The Colorado Kid Read Online Free PDF Page B

was no story.” He paused. “It was like a train running out of a fireplace or a bunch of horses’ heads showing up one morning in the middle of your driveway. Not that grand, but every bit as strange. And things like that…” He shook his head. “Steffi, people don’t like things like that. They don’t want things like that. A wave is a pretty thing to look at when it breaks on the beach, but too many only make you seasick.”
    Stephanie looked out at the sparkling reach—plenty of waves there, but no big ones, not today—and considered this in silence.
    “There’s something else,” Dave said, after a bit.
    “What?” she asked.
    “It’s ours ,” he said, and with surprising force. She thought it was almost anger. “A guy from the Globe , a guy from away—he’d only muck it up. He wouldn’t understand.”
    “Do you?” she asked.
    “No,” he said, sitting down again. “Nor do I have to, dear. On the subject of the Colorado Kid I’m a little like the Virgin Mary, after she gave birth to Jesus. The Bible says something like, ‘But Mary kept silent, and pondered these things in her heart.’ Sometimes, with mysteries, that’s best.”
    “But you’ll tell me?”
    “Why, yes, ma’am!” He looked at her as if surprised; also—a little—as if awakening from a near-doze. “Because you’re one of us. Isn’t she, Vince?”
    “Ayuh,” Vince said. “You passed that test somewhere around midsummer.”
    “Did I?” Again she felt absurdly happy. “How? What test?”
    Vince shook his head. “Can’t say, dear. Only know that at some point it began to seem you were all right.” He glanced at Dave, who nodded. Then he looked back at Stephanie. “All right,” he said. “The story we didn’t tell at lunch. Our very own unexplained mystery. The story of the Colorado Kid.”

5
    But it was Dave who actually began.
    “Twenty-five years ago,” he said, “back in ’80, there were two kids who took the six-thirty ferry to school instead of the seven-thirty. They were on the Bayview Consolidated High School Track Team, and they were also boy and girlfriend. Once winter was over—and it doesn’t ever last as long here on the coast as it does inland—they’d run cross-island, down along Hammock Beach to the main road, then on to Bay Street and the town dock. Do you see it, Steffi?”
    She did. She saw the romance of it, as well. What she didn’t see was what the “boy and girlfriend” did when they got to the Tinnock side of the reach. She knew that Moose-Look’s dozen or so high-school-age kids almost always took the seven-thirty ferry, giving the ferryman—either Herbie Gosslin or Marcy Lagasse—their passes so they could be recorded with quick winks of the old laser-gun on the bar codes. Then, on the Tinnock side, a schoolbus would be waiting to take them the three miles to BCHS. She asked if the runners waited for the bus and Dave shook his head, smiling.
    “Nawp, ran that side, too,” he said. “Not holdin hands, but might as well have been; always side by side, Johnny Gravlin and Nancy Arnault. For a couple of years they were all but inseparable.”
    Stephanie sat up straighter in her chair. The John Gravlin she knew was Moose-Lookit Island’s mayor, a gregarious man with a good word for everyone and an eye on the state senate in Augusta. His hairline was receding, his belly expanding. She tried to imagine him doing the greyhound thing—two miles a day on the island side of the reach, three more on the mainland side—and couldn’t manage it.
    “Ain’t makin much progress with it, are ya, dear?” Vince asked.
    “No,” she admitted.
    “Well, that’s because you see Johnny Gravlin the soccer player, miler, Friday night practical joker and Saturday lover as Mayor John Gravlin, who happens to be the only political hop-toad in a small island pond. He goes up and down Bay Street shaking hands and grinning with that gold tooth flashing off to one side in his mouth, got a good