Men in the Making Read Online Free PDF Page B

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    "That's stupid," Nate told him, rolling his eyes. "Those are guy names."
    "I know," Matty said, using Luke's long red tail like a whip to swat his brother. "But they like it. They're tomboys."
    Within a month, Matty and the dogs were inseparable. They walked him to the bus stop in the morning, announced his return with a melody of mismatched howls in the afternoon, and slept huddled together at the foot of his bed each night. And as Nate became a better rider and began letting Matty ride behind him on the Honda, the dogs would trail them, running and barking all the way up to the forest's edge at the Petit Jean River. Weekends, I'd pay the boys with gas money for washing my truck. Inspecting their work, I'd squat down beside the rear fender wells and point out the missed spots that I pretended to see. "I don't know, boys," I'd say. "You may have to do this quarter panel all over again."
    "Come on, Dad," they'd say. "You
promised.
"
    I never let them off easy. I wanted to have those minutes with them before they rode off to the woods. Today, if I could have them back, I'd keep them there in that driveway, scrubbing that truck indefinitely. And though in time they would recognize the injustice, and call me on it, and surely come to hate me for it, still I would persist, but in those days, when to my mind lost time could be counted in hours or days, I had little to lose by letting them go. "All right," I'd say, handing them each a dollar. "Just be careful."
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    Late that winter the clouds stretched solid and low from horizon to horizon and the pine branches hanging over the highway sagged under the weight of their ice-laden bark. At the mill, the workers huddled around propane heaters, and the planers had to be honed daily to prevent them from biting jagged chunks out of the frozen logs the men pushed through the blades.
    Just before the five o'clock shift change, Anne called. Her voice was quaking, panicked in a way that sent my blood to drumming in my ears. "The boys," she said. "They took the bike out, Tom. I told them not to, but I was working in the kitchen and I didn't hear them. Jesus, Tom, they've been gone for hours."
    "What do you mean, hours?"
    "
Hours,
Tom. God, I didn't want to bother you."
    "Call the sheriff," I said. "The ranger station."
    "I thought they'd come right back."
    "Anne, just
call.
"
    I remember concentrating on the road. Sheets of ice kept blowing from the trees and slapping against the windshield. In the dark of winter dusk, the night seemed to narrow in on me, and as I roared down the hills into the valley ahead it swallowed the light of my headlamps.
    The police found them the next morning near the bank of the Petit Jean, and later, at the station, a bearded deputy with deep-set eyes slid the pictures from the accident report one by one across an unfinished pine desk. The Honda was on its side, bent and buried in the brush near where a washed-out trail met the water. Nate hadn't flown far. He was twisted under the towering oak that had stopped him cold, his head snapped forward under his chest, his arms barely distinguishable from the tangle of roots at the base of the trunk.
    There were no pictures of Matty. They had found him first, followed the high-pitched whining of the dogs right to him. He'd flown farther than Nate, to the water's edge at a bend in the river. He'd shattered a kneecap and cracked two ribs in the fall, but it was the cold that would have killed him.
    "Dipped into the digits last night," said the officer who met us at the hospital. "And him laid out like that on the frozen riverbank, it's a wonder, it surely is, but when we pulled those dogs off him he wasn't even shivering."
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    The town paper made the dogs out as heroes, but Anne couldn't look at them, wouldn't let them in the house anymore. The night after the funeral, I found her sitting alone in the barn. "How could they?" she said. "How could they save Matty and leave Nate for dead?"
    "Honey,