Betty sits quietly, looking loosely out the window, pretending to contemplate the night. Simon has a hard time looking at her. Since he moved into the trailer on blocks behind Boo’s house they are forced to see each other every day. Boo had seemed abashed about offering Simon the broken trailer, with its door that sounded like mating cats every time it was opened, the waterstained ceiling. He was nervous about putting Betty and Simon so close together, but unwilling to make Simon fend for himself. Simon was grateful for it, and shrugged off Boo’s apologies. Well, he’d said, I went from living next to Winnebagos in the Cities to living inside one, ain’t no big switch. Boo, Ned, and the others studiously avoided talking about the past, about the dark gossip of Simon’s crime. They knew the balance between Simon and Betty was delicate, and since Lincoln was living there too they didn’t want to mishandle the secret, more for his sake than anyone else’s.

As for Betty and Simon, they didn’t talk much. Didn’t quite know how to approach each other, so they mediated their relationship through Lincoln, who would visit Simon and smoke his cigarettes. Lincoln talked to them both in complete ignorance of what Simon had done. After a while the tension grew thick and there is nothing that escapes the notice of the young, nothing they don’t register. Even if they can’t assemble the details, the times and places, the emotion, the rolling of blame and love, and loss, none of this is ever lost on them.

Lincoln could tell, he felt that the lines of tension, of anger and recrimination ran so thick that when he banged out the front door of Boo’s house he needn’t have taken the growing trail around the side to knock on Simon’s door—what he didn’t know, but felt, was so palpable that he could have walked it like a bridge from Betty’s door to Simon’s without touching the ground. He began to avoid them both, preferring to spend his time with his cousins and their friends, caught up in the novelty of their outrages.

Simon tries to relax into his chair and Jumbo pulls out the cribbage board from under the pile of pens, magazines and old newspapers nesting on top of the refrigerator. As they peg and count and the food jumps quietly on the stove, the house finds a rhythm and keeps and holds it as the night turns over and over.

They see the pregnant curve of the net even in the dark. The ropes are cutting into the tree and sing with the tension of everything that has gone up or down the river. Listening, standing there without moving, they hear the slop of fish in the current, caught fast in the net.