The girl next door jack ketchum pdf free download

by
Jack Ketchum
NEXT DOOR WHERE PAIN LIVES.
WHERE THERE ARE NO LIMITS TO THE
DARKEST IMAGINATION
"THE GIRL NEXT DOOR is alive... in a way most works of popular fiction never attain;
it does not just promise terror but actually delivers it. But it's a
page-turner, all right; no doubt about that." -from the Introduction by Stephen King
"Realism is what makes this novel so terrifying the monsters in THE GIRL NEXT
DOOR are human, and all the more horrifying for it....Ketchum's writing has the power
that's missing from 90% of the books on the market today. He never plays it safe, never
goes for the cop-out; what you expect to happen, doesn't... psychological horror at its
finest." -Mike Baker, Afraid

JACK KETCHUM
Introduction by Stephen King
THE OVERLOOKED COLLECTION
Overlook Connection Press

1989 by Dallas Mayr

Dust Jacket and interior Illustration 1996 by Neal McPheeters
Published by Overlook Connection Press
P.O. Box 526 Woodstock, GA 30188
Phone: 770-926-1762 Fax: 770-516-1469
Internet: Overlookcn@aol.com

A Signed Lettered Edition of 52 copies published in a deluxe mahogany wood slipcase,

with door.
ISBN 0963339737
Exclusive endpaper artwork, Lettered Edition, 1996 by Claudia Carlson A
Signed Limited Edition of 500 copies published in a slipcase.
ISBN 0963339729
"Introduction to The Girl Next Door" 1996 Stephen King This book is a work of fiction.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or
by any means, electronic or mechanical, without the written permission of the Publisher.
The Overlook Connection Press would like to thank the following whose help made this
very special edition possible: Marsha DeFilippo, Shirley Sonderegger, Alice Marten,
Kevin Anderson and Rebecca Moesta, Chris Smith, Hank Wagner, Jim Moore, Bill
Mayo, Stephen King, Stanley Wiater, Lucy Taylor, Chris Golden, Edward Lee, Philip
Nutman, Neal McPheeters, Paula White, and especially Dallas Mayr who worked with us
closely and every step of the way. Special thanks to Johnathan and ian Wilmot who help
make the OCP a little easier everyday. To my brother Jon. I love you. I miss you. Boy do
I. Your bro, Dave

Introduction to The Girl Next Door

I have written briefly about Ketchum before, saying that he's become a cult figure among
genre readers and a kind of hero to those of us who write tales of terror and suspense.
That's as true now as it was when I wrote it. He is, in a real sense, the closest thing we
have to an American Clive Barker ... although that's more a matter of sensibility than it is
of story, as Ketchum rarely, if ever, deals with the supernatural. That hardly matters,
though. What does is that no writer who has read him can help being influenced by him,
and no general reader who runs across his work can easily forget him. He has become an
archetype. That has been true ever since his first novel, Off Season (a kind of literary
Night of the Living Dead), and it is certainly true of The Girl Next Door, which is
probably the definitive Ketchum work.
The writer he most resembles, as far as I'm concerned, is Jim Thompson, the mythic
hardboiled novelist of the late forties and fifties. Like Thompson, Ketchum's entire ouvre
has been issued in paperback (in his native country at least; he's been published in
hardcover once or twice in England), he has never come within hailing distance of the
best seller list" he is never reviewed outside of genre publications such as Cemetery
Dance and Fangoria (where he is only rarely understood), he is almost completely
unknown to the general reading public. Yet, as with Thompson, he's an extremely

interesting writer, ferocious and sometimes brilliant, possessed of great talent and a
black, despairing vision. His work lives in a way that the work of most of his betterknown literary colleagues cannot even approach-I am thinking of such disparate novelists
as William Kennedy, EL. Doctorow, and Norman Mailer. In fact, of American novelists
working today, the only one I am absolutely sure is writing better and more important
stories than Jack Ketchum is Cormac McCarthy. This is heavy praise to lay upon an
obscure writer of paperback originals, but it's not hype. Like it or not (and many who
read the novel which follows won't like it), it's the truth. Jack Ketchum is the real goods.
And, you might remember, Cormac McCarthy himself was an obscure, chronically broke
writer until he published All the Pretty Horses, a cowboy romance not very similar to his
previous books. Unlike McCarthy, Ketchum has little interest in dense, lyrical language.
He writes a flat American line, as Jim Thompson did, with a rill of jagged, half hysterical
humor to brighten it-I think of Eddie, the crazy kid from The Girl Next Door, walking
down the street "stripped to the waist with a big live black snake stuck between his teeth."
Yet what really informs Ketchum's work isn't humor but horror-like Jim Thompson
before him (see The Grifters or The Killer Inside Me for instance, two books Jack
Ketchum almost could have written), he is fascinated by the existential horror of life, of a
world where a girl can be relentlessly tortured not by one psychotic woman but by a
whole neighborhood; a world where even the hero is too late, too weak, and too divided
against himself to make much difference.
The Girl Next Door is short-only 232 pages long-but it is still a work of considerable
scope and ambition. This doesn't surprise me much, in a way; other than poetry, the
suspense novel has been the most fruitful form of artistic expression in America's post
Vietnam years (they have not been good years for us, artistically speaking; for the most
part we baby-boomers have gotten on as badly with our art as we have with our political
and sexual lives). It's probably always easier to make good art when fewer people are
watching critically, and that has been the case with the American suspense novel since
Frank Norris's McTeague, another novel Jack Ketchum could have written (although the
Ketchum version would probably have left out a lot of the tiresome talk and been
considerably shorter ... right around 232 pages, let's say).
The Girl Next Door (the phrase itself summoning up images of dopey, good-natured
romance, walks in the twilight, dances at the school gym) begins as a kind of fifties
archetype. It is narrated by a young boy, for one thing, as such tales almost always are
(think of Catcher in the Rye, A Separate Peace, my own novella The Body), and opens
(after a chapter which is really a prologue) in a marvelously Huck Finny way: a barefoot
boy with cheeks of tan is sprawled across a river-rock in the summer sunlight, catching
craw dads in a tin can. Here he is joined by Meg, pretty, ponytailed, fourteen, and, of
course, New in Town. She and her younger sister, Susan, are staying with Ruth, a single
mom raising three boys. One of these boys is young David's best friend (of course), and
the bunch of them spend the evenings crashed out in front of the TV in Ruth Chandler's
living room, watching sitcoms like Father Knows Best and westerns like Cheyenne.
Ketchum evokes the fiftiesmthe music, the insularity of suburban life, the fears
symbolized by the bomb shelter in the Chandler basement-with economy and precision.
Then he grabs this spectacularly stupid piece of never-was mythology by its hem and

turns it inside-out with breathtaking ease. To begin with, father certainly doesn't know
best in young David's family; this father is a compulsive philanderer whose marriage is
hanging by a thread. David knows it, too. "My father had plenty of opportunity for affairs
and he took them," he says. "He met them late and he met them early." It's a thin whip
crack of irony, but loaded with a bead of shot at the tip, just the same; you're already
moving on when you realize it stings a little.
Meg and Susan have washed up at the Chandler house as a result of a car accident
(someone should do a study someday on The Ever-Popular Car Accident and Its Impact
on American Literature). At first it seems they will fit in nicely with Ruth's boys-Woofer,
Donny, Willie, Jr.-and with Ruth herself, the sort of easygoing woman who yarns a lot,
smokes a lot, and isn't above offering the boys a beer out of the fridge, if they promise to
keep quiet about it to their parents. Ketchum gives wonderful dialogue and Ruth's got a
great voice, hard-edged and just a trifle raspy in the mind's ear. "Take a lesson, boys," she
says at one point. "Remember this. It's important. All you got to do any time is be nice to
a woman-and she'll do all sorts of good things for you ... Davey was nice to Meg and got
himself a painting ... Girls are plain easy ... Promise 'em a little something and you can
have what you want half the time." The perfect healing environment and the perfect adult
authority-figure for a couple of traumatized girls, one might think except this is Jack
Ketchum we're dealing with here, and Jack Ketchum don't play that way.
Never did, probably never will. Ruth, for all her cheerfully cynical, waitress-with a heart
of-gold exterior, is losing her grip on sanity, spiraling into a hell of violence and
paranoia. She is a hideous but oddly prosaic villain, a perfect choice for the Eisenhower
years. We're never told what is wrong with her; it is not by accident that the talismanic
phrase held in common by Ruth and the children who spend time at her house is Don't
mention it. That phrase could be a summation of the fifties, and in this novel everyone
takes and it to heart until it is much too late to avert the final convulsions.
In the end, Ketchum is less interested in Ruth than he is in the kids-not just the Chandler
boys and David, but all the others that drift in and out of the Chandler basement while
Meg is slowly being murdered. It is Eddie that Ketchum cares about, and Denise, and
Tony, and Kenny, and Glen, and the whole daffy fifties gang,
the boys with flattops Butch-Waxed in front and scabs on their knees from playing
baseball. Some, like David, do little more than watch. Others end up participating, right
of up to the point where they collaborate in stitching the words I FUCK FUCK ME
across Meg's midriff with hot needles. They wander in ... they wander out ... they watch
TV ... they drink Cokes and eat peanut butter sandwiches ... and no one tells. No one puts
a stop to what's going on in the shelter. It is a nightmare scenario, Happy Days crossed
with A Clockwork Orange, The Life and Loves of Dobie Gillis in a crazed mating with
The Collector. It works not because of Ketchum's perfect suburban pitch but because we
are forced to believe, against our wills, that with the right combination of alienated
children and the right adult overseeing the horror and, above, all, with the right
atmosphere of mind-your-own-business to work in, this might be possible. It was, after
all, the era in which a woman named Kitty Genovese was stabbed to death over a period

of several hours in a New York alley. She screamed repeatedly for help and there were
plenty of people who saw what was happening, but no one did anything to stop it. No one
even called the cops. Don't mention it must have been their motto ... and how much of a
step is it, really, from don't mention it to let's help? David, the narrator, is the novel's one
essentially decent character, and as such he is probably right in blaming himself for the
final holocaust in Ruth Chandler's basement; decency is a responsibility as well as a state
of being, and as the one human present who understands that what's happening is evil, he
is ultimately more culpable than the morally vacant children who burn, cut, and sexually
abuse the girl next door. David takes part in none of these things, but neither does he tell
his parents what's going on in the Chandler house or report it to the police. Part of him
even wants to be part of it. We feel a kind of satisfaction when Davey finally does step
in-it's the one cold ray of sunshine Ketchum allows us-but we also hate him for not doing
it sooner.
If hate was all we felt for this misbegotten narrator, The Girl Next Door would fall off the
moral tightrope it walks, as Brett Easton Ellis's American Psycho did. But David is
perhaps Ketchum's most triumphantly realized character, miles from Ellis's pornocyphers, and his complexity gives this book a resonance which is not always present in
his earlier novels. We feel pity for him, we understand his initial reluctance to peach on
Ruth Chandler, who treats kids as human beings instead of nuisances that are always did
getting underfoot, and we also understand his ultimately lethal inability to grasp the
reality of what's happening.
"And then sometimes it was ... like the kind of movies that came along later in the
Sixties," David says. "Foreign movies, mostly-where the dominant feeling you had was
of inhabiting some fascinating, hypnotic in density of obscure illusion, or layers and
layers of meaning that in the end indicated a total absence of well meaning, where actors
with cardboard faces moved who passively through surreal nightmare landscapes, empty
is of emotions, adrift." For me, the brilliance of The Girl Next Door stems from the fact
that, in the end, I accepted David as a valid but part of my world-view, as valid-and in
some ways as the unwelcome-as Lou Ford, the psychotic sheriff who laughs and beats
and kills his way through the pages of Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me. Of course,
David is much more decent than Lou Ford. That's what makes him so awful.
Jack Ketchum is a brilliantly visceral novelist whose bleak perception of human nature is
perhaps only rivaled by that of Frank Norris and Malcolm Lowry. He has been presented
to his readers as the creator of suspenseful page-turners (the Warner paperback of The
Girl Next Door appeared with a skeletal cheerleader on
the cover, an image which has nothing to do with anything beneath it; the book looks like
either a VC. Andrews gothic or an R.L. Stine "camp-horror" juvenile). He is suspenseful,
and his novels are page turners but the cover and presentation still misrepresent him as
completely as the covers of Jim Thompson's novels misrepresented him. The Girl Next
Door is alive in a way no VC. Andrews novel ever was, in a way most works of popular
fiction never attain; it does not just promise terror but actually delivers it. But it's a page
turner all right; no doubt about that. These are pages you will dread to turn, and turn
anyway. Ketchum's thematic ambitions are quiet but large; they do not, however,

interfere with the novelist's main task, which is to beguile the reader's whole attention by
fair means or foul. Most of Ketchum's are foul ... but boy, do they ever work.
The Girl Next Door is a long way from the stupid schmaltz of Slow Dance in Cedar Bend
or the harmless, heroic shenanigans of The Rainmaker, which may be why Ketchum isn't
known to people who confine their reading to the New York Times best sellers.
Nevertheless, we would be poorer in terms of our literary experience without him, it
seems to me. He is a genuine iconoclast, a writer who is really good, one of the few
outside of the Chosen Circle who really matter. Jim Thompson's work has remained
constantly in print and constantly read long after the works of many in the Chosen Circle
of his own day have fallen out of print and thought. The same thing is almost certainly
going to happen with Jack Ketchum ... except I would like to see it happen to him before
he dies, as was the case with Thompson. An edition such as this, which is sure to attract
attention and comment, is a step in that direction.
Bangor, Maine June 24, 1995

Do You got to tell me brave captain 1 Why are the wicked so strong? How do the angels
get to sleep When the devil leaves the porch light on? --Tom Waits
I never want to hear the screams Of the teenage girls in other people's dreams.-The
Specials
The soul under the burden of sin cannot flee.-Iris Murdoch, The Unicorn
You think you know about pain?
Talk to my second wife. She does. Or she thinks she does.
She says that once when she was nineteen or twenty she got between a couple of cats
fighting-her own cat and a neighbor's-and one of them went at her, climbed her like a
tree, tore gashes out of her thighs and breasts and belly that you still can see today, scared
her so badly she fell back against her mother's turn-of-the-century Hoosier, breaking her
best ceramic pie plate and scraping six inches of skin off her ribs while the cat made its
way back down her again, all tooth and claw and spitting fury. Thirty-six stitches I think
she said she got. And a fever that lasted days.
My second wife says that's pain.
She doesn't know shit, that woman.
Evelyn, my first wife, has maybe gotten closer.
There's an image that haunts her.

She is driving down a rain-slick highway on a hot summer morning in a rented Volvo,
her lover by her side, driving slowly and carefully because she knows how treacherous
new rain on hot streets can be, when a Volkswagen passes her and fishtails into her lane.
Its rear bumper with the "Live Free or Die" plates slides over and kisses her grille.
Almost gently. The rain does the rest. The Volvo reels, swerves, glides over an
embankment and suddenly she and her lover are tumbling through space, they are
weightless and turning, and up is down and then up and then down again. At some point
the steering wheel breaks her shoulder. The rear view mirror cracks her wrist. Then the
rolling stops and she's staring up at the gas pedal overhead. She looks for her lover but he
isn't there anymore; he's disappeared, it's magic. She finds the door on the driver's side
and opens it, crawls out onto wet grass, stands and peers through the rain. And this is the
image that haunts her-a man like a sack of blood, flayed, skinned alive, lying in front of
the car in a spray of glass spackled red.
This sack is her lover.
And this is why she's closer. Even though she blocks what she knows-even though she
sleeps nights. She knows that pain is not just a matter of hurting, of her own
startled body complaining at some invasion of the flesh. Pain can work from the outside
in. I mean that sometimes what you see is pain. Pain in its crudest, purest form. Without
drugs or sleep or even shock or coma to dull it for you.
You see it and you take it in. And then it's you.
You're host to a long white worm that gnaws and eats, growing, filling your intestines
until finally you cough one morning and up comes the blind pale head of the thing sliding
from your mouth like a second tongue.
Kids get second chances. I like to think I'm using mine. Though after two divorces, bad
ones, the worm is apt to gnaw a little. Still I like to remember that it was the Fifties, a
period of strange repressions, secrets, hysteria. I think about Joe McCarthy, though I
barely remember thinking of him at all back then except to wonder what it was that
would make my father race home from work every day to catch the committee hearings
on TV. I think about the Cold War. About air-raid drills in the school basement and films
we saw of atomic testing-department-store mannequins imploding, blown across mockup
living rooms, disintegrating, burning. About copies of Playboy and Man's Action hidden
in wax paper back by the brook, so moldy after a while that you hated to touch them. I
think about Elvis being denounced by the Reverend Deitz at Grace Lutheran Church
when I was ten and the rock 'n' roll riots at Alan Freed's shows at the Paramount.
I say to myself something weird was happening, some great American boil about to burst.
That it was happening all over, not just at Ruth's house but everywhere.

And sometimes that makes it easier. What we did. I'm forty-one now. Born in 1946,
seventeen months to the day after we dropped the Bomb on Hiroshima. Matisse had just
turned eighty. I make a hundred fifty grand a year, working the floor on Wall Street. Two
marriages, no kids. A home in Rye and a company apartment in the city. Most places I go
I use limousines, though in Rye I drive a blue Mercedes.
It may be that I'm about to marry again. The woman I love knows nothing of what I'm
writing here-nor did my other wives-and I don't really know if I ever mean to tell her.
Why should I? I'm successful, even-tempered, generous, a careful and considerate lover.
And nothing in my life has been right since the summer of 1958, when Ruth and Donny
and Willie and all the rest of us met Meg Loughlin and her sister Susan.
I was alone back by the brook, lying on my stomach across the Big Rock with a tin can in
my hand. I was scooping up crayfish. I had two of them already in a larger can beside me.
Little ones. I was looking for their mama. The brook ran fast along either side of me. I
could feel the spray on my bare feet dangling near the water. The water was cold, the sun
warm. I heard a sound in the bushes and looked up. The prettiest girl I'd ever seen was
smiling at me over the embankment. She had long tanned legs and long red hair tied back
in a ponytail, wore shorts and a pale-colored blouse open at the neck. I was twelve and a
half. She was older. I remember smiling back at her, though I was rarely agreeable to
strangers.
"Crayfish," I said. I dumped out a tin of water.
"Really?"
I nodded.
"Big ones?"
"Not these. You can find them, though."
"Can I see?"
She dropped down off the bank just like a boy would, not sitting first, just putting her left
hand to the ground and vaulting the three-foot drop to the first big stone in the line that
led zigzag across the water. She studied the line a moment and then crossed to the Rock. I
was impressed. She had no hesitation and her balance was perfect. I made room for her.
There was suddenly this fine clean smell sitting next to me. Her eyes were green. She
looked around. To all of us back then the Rock was something special.
It sat smack in the middle of the deepest part of the brook, the water running clear and
fast around it. You had room for four kids sitting or six standing up. It had been a pirate
ship, Nemo's Nautilus, and a canoe for the Lenni Lennape among other things. Today the
water was maybe three and a half feet deep. She seemed happy to be there, not scared at
all.

"We call this the Big Rock," I said.

"We used to, I mean. When we were kids."
"I like it," she said.
"Can I see the crayfish? I'm Meg."
"I'm David. Sure."
She peered down into the can. Time went by and we said nothing. She studied them.
Then she straightened up again.
"Neat."
"I just catch 'em and look at 'em a while and then let them go. -"
"Do they bite?"
"The big ones do. They can't hurt you, though. And the little ones just try to run."
"They look like lobsters."
"You never saw a crayfish before?"
"Don't think they have them in New York City." She laughed. I didn't mind.
"We get lobsters, though. They can hurt you."
"Can you keep one? I mean, you can't keep a lobster like a pet or anything, right?"
She laughed again.
"No. You eat them."
"You can't keep a crayfish either. They die. One day or maybe two, tops. I hear people eat
them too, though."
"Really?"
"Yeah. Some do. In Louisiana or Florida or someplace."
We looked down into the can.
"I don't know," she said, smiling.

"There's not a whole lot to eat down there."

"Let's get some big ones."
We lay across the Rock side by side. I took the can and slipped both arms down into the
brook. The trick was to turn the stones one at a time, slowly so as not to muddy the water,
then have the can there ready for whatever scooted out from under. The water was so
deep I had my shortsleeve shirt rolled all the way up to my shoulders. I was aware of how
long and skinny my arms must look to her. I know they looked that way to me. I felt
pretty strange beside her, actually. Uncomfortable but excited. She was different from the
other girls I knew, from Denise or Cheryl on the block or even the girls at school. For one
thing she was maybe a hundred times prettier. As far as I was concerned she was prettier
than Natalie Wood. Probably she was smarter than the girls I knew too, more
sophisticated. She lived in New York City after all and had eaten lobsters. And she
moved just like a boy. She had this strong hard body and easy grace about her.
All that made me nervous and I missed the first one. Not an enormous crayfish but bigger
than what we had. It scudded backward beneath the Rock. She asked if she could try. I
gave her the can.
"New York City, huh?"
"Yup."
She rolled up her sleeves and dipped down into the water. And that was when I noticed
the scar.
"Jeez. What's that?"
It started just inside her left elbow and ran down to the wrist like a long pink twisted
worm. She saw where I was looking.
"Accident," she said.
"We were in a car." Then she looked back into the water where you could see her
reflection shimmering.
"Jeez."
But then she didn't seem to want to talk much after that.
"Got any more of 'em?"
I don't know why scars are always so fascinating to boys, but they are, it's a fact of life,
and I just couldn't help it. I couldn't shut up about it yet. Even though I knew she wanted
me to, even though we'd just met. I watched her turn over a rock. There was nothing

10

under it. She did it correctly though; she didn't muddy the water. I thought she was
terrific.
She shrugged.
"A few. That's the worst."
"Can I see them?"
"No. I don't think so."
She laughed and looked at me a certain way and I got the message. And then I did shut up
for a while.
She turned another rock. Nothing.
"I guess it was a bad one, huh? The accident?"
She didn't answer that at all and I didn't blame her. I knew how stupid and awkward it
sounded, how insensitive, the moment I said it. I blushed and was glad she wasn't
looking.
Then she got one.
The rock slid over and the crayfish backed right out into the can and all she had to do was
bring it up.
She poured off some water and tilted the can toward the sunlight. You could see that nice
gold color they have. Its tail was up and its pincers waving and it was stalking the bottom
of the can, looking for somebody to fight.
"You got her!"
"First try!"
"Great! She's really great."
"Let's put her in with the others."
She poured the water out slowly so as not to disturb her or lose her exactly the way you
were supposed to, though nobody had told her, and then when there was only an inch or
so left in the can, plunked her into the bigger can. The two that were already in there gave
her plenty of room. That was good because crayfish would kill each other sometimes,
they'd kill their own kind, and these two others were just little guys.

11

In a while the new one calmed down and we sat there watching her. She looked primitive,
efficient, deadly, beautiful. Very pretty color and very sleek of design.
I stuck my finger in the can to stir her up again.
"Don't."
Her hand was on my arm. It was cool and soft.
I took my finger out again.
I offered her a stick of Wrigley's and took one myself.
Then all you could hear for a while was the wind whooshing through the tall thin grass
across the embankment and rustling the brush along the brook and the sound of the brook
running fast from last night's rain, and us chewing.
"You'll put them back, right? You promise?"
"Sure. I always do."
"Good."
She sighed and then stood up.
"I've got to get back I guess. We've got shopping to do. But I wanted to look around first
thing. I mean, we've never had a woods before.
Thanks, David. It was fun."
She was halfway across the stones by the time I thought to ask her.
"Hey! Back where? Where are you going?"
She smiled.
"We're staying with the Chandlers. Susan and I. Susan's my sister." Then I stood too, like
somebody had jerked me to my feet on invisible strings.
"The Chandlers? Ruth? Donny and Willie's mom?"
She finished crossing and turned and stared at me.
And something in her face was different now all of a sudden.
Cautious.

12

It stopped me.
"That's right. We're cousins. Second cousins. I'm Ruth's niece I guess."
Her voice had gone odd on me too. It sounded flat-like there was something I wasn't
supposed to know.
Like she was telling me something and hiding it at the same time.
It confused me for a moment. I had the feeling that maybe it confused her too.
It was the first I'd seen her flustered. Even including the stuff about the scar.
I didn't let it bother me though.
Because the Chandlers' house was right next door to my house.
And Ruth was .. . well, Ruth was great. Even if her kids were jerks sometimes. Ruth was
great.
"Hey!" I said.
"We're neighbors! Mine's the brown house next door!"
I watched her climb the embankment. When she got to the top she turned and her smile
was back again, the clean open look she'd had when she first sat down beside me on the
Rock.
She waved.
"See you, David."
"See you, Meg."
Neat, I thought. Incredible. I'll be seeing her all the time. It was the first such thought I'd
ever had. I realize that now.

That day, on that Rock, I met my adolescence head-on in the person of Megan Loughlin,
a stranger two years older than I was, with a sister, a secret, and long red hair. That it
seemed so natural to me, that I emerged unshaken and even happy about the experience I
think said much for my future possibilities-and of course for hers. When I think of that, I
hate Ruth Chandler. Ruth, you were beautiful then. I've thought about you a lot-no, I've
researched you, I've gone that far, dug into your past, parked across the street one day
from that Howard Avenue office building you were always telling us about, where you

13

ran the whole damn show while the Boys were away fighting The Big One, the War to
End All Wars Part Two-that place where you were utterly, absolutely indispensable until
the "little GI pukes came strutting back home again, " as you put it, and suddenly you
were out of a job. I parked there and it looked ordinary, Ruth. It looked squalid and sad
and boring.
I drove to Morristown where you were born and that was nothing too. Of course I didn't
know where your house was supposed to be but I certainly couldn't see your grand
disappointed dreams being born there either, in that town, I couldn't see the riches your
parents supposedly thrust upon you, showered you with, I couldn 't see your wild
frustration.
I sat in your husband Willie Sr. 's bar-yes!--! found him Ruth! In Fort Myers, Florida,
where he'd been ever since he left you with your three squalling brats and a mortgage all
these thirty years ago, I found him playing barkeep to the senior citizens, a mild man,
amiable, long past his prime-I sat there and looked at his face and into his eyes and we
talked and I couldn't see the man you always said he was, the stud, the "'lovely Irish
bastard," that mean sonovabitch. He looked like a man gone soft and old to me. A
drinker's nose, a drinker's gut, a fat fallen ass in a pair of baggy britches. And he looked
like he'd never been hard, Ruth. Never. That was the surprise, really.
Like the hardness was elsewhere.
So what was it, Ruth? All lies? All your own inventions?
I wouldn 't put it past you.
Or maybe it was that for you-funneled through you-lies and truth were the same. I'm
going to try to change that now if I can. I'm going to tell our little story. Straight as I can
from here on in and no interruptions. And I'm writing this for you, Ruth. Because I never
got to pay you back, really. So here's my check. Overdue and overdrawn. Cash it in hell.

Early the following morning I walked next door. I remember feeling shy about it, a little
awkward, and that was pretty unusual because nothing could have been more natural than
to see what was going on over there. It was morning. It was summer. And that was what
you did. You got up, ate breakfast and then you went outside and looked around to see
who was where. The Chandler house was the usual place to start. Laurel Avenue was a
dead-end street back then-it isn't anymore-a single shallow cut into the half-circle of
woodland that bordered the south side of West Maple and ran back for maybe a mile
behind it. When the road was first cut during the early 1800s the woods were so thick
with tall first growth timber they called it Dark Lane. That timber was all gone by now
but it was still a quiet, pretty street. Shade trees everywhere, each house different from
the one beside it and not too close together like some you saw. There were still only
thirteen homes on the block. Ruth's, ours, five others going up the hill on our side of the

14

street and six on the opposite. Every family but the Zorns had kids. And every kid knew
every other kid like he knew his own brother. So if you wanted company you could
always find some back by the brook or the crab apple grove or up in somebody's yardwhoever had the biggest plastic pool that year or the target for bow and arrow. If you
wanted to get lost that was easy too. The woods were deep. The Dead End Kids, we
called ourselves. It had always been a closed circle. We had our own set of rules, our own
mysteries, our own secrets. We had a pecking order and we applied it with a vengeance.
We were used to it that way. But now there was somebody new on the block. Somebody
new over at Ruth's place.
It felt funny.
Especially because it was that somebody.
Especially because it was that place.
It felt pretty damn funny indeed.
Ralphie was squatting out by the rock garden. It was maybe eight o'clock and already he
was dirty. There were streaks of sweat and grime all over his face and arms and legs like
he'd been running all morning and falling down thwack in deep clouds of dust. Falling
frequently. Which he probably had, knowing Ralphie. Ralphie was ten years old and I
don't think I'd ever seen him clean for more than fifteen minutes in my life. His shorts
and T-shirt were crusty too. "Hey, Woofer."
Except for Ruth, nobody called him Ralphie-always Woofer. When he wanted to be
could sound more like the Robertsons' basset hound Mitsy than Mitsy could.

"Hiya, Dave."
He was turning over rocks, watching potato bugs and thousand-loggers scurry away from
the light. But I could see he wasn't interested in them. He kept moving one rock after the
other. Turning them over, dropping them down again. He had a Libby's lima beans can
beside him and he kept on shifting that too, keeping it close beside his scabby knees as he
went from rock to rock.
"What's in the can?"
"Nightcrawlers," he said. He still hadn't looked at me.
He was concentrating, frowning, moving with that jerky nervous energy that was
patented Woofer. Like he was a scientist in a lab on the brink of some incredible fantastic
discovery and he wished you'd just leave him the hell alone to get on with it. He flipped
another rock.

15

"Donny around?"
"Yep." He nodded.
Which meant that Donny was inside. And since I felt kind of nervous about going inside I
stayed with him awhile. He upended a big one. And apparently found what he was after.
Red ants. A swarm of them down there beneath the rock-hundreds, thousands of them.
All going crazy with the sudden light. I've never been fond of ants. We used to put up
pots of water to boil and then pour it on them whenever they decided it would be nice to
climb the front-porch steps over at our place-which for some reason they did about once
every summer. It was my dad's idea, but I endorsed it entirely. I thought boiling water
was just about what ants deserved. I could smell their iodine smell along with wet earth
and wet cut grass. Woofer pushed the rock away and then reached into the Libby's can.
He dug out a nightcrawler and then a second one and dumped them in with the ants.
He did this from a distance of about three feet. Like he was bombing the ants with worm
meat. The ants responded. The worms began rolling and bucking as the ants discovered
their soft pink flesh.
"Sick, Woofer," I said.
"That's really sick."
"I found some black ones over there," he said. He pointed to a rock on the opposite side
of the porch.
"You know, the big ones. Gonna collect 'em and put 'em in with these guys here. Start an
ant war. You want to bet who wins?"
"The red ants will win," I said.
"The red ants always win."
It was true. The red ants were ferocious. And this game was not new to me.
"I got another idea," I said.
"Why don't you stick your hand in there? Pretend you're Son of Kong or something."
He looked at me. I could tell he was considering it.
Then he smiled.
"Naw," he said.
"That's retarded."

16

I got up. The worms were still squirming.

"See you, Woof," I said.
I climbed the stairs to the porch. I knocked on the screen door and went inside. Donny
was sprawled on the couch wearing nothing but a pair of wrinkled white slept-in boxer
shorts. He was only three months older than I was but much bigger in the chest and
shoulders and now, recently, he was developing a pretty good belly, following in the
footsteps of his brother, Willie Jr. It was not a beautiful thing to see and I wondered
where Meg was now. He looked up at me from a copy of Plastic Man. Personally I'd
pretty much quit the comics since the Comic Code came in in '54 and you couldn't get
Web of Mystery anymore.
"How you doin', Dave?"
Ruth had been ironing. The board was leaning up in a corner and you could smell that
sharp musky tang of clean, superheated fabric. I looked around.
"Pretty good. Where's everybody?"
He shrugged.
"Went shopping."
"Willie went shopping? You're kidding."
He closed the comic and got up, smiling, scratching his armpit. "Naw. Willie's got a nineo'clock appointment with the dentist. Willie's got cavities. Ain't it a killer?"
Donny and Willie Jr. had been born an hour and a half apart but for some reason Willie
Jr. had very soft teeth and Donny didn't. He was always at the dentist's. We laughed.
"I hear you met her."
"Who?"
Donny looked at me. I guess I wasn't fooling anybody. "Oh, your cousin. Yeah. Down by
the Rock yesterday.
She caught a crayfish first try." Donny nodded.
"She's good at stuff," he said. It wasn't exactly enthusiastic praise, but for Donny-and
especially for Donny talking about a girl-it was pretty respectful.
"C'mon," he said.

17

"Wait here while I get dressed and we'll go see what Eddie's doing."
I groaned.
Of all the kids on Laurel Avenue Eddie was the one I tried to stay away from. Eddie was
crazy. I remember Eddie walking down the street once in the middle of a
stickball game we were playing stripped to the waist with a big live black snake stuck
between his teeth. Nature Boy. He threw it at Woofer, who screamed, and then at Billy
Borkman. In fact he kept picking it up and throwing it at all the little kids and chasing
them waving the snake until the concussion of hitting the road so many times sort of got
to the snake eventually and it wasn't much fun anymore. Eddie got you in trouble. Eddie's
idea of a great time was to do something dangerous or illegal, preferably both-walk the
crossbeams of a house under construction or pelt crab apples at cars from Canoe Brook
Bridge-and maybe get away with it. If you got caught or hurt that was okay, that was
funny. If he got caught or hurt it was still funny.

Linda and Betty Martin swore they saw him bite off the head of a frog once. Nobody
doubted it. His house was at the top of the street on the opposite side from us, and Tony
and Lou Morino, who lived next door, said they heard his father beating up on him all the
time. Practically every night. His mother and sister got it too. I remember his mother, a
big gentle woman with rough thick peasant hands, crying over coffee in the kitchen with
my mom, her right eye a great big puffy shiner.
My dad said Mr. Crocker was nice enough sober but a mean drunk. I didn't know about
that but Eddie had inherited his father's temper and you never knew when it would go off
on you. When it did, he was as likely to pick up a stick or a rock as use his hands. We all
bore the scars somewhere. I'd been on the receiving end more than once. Now I tried to
stay away. Donny and Willie liked him though. Life with Eddie was exciting, you had to
give him that much. Though even they knew
Eddie was crazy.
Around Eddie they got crazy too.
"Tell you what," I said.
"I'll walk you up. But I'm not gonna hang around up there."
"Ahh, come on."
"I've got other stuff to do."
"What stuff?"

18

"Just stuff."
"What're you gonna do, go home and listen to your mother's Perry Como records?"
I gave him a look. He knew he was out of line.
We were all Elvis fans.
He laughed.
"Suit yourself, sport. Just wait up a minute. I'll be right there."
He went down the hall to his bedroom and it occurred to me to wonder how they were
working that now that Meg and Susan were there, just who was sleeping where. I walked
over to the couch and picked up his Plastic Man. I flipped the pages and put it down
again. Then I wandered from the living room to the dining area where Ruth's clean
laundry lay folded on the table and finally into the kitchen. I opened the Frigidaire. As
usual there was food for sixty.
I called to Donny.
"Okay to have a Coke?"
"Sure. And open one for me, will ya?"
I took out the Cokes, pulled open the right-hand drawer and got the bottle opener. Inside
the silverware was stacked all neat and tidy. It always struck me as weird how Ruth had
all this food all the time yet had service only for five-five spoons, five forks, five knives,
five steak knives, and no soup spoons at all. Of course except for us Ruth never had any
company that I knew of. But now there were six people living there. I wondered if she'd
finally have to break down and buy some more. I opened the bottles. Donny came out and
I handed him one. He was wearing jeans and Keds and a T-shirt. The T-shirt was tight
over his belly. I gave it a little pat there.
"Better watch it, Donald," I said.
"Better watch it yourself, homo."
"Oh, that's right, I'm a homo, right?"
"You're a retard is what you are."
"I'm a retard? You're a skank."
"Skank? Girls are skanks. Girls and homos are skanks. You're the skank. I'm the Duke of
Earl." He punctuated it with a punch to the arm which I returned, and we jostled a little.

19

Donny and I were as close to best friends as boys got in those days. We went out through
the back door into the yard, then around the driveway to the front, and started up to
Eddie's. It was a matter of honor to ignore the sidewalk. We walked in the middle of the
street. We sipped our Cokes. There was never any traffic anyway.
"Your brother's maiming worms in the rock garden," I told him. He glanced back over his
shoulder.
"Cute little fella, ain't he," "So how do you like it?" I asked him.
"Like what?"
"Having Meg and her sister around?"
He shrugged.
"Don't know. They just got here." He took a swig of Coke, belched, and smiled.
"That Meg's pretty cute, though, ain't she? Shit! My cousin!"
I didn't want to comment, though I agreed with him.
"Second cousin, though, you know? Makes a difference. Blood or something. I dunno.
Before, we never saw 'em."
"Never?"
"My mom says once. I was too young to remember."
"What's her sister like?"

"Susan? Like nothing. Just a little kid. What is she, eleven or something?"
"Woofer's only ten."
"Yeah, right. And what's Woofer?"
You couldn't argue there.
"Got messed up bad in that accident, though."
"Susan?"
He nodded and pointed to my waist.

20

"Yeah. Broke everything from there on down, my mom says. Every bone you got. Hips,
legs, everything."
"Jeez."
"She still don't walk too good. She's all casted up. Got those-what do you call 'em?--metal
things, sticks, that strap on to your arms and you grab 'em, haul yourself along. Kids with
polio wear 'em. I forget what they're called. Like crutches."
"Jeez. Is she going to walk again?"
"She walks."
"I mean like regular."
"I dunno."
We finished our Cokes. We were almost at the top of the hill. It was almost time for me
to leave him there. That or suffer Eddie.
"They both died, y'know," he said. Just like that. I knew who he meant, of course, but for
a moment I just couldn't get my mind to wrap around it. Not right away.
It was much too weird a concept. Parents didn't just die. Not on my street. And certainly
not in car accidents. That kind of thing happened elsewhere, in places more dangerous
than Laurel Avenue. They happened in movies or in books. You heard about it on Walter
Cronkite. Laurel Avenue was a dead-end street. You walked down the middle of it. But I
knew he wasn't lying. I remembered Meg not wanting to talk about the accident or the
scars and me pushing. I knew he wasn't lying but it was hard to handle. We just kept
walking together, me not saying anything, just looking at him and not really seeing him
either. Seeing Meg. It was a very special moment. I know Meg attained a certain glamour
for me then. Suddenly it was not just that she was pretty or smart or able to handle herself
crossing the brook-she was almost unreal. Like no one I'd ever met or was likely to meet
outside of books or the Matinee. Like she was fiction, some sort of heroine. I pictured her
back by the Rock and now I saw this person who was really brave lying next to me. I saw
horror. Suffering, survival, disaster. Tragedy. All this in an instant. Probably I had my
mouth open. I guess Donny thought I didn't know what he was talking about.
"Meg's parents, numb nuts Both of 'em. My mom says they must have died instantly.
That they didn't know what hit 'em." He snorted.
"Fact is, what hit 'em was a Chrysler."

And it may have been his rich bad taste that pulled me back to normal.

21

"I saw the scar on her arm," I told him.

"Yeah, I saw it, too. Neat, huh? You should see Susan's though. Scars all over the place.
Gross. My mom says she's lucky to be alive."
"She probably is."
"Anyhow that's how come we've got 'em. There isn't anybody else. It's us or some
orphanage somewhere." He smiled.
"Lucky them, huh?"
And then he said something that came back to me later. At the time I guessed it was true
enough, but for some reason I remembered it. I remembered it well.
He said it just as we got to Eddie's house, I see myself standing in the middle of the road
about to turn and go back down the hill again, go off by myself somewhere, not wanting
any part of Eddie-at least not that day. I see Donny turning to throw the words over his
shoulder on his way across the lawn to the porch. Casually, but with an odd sort of
sincerity about him, as though this were absolute gospel.
"My mom says Meg's the lucky one," he said.
"My mom says she got off easy."

It was a week and a half before I got to see her again apart from a glimpse here and theretaking out the trash once, weeding in the garden. Now that I knew the whole story it was
even harder to approach her. I'd never felt so shy. I'd rehearse what I might say to her.
But nothing sounded right. What did you say to someone who'd just lost half her family?
It stood there like a rock I couldn't scale. So I avoided her. Then my family and I did our
yearly duty trip to Sussex County to visit my father's sister, so for four whole days I
didn't have to think about it. It was almost a relief. I say almost because my parents were
less than two years from divorce by then and the trip was awful-three tense days of
silence in the car going up and coming back with a lot of phony jolliness in between that
was supposed to benefit my aunt and uncle but didn't. You could see my aunt and uncle
looking at one another every now and then as if to say Jesus, get these people out of here.
They knew. Everybody knew. My parents couldn't have hidden pennies from a blind man
by then. But once we were home it was back to wondering about Meg again. I don't know
why it never occurred to me just to forget it, that she might not want to be reminded of
her parents' death any more than I wanted to talk about it.

22

But it didn't. I figured you had to say something and I couldn't get it right. It was
important to me that I not make an ass of myself over this. It was important to me that I
not make an ass of myself in Meg's eyes period. I wondered about Susan too. In nearly
two weeks I'd never seen her. That ran contrary to everything I knew. How could you live
next door to someone and never see her? I thought about her legs and Donny saying her
scars were really bad to look at. Maybe she was afraid to go out. I could relate to that. I'd
been spending a lot of time indoors myself these days, avoiding her sister. It couldn't last
though. It was the first week of June by then, time for the Kiwanis Karnival. To miss the
Karnival was like missing summer. Directly across from us not half a block away was an
old six-room schoolhouse called Central School where we all used to go as little kids,
grades one through five. They held the Karnival there on the playground every year. Ever
since we were old enough to be allowed to cross the street we'd go over and watch them
set up. For that one week, being that close, we were the luckiest kids in town. Only the
concessions were run by the Kiwanis-the food stands, the game booths, the wheels of
fortune. The rides were all handled by a professional touring company and run by carnies.
To us the carnies were exotic as hell. Roughlooking men and women who worked with
Camels stuck between their teeth, squinting against the smoke curling into their eyes,
sporting tattoos and calluses and scars and smelling of grease and old sweat. They cursed,
they drank Schlitz as they worked. Like us, they were not opposed to spitting lungers in
the dirt. We loved the Karnival and we loved the carnies. You had to. In a single summer
afternoon they would take our playground and transform it from a pair of baseball
diamonds, a blacktop, and a soccer field into a brand-new city of canvas and whirling
steel.
They did it so fast you could hardly believe your eyes. It was magic, and the magicians
all had gold-tooth smiles and "I love Velma" etched into their biceps.
Irresistible. It was still pretty early and when I walked over they were still unpacking the
trucks. This was when you couldn't talk to them. They were too busy. Later while they
were setting up or testing the machinery you could hand them tools, maybe even get a sip
of beer out of them. The local kids were their bread and butter after all. They wanted you
to come back that night with friends and family and they were usually friendly. But now
you just had to watch and keep out of the way. Cheryl and Denise were already there,
leaning on the backstop fence behind home plate and staring through the links. I stood
with them. Things seemed tense to me. You could see why. It was only morning but the
sky looked dark and threatening. Once, a few years ago, it had rained every night of the
Karnival except Thursday. Everybody took a beating when that happened. The grips and
carnies worked grimly now, in silence.

Cheryl and Denise lived up the street across from one another. They were friends but I
think only because of what Zelda Gilroy on The Dobie Gillis Show used to call
propinquity. They didn't have much in common. Cheryl was a tall skinny brunette who
would probably be pretty a few years later but now she was all arms and

23

legs, taller than I was and two years younger. She had two brothers-Kenny and Malcolm.
Malcolm was just a little kid who sometimes played with Woofer. Kenny was almost my
age but a year behind me in school. All three kids were very quiet and well-behaved.
Their parents, the Robertsons, took no shit but I doubt that by nature they were disposed
to give any. Denise was Eddie's sister. Another type entirely. Denise was edgy, nervous,
almost as reckless as her brother, with a
marked propensity toward mockery. As though all the world were a bad joke and she was
the only one around who knew the punchline. "It's David," she said. And there was the
mockery, just pronouncing my name. I didn't like it but I ignored it. That was the way to
handle Denise. If she got no rise she got no payoff and it made her more normal
eventually.
"Hi Cheryl. Denise. How're they doing?"
Denise said, "I think that's the Tilt-a-Whirl there. Last year that's where they put the
Octopus." "It could still be the Octopus," said Cheryl. "Unh-unh. See those platforms?"
She pointed to the wide sheets of metal.
"The Tilt-a-Whirl's got platforms. Wait till they get the cars out.
You'll see."
She was right. When the cars came out it was the Tilta-Whirl. Like her father and her
brother Eddie, Denise was good at mechanical things, good with tools.
"They're worried about rain," she said.
" They 're worried." said Cheryl.
"I'm worried!" She sighed in exasperation. It was very exaggerated. I smiled.
There was always something sweetly serious about Cheryl.
You just knew her favorite book was Alice in Wonderland.
The truth was, I liked her.
"It won't rain," Denise said.
"How do you know?"
"It just won't." Like she wouldn't let it.
"See that there?" She pointed to a huge gray and white truck rolling back to the center of
the soccer field.

24

"I bet that's the Ferris wheel. That's where they had it last year and the year before. Want
to see?"
"Sure," I said.
We skirted the Tilt-a-Whirl and some kiddie boat rides they were unloading on the
macadam, walked along the cyclone fence that separated the playground from the brook,
cut through a row of tents going up for the ring-toss and bottle-throw and whatever, and
came out onto the field. The grips had just opened the doors to the truck. The painted