The Last Exit to Normal Read Online Free PDF Page A

with his nightstick, at any rate, and besides the fact that every person in town stared at me like I was some deformed retard with spiked hair and calf-length shorts, Rough Butte wasn’t that bad, despite being a slab of petrified beef jerky sitting smack-dab in the middle of an inferno.
    It’s funny how, a block later, things can change. It’s the decoder-card thing. I’d never fallen in love with a girl in work boots, and I never thought I would. I did right then, though.
    If there’s one weakness I have in my sarcastic and cynical little heart, it’s falling in love. I’m a believer in love at first sight, and I’ve no control over myself. A block after the sheriff left, I saw her getting into a pickup truck and I knew I should run. I should turn away and skate to Oklahoma or Utah and join a commune. I should avert my eyes and think about nuns or dead kittens. I should think about Dad and Edward knocking boots. Impossible. When it comes to females, I’m mush.
    I’d fallen in love before. Her name was Hailee Comstock, and she broke my heart like an elephant accidentally falling on a Popsicle-stick house. She’d been my first, and only, real girlfriend in Spokane, and she was awesome. Her mother was a heroin addict. She lived in a dark, dank, and dirty apartment building called the Coldstone in the worst part of town, and we’d danced among the beer bottles, used condoms, and trash of society’s rejects for almost five months before she dashed my heart to the ground and moved to Portland, Oregon.
    This girl, though, wasn’t a Hailee Comstock. Not even close. No pierced lip, no black lipstick, no short skirts, no tattoos. Blond hair pulled in a ponytail, work gloves hanging out the back pocket of her jeans, a tight white T-shirt, and those work boots. Oh, yeah, and a body to drool over, too. She was my country-fried fantasy, and when I saw her, I could only stand there staring. I was doomed to be her slave.
    She opened the door of the pickup, then looked over at me for a moment, her hand on the door as the sunlight poured down on her. As any Don Juan would do, I gave her a goofy smile and waved like a four-year-old. She smiled, got in the truck, and drove away.

CHAPTER 4
    T he deer-hanging house next door had two occupants living in it, and
I’d met Norman Hinks. I hadn’t met his son, Billy, other than saying hello from my window, and over
the last week I’d seen him around, but he avoided looking at me.
    Billy worked. Not like chores an eleven-year-old would do. I’m talking work work. Like all-day,
everyday work. He mowed with a hand mower, weeded, painted, hammered, hauled, hung laundry, watered,
cleaned—you name it, he did it.
    Billy Hinks was a forty-year-old redneck stuck in an eleven-year-old’s body, and I
couldn’t get enough of watching the kid from my bedroom window. Big head, skinny neck, big buckteeth,
too-small clothes, and a crazy, wild-eyed look in his eyes—he was gangly and awkward and moved like all the
right parts fired in all the wrong ways. He got around, though, and there was a kind of clumsy grace in the way he did it,
like he’d learned how to deal with being a spaz.
    Several days earlier, I’d watched from my window as Mr. Hinks skinned, sectioned, and
quartered the deer. I couldn’t help but watch as he worked the knife over the carcass and explained to Billy in
not-so-nice terms how to do it.
    The cool part was watching Mr. Hinks saw the head off, skin it, pop the eyeballs out, get a big propane
burner from the garage, and boil the meat and brains from the skull. It was like having a front-row seat to a Hannibal
Lecter carnival. Three days later, he’d tacked skull and antlers to the wall above the garage, with the fourteen
others hanging there like long-lost brothers welcoming another sibling to the realm of deer death.
    Norman Hinks had lived next door to Miss Mae since he was born, which meant Edward and he had been
neighbors. Mr. Hinks inherited the