Stories of Breece D'J Pancake Read Online Free PDF

sit rigid, I can fill them again. The turkle is moving in the sack, and it gives me the creeps to hear his shell clinking against the gaff. I take the poke to the spigot to clean the game. Pop always liked turkle in a mulligan. He talked a lot about mulligan and the jungles just an hour before I found him.
    I wonder what it will be like when Ginny comes by. I hope she’s not talking through her beak. Maybe she’ll take me to her house this time. If her momma had been anybody but Pop’s cousin, her old man would let me go to her house. Screw him. But I can talk to Ginny. I wonder if she remembers the plans we made for the farm. And we wanted kids. She always nagged about a peacock. I will get her one.
    I smile as I dump the sack into the rusty sink, but the barn smell—the hay, the cattle, the gasoline—it reminds me. Me and Pop built this barn. I look at every nail with the same dull pain.
    I clean the meat and lay it out on a piece of cloth torn from an old bed sheet. I fold the corners, walk to the house.
    The air is hot, but it sort of churns, and the set screens in the kitchen window rattle. From inside, I can hear Mom and Trent talking on the front porch, and I leave the window up. It is the same come-on he gave me yesterday, and I bet Mom is eating it up. She probably thinks about tea parties with her cousins in Akron. She never listens to what anybody says. She just says all right to anything anybody but me or Pop ever said. She even voted for Hoover before they got married. I throw the turkle meat into a skillet, get a beer. Trent softens her up with me; I prick my ears.
    “I would wager on Colly’s agreement,” he says. I can still hear a hill twang in his voice.
    “I told him Sam’d put him on at Goodrich,” she says. “They’d teach him a trade.”
    “And there are a good many young people in Akron. You know he’d be happier.” I think how his voice sounds like a damn TV.
    “Well, he’s awful good to keep me company. Don’t go out none since Ginny took off to that college.”
    “There’s a college in Akron,” he says, but I shut the window.
    I lean against the sink, rub my hands across my face. The smell of turkle has soaked between my fingers. It’s the same smell as the pools.
    Through the door to the living room, I see the rock case Pop built for me. The white labels show up behind the dark gloss of glass. Ginny helped me find over half of those. If I did study in a college, I could come back and take Jim’s place at the gas wells. I like to hold little stones that lived so long ago. But geology doesn’t mean lick to me. I can’t even find a trilobite.
    I stir the meat, listen for noise or talk on the porch, but there is none. I look out. A lightning flash peels shadows from the yard and leaves a dark strip under the cave of the barn. I feel a scum on my skin in the still air. I take my supper to the porch.
    I look down the valley to where bison used to graze before the first rails were put down. Now those rails are covered with a highway, and cars rush back and forth in the wind. I watch Trent’s car back out, heading east into town. I’m afraid to ask right off if he got what he wanted.
    I stick my plate under Mom’s nose, but she waves it off. I sit in Pop’s old rocker, watch the storm come. Dust devils puff around on the berm, and maple sprigs land in the yard with their white bellies up. Across the road, our windbreak bends, rows of cedars furling every which way at once.
    “Coming a big one?” I say.
    Mom says nothing and fans herself with the funeral-home fan. The wind layers her hair, but she keeps that cardboard picture of Jesus bobbing like crazy. Her face changes. I know what she thinks. She thinks how she isn’t the girl in the picture on the mantel. She isn’t standing with Pop’s garrison cap cocked on her head.
    “I wish you’d of come out while he’s here,” she says. She stares across the road to the windbreak.
    “I heard him yesterday,” I say.
    “It