Lost Between Houses Read Online Free PDF

golf; we go by the hardware store and cross over the bridge, it rings like a big hollow drum under the car, there’s Blackburn’s Marina where we gas up the boat, Loblaw’s, the Tastee Queen where we go after the dance at Teen Town. It’s all there, just the same as last summer. I see Sandy Hunter on the side of the road, she must be coming home from school, her hair all long and blonde. We pick up speed. Seven point three miles to go. I know all the houses, the barns, the hilltops from here on in. I undo the window and I can feel the air blow on my face. Smells completely different than it does in the city.
    We turn off the road and go down the lane. Trees on both sides, you can hear the branches scrape the side of the car. Youcan hear our little stream, which runs through the ravine. There’s our mailbox, all rusted from the winter. Pebbles crunching under the car wheels. We come around a corner and there it is, a big field and our house at the far end. Rambling, a white clapboard house with a double garage and green shutters. There’s my room, top right-hand side, overlooking the garage. I’m so impatient to get going I can hardly breathe. I get out of the car. I want to do everything in my summer vacation all in the next hour. But I have to help bring the stuff into the house, groceries and suitcases and pillow slips stuffed with fresh bedding, all kinds of stuff, records, even a plant. Then I run upstairs to my room. I love the way it smells, all unused and empty, there’s a sort of exciting mothbally tang. The cowboys on the wallpaper from when I was a little squirt, the old clothes in the drawer that don’t fit me any more, a skindiving magazine, an old
Field and Stream.
A book on graphology. I flip it open. All my notes in the margin. Jesus, remember that? Man, I really worked at it. Last chapter is called “How to Recognize a Murderer.”
    From my window I can see all the way down to the lake. All the leaves aren’t grown in. It’s not really summer up here yet. The water is too cold for swimming; it’s sort of colourless and foreign this time of year. But it’s going to warm up just fine and in a month it’ll be like soup. That’s what my mother always says when she slips off the dock into the water, a towel around her head. “My God, boys,” she says, “it’s like soup.”
    And then I set off, I zip all over the house, into the bathroom, the empty bedroom at the end of the hall, the old man’s room, I check the cupboards in the downstairs hallway, I love the way they smell, too. Then I go into the basement. That’s where I set up my drums. Well I don’t have a set of drums, they’re too noisy I’m told, so I set up a whole lot of books, just like adrum kit. Plus I’ve got an old cymbal with a chunk missing, a plastic garbage can lid for a high hat and an old record player. I mounted the whole works on a platform, to give it a sense of occasion, as they say. Man, the daydreams I’ve had down there. I won’t even go into it. But you know what I mean.
    Cha-la-la-la-la
,
    It’s not the way you smile
    That breaks my heart
    Cha-la-la-la-la.
    There’s all sorts of old stuff down there, pots covered in spider webs, old photograph albums, a bait box, a workbench, a wonky ping-pong table. Sometimes I feel sort of sorry for the basement, it’s like a person nobody ever visits. I feel like I’m its only protector, the only one in the house that shows any interest in it. If it weren’t for me nobody would care for that place at all. But it also spooks me sometimes, particularly at night. There’s a light bulb down there that you have to turn off before you can go up the stairs. You’ve got to do that last little bit completely in the dark. And sometimes when I’m about half up the stairs, I can feel the hair rise on the back of my neck, I have a feeling that somebody is going to come out from behind the furnace and grab me by the ankles. I don’t know how many times I’ve come blasting into