(2007) Chasing Fireflies - A Novel of Discovery Read Online Free PDF Page B

home to the next. I didn't know what my birth certificate said until Unc here showed it to me."
    He shot a glance at Unc's boots.
    "You ever seen yours?"
    He shook his head.
    "What do people call you?"
    He turned to a clean page and wrote in block letters: SNOOT.
    I studied the page. "They call you anything else?"
    From the moment we had walked in, his left leg had been bouncing like Pinocchio tied to an invisible tether held by a puppeteer above the ceiling.
    "What if you could pick any name ... and you knew folks would call you by it ... what would you pick?"
    The hand stopped, Pinocchio's tap dance quit abruptly, and the kid's head slowly turned toward my feet. After nearly a minute, he turned back to center, and the puppeteer tightened the slack.
    For the first time, I noticed that most of the pages in the notebook were covered in sketches. "Will you show me your notebook?"
    He turned to the first page and held it open on his lap. I put my hands behind me so he'd know I wouldn't take it, and leaned in. The realism was stunning yet, based on what I had seen walking in, so was the speed with which he sketched. He flipped the pages while Unc looked over my shoulder.
    We saw a rundown trailer on blocks with a fat, collared cat sunning itself on top and a German shepherd burrowed in the dirt below with two, undoubtedly pink, flamingos thrown off to one side. One of the heads had been chewed off. One high-top basketball shoe, the laces untied with a hole above the big toe, sat at an angle before the front door. Beer cans and Jim Beam bottles riddled the grass around the front door. A clothesline hung off to one side. Men's underwear, a woman's thong, a few pairs of jeans, and one pair of kid's faded jeans hung from it. A tall live oak rose up from behind the trailer and towered above it. A fifty-gallon barrel cut in half and resting on its end sat front and center, flames rising above the rim. A bag of charcoal had been tossed aside and lay crumpled nearby. On the door hung the number 27. All the windows were open, and a huge floor fan had been lodged in the bedroom window on the end.

    I tried to find his eyes, but he lowered them further. "Can I turn the page?"
    He nodded, and I slowly turned the page-again putting my hand behind me.
    The second page contained a close-up sketch of what looked like a massive and muscled right hand, covered in grease and calluses, wrapped around a pair of pliers and squeezing like a vise. The pliers were pressed against what looked like the back of someone's arm or shoulder blade, and pinched inside the nose of the pliers was a fold of skin, maybe an inch long and half an inch in width. The next picture, or frame, showed the hand and pliers just after they had ripped the skin off the arm.
    I compared the kid to his pictures. First his arms, then shoulders and back. His skin was a war-torn canvas. Including the one beneath the gauze, I counted sixteen scars. Each one was about as long as the nose on a pair of pliers.
    The kid's head had been buzzed short, and entire random patches of hair were missing. They'd been pulled out. His shoulders, bony and narrow, fell off like waterfalls at the edges. His fingernails had been bitten down to the quick, and his feet were that kind of dirty that no single bath would clean.
    Unc studied the pictures, the kid, and then me. His lips were sort of wrapped around the left side of his mouth, and his front teeth were chewing on the inside of his right cheek. Every few seconds, he'd spit out what looked like a dead piece of skin.

    I knelt next to the kid, trying to level my eyes to his. Without touching, I pointed to his arms. "Who did this to you?"
    The speed of the hand on the tether was tapping double-time and now controlled both his left leg and right hand. His head moved from Unc's feet to mine and then back to center. Finally, he shut the notebook and crossed his arms.
    I sat on the floor in front of the kid and pointed. "What's his name?"
    Now his head