King of the Mild Frontier Read Online Free PDF

every drop of water in me is shooting out like I’m trying to arc it across the Grand Canyon.
    My brother calmly closes all the windows.
    When the last drop sizzles off the top of the hot oil furnace, I stand, gazing dazed through the yellow mist. “You said you wouldn’t tell.”
    â€œI won’t,” he says, “but what are you going to tell Jewell and Crutch when they come home and smell this?”
    â€œYou better open those windows.”
    â€œAnd let the whole neighborhood smell it? Then you’d really be in trouble.”
    John could always get me to help him pound those last few nails into my coffin for him. He not only got me, he got me to get me. I’m running around closing the rest of the windows for him so the neighbors won’t form a mob to run my parents out of town for having me as a kid.
    True to what I now know my brother already knew, he didn’t have to tell on me. When Jewell walks through the door carrying my baby sister, the aroma fills Candy’s tiny nostrils and sets her off like a siren. Besides, if you’re from Mars, there’s no mistaking that smell. The good news is that Jewell is so mad she doesn’t know exactly how she wants to kill me, so I get a short reprieve “until your father gets home.”
    I can truthfully say I don’t ever remember my father hitting me, but somewhere I got the idea he could hit really hard, and I always put that idea together with this particular incident. So if my dad ever warmed my butt, it was in response to my doing something neat onto the oil-furnace fire through the living-room grate. But make no mistake about it: Whether or not my father hit me, it didn’t change my behavior one bit. The claustrophobic horror of those first few seconds, and the telling and retelling of the tale, are far more natural consequence than I need to never again peedown the heater. It is good that May and Glen live just across the street, because our house is uninhabitable for at least four days and we have to wait two days after that for the curtains to get back from the dry cleaners. But I don’t go down totally alone. It is widely believed I am telling the truth when I say John told me to do it (“I was just teasing. Geez, I didn’t think he’d really do it”) but his is a misdemeanor and mine a felony that spawns another of those unanswerable questions I will hear throughout my elementary-school years: “If your brother told you to jump off a bridge, would you do it?”
    Of course I would, if he made it seem neat.
    Â 
    There are plenty of wanna-do-something-neat? stories, each more embarrassing than the last, but my brother’s real coup had to be the time he shot me in the head with a BB gun and didn’t spend one second behind bars for it.
    My father would never let any of us kids have a BB gun. “I’ll let you have a twenty-two when it’s time,” he’d say, “but a BB gun is a toy and that makes it dangerous.” We would be allowed to own and shoot a real weapon when we were of age for a hunting license and when he was convinced he had taught us the gravity of holding in our hands a weapon that can kill. So how badly do you think each of us longed for aBB gun? Of course John knew how to get his hands on one.
    We had moved into the big house near the beginning of my second-grade year and found new friends in the Young brothers, Eddie and Richie. Their dad, along with his brother, owned Cascade Auto, the place my dad thought my granddad might as well have gone to buy his pretty blond felon a new car. Eddie and Richie Young could unerringly identify any car made within the last fifteen years that drove down Main Street; and they could have shot the windows out of any one of them because they had a Daisy Red Ryder BB gun.
    One of many grievous errors I could never convince my parents they were making was that of appointing my brother baby-sitter whenever