Brown-Eyed Girl Read Online Free PDF

cheerfully fatalistic “Box of Rain.” The tape was a wildly eclectic mishmash of stuff— from the Dead to Wanda Jackson, Leadbelly and Steve Earl and Spike Jones (way too much Spike Jones) and her own Van Morrison anthem, the one about the brown-eyed girl. Half an hour of unpredictable and uneven music later, she was rounding the Washington Park bandshell for the third time at her usual snail-paced jog, feeling a little light-headed but strong enough to damn well keep on running, soundtracking with Simon and Garfunkel (God, they sang good together).
    She started back toward Meg’s house, meandering through neighborhoods to look at everybody’s flowers. Marigolds and zinnias, purple asters and shasta daisies, petunias and cosmos delighted her from front yard plots, windowboxes, hanging planters on front porches. So many people in the old neighborhoods south of the university gardened madly in the brief summer, with something of the same spirit Sally had heard in “Box of Rain.” She knew that in dozens of backyards, somebody was tasting a gold morning and thinking about harvesting lettuce and string beans and way too many zucchinis. The first frost could come any time after Labor Day, maybe even before.
    She passed Delice’s house, near Fourteenth and Kearny, a brown brick with four gables and tidy dark red trim. Dickie, Delice, and Dwayne had been raised there. When Doreen Langham followed her husband to the grave, she willed it to her daughter, and Delice had lived there ever since. A handsome, lanky teenager and a slightly younger boy stood in front of a basketball hoop in the driveway, shooting free throws. She recognized them from the family Christmas card pictures Mary had sent every year, even when Dickie was on the run. Josh, the older one, was Dickie and Mary’s boy. The younger had to be Josh’s cousin, Delice’s son from her short, spotty marriage to Walker Davis: Jerry Jeff Walker Davis. He was the image of his feckless long-gone father, but looked as if he might have more of a clue. She waved at the boys, then realized that they could have no idea who she was. Still, this was Laramie, not LA. They waved back, smiling uncertainly but smiling anyhow.
    It still cracked her up that Delice had made good on their pledge to each other, that they would name their firstborn children after their favorite singers. Jerry Jeff had been Delice’s first and last, all that remained of a marriage Delice had described as an extended, sometimes pleasurable, often ludicrous mishap with mixed consequences. Sally remembered long, expensive phone calls from Laramie to California and back. Walker, who had lost what there was of his mind over Delice, had finally left his wife and moved into the house on Kearny. Jesus, he was handsome, a great big gray-eyed ranch boy with steerroper’s shoulders and a bull-rider’s ass, but Sally had never regarded him as that big a prize. All summer long, he rodeoed around trying to shatter his pelvis in quest of a big belt buckle. How intelligent was that? He had reached the peak of his career potential driving a truck for the state highway department.
    Sally knew the story. One winter morning when Jerry Jeff was five, Delice got a postcard from Houston, Texas, with a picture of the Baytown Ship Channel on the front (“Eighth Wonder of the World”). Walker was in Houston for the rodeo. On the back was a message in his tiny, childish handwriting, explaining that he’d fallen in love with a barrel racer from Belle Fourche, South Dakota. Wyoming was too cold. They were heading off to Florida to live in a trailer and work cattle for some sawgrass ranch operation: Did she know that Florida was the biggest beefraising state in the US? He hoped he could eventually get on with a road crew there. He wouldn’t ask for half of Delice’s property if she wouldn’t contest the divorce. In all those years he’d been married to her on