Lew rubbed himself, churning it all together, the elf beauty and the beast face and what happened in the barn and showing Seamus her parts. Roh let out a loud sigh in his sleep. Lew didn’t want to wake him and thought now about that magazine he had hidden in the barn, which had been in a pile Annie’s mom was going to throw away and had pictures in it of women in bathing suits. He took the key to their bedroom door from under his mattress. They locked it because of his brother. The lock was a chore; you had to lift the door up from the bottom and jiggle the key. He finally got it unlocked, but gave up trying to lock it from the outside because the loose floorboards in the hall whined like hell and he was afraid he would wake his pop.

He felt a little scared of the dark as he crept out of the house, but it was a full moon and he really wanted to look at those pictures. In the barn he passed the sleeping sow and got the magazine from behind the feed bins. Turning to the page with the women in bathing suits, he began to rub himself again. Shannon came back into his head, then Lola Blickensderfer, who had slipped on the stairs in school and he had seen her pink panties. Abruptly, then, he remembered Annie when they had last gone swimming and it had struck him that there was nothing there between her legs. But this disturbed him. He didn’t want to think about Annie in this way. Shannon reemerged, like a creature, simple and mad, and he saw that great ornery old sow’s teats right in front of him, and his body convulsed and there was the strangest, most wonderful feeling—and something else, warm and sticky, all over his hands. He sat back against the barn wall, a little frightened. This had never happened before. He put the magazine back, cleaned his hands off on some straw, and left the barn.

His heart jumped as he saw the front door was open. Maybe he hadn’t latched it properly. But his bedroom door was also wide open, his brother’s bed empty. He couldn’t wake his pop. How would he explain things?

He went out again and around to the rear of the smokehouse. The one other time Roh had gotten out at night, they had found him looking into the moonlight glinting from the mirrors his pop had dumped back there. No luck, but far off in the woods he saw the glow of a campfire up near the bluffs over the river. He knew his brother might have headed that way and thought instantly of the boogerman.