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Show 53 half mile before we pulled them down to a walk. I was still cussing Buck. "You better watch out," said Davy. "Oh yeah?" "Yeah. He's tough." "Yeah?" I knew a man on horseback is superior to a man on foot. But when I ran into Buck that weekend I was on foot too, face to face with him in the crowd around the dance floor at Arcadia. The dance hall was just outside town, across the river bridge and down in the river bottom, enough dry land for the big barn of a hall and a parking lot, surrounded with a swamp where flourished as nice a stand of watercress and cattails and mosquitoes as you could find in the country. I never thought of the place as Arcadian, as pure, innocent and artless, though I did think of it as a sort of paradise, the underside of paradise with its enchantment of hedonism and ecstasy. Few called it Arcadia, they called it The Swamp, and my mother didn't want me to go there. She'd given up sin, had gotten stylish for a farm woman and belonged to a bridge club; she was small and energetic and dark, black hair in a bun and sharp blue eyes, not at all faded out from scrubbing clothes or anything else. She preferred me to go to the Rainbow Girls' dances at the Masonic Hall, which would have been fine with me if I could have taken Kate or even a Rainbow Girl like Liz Brown. As it was I said that that was kid stuff. "And you're a man, I suppose. Just because you're growing like a weed. That's no place for a fifteen-year-old boy." When I told her it was all right, that lots of high school kids went there, and took dates too, she said she didn't care how many wild girls like Cathy Bradley and Kate Cannon went there, that it wasn't a nice place. Especially now with those CCC boys swarming everywhere. She spoke darkly about sin, about drunkenness and bad language and worse, but in her mind drunkenness was taking |