Out of Their Minds Read Online Free PDF Page B

I could see the shine of ribs just underneath their hides. Most of them were hounds, with flapping ears and slender, whiplike tails. Some of them came howling down to the gate and streamed out into the road to head me off and others of them didn’t bother with the gate, but sailed across the fence in flying leaps.
    The door of the house came open and a man stepped out on the stoop and yelled at them and at his shout they came skidding to a halt, the entire pack of them, and went slinking back toward the house, like a gang of boys caught in a watermelon patch. Those dogs knew very well they had no business chasing cars.
    But right at the moment, I wasn’t paying too much attention to them, for I was looking at the man who had stepped out to yell at them. I had expected, when he’d stepped out, that he’d be Snuffy Smith. I don’t know why I expected this—perhaps because I needed something on which I could hang some logical explanation of what had happened to me. But he wasn’t Snuffy Smith. He was considerably taller than Snuffy and he didn’t wear a hat and he didn’t have a pipe. And I remembered then that the man could not have been Snuffy Smith, for there had been no dogs last night. This was the neighbor that Snuffy had warned me of, the man with the pack of vicious dogs. It would be worth your life, Snuffy had warned me, to go walking down that road.
    And it had been damn near worth my life, I reminded myself, to stay with Snuffy Smith, sitting at the kitchen table and drinking moonshine liquor with him.
    It was incredible, of course, that I should give credence to the fact that there had been a Snuffy Smith. There wasn’t any such person; there simply couldn’t be. He and his pinheaded wife were zany characters that paraded through a comic strip. But hard as I tried to tell this to myself, I couldn’t make it stick.
    Except for the dogs and the man who stood out in the yard yelling at them, the place was the same, however, as Snuffy’s place had been. And that, I told myself, was beyond all reason.
    Then I saw something that was different and I felt a great deal better about the entire crazy mess, although it was a small thing to feel very good about. There was a car standing by the woodpile, but its rear end wasn’t jacked up. It was standing on four wheels, although I saw that a couple of sawhorses and a plank were leaning against the woodpile, as if the car only recently had been jacked up for repair, but that now it had been fixed and taken off the blocks.
    I was almost past the place by now and once again the car headed for the ditch and I caught it just in time. When I craned my neck around for a final look, I saw the mailbox that stood on the post beside the gate.
    Lettered on it in crude printing, made with a dripping paintbrush, was the name:
    T. WILLIAMS

3
    George Duncan had grown older, but I recognized him the minute I stepped into the store. He was gray and shaky and he had an old man’s gauntness, but he was the same man who had often given me a sack of peppermint candy, free, when my father bought a box of groceries and, perhaps, a sack of bran, which George Duncan lugged in from the back room where he kept his livestock feed.
    The storekeeper was behind the counter and talking to a woman who had her back to me. His gravelly voice came clear across the room.
    â€œThese Williams kids,” he said, “have always been a pack of troublemakers. Ever since the day he came sneaking in here, this community has never had a thing but grief from Tom Williams and his tribe. I tell you, Miss Adams, they’re a hopeless lot and if I was you, I wouldn’t worry none about them. I’d just go ahead and teach them the best way that I could and I’d crack down on them when they stepped out of line and that would be the end of it.”
    â€œBut, Mr. Duncan,” said the woman, “they aren’t all that bad. They have no decent