In Zanesville Read Online Free PDF Page B

department
     if a fire starts in
any
house, I don’t care whose.”
    “We did,” I say.
    “Well, you did and you didn’t,” Phyllis says firmly. She settles back onto the couch and drapes the cloth again. “Get yourself
     some french fries if you’re hungry.”
    “We’re sleeping in the camper,” Felicia tells her. She puts the afghan across Phyllis’s feet and tucks it in. She looks at
     me and pretends to punch the feet. I pretend to poke her mother’s eyes out.
    “What are you laughing about?” Phyllis asks. “And I will look out there at eleven o’clock and if I see a light on, you’re
     coming in here to sleep.”
    “Don’t worry,” I say. “You won’t see a light on.”
    *     *     *
    The camper is a dented metal box on wheels that cranks open and pops out into a half trailer, half tent, with canvas walls,
     zippered screens, a table nook, a foot of damp carpeting, and a tiny efficiency kitchen. We sleep in the popped-out ends,
     on wide bunks covered with foam pads, outfitted with sleeping bags and pillows that smell like rain.
    We get the lantern lit and zip everything up so nobody can see inside, and then we creep out, down the pitch-dark alley to
     an abandoned garage, cobwebby and collapsing, where our kittens live. There are three of them—a sick one, a friendly one,
     and a wild one. I don’t even know why we went in there in the first place, just looking to see what they had, and the friendly
     kitten came running up to us. We’ve been feeding them and playing with them all summer with no one finding out, and we hope
     to keep it that way.
    The wild one is named Ruffles; it has long spiky fur and has to be caught using an old T-shirt. The sick one is mine, a rickety
     little tortoiseshell named Freckles who has something wrong with his fur. The friendly one is Felicia’s, pure shiny black
     with an intelligent, trustworthy face. We named him Blacky Strout, after a man running for sheriff, whose name and face are
     on billboards all over town. Once we catch Ruffles and get him tied into the T-shirt, the other two are easy; when they’re
     released inside the camper they go crazy for a while, clawing their way up onto the benches and bunks, attacking our feet.
    “Yours is drooling,” Felicia says.
    It’s true, there’s more foam on him than usual. He doesn’t seem to notice, though, and sits purring on my lap for a fewminutes, running his claws reflexively in and out as I pet him. I have an affinity for anything that has peeled-off fur or
     looks terminal, or, for that matter, for anything that seems to notice me, which this kitten does. When he finally hops down,
     he turns his freckled face to look up at me. His nose and the rims of his eyes are a tender, sore-looking pink.
    “He looks a little bit like the Rebabbit,” I tell Felicia. This was her sister’s former pet rabbit, which had black-and-white
     fur and pale pink features. About a year ago the Rebabbit hopped away while we had it out of the cage, went under a series
     of sticker bushes, and was never heard from again. For a while we’d been able to see it in there, pretending to eat grass,
     whiskers trembling, crouched over its long velvety paws, waiting to be pounced on either by us or by something worse. Every
     time we tried to reach it, we got scratched by thorns and the rabbit took a further hop, until eventually all we could glimpse
     was a disappearing blur of white. The stickers went on for some ways and then blended into the tangle of a dense neighborhood
     ravine. In there were festering communities of garter snakes, looped over fallen logs, draped haphazardly along the reeds,
     et cetera. We wouldn’t go down there if it were our
own
rabbit.
    Felicia’s younger sister, Stephanie, had gone predictably berserk. “He was
mine
and they let him
loose!
” she sobbed determinedly, assessing us from behind her fogged glasses, strands of blond hair stuck to her face.
    You’d never have guessed