The Time in Between Read Online Free PDF Page B

the gun, the cold morning, the giant knife at the hip. A gun is like a hard-on.” He paused and lifted his nose as if sniffing for danger. His jaw was wider than Del had first noticed. His neck was thick. She knew that he liked her. He had pronounced equipment wrong, emphasizing the first syllable, but she did not correct him. His hands were rough and his fingernails dirty; there was a residue under his nails. He smelled clean, however. She did not acknowledge the sexual obscenity.
    Del said that her father took them hunting every fall. They hunted bear. They took a truck up into the interior and spent the day, sometimes two, huddling out of sight in trees, and when they had had their fill, they returned home. “So, yes,” she said, “I hunt.”
    “You don’t go to school?”
    “Not anymore.”
    “How do you learn?”
    Del rolled her eyes. Tapped her head. “It’s all here,” she said, “I just have to find it.”
    He laughed. It was a big laugh and it came from somewhere inside his wide chest, and when he stopped he said, “So, you’re smart.”
    Del shrugged. She did think that she was smart, certainly smarter than Andre Toupin, who had spent the last ten years in school and had nothing to show for it, except a couple of metal studs in his nose and ears and a head full of sociological gibberish. This was their father’s opinion and the children agreed. Andre was not even smart enough to understand that his own mother would soon be sleeping with their father. The Boatman children foresaw that immediately; they discussed it, and though they did not think the love would last, they accepted it. Perhaps they hoped that Madame Toupin would make their father happy. He was not particularly happy, and there was always the possibility that a good-hearted woman, even an empty-headed one, could pull him out of his despondency.
    CHARLES FELT THAT IT WAS HIS RESPONSIBILITY TO EDUCATE HIS children. “You’re not blank slates that need to be written all over,” he’d say. “Imagine yourselves as big containers full of jumbled up letters and you have to reach in and set those letters right so that they make some sense. That’s all.”
    “The world is your school,” he said. “Nothing is banal and nothing is boring.” He grinned. “Except for TV.” And so, en masse, they went out into the world. They scavenged garbage dumps, visited a glass-blowing factory, and collected butterflies. One bleak rainy afternoon in January, on Ada’s birthday, they stopped by a crematorium in Abbotsford where Charles told them that artists throughout the centuries, lacking models, had used cadavers.
    Jon didn’t understand the word cadaver.
    “A dead body, stupid,” Del said.
    They went home that day and Charles killed Rosie, the black and orange pullet, dipped her in boiling water and plucked her, and then he sat the children down at the kitchen table and had them eviscerate and then dissect Rosie.
    Del sat quietly.
    Ada pulled out three yolks.
    “Here,” Charles said, holding out a mug. “We’ll use those for rice pudding.”
    He studied Del. Said, “Well, we were going to eat her anyway. She’s just furthering our education.”
    “But she is Rosie,” Del said.
    Charles had to allow that Del had a point. He said that this was the unfortunate consequence of naming animals, especially animals that would eventually provide you with food. “Take Ollie. What are we gonna do when her time comes? Un-name her? Even if you try you can’t forget that the black goat out there with the long teats and the sad eyes is actually Ollie, the same Ollie who likes to eat my oregano plants and tomatoes. Uh-uh. The thing is, even if Ollie didn’t have a name, you’d love her. And then you’d eat her.”
    Del announced that she was vegetarian. She’d been thinking about it for a while.
    “Nonsense,” Charles said. “You’ll starve.”
    “Let her, Dad,” Ada said.
    “Of course, of course, she’ll do whatever she wants. Go ahead,