"I'm going to hang up, Myles. And I don't want you to call me any more. All right?"

"You f.a.ggot, you see her one more time and I'll kill you. You f.u.c.king understand me?"

He was the one who hung up.

CHAPTER TEN.

At first I wasn't sure I liked the idea of the roses. I mean, roses aren't something you send a he-man, even one who used to be something of a dip-s.h.i.t.

But after my mom got them in the vase and sitting up on the table in front of the window... they looked very pretty... especially now that the snow had stopped and the sun was out and the afternoon had warmed all the way up to thirty-four..

"I wonder who sent them."

"Probably Cindy," I said.

"Well, wasn't that nice of her?" Mom said. "She sure sounds like a nice girl."

"Yeah, she is." And then I closed my eyes and pictured her a moment. And then I said again, "Yeah, she is."

"I wasn't sure if you'd like them."

"They're great."

"Your mom fixed them up so nice."

"Yeah."

"I really like your parents."

"They really like you."

"Really? They said that?"

I smiled. "Really. They said that."

Mom and Dad had gone to a movie at the Cineplex. Josh had gone to the game. They'd all been there when Cindy had shown up. It was kind of awkward at first, me never having exactly had a girlfriend before, but then everybody got along great.

"When did they say it?" Cindy said.

"When did they say what?"

"That they liked me?"

"Oh. Right before they left."

"I didn't hear them say anything."

"They whispered it."

"You're not making it up?"

"Huh-uh."

For a beautiful, bright girl, Cindy had almost as many insecurities as I did.

We were on the couch. She'd already given me eight or nine kisses so I wasn't nervous about kissing her back. I took her face to mine and gave her a kiss and it was like a contact high.

"There's a David Cronenberg movie on in twenty minutes."

"David Cronenberg?"

"He's a director. Canadian."

"Oh."

"It's a little bit gross."

"What's it called?"

"The Brood."

"What's it about?"

"These little babies that are monsters."

"Do they look real, you know, icky and stuff?"

"Pretty icky."

"Do you have any Barbara Streisand movies?"

"Huh-uh."

"Maybe there'll be something on MTV."

"Yeah, maybe."

She made popcorn and we watched MTV. It was the usual stuff. The VJ named Kennedy kept trying to make a fool of herself and pretty much succeeded; and a couple of rap songs talked about what pigs girls were and how white guys pretty much deserved to die; and then one of the MTV male-model types came on and traded a few yuks with Kennedy and pretended that he was pretty much like all the guys watching the show, except maybe for his Porsche convertible and the $10,000 worth of caps on his teeth.

After MTV there was this show called Dimension 4, which was about all these allegedly true stories of people who have been abducted, and who have paranormal powers, and who claim they can channel the voices of people who used to live in condos in Atlantis.

I started mocking some of the guests and for the first time, Cindy got irritated with me.

"That's not very nice."

"Cindy, the guy claimed that the alien gives him extra s.e.xual powers and that he'd like to hear from a bunch of women so he could demonstrate how good he is these days."

"So?"

"Doesn't that sound like a put-on?"

"Gee, the way you like science fiction, I'd think you'd have more of an open mind."

I saw that it really was bothering her, the way I'd made fun of the people, and then I realized that I'd slipped back into my dip-s.h.i.t mode. Putting people down. Sounding like Mr. Know-It-All on the Bullwinkle show.

"Hey, I'm sorry, I really am."

"I believe in aliens," she said.

"You do?"

I couldn't help it. When she said that, my mind immediately went back to the breakdown she'd had, and the time she'd spent in the mental hospital.

"Yes, I do." She looked distant a moment, as if she was remembering something painful. "In fact, I know someone whose mind has been taken over by an alien."

"You do?"

"Yes. And you know him, too."

"I do?"

She nodded. "There's a well out in the woods."

"A well?"

"I'd like to take you there. Would you go?"

"Sure," I said. But I was thinking about her breakdown and the mental hospital again.

For a moment there, I had the suspicion that she was putting me on. Then I realized that it wasn't her style, being sly like that. For all her beauty, she was nervous a lot of the time, and spoke in a very straightforward way. The put-on wasn't part of her.

I was going to say more but that was when I saw headlights sweep the front windows, and heard a car pull into the driveway.

"My folks," I said.

She looked at the clock. "Gosh, it's after ten already."

"That's not very late."

"For you it is," she said. "You need your rest. That's the only way you're going to get better."

"I'm already better."

I tugged her face gently to mine. "Especially after tonight."

This was our first French kiss.

I wanted to start running around the room and yelling yippee the way Yosemite Sam might have but I decided that that was something only a dip-s.h.i.t would do.

Instead I said, "I really like you, Cindy."

And she just looked at me and I couldn't read her.

And I was scared because I knew she could break my heart any time she wanted to, utterly destroy me. When somebody has that kind of power over you, you're a fool not to fear them in some ways.

"I really do know somebody who's being controlled by an alien," she said very softly. "When you're better, I want to take you someplace, OK?"

"I'd love to go."

I was afraid she wasn't ever going to say anything romantic back to me.

Then she smiled and said, "I really like you, too. I just wanted you to know that."

Then my folks were there, and the fun was all over.

CHAPTER ELEVEN.

Two nights later, we went to get a pizza, and afterward she took me out to the well.

Everything was silent except for our feet crunching through the layer of ice. The town spread out below us like a mirage on a vast white prairie. A midnight train ran the length of the distant countryside, tearing through the darkness with purpose and fury.

The moonlight on the snow gave the woods a soft glow. Fox and possum and racc.o.o.n and rabbit darted through the undergrowth as we made our way deeper into the stands of hardwoods. My nose and cheeks were frozen. Our breath was vapor. Despite the cold, every time I'd touch her for any significant time, I'd get an erection. I was a virgin, but not a happy one.

Little kids in our town believe that there are two long-haunted places. One is the old red brick school abandoned back in the fifties. The story they tell is that there was this really wicked princ.i.p.al, a warted crone who looked a lot like Miss Grundy in "Archie" comics, who on two occasions took two different first-graders to the bas.e.m.e.nt and beat them so badly that they died. Legend has it that she cracked the concrete floor, buried them beneath it and poured fresh concrete. Legend also has it that even today the spirits of those two little kids still haunt the old schoolhouse and that, on certain nights, the ghost of the princ.i.p.al can be seen carrying a blood-dripping axe.

The other legend concerns Parkinson's cabin, a place built in the mid-1800s by a white man who planned to do a lot of business with the Mesquakie Indians. Except something went wrong. The local newspaper noted that a huge meteor was seen by many locals one night, and that it crashed to earth not far from Trapper Parkinson's crude cabin. The odd thing was, n.o.body ever saw or talked to Parkinson again after the meteor crash. Perfect soil for a legend to grow.

It took us thirty-five minutes to reach the cabin from the road. About halfway there, Cindy finally told me that that was where we were headed. Bramble and first-growth pine made the last of our pa.s.sage slow. But then we stood on a small hill, the moon big and round and blanched white like the one the Aztec priests always called a demon moon, and looked down on a disintegrating lean-to of boards and tar paper. Over the years, hobos had periodically tried to fix the place up. An ancient plow, all blade-rusted and wood-rotted, stood next to the cabin. A silver snake of moon-touched creek ran behind.

And then Cindy said, "You see it over there? The well?"

Sometime in the early part of this century, when the last of the Mormons were trekking their way across the country to Utah, a straggling band stopped here long enough to help a young couple finish the well they'd started digging. The Mormons, being decent folks indeed, even built the people a pit made of native stone and a roof made of birch. And the well itself hadn't been easy to dig. You started with a sharp-pointed augur looking for water and then you dug with a shovel when you found it. Sometimes you dug two hundred feet, sending up buckets of rock and dirt and shale for days before you were done. It was all tumbledown now, of course, but you could see in the remnants of the pit how impressive it must have been when it was new.