Faraway Places Read Online Free PDF Page A

off—and pecked at you when you tried to reach for them.
    The tractor broke down.
    My mother said she forgot how to sleep.
    When you looked out the kitchen window in the afternoon, you could see puddles of water in the yard, but they weren’t really puddles. They were heat waves—a mirage in the yard; illusion.
    Mosquitoes at your ears at night.
    And those hawks flying.
    One morning I heard my mother let out a scream and I ran outside to her. There she stood on her patch of lawn. The lawn was covered with dandelions. Every day my mother went out there, and after she watered the Virginia creepers and the Seven Sisters rose on the trellis, she dug dandelion roots up out of that patch of lawn of hers with the paring knife, and the day before, there had not been one single dandelion there in the grass. Then that morning she screamed, there they were: on her patch of lawn like a plague.
    THE DAY THAT I saw those three forbidden people together—Harold P. Endicott, that woman Sugar Babe, and the nigger—was the first time that I had ever actually seen the nigger, but it wasn’t the first time that I had seen Sugar Babe. It wasn’t my first time for seeing Harold P. Endicott either.
    Twice before, on my swing, I had seen that woman Sugar Babe leave the lean-to on the other side of the river under the catalpa tree, and both times she was in a yellow dress, carrying a big yellow hat with a wide brim. I could see that her black hair was long and thick. It shined. I could see that she was wearing high heels, yellow high heels. What I could actually see was that her shoes were yellow, I couldn’t see that her shoes were high heels, but I could tell that they were by the way she walked. She walked the way my mother walked when my mother wore her high heels with the holes in the toes on Sunday.
    That woman walked up the wooden planks to her old ’49 Ford and got in the old Ford and drove off to the Working Man’s Club with the blue half-moon in the window on West Center Street in Wind River, where she was a waitress. Sugar Babe in her yellow dress, in her yellow wide-brimmed hat, in her yellow high heels walking like that in a Negro bar, waitressing, serving martinis to Montgomery Clift, who sat at the bar in a suit with thin lapels, hunched over one of those special kind of glasses, smoking.
    The only time I saw old Harold P. Endicott before that day that I saw all three of them together was in the Grand Entry of the Wind River Frontier Rodeo with the rest of the Matisse County Mounted Posse. I was in the grandstand with my mother when Harold P. Endicott rode in on an Appaloosa mare leading the other men on their horses through the figure eight.
    The shiny dark green material of his posse shirt had two big dark wet spots under the arms and a long dark wet spot down the middle of the back. In front, the buttons strained to cinch him all in. The silver whistle that called his hellhounds hung on a chain around his neck. Lard ass my mother said, and I laughed when she said it because I had only heard her say damn once when she said damned old souse , and son of a bitch twice when the pigs got out and jumped in the river. I had never heard her say ass before, and I had never laughed before when I heard her swear—at least not in front of her. And I had never heard her say any kind of swear word before without putting the Sign of the Cross with it pretty soon after. That day when she said lard ass at the Wind River Frontier Rodeo—meaning Harold P. Endicott—was the first time I ever saw her not cross herself. When I laughed out loud she looked at me sideways for a minute, but then she ended up laughing too.
    You could tell by the way Harold P. Endicott wore his Stetson hat that he had no hair because his hat came right down to his eyes like a Stetson hat on a trailer hitch, and he squinted his eyes like he was always looking at the toolshed. The squint screwed up his whole round pink face.