Into the Great Wide Open Read Online Free PDF Page B

me tell you about my feelings,” Kenny said. They were walking back, and he knew he was losing her, and he didn’t know why. Her own internal drama. He didn’t know if it was right or not, to talk about his own difficulties, but it was the only way toward her Kenny could see.
    He said, “I came home last week, I don’t know, Tuesday or Wednesday and my father was home early from work and he was drinking again. I guess he went out to lunch and had a couple and just kept right on going. He was sitting there at the kitchen table and reading the paper. So it’s like Hi Dad, Hi Kenny, and I go off to my room because I don’t like to be around him when he’s drinking, nobody does. He gets to feeling sorry for himself.”
    Suddenly he didn’t feel like telling the rest of the story, which ended with his father pissing in bed and calling Kenny a bastard.
    “What?” she asks.
    “I don’t know,” he says. “Various shitty things happen. I’m sorry.”
    “Let’s spend the evening apologizing to each other,” said Junie.
    “For things we have no control over,” said Kenny.
    The magic word, apparently: she slipped her hand into his, their fingers laced together and they walked back through the dunes that way. Touching. Leaving the ocean behind them, the wild sea. Kenny saw her again, wading out toward Portugal, holding her skirt in her hand, bare cold legs, and wondered what she meant to do then. He had the sense of calling her back from her home under the sea. Half the year on land and half the year drowned. They left the sea behind and then, dropping down into the pine grove out of the dunes, they left the wind behind, except for the noise of it in the trees. There were electric lights, the smell of the outhouse, the distant sound of laughter, loud talk, Springsteen.
    At the door of her cabin, while he was getting ready to let go ofher, she turned instead and kissed him: briefly, awkwardly, but still. Smack dab on the kisser. The sudden reality of another body. He felt the damp wool of her sweater with his cheek, coarse nylon of her parka, the
fullness
of her: as tall as he was, breasts pressing through the layers of cloth. Then the awkward, disentangling. She blinked, sleepily, still caught in some dream.
    “Well …,” she said—the opening to some drab good-bye, so very nice to meet you, what a pleasure, let’s do it again. Kenny didn’t want to hear it.
    “Can I come in?” he asked.
    Sparrow startling out of a hedge, birds taking flight: Kenny was sure she would fly away. But no, she opened the door of the little cabin, she held it open wordlessly, she followed him in, and the door slammed shut behind them. A bare bulb racketed to light, casting crazy shadows into the damp corners of the room. “It’s cold in here,” Kenny said.
    “There’s a little stove.”
    “Is there any firewood?”
    “I don’t,” she said. “I mean, I don’t want to be always making rules and so on. But I don’t want to, not tonight. I mean, I don’t want to give you the wrong impression.”
    “No.”
    “But it’s OK if you stay, if you want to. I mean, I’m not trying to get rid of you, I just don’t want to …”
    Prick-teaser, Kenny thought, the word rising up into his brain like some stinking bubble of swamp gas. He didn’t want to be like that, wasn’t going to. But still … some ugly suspicion, male pride she was messing with. You owe me a fuck. This whole side of himself that he didn’t like and didn’t make. Inherited from his father, from everywhere, Fred C. Dobbs. De Niro,
Taxi Driver
. Being a man felt like a sickness sometimes.
    “I’m sorry,” she said. She lit a kerosene lantern, shut the bulb off, and the room went soft, the damp still lingering in the corners.
    “You’re apologizing again,” he said. “I’ll build a fire. We can make s’mores.”
    “We don’t have the ingredients.”
    “Take two Girl Scouts and rub them together,” he said; and saw her face go dark again, just