there, probably for that birthday party. The girl was carrying the gift-wrapped bubble bath. He parked down the street for a stake-out on that house, and hadn’t been waiting very long before two of the cars took a whole bunch of the girls, six or seven of them, back across town to a roller skating rink.
There is kind of a little balcony at one end of the roller rink, where the skaters stop and step out to take a breath of air or to goof off or whatever. Sog drove his truck around behind the roller rink so that he could watch that little balcony.
It began to get dark. Usually two or more of the girls would appear on that balcony together. Sog got out and stood so he could reach up to the balcony, which wasn’t very far above the ground. His eyes was level with the rink floor and he could see inside the rink, where a whole bunch of skaters was a-gliding all over the place, and there in the midst of them was his truelove, doing all kinds of fancy turns and spins and even leaps. She took his breath away. And he loved her more than ever.
He waited patiently, and just like they say, everything comes to him who waits. By and by, she come out onto the balcony by herself, breathing hard after all those stunts. She was too winded to put up any struggle. He grabbed her and gagged her and took her away.
Chapter nine
S he didn’t mean for him to see her. She intended to take possession of the yards and fields and to let her in-habit know that this was her new home, and live in peaceful co-existence with the mean bastard without being his dog. She kept herself hidden in the grass, spying on him while he brought in a crate filled with chickens from the old home and turned them loose in the yard near the dilapidated henhouse, then broadcast chicken feed around the yard. The chickens discovered her while scratching around for their feed, but they knew her and did not even bother to cackle in recognition, and of course she wasn’t making a sound. Later she watched with great interest as he appeared, coming up the trail from the forest with some enormous thing on his back. It took her a while to recognize it, possibly because it was upside down and didn’t seem to belong on a man’s back out in the woods, but she caught a distant whiff of its scent and realized it was the big soft feel-good piece of furniture that had been in the old house, that she herself had once tried to sleep upon because it was so comfortable. He had kicked her off of it, and had said, “Bitch, don’t never let me catch you on there again.” Well, she reflected, whatever doubts she might have had that he intended to forsake the old place entirely and move into this mountaintop homestead were now laid to rest. He loved that piece of furniture more than he loved anything else in this world. That piece of furniture was his wife, and now the new home was complete.
When she had heard the first distant thunderclaps she had cringed and burrowed her belly into the earth, lowering her ear flaps down over her ears. But then the thunder came nearer and louder and the hard blankets of water fell from the sky and she started losing her mind, and decided to make a mad dash for safety and shelter in the building that had been a workshop. She didn’t care if he saw her or not. Inside the workshop she was protected from the waterfall but not from the terrible noise, and she took a leap and landed inside of one of those tall round wooden things, where she cowered and trembled. The walls of the wood around her offered only a little protection against the crash of the thunder, and once again she was convinced that the world was coming to an end. Eventually the hideous noise stopped, and she had to make three or four jumps before she could extricate herself from that deep drum. She sniffed the air and detected that he was approaching just in time for her to hide herself in a dark corner of the shop.
It was while she was hiding that she became unmistakably aware of an
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