The supper of small talk passes, bacon wrapped in white bread, water from the creek, cheese. Nathan washes the dishes afterward, kneeling by the creek bed. Neither stars nor moon can be seen tonight; dark clouds are rolling overhead. The pitch of insect and frog song rises, then the wind picks up the note and out sings everything. Gusts whip the campfire and towers of sparks rise briefly over the heads of the boys. They are listening to the forest, no one is speaking. Smoke from the fire flies toward the murky branches, vanishing within the tangles. Tonight the world is wide and has a clean, sharp smell; the feeling of open space overwhelms Nathan and he flares his nostrils at the change of air, the taste of lightning. Roy stands with his hands in his pockets and his head thrown back, drinking the world through closed lids. He is breathing with a strong, steady beat. "I'm glad we came out here," he says, to no one in particular, and Burke grunts at him and Randy echoes his words.
Burke pulls out a little bottle and passes it around. Roy sips from it, and so does Randy. Nathan sniffs the whiskey and passes it back to Burke, who sneers. "Don't want none for yourself?"
"No."
"What's the matter?" "Nothing's the matter."
Burke swallows, then caps the bottle. He stares at Roy, at Roy's face in the fire. "You want some more?" "Not right now."
Burke shrugs. "Just say when, podner." "It's been a lot of people killed out in these woods." Roy smiles at Nathan, across the fire.
"Don't start this shit, Roy." Randy takes the bottle from Burke.
Burke laughs.
"I mean it. It was two men killed out here this summer, wad'n it?" Roy nods to Burke. "That's right. Two of them."
"Them two suckers from Blue Springs. They found one of them hanging upside down with his nuts cut off. You 'member, Burke?"
"You're full of shit," Randy says, "there wad'n anything cut off of them."
"That's not what the deputy sheriff told my dad. They found one of them men hanging upside down, and his nuts had been sliced off at the root, and his eyes popped open from hanging upside down like that, and he bled to death. They still don't know who done it."
"And they never found his nuts, neither," Burke hooted, laughing.
"Nope, they never did."
"You two sonofabitches better shut this shit up."
The gale of laughter at Randy's expense precedes silence, and the bottle goes round again. Roy drinks. "There was one man who was killed out here one time, they chopped his head up with a hatchet, so bad you couldn't even tell who he was, and my dad used to see him sometimes in our back fields, still walking around like he was looking for something. He would come right to the edge of the woods and look out, and that was all he would do. Then he would go back and look somewheres else."
Randy refuses to respond. Arms crossed, he stares upward into the shadows of branches.
"You know a lot of stories like that," Burke says.
Roy takes this as praise, pleased with himself. "What do you say, Randy? You want to hear some more ghost stories?"
"Suit yourself." Tightlipped.
"Tell that one about the bloody red hand," Burke says, "that's the one I like, you know, with the mansion, and the knocking at the window, and all."
Roy sips from the flask again, and stirs up the fire. Leaning back on his arms, he studies the fire and recites his story, about the man in Somersville who killed his girlfriend's husband and chopped off his hand, only to be pursued thereafter for the remainder of his days by a Bloody Red Hand, which could enter through the window of even the most secure chamber, after knocking on the window three times first, and then entering and creeping across the windowsill and strangling its victims with bloody red fingers. Killing the killer's most precious relations one at a time before finding the killer himself at last. "And the police have that whole story right down in their files in Somersville, only if you ask them about it, they act like it never happened."
He tells the story of the Devil's Stamping Ground, a place in the woods where the Devil comes to dance, you can see his hoof prints baked into the ground, and if you sleep too close to the circle, you're never seen again.
