One Fat Summer Read Online Free PDF Page A

wall-to-wall carpet. Smooooth.
    I’ve got a job. My own money. Seventy-five cents an hour, six hours a day, that’s four dollars and fifty cents. Five days. That’s twenty-two dollars and fifty cents a week. My own money. I’m rich. I won’t tell anybody for a while. One day I’ll go into town, buy some earrings for Mom, a belt for Dad; I might even get Michellesome perfume. I’ll write a note with that: For a sister who smells. When they ask me where I got the money, I’ll tell them I robbed a bank. A man has to do something with his life. I don’t find that amusing, Robert. Now, Bobby, we really appreciate these presents, but…
    And then I’ll tell them. That’ll get a smile out of my father. He’ll be proud of me.
    I’ll get Joanie a book of poems. Emily Dickinson. She loves Emily Dickinson. I can’t wait to tell her about my job. She’ll have a lot to say about it.
    Ouch. A small stone shot out from under the mower and bounced off my ankle. Watch those stones. I was just about to stop and rub my ankle, it really hurt, when I noticed that Dr. Kahn was watching me from the porch. Wouldn’t want him to know I ran over a stone.
    The sun was prickling the little hairs on the back of my neck. I could use one of those big white cavalry hats John Wayne wears in the movies. Captain Marks of the U.S. Cavalry, the only man who understands the Apaches. He grew up with them after his parents were killed in a wagon-train massacre. A renegade band hasbroken loose from the reservation, led by Chief Willie Ratface. They’re on the warpath, raiding settlements; nobody’s safe. And the colonel’s daughter is coming in on the next stagecoach to visit our desolate desert outpost. Captain Marks and his rough-and-tumble troopers, the dregs of the cavalry who’ll take orders only from him, will ride out and save her.
    Once I had a U.S. Cavalry hat. I had a complete U.S. Cavalry uniform with a holster belt that went around your waist and over your shoulder, and a metal cap pistol shaped like a six-shooter. My grandparents sent it to me for my birthday. The pants were blue with a yellow stripe down the leg. The jacket was blue, too, and had captain’s bars on the shoulders, and ribbons and shiny gold buttons. It was beautiful. But it didn’t fit. Not even the hat.
    I couldn’t button the jacket or zipper the pants or even get the belt around my waist. I never even got to play with the gun because my mother wanted to keep the set new so she could exchange the uniform for a larger size. But it was the largest size they made. I guess I was around eight or nine years old then. My father wantedme to keep it, he said it would give me an incentive to lose weight so I could fit into it. I wished they had given it away. Just looking at that uniform in its box made me feel so bad I ate more. One day when I was alone in the house I opened a box of Hydrox cookies and jammed them into my mouth, fast as I could, not caring about the brown crumbs spilling out of the corners of my mouth; just jammed in those cookies faster than I could chew them, swallowing lumps of cookies big as Ping-Pong balls that got stuck in my throat and chest until I choked and had to wash them down with cold milk. They still hurt going down, I felt every Hydrox Ping-Pong ball push through my throat and chest until it fell with a thump into my stomach. And still I couldn’t stop until I’d finished every cookie in the box, and then I had to lie down. My stomach had turned to concrete. I couldn’t move for hours until it was digested.
    I felt hungry. I looked at my watch. 9:42 A.M. That’s all it was. I’d been cutting only a little more than a half hour. How could time move so slowly? The world must have a low Basal Metabolism today.
    Keep cutting. Can’t stop. He’s watching me from the porch. My mouth got dry and my nose was filled with fumes from the gasoline