Rabble Starkey Read Online Free PDF Page B

you!" but I poked her and made her quit because yelling back only pulls us down to his level, that's what I think.
    Gunther, he just trotted along behind, not even listening to Norman Cox because he was thinking about catching frogs, I expect.
    When we got past Coxes' we had only Millie Bellows's house to pass, and she was sitting on the porch like she always does in good weather. Millie Bellows is the oldest person I know, so old I can't even put a number to it in a guess. Maybe ninety would be as close as I would try. Old and pink and evil-tempered, like a big old grumpy-faced doll setting there in the rocker on the porch, watching what goes by.
    It is almost hard to believe what they say about Millie Bellows, that she had three different husbands along the way, all of them dead now. Looking at her propped up there all pink and scowling in her rocker, with a blanket over her legs on the hottest day so far this September, who'd ever think that someone would even want to marry Millie Bellows? Evil-tempered old thing.
    Veronica and me, we always called out greetings politely to Millie Bellows, in hopes that good manners would rub off on her, even in her advanced years.
    "Hello, Mrs. Bellows," we called.
    "I declare, isn't it hot?" I added, because a comment about the weather is always a courteous thing,
according to this column on etiquette I read in the newspaper.
    "Don't let that boy tread on my grass," Millie Bellows called down from her porch in that old-lady, evil-tempered voice.
    We looked back at Gunther, and he wasn't even nowhere near Millie Bellows's grass. He was tippy-toeing right down the middle of the sidewalk, watching for ants as he went, and hiccuping now and then.
    Her dumb-ass grass was all brown from the heat anyways, and if old Gunther Bigelow was to step on it, it wouldn't show a bit. But Veronica took him by the hand, just to show Millie Bellows that we was watching out for him.
    We nodded politely to her to call her attention to what good manners is like, and then in a jiffy we was past her property and headed down through the vacant lot to the creek.

4
    The best time for the creek is spring, with the water rushing over the rocks, and it's ice cold then, too, so that if you dip your feet in they turn downright numb. In spring, around the creek, bright green grass shoves up all ferny and thin, trembling-like if the wind blows, and sometimes pale yellow flowers peek out, bashful, all through it.
    But this was September, and the creek was always low by then. Warm and sloggy and brown, with the grass thick and scruffy by the edges where the rocks are. Dragonflies was everywhere, dipping and flying around, all shiny and breakable-looking. The rocks was warm and mossy and smelled of decay, laying out that way in the heat where stuff—plants or even small animals and such—sometimes died. Once me and Veronica found a snake laying there, hot and dry and dead. And once a frog.
    But there was always billions of live frogs, too, and we could hear them chugging and burping even before we got to the creek, when we was still pushing through the high grass in the vacant lot. Gunther was holding onto both our hands, Veronica's and mine. He was scared of the high grass because he disappeared in it, and I sure don't fault him none for that. I'm scared of disappearing, too.
    We sat down on the flat rocks by the edge, took our shoes off, and tested the water with our bare feet. In spring, that's the time when we all yell and squeal from the surprise of the coldness. But now, at the end of summer, it was like poking your toe into the bathtub. The difference was, your toe came out muddy and slick from the creek.
    "Here, Gunther, hold my hand tight," Veronica said, and she walked with him across the slippery bottom, round the rocks.
    "Here, frogs, here, frogs," old Gunther called in his little voice. He was only four, remember, and even though he was smart for four, still he thought them frogs would come and jump