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scoped out the desolate sections of campus, patrolling the streets, peeking in car windows, sniffing out misery and heartbreak. With unsettling intensity they stared at the neo-Georgian buildings that lined the quad, but they never entered the buildings, nor did they speak to the lovely young women or comment on their long legs and ample breasts. In particular they liked the formal dances held in the opulent Town & Gown Ballroom and gawked at the twinkle lights strung across the entrance that formed a dazzling fractal of endlessly repeating arcs and loops. From the wide bed of their pickup truck, they listened to the steady thump and drone of music and observed the fashionable couples sneaking outside to share a cigarette, to take a quick swig from a flask, to steal a breathless moment beneath the elms. The thick and swampy air was a marvel of fabricated sin, and the men laughed at the couples as they lost themselves in the irrationality of love, how their fingers unclasped hooks and fumbled with buttons and zippers. The men waited until the right moment, the supreme moment, and then flew out of the gloom. On those rare occasions when they hadn’t drunk themselves blind, the ticks said, “Beg your pardon. Didn’t mean to interrupt. Continue what you were doing.” But if they were drunk—and usually they were plenty drunk—they invited the startled couples to take a ride down to the river, where the ticks yearned to stuff them headfirst into a tire swing and violate their “sweet virgin asses.” With caution the couples stepped away, as if from a pack of snarling coyotes, and hurried back inside.
    Worse than their improprieties on campus, the ticks were occasionally accused of stealing prescription medication from the local pharmacy; of crushing pills into a fine powder and snorting long lines on the dashboards of stolen cars; of fighting in the bistro, in the cabaret, in the town square, in emergency rooms where they sought treatment for their broken noses, busted jaws, chipped incisors; of hallucinating on a fierce cocktail of moonshine and formaldehyde; of running wild through the streets and cornering victims, men and women both, in lonely alleyways and pinning them against urine-splattered walls, pawing at their pants, giggling as their victims pleaded for mercy.
    Where they went at night—to a government-subsidized apartment complex, a trailer park, a campground, a highway underpass, an abandoned warehouse on the square—the men did not say, but there were whispers around town that they lived on a sailboat illegally tied to a set of crooked pylons below the falls where the wide sweep of river was deep and calm. As darkness shot across the sky they drove their pickup to the valley and took turns ferrying each other out to the vessel on a rowboat. This story struck some townspeople as odd since the ticks, by their own admission, were not men of the water, of the lakes and rivers and streams, but keepers of livestock and reapers of grain, the wayward children of subsistence farmers with only a tangential connection to the modern age, a fatalistic people who would have adopted Stoicism as their one true faith had someone preached it to them from the pulpit. Indigent and unwanted, driven by hunger and poverty from misty knobs and swampy hollows, the men regularly traversed the rutted roads looking for employment, listening for the sound of growling tractors, following the long, strangling coils of yellow dust that unfurled high above the empty plains.
    When they arrived in Normandy Falls, they found the sailboat in an abandoned barn in the valley. Concealed under a blue tarpaulin on a trailer, the thirty-foot sloop seemed to be waiting there for them. The boat was in a sorry state, its small, sinister galley and four narrow berths infested with spiders and termites. In the evenings, after snaring a wild turkey near the fens, the men clambered aboard to clean and breast the bird and prepare their meal. The warped and