Kings of the Earth: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

showed it to the rest of them. Also to the woman at her side. “My son’s Michael,” she said. “I mean he plays Michael. The youngest boy.” Pointing. “His name’s Tom. He’s only ten.”
    “I’ll keep an eye out,” said the other woman. “You must be very proud.” She might have flicked a glance past Donna and let herself size up the menagerie she’d brought in with her for comparison against the prospective child, but it was hard to say for certain. Donna didn’t care anyhow. The orchestra, such as it was, had trooped in and begun to play, and the lights overhead were fading and the curtain was rising like fog, and on the stage thus revealed a thousand stars twinkled beyond an open bedroom window. Three children lay asleep in their beds. A tiny spotlight from somewhere over the shoulders of the crowd began to dance along the dark wall of the nursery.
    Donna slid forward in her seat and held her breath and sought out the smallest of the three forms on the three high beds, the one that belonged to Michael Darling. Her boy, Tom. She had no interest in Peter Pan, the child who could never grow up.

    When Tom finally jerked into the air, the crowd roared and his uncle Audie jumped clean out of his skin. All the pixie dust in Neverland could not have raised him higher. All the lovely thoughts in London could not have lifted him any more suddenly. And by the look on his face he was prepared never to come down again.

    Since this was a special occasion, the brothers had refused Donna’s offer of a ride and taken their old tractor the six miles into town. Vernon on the curved seat of perforated steel, Audie and Creed perched on the running gear to his right and his left. Audie’s beard was long even then, and it streamed out behind him like a pennant. Vernon’s was shorter than his brother’s by a foot and roughly shaven above the lip in the manner of a haphazard Abraham Lincoln. Creed didn’t have a beard at all in those days unless you counted what grew back weekly. Not one of them had yet gone white.
    Now Donna wanted to drive them home. The springtime was well along but it was still chilly at night, even cold, and they weren’t dressed for it. She said they could go on and leave the tractor in the high school lot, and she’d fetch one of them back for it tomorrow. They could pull it right around back by the cafeteria entrance. Nobody would care. Tomorrow was Saturday anyhow.
    But there was a field to be plowed in the morning, and they couldn’t afford her kindness.
    She stood alongside them in the lobby as the crowd passed around them like water around stones and she tried to be reasonable. “Does that thing even have a headlight?”
    “You bet,” said Vernon. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a lump of Red Man and started on it, considering. “It’s got a headlight all right.”
    “If I know you, it doesn’t work.”
    “If it don’t work, we’ll go slow,” he said. Which was true enough. They would go slow regardless.
    “You wait here while I get Tom,” she said. “Maybe he can talk some sense into you.”
    The three of them brightened at the idea, as if they were about to make the acquaintance of some favorite Hollywood star they knew from television. Andy Griffith maybe, or Little Joe from Bonanza . Groups of high school students passed them by, noisy and full of life, some with instrument cases in their arms and some still half in and half out of costumes. A few eyed the brothers like naturalists happening upon a rare species and a few sized them up like old jurists grown intolerant with the passing of too many years and the rest seemed not to notice them at all. The girl who had played Tom’s mother flickered in and out of Vernon’s vision and he recognized her right off, although she looked younger than he had expected. He thought she was pretty and he said so to Creed under his breath. Creed looked at him as if he’d just made a lascivious remark about their own sister, and