Why the Devil Chose New England for His Work Read Free Page B

smelled of chocolate. His eyes watered when she rested her hand on his knee and started to rub his thigh as if he were cold. She rubbed until his leg burned. Her stomach rose and sank over the gentle slopes as Dion pressed down harder on the pedal. The road to Monmouth was straight and rolling, the Firebird rising and falling as if with the swells of a heavy sea, the shocks rattling in a drum roll. Slow down, she said, but he didn’t. What’s in Monmouth? she wanted to know but didn’t want to know. There was no reason to know, even though she had heard and did know. The bar everyone had heard about, the Chanticleer, that no one, at least no one from Bigelow Junior High, had been to. We heard itsmelled of a cellar after a flood, the sweet twinge of wet walls and soaked carpets on a warm day.
    It was a low windowless building tucked under a maple tree between the side of the road and a trickling stream, no light outside except the one BUD sign. This beer, golden from the tap, was sweeter than what Ron had given her, stolen from his father’s icebox. She sat in the back of the room, far away from the others at the pool table, and stared down into her glass. She took a sip and put the mug down. He came over from the pool table and traced his finger along her lower lip, leaned over to kiss her. He loved her in that yellow sweater, her breasts weighted, pushing against the soft fabric, her yellow hair, each strand distinct, falling around her chin. She didn’t want him to put on any music, she didn’t want to play pool, she didn’t want to have another beer, she didn’t want to sit alone so many miles from home, she didn’t want to be sitting under the bar light, dissected in its brightness at the end of this numberless dark road. So he took the keys to the car, the hell with the rest, and they drove all the way up to Monmouth over the Kennebec River and back again.
    They held hands all the way; he said nothing and she loved the way he said it. She didn’t want to go home, and so they kept going in another direction. All the roads looked the same at night. She said it clearly to him, LOVE, just before dawn, and he was afraid as they parked by a river, further away from home than she had ever been, of touching her. So she touched himas she had seen herself touch him in her mind, and just as she had imagined he held absolutely still. If he said anything, he said what she thought he would say, he said what she wanted him to say, what we all wanted to hear, things he had never said to anyone before, words he had never thought before, whose meaning he would not have been able to explain but felt as he said them as clearly as he felt her breath on his neck, as surely sweet as her hair was soft, as clearly as he felt he was not the same and would not ever want anything, anyone, as much as he wanted her.
    The night she didn’t come home, the first night ever, people thought of her bruised and bleeding in the corner of some motel room halfway between Vaughn and Mississippi. Others thought of her in the Hyatt in Boston, or they wouldn’t wait so long: the Marriott in Portsmouth. Or they were on a cruise, on the Scotia Prince headed for Halifax, gambling in black tie and satin dress. And still others said, shaking their heads, No, no, she was gone, long gone from us, lying somewhere by the railway tracks. The man in the caboose will find her the next time we hear the Boston and Maine. She’s somewhere between Haymarket and Bangor, bleeding into the gravel, her linens smudged, silk torn, the blush of her cheeks chalk white, and Dion halfway to Mexico. Andy was the only one who got it right, the more obvious answer: they lay side by side in the back of his brother’s car parked on the edge of afield in the next county. She pulled the blanket beneath her chin as he pulled her head against his chest and ran a single finger through her hair. When she tilted her head, only her bangs and her