The Stranger Read Online Free PDF Page A

of school. Neighbors and co-workers crucified my mother in that nice , civilized way responsible adults employ on former friends. They stopped talking to her. She was no longer invited for coffee. Some kids beat up my sister. She was seven years old. Other stuff, too. Dog turd smeared in the mailbox. The kid across the road fired his air gun at the kitchen window. Someone ran a screwdriver down the side of our car to achieve that nice customized scratched-to-hell look.
    You know the sort of thing, don’t you? Really neighborly stuff. Christ.
    And then there was the Halloween that followed the ruckus with Chunk. It wound up trick-or-treat night for us, all right, with OUT, OUT OUT! aerosoled across the garage door. Mom wept. I mean really wept: Her tears left big damp splotches on her sweater and her eyes were puffy and sore for days afterward.
    You think I’m angry? You bet I’m angry. She didn’t deserve that. Or the fact that the guy she was seeing dumped her because of all this. Yeah, but what’s new about this kind of crap? This stuff happens in every street. Every neighborhood. Every town. Happens damn well everywhere.
    I wound up writing about Chunk and all that shit because I was angry about what happened the day I delivered wood in the truck and Crowther tried to crack open my skull with a log I’d just taken the trouble to saw the day before.
    No. I’d set out to write everything properly. Everything with a beginning, a middle and an end. Instead, I found myself jumping ’round, describing stuff when I was fourteen, then going back to when Crowther battered me with the log. Like that pile of rocks I was building as a memorial to my mom and my sister, I intended this as a kind of memorial. A great pile of words in a book that would, somehow, all neatly fit together to tell you what happened and what it was like to live in a world that had gone head over tip.
    But to write a book? How do you start? When I sat down that night of the Crowther attack I began. There I was, in the cabin by the lake, trying to write the first line. The right-hand side of my face was a mess of reds and purples where the log had gone about making a big impression. A scab the size of a quarter clung to my forehead. One eye was closed. My neck ached like sin itself. But I was determined to crack this thing open.
    No words would come. Instead there were these brilliant images. They didn’t just sidle into my head, they crashed, exploded, BOOMED like bombs inside my mind. There was no order to them. I saw them as clearly as the day we saw it all on TV. When they took the White House and burned it to the ground. There were thousands of bread bandits running over the lawn. A guy with hair that somehow made me think of ice cream, all white and wavy, came out to talk to them. The reporter said he was some senator who once helped those guys who were now trashing the place. He stood there with his hands outstretched like he was trying to halt a tidal wave. But the bread bandits just dove on him. They had no weapons, so they ripped him apart with their bare hands. One even tore off the senator’s scalp and tossed it into a tree. His white hair hung there from a branch in one piece. That image returns to me a lot.
    Here comes another memory bomb. Pow! It’s completely out of chronological order. Boom! Here’s the image exploding inside my head right now. I remember killing the first stranger. He turned up in town, totally normal-looking. But instinctively I knew he was lousy with Jumpy. I grabbed a wrench and, well, there I go again. Hitting you with this helter-skelter of images. Yes, I killed him. A guy with a thick black mustache. He had a mole on his left cheek like a brown thumb print. And he wore a leather belt with a dog’s head buckle. On his feet, neat shoes with a Cuban heel. And he had this red-checked shirt with a button badge that said SMILE. I’M A FRIEND . Yeah, it all comes back. Every detail.
    So I sat there with my beat-up