Fortunate Son

Some time during the night or early morning of the third of August of that year, my sister Elizabeth was taken from her bed. She was ten years old. The ugliest of ugly ducklings, her only friends were Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys.

Maybe you read about it in the papers. Nearly all of Bane County came out to search for my sister - for those two terrible weeks; when all my parents could do was wait, and pray.

Alders Dam lies on the Reservation River where it cuts through Tecumseh Canyon. There are caves in the canyon with paintings that are tens of thousands of years old. The art is ancient. The human remains are not.

Alders Dam was where Becky Ludlow showed me her breasts. Becky was sixteen that summer, and her breasts were all the proof a boy ever needed that there really was a God.

Pretty and popular, Becky was my first girlfriend and my first real kiss. The sin and the desire to sin. If I sinned from her lips, it was trespass sweetly urged.

Sky Fell was my best friend. What the hell kind of name is Sky, anyway? He ate at our table. My mother taught him to read. My sister loved him, I think, in her own way: awkward and angst.

One day I said to Sky, 'Your dad's a drunk and your mom makes the rent money lay-n on her back.'

And he said, 'Those are just my foster folks. They're not my real parents.'

'Don't kid yourself,' I told him. 'You ain't no fortunate son.'

This was before me and him went swimming in Alders Dam. Before the Daltons' trailer burned to the ground with Sky's foster parents inside it. Before my best friend turned up on our doorstep in the middle of the night to tell me he was leaving - running away.

'Running to where?' I asked him.

'Mexico,' he told me.

'What's in Mexico?'

'Freedom.'

'Your family?'

'Maybe.'

'Sure,' I said. 'You just keep right on dreaming.'

He told me one other thing.

Where to find my sister's dead body.

I already knew. I think I'd always known.

And Elizabeth wasn't the only one.

Just about everyone in Bane County went out looking for Becky Ludlow. They never found her. Maybe you read about it in the papers.