Free Inside a Silver Box by Walter Mosley

away and started scratching furiously at her sides and all around the waist. She made panting sounds and was in such distress that she fell to the ground scratching, scratching. Ronnie got down with her, putting his hands up her dress to help.
    “Don’t do that!”
    “I have to, Lorraine. I got to see what’s wrong.”
    Lorraine stopped struggling and lay stiff on the ground. Ronnie lifted the blue fabric.… Bug bites covered her abdomen and sides going down under the line of her panties, coming out at her thighs, and traveling down another five or six inches.
    “The bugs must be in your clothes,” he said. “I’ll carry you back to that pond we saw and we could wash’em there.”
    Lorraine yowled loudly and Ronnie hoped that insects were the largest creatures in that wood.
    *   *   *
    H E WALKED HER out into the middle of the deep pond. It was about thirty-five feet across, fed by the stream that they had lain next to the night before and three or four other rivulets.
    When the girl was shoulder high in the natural pool, he had her take off her clothes. These he took to the shore and rinsed over and over, finally beating them with rocks.
    “Ronnie, are you there?” Lorraine called from her semidarkness.
    “Right here beatin’ on these clothes. You know if there was any bugs left, they all dead and crushed. How you doin’?”
    “The water soothes the itch. It’s cold but I like it.”
    “It’s really pretty here. When your swelling goes down, you’re gonna love it.”
    “You know what’s so crazy, Ronnie?”
    “What’s that, Lore?”
    “That we just accept all this as real. I mean, it’s impossible, right?”
    “It always felt like that for me,” the once brooding and ravenous brute said.
    “Like what?”
    “Like nuthin’s real but I couldn’t stop it anyway. Locked doors, hunger, me hatin’ myself for the things I never did and the things I never did right.”
    Lorraine turned her blind gaze toward her companion. There was a question in her mind that went unspoken.
    “You surprised that a niggah like me think about things too?”
    “I guess I am,” she said. “I mean, I don’t think that name about you but what you just said, that question and that feeling has been in my heart for as far back as I could remember.”
    “It’s like when somebody you know die, right?” Ronnie added. “You feel like they should be alive, like they must be somewhere. All you got to do is figure out the right way to turn or somethin’ special you could say.”
    “But if you did, it would turn out like Claude Festerling,” Lorraine added. “And me too if you hadn’t come back.”
    Lorraine pushed herself toward the sound of Ronnie Bottoms’s voice and came out of the water only a few feet away. He wrung her clothes with all his strength and then reached out.
    “You’ll be cool in these.”
    “Thank you, Mr. Bottoms.”

 
    FOURTEEN
    T HAT NIGHT THEY slept on the flat top of a boulder far away from any water, reasoning that whatever had bitten Lorraine was an insect living in or near the stream. Ronnie stayed awake for a long time after she was asleep to make sure no biting bugs crawled up or flew down.
    He finally fell asleep and did not see the approach of the huge form of a woolly beast that was at least forty feet in height and twice that in length. The nearly silent four-legged creature moved through the woods like shadow. From its shaggy, egg-shaped head, a long and needle-thin bone slowly stretched out until it reached the sleeping young man, pricking him on every joint and at the back of his neck.
    The slight discomfort from the venom of the mammal’s sting caused Ronnie to twist and turn until he came to rest on his back with legs straight and arms down at his sides.
    Its work done, the needle withdrew and the shadow beast backed away, merging with the moonlit shadows of the nighttime forest.
    “Ronnie, I’m cold,” Lorraine complained in her sleep.
    He imagined turning on his