The Times Are Never So Bad Read Online Free PDF Page B

a motherfucking, cocksucking string of other things. I like this girl. With the lights off, I back the jeep up away from the club and make a wide half-circle around her to the road, so she can’t read my plates. I pull out and turn on the lights.
    I take a beer from the cooler on the floor and light a cigarette. My hands are shaky, but it’s the good kind. Kingsley taught me about adrenaline, long before he used it over there, when I started first grade, which for boys means start learning to fight too. He said when you start to tremble, that’s not fear, it just feels like it; it’s to help you, so put it to use. That is why I didn’t say to DeLuca the things I thought of saying. When I know I have to fight I never talk. Adrenaline makes guys start talking at each other, and you can use it up; I hold it in till I’ve got to either yell or have action.
    The street is wide and quiet, most of the houses dark. I pass a cemetery and a school. I don’t know why it is, but I know of four schools in this town either next to or across the street from a cemetery. I’m talking elementary schools too. Maybe it’s an old custom, but it’s weird looking at little girls and boys on a playground, and next door or across the street are all those tombstones over the dead. King is buried in one with trees and no school or anything else around but woods and the Merrimack River. The sky is lit up with stars and moon, the kind of night you could drive in with your lights off if you were the only one on the road, just follow the grey pavement and look at the dark trees and the sky and listen to the air rushing at the window. I turn on the radio and get onto 495 north. My knuckles are sore but the fingers work fine. I suck down the beer and get another from under the ice, and it feels good on my hand. I’m getting WOKQ from Dover, New Hampshire. Every redneck from southern Maine to Boston listens to that station. New Hampshire is also a redneck state, though the natives don’t know it because they get snow every winter. When King was at Camp Lejeune he wrote to the family and said they could move New Hampshire down there and everybody would be happy except for the heat, which he wasn’t happy with either. The heat got to him in Nam too; he wrote and said the insects and heat and being wet so much of the time were the worst part. I think about that a lot; was he just saying that so we wouldn’t worry, or did he mean it? Most of the time I think he meant it, which taught me something I already knew but didn’t always know that I knew: it gets down to what’s happening to you right now, and if you’re hot and wet and itching, that’s what you deal with. You’ll end up tripping a mine anyways, so you might as well fight the bugs and stay cool and dry till then.
    Mostly there’s woods on the sides of the highway. People are driving it fast tonight. I pull into the right lane, Crystal Gayle is singing sad, and take the exit. I hope Waylon comes on; I’m in a Waylon mood. I cross the highway on the overpass, cars going under me without a sound I can hear over Crystal, and go on a two-lane into the town square of Merrimac, where they leave off the k . I don’t know why. The square has a rotary and some lights and is empty. I turn right onto no, two-lane and hilly with curves, and I have to piss. It’s not just beer, it’s nerve-piss, and I shiver holding it in. Nobody’s on the road, and when I turn left toward the lake I cut the lights and can see clearly: the road is narrow with trees on its sides, and up ahead where the road turns left, there are trees too, a thin line of them at the side of the lake. I shift down and turn and back up and turn, and park it facing 11 o. I take the gasoline can from behind my seat, then piss on the grass, looking up at the stars and smelling the pines among the trees. I carry the gasoline can in my left hand, the side away