Free Lamb by Bonnie Nadzam Page A

lifted one of the wires between its barbs and held it open. “That’s just a fence.”
    She stepped through and he followed.
    “Ready?” he said, brushing his hands on the thighs of his blue jeans. “Set. Go!” He took off running, his black-and-silver head flashing in the dazzle. “Try to keep up, you lazy pillow pig!” She ran after him and he grinned back at her puffing and bobbing over the uneven ground, stopping her with an arm across her belly when she approached the house. The tops of her cheeks were pink behind her freckles, and her hair stuck in sweat to her temples.
    “Careful,” he said. Rusted orange nails pointed up from the overturned boards.
    Glassless windows, all the house wood gray. A rocking chair the color of dirt sat oddly intact and perfectly still on the wood-slab porch.
    “Someone must have brought it out,” he said, looking at it. “You see any beer cans, you’ll know for sure.”
    “Kids come here?”
    “I bet some guy dragged a mattress out here in his old man’s truck and hauled out a bunch of flashlightsand cheap wine and paper cups and cigarettes, and brings out a different girl every Saturday night.”
    “Gary!”
    He put his hands up in the wind. “Hey, I’m just a guy telling you how it is. It’s better if you know. Consider yourself warned.”
    “Sick.”
    “Do you want to go inside and see?”
    “No. It gives me a spooky feeling.”
    “I know,” he said.
    “Do you think they died here?”
    “Who? The girlfriends?”
    “No, dummy.” She punched him lightly in the arm and pulled down on her T-shirt, lifted by the wind like a thin yellow flag off her belly. “The people who lived here.”
    “I don’t know. Maybe. Indians. Snow. Fever. Smallpox. Any number of things. But there’s no graveyard, is there? Which makes me think they probably just moved on.”
    “That’s not as fun to think about.”
    “Don’t get melodramatic on me, Tom. We’ll never survive the week.”
    She made a visor with her hand and looked across the empty grass and around behind the house to a single section of standing rail fence.
    “That’s where they tie up the ghost horses at night,” he told her.
    “Is this what your cabin is like?”
    “I’ve told you what it’s like.”
    “Will we have horses?”
    “Look, Tom. I know I’m a handsome guy and all, but you’re not invited to stay that long.”
    “I was just pretending.”
    “Long as we’re both clear on that.” He turned over his wrist and read his watch. “Five days from now we’ll be driving back the other way, delivering you to your loving mother, and—”
    “—none of this ever happened.” She rolled her eyes. “I know.”
    He dropped his hand and gaped at her. “That’s not what I was going to say. Never happened! Tommie. Of course it will have happened. It’s happening now. Isn’t it?”
    “Duh.”
    “That’s right. And eventually—maybe not right away, but eventually—you’ll tell everyone about it. Right?”
    She snorted. “Yeah, right. I’d be dead meat.”
    “So you wait till you’re eighteen. Or twenty-six. Right now you’re just eleven.”
    “Don’t remind me.”
    He lifted her chin with his hand. “Eleven is the most perfect age to be a girl. And you’ll know it the minute you turn twelve.”
    He took her arm and they circled the falling house, stepping carefully through the high grass, lifting their knees as though walking through deep snow.
    They came to the ragged edge of dry weeds and he opened the fence and she stepped through.
    The truck was straight ahead, tilted on the shoulder. He nodded at it. “Race you back?”
    He beat her to the highway by twenty yards and stood at the truck with his hands on his thighs, watching her come as if she hadn’t already lost, her little white fists pumping high at the sides of her flat, narrow chest.
    “That’s a sign of a real athlete,” he said when she reached him. “That’s what you call running through the line.”
    She leaned