The Crane Wife Read Online Free PDF

going part of the way with Roy, who’d push the bike between them, its green metal bulk as steadfast and calm as a cow.
    On this particular day, a spring one, the sun held court in the sky, with a few supplicant clouds criss-crossed by the vapour trails of jets from the nearby Air Force Base. Just the kind of lovely day when God liked to test you, Miss Kelly often said.
    ‘So then you find out the whole ship is a gun, right?’ George was saying, excitedly. ‘The
whole
ship! And it shoots this huge blast of light out the end and BOOM! They destroy the Gamilon home world!’
    Roy’s family didn’t have a television because TV was where the Devil did his best recruiting (George had decided not to mention this problem to his own parents, though in retrospect it seemed unlikely they would have agreed, given the porn), so George would often fill their walk home with what Roy was missing.
    ‘Except it’s not a whole planet?’ Roy asked.
    ‘No!’ George shouted with amazement. ‘That’s the most incredible thing ever! It’s
half
a planet and it’s floating in space and there are cities on the top half and it’s all rocky and round on the bottom. Except it isn’t any more, because the Starblazers blew it up.’
    ‘Sweet,’ Roy said, with due respect.
    ‘No kidding, it’s sweet,’ George agreed seriously.
    They reached 53rd, the busiest street between O Come O Come and their respective homes. They walked past the supermarket on the corner, its parking lot filled with slightly sluttier versions of their own mothers, along with kids smaller than Roy or George who tended to stare at their uniforms. Across the street was a gas station, filled with much the same.
    Roy and George waited at the crosswalk for the light to change.
    ‘Except I think some Gamilons escaped or something,’ George said, ‘because no one seemed very happy. And there was also a lot of shouting and stuff I didn’t understand.’ He smiled again. ‘But the whole ship was a gun all along!’
    The light turned green, and the ‘Walk’ signal came on. They entered the crossing, Roy pushing his bike along, George caught up in the unfathomable mysteries of Japanese animation.
    ‘I’m going to turn this bike into a gun,’ Roy said. ‘I’ll take it to Vietnam when I turn sixteen.’
    George said, ‘That’d be.’
    And the car hit them both.
    When George told this part of the story, he invariably found himself saying ‘This actually happened’ and ‘I’m not making this up’ because it seemed too cruel that the car that had run the red light and knocked into Roy and the bike and him should have been driven by an eighty-three-year-old lady who could barely see over the steering wheel.
    Sadly, it was the truth. If George had ever learned her name, he’d long forgotten it, but he’d remembered that she was eighty-three, that she was barely taller than him or Roy, and that the words she kept repeating afterwards were, ‘Please don’t sue me. Please don’t sue me.’ For the dignity of old ladies everywhere, George often wished this part of the story hadn’t happened, but there you were, sometimes life didn’t oblige with appropriate variation.
    She wasn’t going especially fast, but the impact was so shockingly irresistible, so bluntly unstoppable, that both George and Roy cried out simultaneous, surprised ‘Ohs!’ as she drove into them.
    And didn’t stop.
    There were theories about this afterwards, most of them unsurprising: that the impact had taken a short while to filter through her diminished-by-age capabilities; that it had shocked her so much that she had simply frozen, her foot remaining on the accelerator rather than moving to the brake; or that the disbelief at what was occurring in front of her was so strong that, for a few terrible moments, she simply expected someone
else
to act. Whatever the reason, she hit them, and on she drove.
    Roy had seen her coming at the very last second and had taken a step back, though not