Silent Retreats by Philip F. Deaver Read Free Book Online Page B

where the highway was rerouted fifty yards west of itself for a certain short stretch because it would always flood in a heavy rain and people would get killed. So, instead, people got killed in the curves. Late one night in that particular summer, early June, Karen, with another Arcola girl named Marie, ran off the road at high speed on their way home. They went over the ditch and deep into the weeds, through a fence, flipped into a field. They weren't found until morning.
    The crumpled ghost of their Chevy rusted most of the summer and part of the fall where the wrecker let it down, half a block from the Dairy Queen in the wreck lot of Ford Motor Sales. I don't know what the fascination was, but sometimes I'd go by there. Through the crunched, blue-tinted windows, in the folds of the damp, bent seats, I could see a Beatles album and a soggy package of Kools. There were stains of blood in the driver's seat. One of their shoes was decomposing in the gravel next to the car. I'd find myself staring. This was before Vietnam really got going. Back then, the whole idea of people dying who were about my age was a rare and somehow fascinating thing. The Arcola girls, Karen and Marie, they were the first I remember.
    There was one Arcola girl named Rhonda Hart, a wild girl with dark brown hair and strange, blue catlike eyes. Each Saturday night, late, when the dance was almost over and the room was humid and warm like hot breath, a group would gather around Rhonda, who was by then dancing alone, doing, if the chaperones weren't looking, a pantomime of taking her clothes off to a grinding-on-and-on rendition of "Louie, Louie" that the local bands had turned into the theme of the summer.
    I remember that her legs were skinny, but she was round and ample under a pure-white sweatshirt, and her menacing cat eyes stared into the group around her, mostly boys, her lips pouting like a bad girl. She'd make-believe unzip her candy-colored red shorts at the back, make-believe slip her panties off her hips and slide them down the skinny legs to the cold cork looking floor of the West Ridge community building. A little kick at the last and, imaginary pale pink, they sailed through the imaginary air. And on she danced, her arms out to you. She was pretty good.
    At Webster Park there was an old bandstand the Arcola girls used to gather at on summer nights. They would park their cars in the deep shadows. The local high school boys would go there, too, and in the black shade of the park maples they would all play, smoke, make out, the Lord knew what else (there were always whisperings, strange rumors going around). These were country girls. Maybe some of them might not have gotten a second look from the boys in Arcola, but in West Ridge they were exotic and different, from a place that, to us, then, seemed far away. They made the air palpable with sex and play.
    The first time I ever heard a girl say "fuck," it was an Arcola girl, and she didn't say it mean or loud, but it seemed to echo all through Webster Park, down the length of it into the cluster of pine trees, beyond that to the ball diamonds, the deserted playground and city pool, the walking gardens.
    "You'd love to go out with one of those girls," my girlfriend would sometimes say.
    We'd be at the drive-in and one of their cars might spin through. The curb-hops would jump back to avoid it. I might crane my neck to see who it was.
    "Cathy says they're all dumb as posts," she'd say. Cathy was my girlfriend's friend.
    "Cathy should talk," I told her. I'd turn up the radio, the manic, rabble-rousing prattle of Dick Biondi, WLS.
    That summer a couple of classmates of mine, Bob Reid and Buzz Talbott, slipped into a slumber party in Arcola. They climbed through a bedroom window, bringing with them their sleeping bags and beer. Rumors were it had been some great party. The rumor was that somebody's farmer-dad caught them, though, and there had been a shotgun fired and a quick getaway. Bob Reid, and a