Not-Just-Anybody Family Read Online Free PDF

place. He and his mother—a big yellow farmer’s dog named Minnie—had been chasing cars along County Road 26. His mother was a great car chaser, and the first thing all her pups learned was to chase cars.
    Mud had inherited from his mother a lot of natural ability for chasing cars, but he still had a lot to learn.
    On that particular morning Mud and Minnie had spent a lot of time lying in the shade, waiting for the hum of motor.
    About noon Minnie heard a loud roar. It was a car Minnie particularly liked to chase, a BMW. She got up from her hole under the tree and jumped the ditch. Mud did too.
    Minnie got down low in the weeds—she liked to take cars by surprise.
    Mud was beside her, down low too. His mother’s body was trembling with excitement. His was too.
    The car roared into view. Minnie and Mud sprang out of their hiding place.
    But this time the car didn’t gain speed as it usually did. This time it didn’t race Minnie. This time it swerved right at her.
    Minnie got out of the way with a graceful, twisting backward dive, but Mud didn’t. Mud was hit and flung into a drainage ditch beside the road.
    Pap came by about a half hour later, on foot. He was whistling “Camptown Races.” He stopped after the first doo-dah because he saw Minnie. She was whining and taking anxious steps back and forth at the far side of the ditch.
    It was clear to Pap she was worried about something in the ditch.
    “Well, let’s see what we got here,” said Pap.
    Mud was so covered with mud that Pap didn’t see him at first. Then he said, “Well, well.”
    He put one foot down in the ditch, and he touched Mud’s throat in a certain place to see if he was still alive. When he saw that he was, he said, “Let me help you, pal,” in the same voice he would use if he was helping one of the children.
    “Not another dog,” the kids’ mom had said when she saw him carrying Mud through the doorway.
    Pap nodded.
    “I wish one time you’d bring home something worth looking at, like a French poodle.”
    “Where’d you find him, Pap?” Vern asked.
    “In the mud. His leg’s broke.”
    “Well, as soon as it heals, you get rid of him. I mean it.”
    “I know you do.”
    Mud spent most of the afternoon running around town, dodging cars and trucks and people. At dusk he dropped like a bag of bones under the carryout window of a Dairy Queen. He lay there, so spent, so miserable, that during the evening people began dropping pieces of their hamburgers around him, the way people drop coins into a beggar’s hat.
    Here was the word he heard again and again, but even if someone had presented him with a sirloin steak, he would not have had the heart to eat it.

CHAPTER 9
Busting Open
    “What’s wrong with you—really?” Junior asked. “I’m serious. I have to know.” For two hours Junior had been trying to get Ralphie to tell him why he was in the hospital. “I told you what was wrong with me,” Junior went on in a bargaining voice.
    “No, you didn’t. The nurse did.”
    Junior said, “Well, I would have.”
    “You’ll find out when I go to therapy.”
    “What’s therapy?”
    “Don’t you know anything?”
    “I guess not.” Junior sounded so low that Ralphie relented.
    He said, “Oh, all right. Here is what’s really and truly wrong with me. I swallowed watermelon seeds and now watermelons are growing inside me, and when they get big, I’m going to bust open.”
    “No,” Junior said.
    “When I bust open, you better get out of the way or you’ll get watermelon and guts all over you.”
    “No!”
    “After I bust open, they’re going to put a zipper in my stomach so I can zip myself open and shut.”
    “No!”
    “Now, Ralphie.” It was the nurse again—more little paper cups, more pills. “What lies are you telling Junior this time?”
    “He told me he had watermelons inside him and marbles in his head. He told me he was going to bust open and then you were going to put a zipper in him.”
    Junior tossed