Done in Fifteen Years novel · Chapter 11 of 32

Chapter 11: Midnight

The boy with the sunburned nose saw him too.

"That's the guy," he said.

"That's the guy."

"Okay." He stuck two fingers in his mouth and whistled. "Gravel bar! Everybody to the gravel bar!"

The whole raft of tubers turned and kicked for the far bank, upstream of the bridge.

There was a gravel bar there under the willows, and under them, nose out, with the engine running, was a gray pickup.

Deke had the passenger door open before we hit the rocks.

"Get down."

Twenty kids stood up in the shallows and held their tubes up over their heads.

I went up the gravel in my wet jeans behind a wall of black rubber, dove across the seat and folded myself onto the floorboard.

Deke threw a feed sack over me.

He pulled out through the willows onto a ranch road I'd never seen and didn't drive fast.

"How did you know where I'd come out?"

"Every tube on the Frio comes out at that crossing," he said. "I've been fishing that bar since I was six."

I started to laugh under the sack, and so did he.

We sat out the afternoon in a dry creek bed and came in the back way at dusk.

The lot was empty.

Vernie had hung a CLOSED, FAMILY EMERGENCY sign on the door and turned off every light in the place.

The news van and the white sedan were parked at the gas station by the highway, waiting.

We didn't turn on a single light.

The four of us sat on the dance floor around a camping lantern turned down to a glow.

I sat wrapped in a quilt in one of Vernie's old dance dresses, because my clothes were still dripping on the back porch.

It was turquoise, with fringe.

Macey couldn't look at me without falling over.

"You look like a country singer who lost a bet," she said.

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