaker, but he certainly did not have the dead eyes that a murderer
should. On the contrary, his eyes were teary and wild, like something was
being robbed from him but he couldn’t comprehend what. I walked over
and hauled Bill Maloney safely out of his house, and I had to run all the
way back to my double wide on foot, see, because River was already gone.
28
She whipped out this
black knit cap and slid it
over her face, and every
bit of that brick-colored
hair disappeared. It
wasn’t two seconds before
she had gloves and a ski
mask on me, too.