Jess, however, is untroubled by strategy. She’s up over the lip of the Teacup and skibbling down the hill toward the men, darting, stumbling — half-falling — from tree to tree. Walker prepares for trouble.

  But it doesn’t come. The men finish their business, wipe their hands on their grimy overalls, oblivious to the witness of their crime. The engine roars and the truck lurches up what must be another logging trail, for these woods were logged heavily in the old days. The truck’s wheels spin in the mud with no load any longer over the back tires. By the time Walker joins Jess, she’s writing the license plate number with a rock on the slimy backside of a piece of birch bark.

  “Nice work,” says Walker. He wants to scold her for her rashness, but he stops himself. He doesn’t want to be accused of derring-don’t.

  She hands him the birch-bark evidence and looks anywhere but at the oil spill.

  “Neat, eh!” she says. And Walker notices for the first time they are standing in an old junkyard, an abandoned dump site on the edge of swampy ground. He can’t remember ever knowing it was there before. Jess seems delighted. There are bedsprings and bowed pieces of ancient farm equipment. There is an icebox with its doors torn off, and a cracked woodstove with weeds growing in the firebox like newly minted flames.

  It is an old dump, its rusty feet still trapped in hard gray snow. It is overgrown. There are no Coke cans, no plastics. Nothing new but a small lake of black effluent.

  Jess explores. She liberates a steering wheel and drives it around the dump. She tries on a tractor seat as if it were the latest in spring helmets. Walker stands on the shore of the inky sludge, feeling somehow abandoned.

  “Look at this!” cries Jess. She has found the carcass of a telephone booth. “This must be pre-Columbian,” she says, for Columbus has figured prominently in her schoolwork this term.

  She kneels down and picks through broken glass and drags out a matted coat of animal pelts. “No, it’s older,” she says. “Probably Stone Age. Look at this, Walk, look. There’s a label inside the collar. ‘Property of Og the Caveman.’”

  Walker cannot speak. It is shady down here, colder. All the spring seems to have been wrung out of the day.

  “Maybe he was phoning home,” Jess rattles on, “to tell Ogetta that the woolly mammoth hunt wasn’t going so well when — boom! — he was hit by a meteorite.”

  “Boom!” says Walker. “Bloody boom …”

  Jess makes a face at him, at his apparent bad mood. She slips her arm into one of the coat’s tattered sleeves. She is tentative, fearing perhaps that her fingers might make contact with some of Og, or a mouse, or a slug family. Triumphantly, her fist pokes through the opening. Then her left arm fearlessly navigates the damp reaches of the other sleeve.

  “This used to be a whole herd of raccoons,” she says. “Imagine.”

  “Do you have any idea what vermin probably live in that thing now?” says Walker.

  Jess looks down at the tattered hem hanging around her ankles. She sniffs. “It stinks,” she says, but makes no move to take it off. Then she has to skip-step aside, for a rivulet of the oily puddle has found its way to her.

  “What is it?” she asks, wrinkling her nose.

  “Gunk,” says Walker. “Lubricant soup. Crankcase oil, goop of all kinds — you name it.”

  Jess joins Walker beside the still, dark pond. She growls, “The devil damn thee black, thou cream-faced loon.”

  * * *

  The sun is low on Foxtail Road. Jess spins around to make her new-old coat twirl. It is so heavy she almost falls over. “I think it belongs to Superman,” she says.

  “What happened to Og?”

  Jess snorts. “Oh, come on, Walk. As if they had phones in the Stone Age.”

  But Walker doesn’t rise to the bait. He is filled with chagrin. And Jess’s gaiety suddenly annoys him.

  “You know how he changes in phone booths?” she says. “Well, he must have left it there, see. Then robbers came and stole the booth before he got back.”

  “Sure,” says Walker. “Right.”

  * * *

  Jess is Walker’s half-sister, his mother’s other kid. His father never remarried. Too busy. Their mother is away right now. She is an actress. She is playing Lady Macbeth in Winnipeg. That’s where the “cream-faced loon” came from. Macbeth. Jess has learned all the lines. There was even a chance she’d get to play Macduff’s son, but the director’s nephew got the part. She would have loved it. “Thou li’st thou shag ear’d villain!” She is not a child of ordinary curses.

  Jess’s father, Steve, phones the police when they tell him what they’ve seen. The police tell Steve it’s not in their jurisdiction; he should phone the provincial police. The provincial police tell him to phone the offices of the municipality. But the office is closed.

  “I’ll phone first thing in the morning,” says Steve.

  Jess sits on the kitchen floor in Superman’s discarded furs, absorbed in getting her Barbie doll into a fur coat of her own. She pushes too hard, tears one of Barbie’s sleeves.

  “Hell-kite,” she says.

  “Jess!” says Steve. “And will you please get that wretched coat out of the house.”

  * * *

  Walker dreams of an otter. There is no one lying in wait, no one to scare it off. It is his dream, but he is not in it. Suddenly the otter pricks up its ears, listens, scampers out of the stream, terrified. By what, what? Then Walker is sitting up in bed, falling out of bed, his feet tied up in the bed clothes. Someone is screaming.

  It’s not a dream. It’s Jess. Her father is the first to reach her.

  “O, O, O,” she sobs, wringing her hands. She trembles in his arms. “Everything will be black,” she says. “The girl, the girl. She’s trapped.”

  “I’ll get you a glass of water,” says Walker. When he arrives back, Jess is a bit calmer but disoriented. She takes the glass from him but stares at it suspiciously. Won’t drink it. Won’t.

  “What are we going to do, Walk?” she says, her voice small and pleading. “The goop will all be gone by the time anyone bothers to go see it.”

  Walker sighs. “I’ll go get a jar of it, okay? As evidence.”

  “Okay.”

  “First thing tomorrow.”

  “No. Now.”

  “It’s midnight, Jess. Tomorrow. First thing.”

  “No, no, no!” says Jess. Suddenly she’s out of bed and heading for the door, fighting off all attempts to restrain her. Walker and her father block the way. She is out of control. No pleading, no sweet language will contain her. Around and around her room she tromps, over the bed, down the other side. She is acting out of her dream, urgent, unmanageable.

  She has sneaked the raggedy coat up to her room. Now she slips it on. She points her finger at her two pursuers, stopping them in their tracks.

  “This is Superman’s coat!” she warns them. She is shaking with rage. Then — maybe it’s the looks on their faces, or maybe she has only just woken up — suddenly it’s too funny and she is laughing. Then crying. Then they are holding her.

  Then somehow, though he cannot quite believe he agreed to it, Walker is out in the blustery spring night, in boots and a winter parka, with a flashlight and an empty Miracle Whip bottle, on a goop-gathering mission.

  The moon — confused by spring — set before nightfall. There is only starlight to accompany Walker on his lonely mission. Stars and the wind in the pines and the peepers in the lowland. And a barred owl barking like a moon-throated dog.

  His mind is full of Jess wringing her hands like Lady Macbeth; sleep-walking, unable to wash away the blood stains from her own murderous hands. This is not a comforting thought.

  And it’s a great deal worse when Walker veers off the Foxtail Road into the woods, the closer darkness of the Haunted Road. He curses Jess and her fertile imagination — her naming of things — for it has infected him.

  Things move in the woods, creak and snap, stirred by the wind. Things skitter for shelter, stalked by night hunters. Branches break underfoot or reach out and brush his cheek with alarming familiarity. Even the sound of Teacup Falls when it comes to him at last holds little pleasure. It is too loud, covers up too much else. Walker finds himself flinging the flimsy beam of his flashlight every which way, manufacturing monsters in the tangle of shadows and wind-fingered undergrowth. A bear. Wolves. Three witches. Two men in overalls with oil-dirty hands.

  Here are his and Jess’s tracks from the afternoon, sinking into the boggy ground along the stream’s bank. Down the rocky steps, below the wind into the sheltered dip of land Jess calls the Teacup.

  From here he will make his way down to the valley floor and the dump. He just needs a little rest before making his descent. He sits on a boulder by the brook, trying to collect his racing thoughts. He shivers, for this moonless April night is still fat with winter.

  A clattering sound comes to him from farther down the stream. He stops a raccoon in his flashlight’s beam.

  It is perched on a table rock that juts out over the falling water. One paw is deep inside something that looks to Walker at first glance like a hive of some kind but that glitters faintly in the light. The raccoon is transfixed by the beam. Then hastily it withdraws its paw, something white in its grasp.

  “Shoo!” whispers Walker. And the raccoon jumps down from the rock, dropping whatever it has won from the hive-like thing, and races off into the forest.

  Walker tracks the raccoon with his flashlight until it is out of sight, then he swings his beam back to the construction on the rock. It is not a hive but an inverted bowl-shaped thing.

  Walker slides down the bank on the seat of his pants. The scent of wild leeks rises up around him. Finally he stops beside a small mystery, a dome-shaped creation. The structure sways in a gust of wind. Impulsively, Walker reaches out to catch it, fearing it will be whisked clear off its foundation, whirled away into the night. But it is fixed to the rock. There is a tear in its side where the raccoon has been at work. Caught in the rocks at the foot of the stone table, Walker finds a small white naked doll.

  He peers closer at the construct. It is made, it seems, entirely from dragonfly wings. Bending low, so that his chin hovers just above the cold granite table, Walker shines his light through the transparent walls. There is a bed made of twigs tied together with woven grass. The bed is weighted down with a beautiful rounded stone pillow. There is a handkerchief bedspread half dragged off the little bed onto the floor of the dragonfly house. With each gust of wind, the house seems to breath. In and out. So fragile and yet so strong.

  Walker’s fears desert him. He is filled with astonishment, with wonder. He hunkers down close to the rock out of the wind. He remembers how every year the dragonflies come. Their coming is a celebration for it marks the end of blackfly season. The dragonflies are the cavalry of early summer. Whirlybird knights. They come in scores, gobbling blackflies by day and resting on the west wall of the house in the evening, as if recharging their batteries in the setting sun.

  When they are killed, as many of them are, by passing cars, Jess picks up their broken bodies from along the Foxtail Road; she plucks them off the car grills and out of the mesh of screen doors and windows. She collects them in a blue and emerald-green pottery bowl. He has seen it on her windowsill. And now she has built this house, though how she has accomplished it, Walker cannot tell.

  Another gust of wind smacks the gossamer walls. It wobbles but does not fly apart as Walker fears it must. It just breathes quietly, in and out like a sleeping mouth. Walker looks closely at the tiny doll baby in his palm, pockets it. Then he sees that the raccoon has left something behind: oily paw prints on the table rock. With new resolve, he makes his way down to the dump. He manages to fill most of the bottle with goop-soaked earth.

  * * *

  The municipal offices tell them to phone the Ministry of the Environment. The Ministry of the Environment says they’ll look into it. And they do. The investigator even drops around to report. The license plate number belongs to a vehicle owned by an automobile establishment. The investigator cannot divulge the owner’s name, but he has visited the establishment.

  “They’re properly registered,” he says. “They’ve got what’s called a waste generator number,” he says. “That means they are required by law to have all hazardous waste removed by a licensed company. They have a receipt of a pick-up on Tuesday. They’re too small an operation to have produced even a single drum of waste since then, let alone four,” he says.

  Jess scowls at the investigator. “Well, they did!”

  “That may be so,” says the investigator. “But it seems the owner is plagued by youths trespassing on his property, playing in his wrecking yard. Stealing things. He’s had to run them off quite a few times and he seems to think there are a few of those kids who wouldn’t mind making things hot for him, if they had the chance.”

  It takes Walker a moment to digest this news, pick up on the inference. “We’re not making this up,” he says. “You saw the spill yourself.”

  The investigator shrugs. “I did. And I believe what you’re telling me. But the fine for this kind of illegal dumping is pretty steep. If we try to prosecute, this guy is going to claim it’s all a frame-up. We’ve only got circumstantial evidence. It’s his word against yours.

  “If you could get photographs, then we’d have something to work with,” says the investigator. He asks them to keep their eyes open. Then he’s gone.

  “Hell-kite!” says Jess.

  “Now, now,” says Steve. “He’s done what he can.”

  “I didn’t mean him,” says Jess, “I mean Carmody’s Auto Wrecking.”

  Walker and Steve stare at her, mouths agape.

  “Well, that’s who he’s talking about,” says Jess.

  And so the story unfolds a bit more. Jess recognized the men making the dump when she saw them up close. She recognized the truck, too. They work for Carmody’s Auto Wrecking up on the French Line.

  “We go there sometimes after school,” she says. “They never caught me, though. And we don’t steal stuff!” she says. “We just play Freedom Fighters in the dead cars. It’s just a game.”

  Then, before anyone can say anything adultish, she heads for her room. “It’s not as if we were killing anyone,” she says.

  * * *

  Walker isn’t sure what to do and so he does nothing. There are summer job interviews to go to and old school friends to visit. There are errands to run and a leftover paper to write for school. And there is Jess to visit with and babysit when Steve’s away. They play cards at night, Spite & Malice. She is merciless.

  What Walker doesn’t know, because Jess doesn’t tell him, is that she has declared a personal war on Carmody’s Auto Wrecking. She is a warrior for the Stream of Dreams.

  She bikes up to Carmody’s every day after school. She stands in full view of the office window in her invincible Superman coat until Carmody yells at her to vamoose. Then she crosses the road and marches back and forth in front of his property or plays provocatively with the flap on his mailbox until he yells some more.

  She makes a sandwich board. Looking for a large oil spill? it says on the front. Then on the back it says, Just call Carmody for free home delivery.

  “I’m calling the cops,” Carmody bawls at her.

  “Good,” she says.

  But he doesn’t.

  Then she enlists some willing friends. They play the wrecking yard as if it were a great noisy instrument of torture. They pull out all the stops. They bang on wrecked car doors and yodel through improvised megaphones. Kids’ stuff.

  Carmody and his men chase them away.

  She steals out of bed one night and spray-paints his office window. Environment Killer.

  She prints up a flyer spelling out Carmody’s crime in detail. She and her friends deliver it all over the neighborhood. That’s when Carmody really does call the cops. Jess is there waiting for them. The cop bends Jess’s ear. He drives her home. Walker is the only one there right then. The cop tells Walker what she’s been up to. He tells Walker to have Jess’s father contact him. He issues her a dire warning.

  “Shag ear’d villain,” she says when the cop car leaves.

  And Walker is terribly proud of Jess and terribly sad. Because, to his mind, it is not a game anymore. Among his sins, Carmody has stolen Jess’s childhood. That’s what Walker thinks and he burns with frustration. But he is wrong about Jess. She is playing hard, devoted to her game. He worries. He thinks of Jess’s miraculous house by the Teacup Falls, and he wishes his mother were home. Jess is so like her. And he is not. He is not.

  Jess goes underground. She spies, lurks, prowls, slinks, skulks and glides between the rusting hulks of Carmody’s wrecked kingdom. She sees a truck come to take away Carmody’s hazardous waste, pumping it up from a holding tank. But there is goop and gunk the licensed company will not take. She sees the man from the licensed company do some kind of a test and shake his head. Won’t take it. Then, when he has gone, Jess watches it being carted off to a shack at the farthest, most overgrown corner of Carmody’s vast lot.

  “Damned PCPs,” she hears one of Carmody’s oafs swearing.

  Then one day, just around closing, she watches Carmody’s men load up the half-ton with four more drums of waste. She bikes home filled with fire.

  * * *

  It is the first time Walker has returned to the Teacup Falls since the night of no moon when he scared away the raccoon and discovered a house built out of dragonfly wings.