“Hey, Eddie,” Scotty told his buddy when they got together about the same time Jack and his friends were going their separate ways from the Frostee Freeze. “We got a little problem. The kid’s pool I thought we had went to the junk.”

“Well, nuts,” Eddie replied. “You got any ideas?”

“The only thing I thought of was that we could put a big sheet of plastic in the back of my truck, and dump the ice and beer and shit into it.”

“Yeah, that ought to work,” Eddie agreed.

“The hooker in the deal is that if we’re gonna have a bonfire we’re going to have to get some wood. If we have the back of the truck full of ice it’s going to be hard to deal with the wood.”

“Well, yeah,” Eddie said. “About the only thing I can think of is to go find some wood right now, haul it out to where we’re going to have the party, dump it off, and then sweep out the back and get the ice and salt. That means we’re going to have to get hot on getting the wood.”

“That would work, but you got any ideas where we could find some?”

Eddie thought for a few seconds. “Well, yeah,” he said finally. “There’s a house going up out northeast of town, and there might be some cut-off two by four ends out there. If not, I can think of a couple hunting cabins out in the woods with no one around where we could rip off some of their firewood supply. It’s not like we need a whole lot, nothing like filling the bed of the pickup.”

“That might work. We’d better get moving, though. If we’re going to go scrounging some wood we don’t have a lot of time.”

In a couple of minutes they were heading out of town in the pickup. “I think we did a pretty good job of spreading the word last night,” Scotty observed.

“Yeah, I think we managed to get to just about everybody. You think everyone is going to be there?”

“Probably not,” Scotty shrugged. “I think I’d have a heart attack if Mike Kovacs and Steve Sarmeinto showed up. I mean, they know about it, but they’re just too fuckin’ on the God box to show up at something like a beer bust.”

“Fuckin’ pussies,” Eddie snorted. “Shit, you’re right, they’d never show up to something like that. As far as I’m concerned that means they really ain’t full members of the team. I’d expect the rest of the seniors to show up, except for Rusty Frankovich, Larry Coopshaw and Matt Effingham. Rusty’s still pretty grounded, and Larry and Matt can’t play. I told Matt he and Larry could come anyway but I don’t know if they will.”

“No Frenchy, of course,” Scotty grinned.

“Yeah, he has a previous engagement,” Eddie laughed. “Of course, even if he could come he’d want to kick someone’s ass just because he could.”

“Jeez, when you stop and think about it, that thins us seniors out pretty bad,” Scotty sighed. “Any idea about the juniors?”

“Well, Jimmy Gogolen hasn’t been in town all summer, he’s working down at his granddad’s downstate, I know that,” Eddie said, running the list through his mind. “Chad Kimble, I doubt it, he’s about as bad a God-boxer as Kovacs and Sarmeinto. Greg Ritzmaker, no way, his family moved out of town. Might be a couple others, I don’t know the juniors as well as I do the seniors.”

“No great loss, except for Jimmy. Little sucker can run, he’s gonna be a help. Is he gonna make it back for practice?”

“I don’t know, but whatever, we still should have a pretty good crowd if those guys don’t show up. It just means more beer for the rest of us to drink.”

“Yeah, man, we’re going to have us a party,” Scotty laughed. “The only thing that worries me is if some asshole like Kovacs or Sarmeinto called the cops on us.”

“So what if they did? This is the football team, man! Football is too big a deal for them to fuck with. The cops aren’t going to do anything. This is going to be a night to remember!”

About half an hour later Lyle pulled his dad’s car to a stop in front of Ashley’s house. “Great afternoon, Ashley,” he said as he shut the car off. “I just wish it didn’t have to end so soon.”

“Me, too,” she sighed, “but I’ve got to change clothes and get to work. At least it ought to be a little different than normal tonight. While the football team is out showing off how manly they are by trying to see how drunk they can get, we might have a few of the decent kids showing up tonight.”

“Yeah, that’s a thought,” Lyle agreed. “Hey, would you mind if I came down and hung around a bit? It’d be nice to hang out there while I know all the assholes are somewhere else.”

“No reason why not,” she smiled. “It might be a little slow and we could get some time to just talk and stuff.”

“I’d like that,” he said. “I wouldn’t want you to get in trouble with your boss or anything, though.”

“Well, yeah,” she said, “and hey, it might even be a little busy. I don’t know, we’ll just have to wait and see. If I’m busy, there ought to be someone else you can hang out with a little.”

“If it’s too busy, I’ll just head on home,” he said. “Have you got anything going tomorrow? Like maybe tomorrow evening?”

“I’ll be working again tomorrow night. I do have Monday off, though. It’s usually pretty slow down there. Why are you asking?” she asked, a little hope rising in her mind.

“Well, I was thinking we could get together again,” he smiled. “Like I said, Ashley, I had a real good time this afternoon and I wouldn’t mind seeing you some more.”

“I’d like that, too,” she smiled, wondering if he was going to make a move. Probably not, she realized; she’d had to take the lead on everything else, so why not this? Oh, hell, just quit agonizing and do it, she thought. She twisted sideways in her seat, leaned over, grabbed his shoulder and pulled herself closer to him so she could reach his face with her lips. “I really did have a good time,” she told him, then kissed him.

It really wasn’t all that much of a kiss, and it didn’t last a long time, but for Ashley it was a first real kiss and she suspected it was for him too. She would have liked it to be better, to have gone further, maybe even much further, but it was daylight, time was tight, and as big as they were it was just a little bit awkward in the front seat of the car. But it was just fine; more could come at a later date and at least she could leave him wanting more.

They soon pulled apart. “Thank you, Lyle,” she smiled. “Maybe if we can get together tomorrow we can do that a little more.”

Not much later than that Jack pulled the Jeep to a stop in front of Vixen’s house, which had gotten to be pretty familiar the past few days. His romance with her had been pretty whirlwind, and a lot had happened in a short time, but she was proving to be a pretty neat girl and there seemed to be quite a bit of future together in front of them.

Heading down to Camden for short track car racing really wasn’t on his priority list of things he’d like to do with her tonight, but it seemed like a good opportunity to get to know her father better, so it would be time well invested. He didn’t feel like he was quite familiar enough around the Hvalchek household to just walk in the back door without knocking, but a shout from inside inviting him in when he knocked was all the invitation he needed. “Good, you’re here,” Bob Hvalchek said as Jack walked into the kitchen. “Vixen will be down in a minute, and Marilyn decided she wanted to go with us.”

“Good, the more, the merrier,” Jack replied, realizing that this was a good chance to get to know Vixen’s mother better, too. So far, they’d gotten along pretty well, although Vixen had said that her mother got pretty religious at times and they’d often been on each other’s cases about it. However, Jack hadn’t seen any of that side of her, and some of the things that had happened in the past week or so couldn’t help but make him wonder if Vixen had been exaggerating things a bit.

A moment or so later Marilyn Hvalchek walked into the room, wearing cutoff denim shorts and a luridly painted “Jimmy Johnson” T-shirt. “Hi, Jack,” she said. “I didn’t feel much like sitting around the house by myself tonight, so I hope you don’t mind that I’m going.”

“How could I mind?” Jack smiled. “I figured that it was you two who invited us in the first place.”

“Have you ever been to one of these?” she asked.

“Not for quite a while,” Jack admitted. He might have been seven or eight at the time, he wasn’t sure. This would be more or less a new experience for him. He looked up as Vixen entered the room, wearing an mid-thigh length halter top yellow sundress, cut low enough in back that there was no way she could be wearing a bra. She often didn’t anyway – she really didn’t need it, not that he minded. “Wow, Vixen,” he said. “You look terrific! That’s not what I would have expected you to wear to a car race.”

“Well,” she giggled, “since this is sort of a date, I decided to look girly for once.”

“You bring it off well,” he smiled. “I’m going to have guys all over the place envying me for this good-looking babe I’m with.”

“You know, Jack,” she smirked, “you keep talking like that and you might wind up getting more than you bargained for.”

In a few more minutes they were in the Hvalcheck’s minivan. Like most minivans, this one had a narrow seat in the middle of the van, so this gave Jack and Vixen the chance to snuggle up more than they would have been able to otherwise. It seemed amusing to Bob and Marilyn to see the two of them sitting close together, with Jack’s arm around their daughter.

The noise in the minivan, especially with the radio playing, was enough for Jack and Vixen to have a private conversation if they kept their voices down. “I’m glad you like the way I look,” she whispered in his ear. “I wanted to show off a little for you.”

“You don’t have to do it, which is why I like it even more,” he told her.

“In about five weeks you are going to get so lucky you’re not going to believe it,” she smirked. “And I’m looking forward to it, too. Maybe even more than you are.”

“You’d better believe I am,” he smiled.

“Maybe we’d better not talk about it right now,” she said. “They’re not going to overhear us but if we keep talking about sex our hands are going to be doing things I don’t think I want my dad seeing in the rear view mirror. So what do you have in mind for tomorrow? More birding?”

“Yeah, we could,” he said, grudgingly admitting to the reality. “There’s still the eagle’s nest out northeast of the lake I thought we could go take a look at. The problem is that I don’t know if it’s active or not and I haven’t been close enough to tell. There’s no good way to get in there except walking a lot, so I want to spend some time on the Internet getting some aerial views to see if there’s a way we can get close with the Jeep.”

“Sounds like it might be a plan,” she agreed. “At least spending the time on the Internet. As hot as it’s been I’m not so sure I’m all that crazy about a long walk that might not be worth the effort. Or, are there any possible swimming holes out that way?”

“I don’t know,” he smiled, knowing exactly what she had in mind, since it was on his mind, too, and it involved skinny-dipping, and more. “That’s something else I’m going to have to find out about on the Internet.”

“I can stand an air-conditioned afternoon on the Internet,” she told him. “Sounds like a plan.”

It turned out that there wasn’t a lot of obvious scrap wood at the building site, but Eddie and Scotty threw what they could find into the truck. It wasn’t going to be enough for a fire, so they headed out into the woods northwest of Spearfish Lake, where there were scattered and isolated hunting cabins that usually weren’t in use this time of year. The first cabin they went to was obviously unoccupied – weeds grew waist high in the yard and there was no sign of a vehicle recently matting them down – but there was no sign of a stack of firewood, either.

They had to take down a cable stretched across a two-rut to get to the second one, which was still just as unoccupied, but there was an open woodshed next to the small, run-down cabin. It seemed clear that no one had been there since hunting season the fall before. Scotty backed the truck right up to the woodshed, and the two of them got busy throwing wood into the truck. The bed was half full when they figured they had enough. They were even thoughtful enough to stop and re-string the cable across the two-rut when they left; with any kind of luck at all when the hunters showed up from downstate in another three months they might not even notice the wood missing.

“Well, all right,” Scotty said as Eddie climbed back into the right seat. “That ought to give us one hell of a fire.”

“Yeah, it will, but we’re going to have to hustle to get this stuff unloaded, then get the ice and salt,” Eddie agreed.

“Oh, relax,” Scotty shook his head. “We’ve got plenty of time.”

“Yeah, I know, but I want everything to go right after we’ve gone to all this trouble, and we’ve got to give the beer some time to get cold, too. Do you really want to drink that Shadler’s shit while it’s warm?”

“Yeah, you’re right. We’d better hurry.”

Since the track was on the south side of Camden, it took more than an hour to get to the front gate. The place was filling up nicely as they arrived; they had to stand in line for tickets, then went in and climbed to the top of a tall grandstand overlooking the track. The Hvalchecks had brought enough stadium seats to go around, and they got comfortable. “Racing should get underway in about half an hour,” Bob told them. “Why don’t you kids head down and get in line for the concession stand? Then Marilyn and I can go when you get back.”

“Good deal,” Jack agreed. “I’m getting a little hungry.”

The two of them clambered back down through the grandstand and got in line for the concession stand. The line was long, but it moved quickly since several windows were open. “The hamburgers here are pretty crappy,” Vixen warned him, “but they make a real good chili dog, and the French fries are some of the best you’ll ever find anywhere.”

It didn’t take long to get up to the window. Jack was hungry and decided to risk one of the burgers. Since he wasn’t sure about it, he added a couple chili dogs and a big cup of fries, along with a large Pepsi. Vixen, seemingly concerned with her figure – and a fine figure it was, Jack thought, looking at her in the sundress – limited herself to a chili dog and fries. Jack wanted to load down his hamburger, so the two of them walked over to a little shelf not far from the windows so Jack could start in on the trimmings.

“Are you going to put onions on your burger and dogs?” Vixen asked. “If you are, I’ll put some on my chili dog.”

“I don’t mind a little onion breath if you don’t,” he replied. “And with your folks watching it might not matter anyway.”

“Yeah, true,” she smiled. “That is kind of a down side, after all.”

They got their armloads of food and drink and headed back up to the grandstands. On the way, they happened to meet a couple of familiar faces heading toward them: Mike Kovacs and Steve Sarmeinto, kids they went to school with. Of course, they had to stop and talk for a minute. “Wow, Vixen,” Mike said, “you sure look good tonight.”

Vixen was in a mood to show off. Steve and Mike weren’t among the popular kids in school, and she hadn’t seen them more than once or twice over the course of the summer, just in passing. “I like to look nice for my boyfriend,” she giggled.

“You two?” Steve said, obviously showing that he wasn’t clued into the Spearfish Lake gossip circuits. “I never thought I’d see that happen, but it makes a lot of sense. Congratulations, you two.”

“I’m a little surprised to see the two of you here,” Jack said. “I figured that you’d be partying with the rest of the football team.”

“No way,” Mike sneered. “Beyond the fact that the folks would kill us if they found out we went to a drunken beer bust, I have no desire to be around that bunch of bums while they’re getting loaded and talking trash.”

“We decided it would be best if we just got out of town tonight,” Steve added. “Fortunately Mike’s folks were coming down anyway, so we decided to catch a ride.”

“That’s probably real good thinking,” Jack told them, watching his language a little since he knew the two didn’t appreciate foul mouths. “I sure wouldn’t want to be around that gang, especially tonight. I don’t know how you guys manage to put up with being on the team with some of those jokers.”

“I came pretty close to quitting last year,” Mike admitted. “It’s a pain in the neck, but you only get one chance to play varsity football.”

“Yeah, me too,” Steve said. “It shouldn’t be quite as bad this year with LeDroit in jail where he belongs, but at least it’s my last year, so I shouldn’t have to put up with some of the stuff like I had to last year.”

“As far as I’m concerned, now that the county has him they can keep him,” Jack agreed. “He was giving us a load of problems earlier in the week. With him in the slammer till March, I don’t see him coming back to school this year at all. If he comes back next year, we’re going to be out of there, so that’s even better.”

“No fooling,” Mike smiled. “With him gone and Payne gone, and Mrs. Wine now the principal, this might not be all that bad a year after all.”

“I’m sure hoping that,” Jack nodded. “You guys have a good night. We’d better get back up in the stands to give Vixen’s folks a chance at the food.”

Jack and Vixen were soon back at the top of the stands, with her folks heading down to the concession stand. They took the opportunity of having them gone, or at least having their backs turned, for a friendly low-wattage kiss before they started generating onion breath. “You know,” Vixen said, “those two prove that you don’t have to be an asshole to be a football player.”

“Yeah, they’re going to take some shit for skipping the party,” he agreed, “but they know what’s right, and they’re doing it.”

There was a burned-over spot down at the party site where people had obviously had fires before, so Scotty and Eddie dumped the wood in a pile close to it. “That ought to be enough for a pretty good fire,” Eddie commented as he looked at the pile.

“Yeah, that ought to work out all right,” Scotty agreed. “Let’s head back into town and get the ice. How much do you think we’re going to need?”

“Good question,” Eddie said as he headed back to the truck. “I’d guess about as much as we have beer. Lame Badger said yesterday we had over 450 pounds, so I’d say we need two dozen or so if they are twenty-pound bags.”

“How much is that going to come to?”

“Oh, shit,” Eddie shook his head. “It was four bucks and change down at the Holiday station the other day, and it probably hasn’t changed much. So it’s going to be over a hundred dollars, plus whatever the rock salt costs. We better swing by the house; I don’t have that much money on me.”

“I hate to ask stupid questions,” Scotty said, “but isn’t someone going to be wondering about why we need that much ice?”

“Aw shit, if someone asks we’ll just tell them the truth, it’s for a party,” Eddie grinned as Scotty fired up the truck. “Maybe we can just get it all at the Fiesta station. I think Laurel Hauessler is working there tonight, she’s not going to give us any shit.”

“You’re probably right,” Scotty agreed. “We need to swing by my house, too. I need to pick up the plastic to line the bed liner with, and I probably ought to sweep it out before we do.”

It took them half an hour to get back into town, get the money and the plastic tarp, and sweep out the truck before they headed down to the Holiday station. It turned out that the Holiday station didn’t have that much ice, at least in twenty-pound bags, since the weekend traffic of tourists filling coolers and the like had depleted much of it. They were still six bags short when Eddie paid Laurel, so they picked up Eddie’s Chevy, still loaded with the beer from the day before, on their way to the Spee-D-Mart out on the highway. A few minutes later they had the last of the ice they needed, and took the quicker route down the highway to the Albany River bridge and back up 417 to the party site.

“All right,” Eddie said as he parked the Chevy next to the pickup. “I think that’s everything. Let’s bust open some of the bags of ice, lay some beer on top of them with some of the salt, and then go for another layer.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Scotty said, pulling out a pocketknife to start ripping ice bags open while Eddie started unloading beer from the trunk. He ripped the end off one of the twelve packs, and dumped it into the back of the pickup, which was parked slightly nose-uphill.

The work went quickly. “I figure we can just dump the empty cartons over in the fire area, then stack the wood on top to help get the fire going,” he said. “That ought to give us a big fire in a hurry.”

“Plenty of time now,” Scotty agreed. “I wouldn’t expect that the gang to start showing up for a couple hours. You might want to think about parking your car across the road into here so this area doesn’t get filled with people wanting to park their cars down here.”

“Good idea,” Eddie said. “Maybe when we get this done we can have a brew or two ourselves to cool off, but you know what? Looks like we’re going to have a party!”

Well up in the trees on the far side of the river, Sheriff Steve Stoneslinger was sweating like a mule in the camouflage clothing he normally wore out in the woods during archery deer season when wearing hunter orange wasn’t required. Since he didn’t want to mess around with camouflage makeup, he wore an olive drab mosquito head net. It was probably overdoing it; as hidden in the foliage as he was there was little chance that a casual glance would spot him. But the thrill of the hunt was on him, and it was like a fourteen-point buck was wandering close, and he was waiting for the perfect shot. He sat there for a couple minutes watching the scene across the river in his binoculars before he decided he’d seen enough.

He pulled out his cell phone – there was no point in alerting the possible leaker by using his portable radio – and placed a call to Charlie Wexler. “Get your people coming,” he said obliquely, the habit of stealth still on him. “Looks like we’re going to have a party.”

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