A couple of hours later, as Jack and Vixen were busily looking at marsh birds and Vixen was learning to identify and record them, back in Spearfish Lake Ashley Keilhorn wasn’t wearing a bra either. It was still a bit on the cool side, so she was wearing a T-shirt with the words, “All Natural” printed over her large and soft breasts, which tended to flop around beneath the shirt. She was also wearing panties with the words “Promised Land” printed on them. They were rather small panties, and dark pubic hair poked out around the edges, but since she couldn’t see it clearly because of her belly being in the way, she didn’t mind. When she’d put the panties on earlier, she’d once again wished she knew some guy who wanted to go to the Promised Land, but the fact was she didn’t. Maybe someday.

Ashley was in her usual position on the lounge on the back porch, cell phone in hand, and this morning she was just a little bit frustrated with her job. Usually the order window at the Frostee Freeze gave her a pretty good cross section of what was happening among her classmates around Spearfish Lake, so she felt just a little humiliated that she’d had to learn the big news of last night from Heather Callahan. Misty Frankovich had told her – and a few others – that her brother had been on a date with Summer Trevetheck, and he’d abandoned her in the Multiplex down in Camden.

Then she’d heard from another classmate that Rusty had tried to get his hand in Summer’s panties, and had gotten slapped for it. That classmate had heard it from her mother, who had heard it from another mother, and it had the ring of truth to it. Ashley knew that Rusty Frankovich was an asshole from the word go, but she hadn’t realized that he was that big an asshole. She was a little surprised that Summer had even agreed to go out with him.

Under different circumstances Ashley might have been willing to go out with Rusty on the chance that he’d get his hand in her panties, and maybe more, but there are limits and what Rusty had done went well beyond them. According to Misty, through Heather, Rusty had the riot act read to him by his father and Summer’s , and it hadn’t been nice. It seemed that Rusty was up shit creek without a paddle, which struck Ashley as a good place for him.

But as far as Ashley was concerned, having to find out several hours after the fact, from Heather, of all people, really put her behind the eight ball. As far as she knew, no one had gotten Summer’s side of the story. She’d tried to call Summer several times, but her phone was off and she kept getting bumped to voicemail. That was a shame; Summer would have been able to add a lot of detail. It was especially frustrating in that everyone she talked to seemed to know as much about the situation as she did and playing catch-up was hell.

There ought to be someone she could call, she thought, as the cell phone rang again. Probably somebody else calling to rub it in on me, she thought. Well, somebody might know something she didn’t that could give her another lead somewhere.

A little to her surprise, it was Brianna Melbourne. Brianna was a cheerleader and really into the clique, so she didn’t gossip with her very much; she seemed to think that she was above talking to fat girls who she thought were beneath her socially. Brianna wasn’t a friend, but at least she had a line into the cheerleader clique, so this held the possibility of something new. “Hey, Ashley,” she said. “How’s it going?”

“Oh, not bad,” Ashley said. “Just another day in paradise. What’s happening with you?”

“Not much,” Brianna sighed. “Just waiting for school to start. At least football practice is starting soon, although it looks like the team took a big hit last night.”

“Oh? What happened?” As if she really cared about football, but some of the stupid things the football players and their cheerleader cohorts did were worth talking about.

“Rusty Frankovich sorta fucked up last night, and his dad told him he wasn’t going to be playing football because his ass is going to be like totally grounded for the next six months. He can’t even go to the games.”

“Well, I hadn’t heard that,” Ashley said. “I heard he got himself into a little trouble, but nothing about what happened to him other than a world class bitching out.”

“Yeah, but I can’t figure out what he could have done that was so bad that he’d have to miss football,” Brianna replied glumly. “I mean the team doesn’t have much in the way of prospects anyway, but he was about the best ball carrier they had last year.”

“You hadn’t heard?” Ashley smiled. “Rusty sort of stuck his foot in it.” She went on to capsulize the stories she’d been hearing, about Rusty’s dating Summer Trevetheck, and then abandoning her at the Multiplex.

“Well, I don’t see how that’s all that bad,” Brianna pouted. “If she was going out with him, she should have known that he’s all hands. I can’t see how that should keep him from playing football.”

“Maybe Summer’s not that kind of girl,” Ashley said. Summer wasn’t exactly a friend, but more like a compatriot. To some extent Brianna was the enemy though. “I mean, how would you like it if you were on a date with some guy, and he just dumped you and walked, off sixty miles from home?”

“Well, yeah, that would sort of suck, when you put it like that,” Brianna agreed. “I sure as hell wouldn’t date the guy again, and I’d warn off all my friends about him too.”

“Yeah, it would sort of suck all right, and it doesn’t matter if it’s you or Summer. Maybe you’d better warn your friends about him too.”

“Well, yeah, but he’s a football player,” Brianna protested. “But then again, I guess he isn’t one anymore, so maybe you’ve got a point there.”

You’re the one with the point, Ashley thought, right on top of your head. “No girl should have to put up with that shit,” she reinforced her message.

“Yeah, I guess maybe not,” Brianna agreed. “But still, it kind of sucks, what with football season not being all that far off now.”

Ashley was really getting tired of the subject, and she was getting tired of Brianna. But still, she was a line into an area where Ashley didn’t have all that many good contacts. “Speaking of football,” she said to explore another area she had some curiosity about, “is Mary Lou still going to be cheering?”

“Maybe, they’re not real sure yet. I was there when she got into it with Vixen Hvalchek. Mary Lou was drunk and nothing was going to stop her. I was expecting a real cat fight when she went after Vixen, but she sure got knocked on her ass in a hurry. Her jaw is all wired up, she can’t speak real well, her face is about half tape, and she’s got a huge shiner. She’s real pissed about it, too; she’s like Vixen should have just stood there and taken it.”

“You play with fire and once in a while you’re going to get burned,” Ashley replied with no little degree of satisfaction. “I didn’t think Vixen had it in her.”

“Mary Lou didn’t think so either,” Brianna laughed. “Of course, Mary Lou is a little pissed right now, anyway. Frenchy hasn’t come by to see her since she got hurt.”

“Well, when he finally gets around to it, he’d better remember it’s flowers, not candy, what with her jaw being wired shut.”

“I wouldn’t want to bet,” Brianna laughed again. “Frenchy doesn’t think like that. He thinks that pounding Alan Jahnke for laughing at him sort of evens things up for Mary Lou. He really kicked the shit out of him too. I was standing there along with Vanessa Robideaux when he did it. Him and Larry Coopshaw and Matt Effingham. Man, that road out to where he dumped Alan off is rough. Maybe that’ll teach him to laugh at the wrong people.”

Interesting, Ashley thought. She knew Frenchy and some football players had been involved in that, but she didn’t know who. She hadn’t heard that there were cheerleaders involved, although it seemed pretty likely to her. Stink and shit hung around each other, after all. “Maybe Frenchy ought to watch that kind of stuff,” she said thoughtfully. “It might come back and bite him some day.”

“Yeah, but not this time,” Brianna snickered. “Come on, Alan Jahnke? He’s such a wuss.”

Unlike Vixen and Ashley, Summer Trevetheck was wearing a bra under her shirt, and unlike Vixen and Ashley, she wasn’t thinking about someone playing with what the bra covered up. She’d had fantasies along that line, and like Ashley and Vixen until the day before, she had no experience with it, however good and exciting it might feel. And, also unlike Ashley and Vixen, her mind was nowhere near that subject as she lay on the lounge on her own back porch.

It was Sunday morning, and of late that had become something of a downer for Summer. She knew that if she’d been out front, she would be seeing people in their nice clothes heading off to church. Spearfish Lake was no more overtly Christian than anywhere else, but on Sunday mornings the church bells would ring, and at least some of the people of the town would gather and share their faith and fellowship. In spite of the fact that Christians had been responsible for most of the burnings for a thousand years and more, she was just a little jealous of their being able to show off their faith, while she had to keep her own hidden very deeply. Her faith in the Old Way was no less deep than any of the Christians she knew, so it just wasn’t fair.

So far as she knew, no one in Spearfish Lake but the women of her own family had any inkling that they practiced the Old Way, or that there was an established Circle in town. Once upon a time, people of the Old Way could walk about openly and proud of their relationship with the Goddess. They were respected members of the community, responsible for bringing good crops and good fortune; they blessed weddings, births, and funerals as one life cycled into the next. But then, the Christians had come with their lies and their swords and their fires and had almost snuffed out the Old Way.

Almost, but not quite. Scattered remnants remained, passed down by word of mouth from one generation of women to the next, despite all the lies and all the burnings. How many were left? Who knew? Secrecy was so vital to maintaining the Old Way that the various paths for the most part didn’t even know that others existed, much less who they were. The burning times of the past had taught the believers in the Old Way well. The mere existence of the Old Way had to be a closely guarded secret, and the fact that she was a believer had to be kept even more secret. That had eased a little in the last few cycles, so all that Summer knew was that there apparently were others who at least followed a portion of the path of the Old Way, and not the modern foundlings who had only recently acquired a skewed version of the Old Way.

Though Summer had no real memories of her previous lives, there was sort of a latent aura that fifty lifetimes or more of believers lay within her. When she touched her faith, she could feel it reaching back over millenia the concentrated wisdom of all those lives she’d led. The racial memory of the burnings lay within her; though there was no way she’d ever be able to know for sure, Summer could sometimes almost feel that she’d been one of those burned at the stake for witchcraft in some previous lifetime, perhaps a dozen lifetimes ago. Thus, she was extremely reluctant to even hint about the existence of the Old Way to anyone but members of the Circle, all of whom were female relatives.

And therein lay the problem. Purely by happenstance, the existence of the Circle had been revealed to an outsider, and a male outsider at that, which made things all the worse. That was embarrassing, and could easily turn dangerous if not deadly. Though the burnings were in the past, there were Christians around who would be perfectly happy to revive the practice if they were allowed. “Do not suffer a witch to live,” it said in their Bible, and by their definition, a member of the Old Way was certifiably a witch. The practitioners of the Old Way – at least their version of it – didn’t use the term, but a lot of the classical definitions of what a witch did were practiced by the Old Way. They didn’t actually ride around in the night sky on brooms, but a broom was considered to be something of a symbol by some, so it was easy to see how the mistake had been made.

Now the secret was out. Perhaps safely out, if such a thing could be said, because it didn’t seem like Jack was one to run his mouth. Certainly, the night before he hadn’t even hinted of the pictures Sharon had seen, but that meant absolutely nothing.

It was a huge dilemma, and one that she hadn’t had enough time to explore with her mother and sisters. Her grandmother might be able to offer some advice, but perhaps not. Most likely not, in fact; she didn’t know Jack.

As far as she could tell, the options were still the same as they’d been last night: say nothing, and hope and pray that Jack kept his mouth shut, or go to him to beg for the pictures and implore him to keep it a secret. The problem was that even if she had the pictures he still had the knowledge of the Circle, and if things went wrong that could be dangerous indeed. And there was no guarantee that he’d give her the pictures anyway.

But there were spells that could be used to convince him, and maybe keep things a secret. Most spells were weak, and sometimes didn’t work at all – there was too much knowledge that had been lost over the centuries of the burnings. It seemed likely that there were branches of the Old Way with members who remembered secrets that others had forgotten, but the information was useless to her unless she had it. There was one spell, however, that was very powerful, and properly used stood a chance of minimizing the damage. That spell involved a woman’s natural power over a man. Summer didn’t even have to think about it – if necessary, she’d be willing to offer her virgin body to Jack to help preserve the secret of the Old Way.

Frenchy LeDroit was not in a good mood.

In fact, he was in a downright rotten one, nothing like the day before when he woke up still feeling good about the way he’d smacked around that little shit Jahnke. The little fucker had it coming to him, after laughing at him over that shit down at the Frostee Freeze. He’d really have rather smacked the shit out of that Erikson asshole for daring to stand up to him down there, but he and that little bitch of his had disappeared too quickly. Frenchy and his buddies had ridden around town for a while looking for that Erikson asshole and his little slut of a girlfriend, but wherever the hell they went, it was someplace where they couldn’t be found. They probably went someplace to celebrate what they’d done to Mary Lou, probably with a blow job.

That thought made him wince. Goddamn Mary Lou, anyway! It was for sure that the little Hvalchek bitch needed to be taken down a notch or two, and a girl fight was always fun to watch, what with all the swearing and scratching and hair pulling. But Mary Lou had fought like a girl, and that little Hvalchek cunt hadn’t. Mary Lou had no idea of what had hit her, but the bottom line was that with her jaw wired shut she wasn’t going to be giving him any blow jobs for a couple months. That pissed him off more than he wanted to think about. She was good with her mouth and liked to take it deep in her throat, like a good bitch should, and now that little Hvalchek skank had effectively cut him off from the good stuff. He really needed to do something about that, and soon. He had visions of ramming his tool down her throat just to show her what he was missing, but it wouldn’t be the easiest thing to do and get away with. Little bitch ought to know better than to fuck with the football team, he thought.

Now, there was an idea. Get some roofies, and maybe have her fuck the football team. The whole team in a gang bang, that would do the job of putting her in her place all right. Any bitch who wouldn’t spread for someone on the football team deserved it anyway, especially after she’d put Mary Lou out of action.

There was one hitch to that idea – he had no idea where to get any roofies. Well, it wasn’t an impossible thing, he thought. He could ask around a little. There was a good chance Lame Badger would know – he always seemed to know where to get off-the- wall stuff like that. Lame Badger had contacts all over the place, things that Frenchy wouldn’t even know about.

That was another thing that pissed him off. He was going to have to take a run up and see Lame Badger, and today. That goddamn Coopshaw had been knocking the beers back like they were water last night. Frenchy had a pretty good buzz on, enough to give him a noticeable hangover this morning, but God knew how bad Larry’s head must be hurting this morning after the way he’d been inhaling the stuff. The Schadler’s Frenchy got from Lame Badger always gave a pretty good hangover anyway, and when you got really drunk it’d puke you quicker than almost anything. It had with Larry; he’d hurled a couple times and almost got some in the car. Fucking asshole. The worst part about it was that he’d drunk them clean out of Schadler’s, and everything else. Hell, Frenchy really needed a beer to get his eyes open this morning, but there was none to be had because that goddamn Coopshaw had drunk it all and puked it all up right afterwards. So now he was stuck here in the fucking kitchen drinking a cup of fucking coffee, and that wasn’t helping his head a damn bit.

So in spite of everything else, Frenchy knew that the main thing he had to do today was get more beer, and that meant a run up to Lame Badger’s, up on the far side of Three Pines. It wouldn’t be long before football practice got started, and then school, and that meant the partying was going to have to be cut way back, which was why the team held a traditional pre-practice party, and he needed beer for that too. Lots of it. The time to get it done was now before all that school horse shit started up again.

That was sure a neat deal that Lame Badger had cut for himself – his place was on the reservation, so the state swine and the county mounties couldn’t touch him. He kept the tribal cops’ hands well greased, too, so he didn’t have any trouble on that account. He bought beer a truckload at a time, and sold it a case at a time for a price that was just about twice what it would have cost down at the Super Market. It was pretty fucking high, but there was none of this shit about checking IDs as long as your money was green. What was worse, you didn’t get any choice on the beer, it was what Lame Badger had, and he always bought the current cheapest stuff he could. It was rare that he had something like Pabst, Blatz, or Schlitz, and even they were pretty rank. Usually it was some shit he’d never heard of before and tasted about like it, stuff like Schadler’s or Red and White.

It was a fucking ripoff, that’s what it was, but the choice pretty much was to pay the asking price, or go without. His weed was a little closer to street price, and the word was that it was grown up on the reservation somewhere. It was pretty good shit, but he was obviously making a fucking bundle on that too. Fucking Indian and his fucking Cadillac.

To top it off, Frenchy knew he was going to have to make the run up there by himself. The surest way in hell to get some fucking cop to stop you was to have a carload of kids coming back from the reservation, anytime, day or night. The cops knew goddamn well where the beer was coming from, even if they couldn’t do anything about it at the source. Most cops figured, and usually correctly, that a carload of underage kids coming back from the reservation was likely to have a trunkload of beer, and maybe other stuff, so you got stopped as a matter of course. Frenchy knew that the best way around that was to go by himself, during the day and preferably on Sunday morning, keeping it under the speed limit. It would have been nice to have a bud along to shoot the shit with, but if he did get caught by a cop outside Spearfish County where the football team didn’t have any drag, that way only one guy would go down, not a bunch of them.

Frenchy decided he might as well get it over with. He figured that with any luck he could get up to Lame Badger’s and back while his folks were still passed out from their binge of the night before. Not that they’d be pissed about it or anything, but if he didn’t have the beer hidden some place his folks would be drinking it faster than he and his buddies could do it. You’d think that if they’re going to drink it they ought to buy it once in a while.

He left the coffee cup in the mess on the kitchen table, checked his wallet to be sure he still had the money from the collection he’d taken the last couple nights, and headed for the door. It was so bright outside that it hurt his eyes, which didn’t do his headache any good either. There were sunglasses in the car, thank God, or he’d never be able to make it without his head exploding.

He got in the car, stuck the key in the ignition, and pulled on the shades. There that was better! Get this pain-in-the-ass beer run out of the way and then go find some buds to hang out with. Maybe he might get lucky and find that Erikson bastard so he could even things up with him.

He reached out, started the car, dropped the four-speed into low, gunned it a little and dropped the clutch. The car lurched forward, and all of a sudden there was the sound of some muffled “thunks.” He felt the car fall a little, then stumble ahead like it was drunk. What the fuck? Something was definitely wrong!

He stopped the engine, opened the door and got out. His first glance was at the left rear, which was flat as a board. That’s all I need this morning, he thought. A fucking flat. He headed back to the trunk to get to the spare, but as he turned he happened to glance at the front tire, which was as flat as the back one, if not flatter.

“What the fuck?” he said out loud. He turned to go take a closer look, and noticed that the car was sitting funny on the passenger side, too. With anger rising, he headed around to the right side of the car, to see that both of those tires were flat too.

“Goddamn it,” he swore. “Some fucking motherfucker thought it’d be cute to fuck with me and let the air out of my tires. I’m going to fucking have his ass.”

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.