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sometimes. But I think she means well.” She paused and then said, “Woofer’s a little weird.”
    “You can say that again.”
    We laughed. Though the comment about Ruth confused me. I remembered the reserve in her voice, the coldness that first day by the brook.
    “We’ll see,” she said. “I suppose it takes time to get used to things, doesn’t it.”
    We’d reached the bottom now. One of the carnies lifted the crossbar and held the car steady with his foot. I hardly noticed him. We stepped out.
    “I’ll tell you one thing I don’t like,” she said.
    She said it almost in a whisper, like maybe she expected somebody to hear and then report to someone else—and as though we were confidants, equals, co-conspirators.
    I liked that a lot. I leaned in close.
    “What?” I said.
    “That basement,” she said. “I don’t like that at all. That shelter.”

Chapter Six

    I knew what she meant.
    In his day Willie Chandler Sr. had been very handy.
    Handy and a little paranoid.
    So that I guess when Khrushchev told the United Nations, “We will bury you,” Willie Sr. must have said something like the fuck you will and built himself a bomb shelter in the basement.
    It was a room within a room, eight by ten feet wide and six feet high, modeled strictly according to government specifications. You went down the stairs from their kitchen, walked past the paint cans stacked beneath the stairs and the sink and then the washer and dryer, turned a comer and walked through a heavy metal bolted door—originally the door to a meat locker—and you were inside a concrete enclosure at least ten degrees colder than the rest of the place, musty-smelling and dark.
    There were no electrical outlets and no light fixtures.
    Willie had nailed girders to the kitchen floor beams and supported them with thick wooden posts. He had sandbagged the only window on the outside of the house and covered the inside with heavy half-inch wire-mesh screening. He had provided the requisite fire extinguisher, battery-operated radio, ax, crowbar, battery lantern, first-aid kit and bottles of water. Cartons of canned food lay stacked on a small heavy handmade hardwood table along with a Sterno stove, a travel alarm clock and an air pump for blowing up the mattresses rolled in the corner.
    All this built and purchased on a milkman’s salary.
    He even had a pick and shovel there, for digging out after the blast.
     
    The one thing Willie omitted and that the government recommended was a chemical toilet.
    They were expensive. And he’d left before getting around to that.
    Now the place was sort of ratty-looking—food supplies raided for Ruth’s cooking, the extinguisher fallen off its wall mount, batteries dead in the radio and lantern, and the items themselves filthy from three solid years of grim neglect. The shelter reminded Ruth of Willie. She was not going to clean it.

    We played there sometimes, but not often.
    The place was scary.
    It was as though he’d built a cell there—not a shelter to keep something out but a dark black hole to keep something in .
    And in a way its central location informed the whole cellar. You’d be down there drinking a Coke talking with Ruth while she did her laundry and you’d look over your shoulder and see this evil-looking bunker sort of thing, this squat concrete wall, constantly sweating, dripping, cracked in places. As though the wall itself were old and sick and dying.
    We’d go in there occasionally and scare each other.
    That was what it was good for. Scaring each other. And nothing much else.
    We used it sparingly.

Chapter Seven

    “I’ll tell you, what’s missing from that goddamn Karnival’s a good old-fashioned hootchie-koo!”
    It was Tuesday night, the second night of Karnival and Ruth was watching Cheyenne Bodie get deputized for the umpteenth time and the town’s chicken-shit mayor pinning the deputy’s badge to his fringed cowhide shirt. Cheyenne looked proud and determined.
    Ruth held a