Oscar Casares Read Online Free PDF Page B

one.
    “You want to knock a few in?”
    “You bet,” he said.
    We switched places. I held the board against the window, and Bannert climbed the stepladder. He took a couple of practice swings with the hammer and then hit his first nail. He had two good swings before he hit to the left and the nail bent sideways. It took a couple of taps to straighten it out and start again. The next few nails went the same way.
    “Be sure you hit the center of the head and put some more weight behind your swing.”
    He nodded okay and banged the nail a couple of times. On the next swing he missed the nail altogether and the hammer pounded the side of the house. That was what finally made the head crack off the wooden handle. The head flopped over like a chicken with a broken neck.
    “Sorry.” He stayed looking at the broken hammer.
    What could I say? He'd borrowed my good hammer and never returned it, and now he'd broken my old one.
    “It's my fault,” he said.
    I didn't argue with him. He climbed down from the stepladder and turned towards me.
    “I'm going to give you my hammer,” he said.
    Then he reached into a brown shoe box he had in the carport and pulled out my hammer. There it was, after four years. It didn't look any different from the day he had borrowed it. I held the hammer again and it felt like a missing finger that had been reattached to my hand. So, yes, maybe he really had forgotten that it was my hammer. That didn't excuse the past four years, but at least it explained to me how a mistake could've happened.
    “Go ahead, it's yours now,” he said. “I owe you one, hombre.”
    I guess he thought I might refuse his offer to take the hammer. He looked me in the eye, and I wanted to believe that the man was telling me the truth about having forgotten. I mean, there were things I forgot now and then. Sometimes I had to look in my notebook just to remember what I was doing two days earlier. It was possible that his memory could've failed him. Anything's possible.
    “Thanks, Bannert.”
    It felt strange to be thanking him for giving me something that was really mine, but those were the only words that came to me. I wanted to say more and set things straight with him, explain the misunderstanding, and see if maybe there was some way to put this behind us. It was just a hammer that had caused this. Maybe we could even laugh about the whole thing. I would've said something right then, but I could feel the temperature had already dropped a couple of degrees and the wind was beginning to shift. I only had a few hours left to board up my own house.

Chango
    B ony was walking back from the Jiffy-Mart when he found the monkey's head. There it was, under the small palm tree in the front yard, just staring up at him like an old friend who couldn't remember his name. It freaked him out bad. The dude had to check around to make sure nobody had seen him jump back and almost drop his beer in the dirt. It was still lunchtime and cars were parked up and down the street. For a second, it looked like the head might be growing out of the ground. Maybe somebody had buried the monkey up to its neck the way people did to other people at the beach when they ran out of things to do. Maybe it was still alive. Bony grabbed a broom off the porch and swung hard. He stopped an inch away from the monkey's little black eyes, and it didn't blink. He poked the head with the straw end of the broom and it tipped back and forth. The short black hairs on its head were pointed straight up at the cloudy sky. The nose was flat and wrinkled around the edges like it'd been a normal nose and then God decided to push it in with His big thumb. The ears were old man's ears with whiskers growing on them and in them. And it kept smiling. It smiled from one monkey ear to the other.
    Bony's mother said it was the ugliest thing she'd ever seen. ¡Qué feo! She wanted it out of her yard. What were the neighbors going to think? What were her customers going to say? Who