Father and Son Read Online Free PDF

out of the trunk and it was sitting at his feet. A few wrenches stuck out of his pocket. They opened the doors of the car shed and pulled them back so that the late-afternoon sun glowed dully on the rusted chrome of the bumper. The hood was up. Puppy looked inside and glanced at his brother.
    â€œGood thing we brought one,” he said.
    Glen looked inside the engine compartment and saw the positive andnegative cables lying inside the battery box. His hand was hurting and he wished the monkey was still alive so he could kill it again.
    â€œI be damn,” he said. “I’d like to know who in the hell did that.”
    â€œIt was in there last time I was out here,” Puppy said. “Get the gas out of the trunk, Glen, and I’ll stick this battery in and we’ll see if she’ll turn over. I need to get on home.”
    It took fifteen minutes to get it running. Puppy adjusted the timing and the carburetor until it would idle and advance. They bled the brakes.
    â€œI’d put some plugs in it first chance I got and some points too,” Puppy said. “I believe I’d get some new water hoses. They’ll rot when one sets up this long.”
    Glen got behind the wheel and cranked it, revving it a little. He drove it into the yard and cut it off. His brother leaned in the window opposite. “What’s your plans?”
    â€œI don’t know. Get something to eat. I may go see Jewel. She still live where she did?”
    â€œShe ain’t moved. I wouldn’t get in no trouble if I was you.”
    â€œYou ain’t me, though, are you?” Glen said.
    Puppy just shook his head and looked down at the seat.
    â€œNaw, Glen. I sure ain’t you.”
    He stopped at a station two miles down the road for fresh gas, then went inside for cigarettes and two little Cokes. He mixed a drink from the bottle of whiskey he’d stolen and rode around for a while. He didn’t want to get over to her house before dark. The sun was going down and there was mown hay raked in the fields. He hung his arm out the window and smoked a cigarette, cruising past the houses set back from the road with their amber lights showing through the front windows. Suppertime. He drank from the Coke bottle and it warmed his stomach. He finished that one pretty quick and opened the other bottle and mixed another drink.
    At the red light in town he came to a stop and waited for it to turn and drove through it once it did and eased along the storefronts, looking at the cafe. The lights were off and the door was shut. He circled the square twice. A few produce vendors were still doing business. On Saturdays they sold vegetables from the back ends of their trucks, the vehicles nosed into the high sidewalks and little roofs of wood and tin built over them to shade their goods from the sun, big watermelons and bushel baskets of purple hull peas and yellow squash, bright red tomatoes. At one time that was his lot, too, rising early with his mother to go out to the truck patch and pick the produce from vines still wet with dew, loading them into the truck and getting to the square early to set up and hang the scales and lay out the paper sacks, sitting there all day to earn money that his father would drink up that weekend.
    He sipped his whiskey and glanced at the vendors a last time and then headed out of town, reading the signs in the store windows, looking at the cheap furniture on the sidewalks, the lamps and dressers, driving slow and thinking about his old man. He had first fought him when he was twelve and he had fought him five times before he whipped him the first time when he was fifteen, a prolonged battle that went all through the house with both of them knocking over furniture, breaking tables, his mother down on the floor with her hands tangled in her hair screaming for it to stop. That day he had knocked his father all the way through the screen door onto the porch, but it hadn’t resolved