The Killing Tree Read Online Free PDF Page A

or where I was at. Lord knows I tried to go up to his level. I talked about travel. I read up on new cars. And
     you know what I learned? Being rich is boring as hell. Nothing to think about, or wish for, or dream. Like us, we may dream
     about flying off to paradise on a big shiny plane wearing new Calvin Kleins and red sunglasses. But rich people, Mercy, rich
     people don’t dream. They just die at night. Why I would wake up from some wild dream, roll over and tell Carl about it, and
     he’d just look at me. So I asked him to tell me about his dreams. For a solid week, every morning I’d say, ‘What’d you dream
     last night?’ You know what he always said? He shrugged his shoulders and said
nothing.
People like us, Mercy, we live through our dreams. We see things in our dreams that we can never see in our lives. But rich
     people, they don’t have the need like we do. They lay there like a dead person dreaming nothing. And the last thing I want
     to do is sleep with a dead person.” She took another gulp of her beer before tossing it out the window.
    “But maybe,” I said, “Carl could tell you whether your dreams were true. Like my dreams of the ocean. Ever since I held that
     seashell to my ear in second grade, I’ve been dreaming about that ocean. I have a shoe box stuffed with magazine clippings
     of it. But I still haven’t really seen it. Only in my dreams have I heard it, smelled it, or felt it. But a rich man, a man
     that has seen outside these mountains, he could tell me if my dreams were true. He could tell me whether you can stand next
     to the ocean, lick your lips, and taste the salt.”
    “If you are trying to twist me back into dating Carl . . .” she began.
    “All I’m saying is maybe he deserved a better chance. I mean he’s no Jake. After what Jake did to you, I think sleeping with
     dead people sounds pretty good.”
    She grew quiet for a moment, her eyes saddened. “But what if I told you that you had to stay with a man who thought you were
     crazy for dreaming about that ocean? Who made you feel small for your dreams. Could you do it?” she asked. “Beat me or don’t
     beat me, I just don’t think I could stay with that kind of man. You couldn’t either.”
    She was right. I couldn’t love a man that made me feel small for my dreams. Or that had never spent a moment searching his
     mirror to see if he really belonged.
    “Well,” Della said, laughing, “tonight’s not the night for us to be worrying about it all anyway, rich or poor, cute or ugly,
     we are going to have us a little fun!”
    I had my doubts. The docks always felt like a bad high school dance for people too old for high school. It began as the political
     dream of an old mayor of Crooktop. As the whole world began to shift to other forms of energy, towns built around the coal
     industry began to worry. There was an election that year, and the election was won or lost on the issue of what was going
     to happen to Crooktop after coal. Tourism was the proposed solution. And a big part of that solution was the docks. The voters
     were told that people loved to come to the mountains. But Crooktop lacked one important essential to being a tourist magnet—water.
     We needed a lake, the mayor said. And the perfect spot was found in an old quarry where the ground had been stripped and blasted
     so much that a lake was the only thing that could hide the destruction. So there, in between the mountains, a small, muddy
     lake was born.
    The tourists never came. Eventually the docks became known as a place where you could still find people selling their moonshine
     and pot. Go parking. Blast Lynyrd Skynyrd out of your car. Nice people were warned that the docks was where a rough crowd
     hung out. Sometimes that was true, but usually it was just young people doing grown-up things and old people that didn’t realize
     they weren’t young anymore.
    We got out of the car and I stood awkward and stiff while Della looked