Greenville Read Online Free PDF Page B

boy we want living with us? Some hoodlum in the making?
    At the mention of his mother, the boy’s fists ball even more tightly, until he can feel his pulse in his fingertips. Although he didn’t know until this morning that she wanted to send him away, he does know what he’s done. Knows, at any rate, why she would want to be rid of him.
    Well Bess, he hears his uncle say. You never met Ethel. Don’t be so quick to judge the boy on that account.
    It comes back in a rush: the knotted sticky bark of the pine limb in his hand, the enveloping stink of his father’s coat and hat, the rivulets of sweat running down the back of his neck and spine and into his drawers. Though the room he lies in is cold as an ice cube—a chipped ice cube really, given the ceiling’s slope—he suddenly feels hot, and wants to throw the quilt from his fully clothed body.
    It had been the first week of school. This past year? Two years ago? Funny, but he’s not sure. What he is sure of is that on the morning of the first day of school Bruce St. John had held his hands behind his back while Robert Sampson used his stomach as a punching bag, and on the morning of the second day of school he’d encountered Robert Sampson alone and asked him what he was going to do without his buddy to hold his arms behind his back and Robert Sampson had said he was going to use his karate to kick the boy in the ear, and then he had kicked the boy in the ear and later that day, in English, the boy had felt warmth on the side of his cheek and discovered a trail of blood as thick as a pencil running down the line of his jawbone and seeping into his shirt collar. On the third day he’d managed to make it to school unmolested, but that afternoon Vinnie Grasso had chased him into the Pine Barrens, and even though Vinnie is three years older than the boy he never would have caught him if the boy’s shoes hadn’t been too small—which means it was this year, the boy realizes, this past September. The boy’s shoes had pinched his feet, slowing him down, and when Vinnie finally caught the boy he made the boy take off his belt and used it to tie him to a tree, and though the boy struggled to free himself all he managed to do was shake his too-large pants down below his drawers. Vinnie had bowled over laughing at that, held his stomach with one hand and pointed at the boy with the other, and the boy had thought maybe that was all Vinnie was going to do when Vinnie stood up and pulled a switchblade from his pocket and held it to the boy’s throat and told him he was going to have to kill him now, so there wouldn’t be any witnesses. Or maybe he would just cut out his tongue, Vinnie said. Cut out his tongueand cut off his fingers so he couldn’t tell anybody what happened. Couldn’t speak, or hold a stick to write in the sand. Or maybe … and the knife had trailed south past clavicles and ribcage and solar plexus, and the boy started struggling so wildly that his pants fell all the way to his ankles. Vinnie laughed again, laughed for a good five minutes, and in the end all he did was cut open the seams of the boy’s pants pockets. Here hold this for me Dale will you? he said, making the boy take the blade of the knife between his teeth while he pulled the boy’s pants up and stuffed his cuffs into his socks and proceeded to dump handfuls of dirt into the ripped pockets of the boy’s pants, not stopping until both pant legs were about as filled with dirt as the pillow beneath the boy’s head is with feathers. It took the boy a half hour to work his hands free after Vinnie left, and then he’d had no choice but to take his pants off in the Barrens and shake and scrape as much dirt from them and his muddy legs as he could and run all the way to Slaussen’s, where Mr. Krakowski, the produce manager, had docked his pay for being late. He had not paid him anything at all, and because it was too warm for a jacket the boy hadn’t been able to steal any fruit either.