Strider Read Online Free PDF Page A

“Hi, Leigh.” Then, to hide his feelings he said, “Hello there, Strider, old boy. How’s our dog?”
    Strider wagged his piece of tail and sat downwith his chin up and ears back, which meant he wanted to be petted.
    I tensed up, waiting to see if Strider would place his paw on Barry’s foot. He kept all four feet on the sidewalk.
    Whew!

August 10
    Now that Barry has returned, summer is going fast. Barry puffs when we run with Strider. After being exercised by my, I mean our , dog for the past month, I don’t puff at all.
    When I showed Barry my shirt, he fell over on the couch laughing and said, “You mean you’re going to wear that to school?”
    â€œSure,” I said. “You’re just jealous.”
    â€œMe, jealous? Of that ?” Barry laughed some more. I started to pound him, and we scuffled. This made Strider so anxious we stopped. We weren’t sure which of us he would defend, but I was pretty sure it was me. I mean I.
    I wish I could forget Barry’s saying, “Me, jealous?”

August 19
    Last night Dad telephoned from Bakersfield to say that today he was coming through Salinas with a load of garlic and wanted to know if I would meet him at the bus station and ride with him to the dehydrator in Gilroy. Would I!
    I got up early this morning, whizzed around with the mop at Catering by Katy, exercised Strider, showered, left Strider in Barry’s yard, and caught the bus to Salinas. A couple of minutes after I got there, Dad came barreling up in his tractor. He was hauling two flatbed trailers loaded with wooden bins of garlic stacked two high and tied on with cables.
    I climbed into the cab beside Dad, who asked, “How’re you doing, Leigh?” Bandit looked up from his bunk behind the seat and went back to sleep.

    I told Dad I was doing okay, and we drove off smelling of garlic. An empty Styrofoam cup rolled around the floor of the cab.
    Traffic was heavy on 101. There were tractors hauling double gondolas of tomatoes or grapes, and because summer vacation is almost over, tourists with carloads of kids were hurrying toward home.
    High in the cab, I had a good view of the Santa Clara Valley. We passed acres of tomatoes,cauliflower, and spinach, a few dying orchards, and beautiful fields of flowers. Zinnias, I think they are called, and marigolds. I asked Dad if the people who raised them got the idea from the Steinbeck story of the man who raised acres of sweet peas. Or maybe it was the other way around. John Steinbeck got the idea for his story from fields like these. Dad said he wouldn’t know, but he did know the flowers were raised for seed, which brought a good price.

    Because of the dehydrator, Gilroy is a town you can smell before you see it. Once before when I rode with Dad, the whole town smelled like frying onions, which made me hungry for a hamburger. Today, when the dehydrator was working garlic, Gilroy smelled like Mrs. Brinkerhoff’s kitchen when she makes spaghetti sauce.
    As we turned off near the dehydrator, the air was so heavy with the smell of garlic that it made my mouth water. “Do you suppose the garlic smell makes everybody in Gilroy salivate all the time?” I asked. Salivate . That’s a word I had never used before. I usually say drool, but salivate is a good word to save for school. Teachers like large vocabularies.
    â€œNah,” said Dad. “They’re so used to it they probably can’t even smell it.”
    After the garlic was unloaded at the dehydrator, we were so hungry from the smell of garlic that we stopped for pizza for us and water for Bandit. As Dad and I sat facing each other under a wall-mounted TV set showing reruns of boxing matches, Dad asked, “Leigh, you made any plans for the future?” He spoke through a mouthful of pizza. Dad always eats fast. In places like this, he also eats with his cap on. He wouldn’t if Mom were around.
    â€œOh, not