Stony River. Tricia Dower

      Contents

       Stony River

       Author’s Note

       Acknowledgements

       The Author

       Readers Guide

       About the Book

       An Interview with Tricia Dower

       Discussion Questions

Stony River

      Summer Solstice 1955

      The river crooked its finger at her.

      Linda crab-walked down the treacherous bank, taking care not to slip. She didn’t dare go home with mud on her behind. A swallowtail’s flutter made her jump, the call of a tree frog. Strides ahead, her new friend Tereza was carving a path through tall, hairy milkweed.

      The Stony River meandered for miles through a dozen New Jersey towns like this one, passing through woodlands and wetlands, salt marshes and tidal flats. Once upon a time, it harbored creatures with astonishing names like diamondback terrapin, alewives and cormorants. Now you were more likely to find rusty car fenders and stinky chemical foam.

      Daddy told of swimming in the river when he was a boy, of the whole town turning out for canoe races past bridges decorated with paper lanterns. Mother told of lying awake at night after Pearl Harbor, sick with worry the Japanese would skulk up the river, signaling each other with jars of lighting bugs. Two boys drowned one winter, the ice breaking as they slid across the river, their frozen bodies found with sad little arms outstretched. If caught anywhere near the river Linda would be banished to her room without dinner and there’d be one more black mark against her on Judgment Day. Honor thy father and thy mother. But on that sticky hot afternoon, when Tereza said, “Let’s go smoke punks at the river, it’ll be cooler there,” she said, “Sure.”

      Tereza did whatever she wanted, maybe the difference being she was thirteen and Linda two months shy of twelve. Or maybe because, as Mother said, “There’s more than a little gypsy in that girl.” All Linda knew of gypsies was that they got to play tambourines and trek around exotic lands in painted wagons strung with pots and pans. Tereza’s family rumbled into the neighborhood two weeks ago in a rusting blue truck, choc-a-bloc with boxes, mattresses, a bicycle and furniture odds and sods. They’d lugged it all into the ground-floor apartment of the two-story building across the street and two doors down from Linda’s house. The building housed a corner store to which Mother sent Linda when they ran out of bread and milk, not wanting to go there herself because it was “seedy.” Daddy said it had just been neglected. Linda tried not to feel superior to Tereza for living in a tidy bungalow with green siding and its own yard. Judge not, that ye be not judged.

      What Tereza called punks were cattail flowers that looked like fat cigars. To get to where they grew, the girls had scampered down a narrow road past Crazy Haggerty’s house, the biggest and creepiest in the neighborhood, its once white paint weathered to gray. It sat high above the water with no other houses around. The drapes were drawn tight, not a window open to catch a breeze. Linda wondered if Haggerty was in there watching. She’d only ever seen him on her way home from school. He’d be heading toward town, weaving back and forth, always wearing the same red shoes and satiny black suit with sequins. He’d scowl if you gawked, tell you to get lost. Mother said to steer clear of him. Daddy said the poor man seemed tortured.

      Reaching the river’s edge without a tumble, Linda released a breath and lifted her gaze from her feet to brown water as sluggish as the air. Bright green slimy globs lazed on the surface. She couldn’t picture Daddy swimming in that.

      Tereza held her nose. “Smells like sweaty socks, don’t it?”

      Linda grunted in response. When the wind was right, she would catch whiffs of the river on her way to school. The sometimes sweet, sometimes rotten smell of mystery lurked behind houses grander than hers with plush green back yards leading to wooden docks and rowboats. But this close to the water, the smell was almost indecent, more like soiled underwear than sweaty socks.

      Tereza pulled a penknife from her pocket and cut a couple of punks, leaving short stems. She produced a small box of wooden matches. The punks weren’t dry enough to flame up and she wasted a couple of matches before they caught and smoldered. “Mmm,” she said, waving her punk under her nose, “I’d walk a mile for a Camel.”

      Linda hid herself behind a bush and held her punk down by her knees so the smoke wouldn’t