Ask the Dark by Henry Turner Page A

weren’t ole Skugger’s drug buddy.
    But you still see’m, right?
    Yeah, now and then. What’s up?
    I want you to do something for me. Skugger’s been driving around in this blue car, you seen it?
    Oh yeah. Plenty of times, he said.
    Do me a favor, next time you see Skugger, ask him who owns that car, will ya?
    I know who it is already, Billy, Sam said. It’s the guy who sells him drugs.
    So I was right about that, I’m thinking.
    I say, You know his name?
    I never met him, Sam said.
    Try, I say. Try’n meet’m. He won’t meet me ’cause Skugger don’t like me. But if you do it I’ll have something for you. Something good.
    What?
    Don’t know yet, but something, I say.
    Sam looks sad a minute. You aren’t doing drugs, are you, Billy? Because if that’s what it is, I don’t want any.
    No way! I says. Never done’m! Ain’t gonna sell’m, neither, that ain’t why I’m asking. I just want to know what his name is, if you can manage it.
    All right, Sam said. When I see Skugger I’ll ask him.
    Knowing Sam like I do and how he wants boys to like’m, I hold up a minute. I know he might just walk right on up to Skugger and say, Hey, Skugger, who’s that man you hanging with, Billy Zeets wants to know. So I take Sam’s arm and look at’m tight. Just do it on the sly, I said. Don’t go saying it’s me that’s askin’, you hear? And if you can, try’n find out where he lives, will ya? It ain’t for nothing bad, I promise you. Will you help me?
    Sam said yeah, he’d try. Then he got up out the bushes. I’ve got to finish my route, he told me. Curfew’s coming.
    Thanks, buddy, I said, and I squeezed his arm again and he smiled.
    He went up the street and I saw him tossing papers all going swap, swap, and then he walked down to the bottom of the hill and it was like them trees rose over his head’n swallowed him.
    I turned back around, real sudden. Watchin’ Sam walk off, something had caught me out the corner of my eye. So one last time I looked up at the house.
    A man stood at that window, the man from the car. I seen him just a second, before he pulled down that tarp and disappeared.
    I stood a minute, staring, feeling cold all over. Then I started on home, walking down the middle of the street, faster than usual. Every few feet I looked behind myself, though that didn’t slow my walking.
    And once or twice . . .
    I started runnin’.
    I was prob’ly just seeing things, ’cause’f shadows on the street.
    But the feeling I had was that this man I wanted to find was now trying to find me.

Chapter Fifteen
    I got home all sweaty, and all I done was go upstairs and rest until dark. I ain’t one for getting scared, I guess you know that. But this man I seen was bugging me out. Fact is, Sam and me in the bushes couldn’t be seen from the street, but anybody in the house could’f looked right down and seen us fine, and maybe even heard a word or two. So I was worried, and knew damn well somebody followed me partways home, ’cause I got a sense for that.
    Something weird was going on. I mean, them mittens struck me as weird and that blue car struck me as weird and so did the chip bag. I felt so damn confused. It was like when you in class and just staring at your desk and not listening and then all a sudden the nun prods you and asks you for the answer, asks just because you ain’t been listening, and you get all startled and try to remember, and maybe if you had a spare hour you would remember, remember what you sort’f heard but didn’t pay attention to, ’cause you heard it just the same. But you never do get that hour and so you hear everybody say you ain’t nothing but a dummy and laughs all round the class.
    Them things like the mittens and the boxes and the chip bag, they was like them answers you sort’f heard but can’t remember, and you gotta give’m time to come up.
    So what I done was lay still, waiting for them answers.
    But I didn’t get no time ’cause right then I heard a