Summer of Night Read Online Free PDF

steps toward the thing, squatted gracelessly in front of it, and began twiddling the dial.
    Dale stared. The cabinet was huge, almost four feet tall, and impressive with its different dial bands-the top one saying national and listing Mexico City at 49 Megahertz, Hong Kong, London, Madrid, Rio, and a list of others at 40 Mh, the sinister cities of Berlin, Tokyo, and Pittsburgh at 31 Mh, and Paris alone and mysterious far down the dial at 19 Mh-but the cabinet was empty. There were no works left at all.
    Duane squatted and twiddled the dials carefully, head cocked, alert for the slightest sound.
    Jim Harlen caught on first. He scooted behind the cabinet, pulling it back in the corner so no part of him showed.
    Duane said, "I'll try the domestic band." He twiddled the middle dial between international and special service." "This is labeled Chicago down here," he muttered to himself.
    From inside the cabinet came a hum, as if of tubes wanning up, then a rasp of static as Duane moved the dial. Short bursts of baritone were silenced as announcers were cut off in midsentence, snatches of rock and roll music exploded and were silenced, static, rasp, a ballgame-the Chicago White Sox!
    "He's going back! Back! Back against the right field wall of Comiskey Park! He's jumping for it! He's going up on the wall! He's…"
    "Aw, nothin' here," muttered Duane. "I'll try the International Band. Dum-da-dee… here we are… Berlin."
    "Ach du lieber der fershlugginer ball ist op und outta hier!" came Harlen's voice, changed instantly from the excited Chicago Dizzy-Deanish drawl to a throaty, Teutonic lashing of syllables. "Der Fuhrer ist nicht gehappy. Nein! Nein! Er ist gerflugt und vertunken und der veilige pisstof-fen!"
    "Nothin' here," muttered Duane. "I'll try Paris."
    But the falsetto and phony French from behind the cabinet was lost in the giggles and laughter in the chickenhouse. Mike O'Rourke's last shot with the rubber band went wild and the daddy longlegs escaped into a crack in the roof. Dale crawled toward the radio, ready to try some stations, while Lawrence rolled on the floor. Kevin crossed his arms and pursed his lips while Mike prodded him in the ribs with his sneaker.
    The spell was broken. The boys could do anything they wanted to.
    Hours later, after dinner, in the long, painfully sweet twilight of a summer's evening, Dale, Lawrence, Kevin, and Harlen slid their bikes to a stop at the corner near Mike's house. "Ee-aw-kee!" shouted Lawrence.
    "Kee-aw-ee!" came the shouted response from the shadows under the elms and Mike rode out to meet them, sliding his rear tire in the loose gravel, spinning to face the same direction the others were facing.
    This was the Bike Patrol, formed two years earlier by these five boys when the oldest were in fourth grade and the youngest still believed in Santa Claus. They didn't call it the Bike Patrol now because they were self-conscious about the name, too grown up to pretend they patrolled Elm Haven in order to help people in distress and to protect the innocent from evildoers, but they still believed in the Bike Patrol. Believed with the simple acquiescence to the reality of now which once left them lying awake on Christmas Eve with pulses racing and mouths dry.
    They paused there a moment on the quiet street. First Avenue continued past Mike's house out into countryside, north to the water tower a quarter of a mile, and then turning east until it disappeared in the evening haze above the fields near the horizon where the woods and Gypsy Lane and the Black Tree Tavern waited out of sight.
    The sky was a softly burnished shield of gray, fading now in the hour between sunset and dark, and the corn in the fields was low, not yet up to an eleven-year-old's knees. Dale looked out over the fields that stretched east past distance-softened horizons of trees and imagined Peoria there-thirty-eight miles away beyond the hills and valleys and stretches of timber, lying in its own river valley and