The Water Museum Read Online Free PDF

of the World!” Shadow said.
    Chango had wanted to hang the Mexican’s tooth on a thong so Junior could wear it like some Apache warrior.
    “Sup?” said Junior.
    “Sup with you?”
    Junior shrugged.
    “Aquí nomás,” he said. “Sup with you?”
    “Nuttin. I don’t know. Sup?”
    “Hangin’.”
    “I hear that.” They stared at each other through the screen.
    “Chillin’,” Shadow offered. “After the big fight.”
    Junior chuckled.
    “Tha’s right,” he said. He made a muscle.
    “No shame in your game!” Shadow announced.
    They smiled.
    “Um, I got you somethin’,” Shadow said.
    “Yeah?”
    “Like a prize or some shit, right?” Shadow reached into his back pocket and pulled out a flimsy little pink paperback. “Check that out. I di’nt get a word of it, but I know you like that crazy stuff.”
    Junior opened the screen and took the book. It was a bent and battered Trout Fishing in America. He already had one under his bed.
    “Brautigan,” he said.
    “Is that how you say it?” Shadow asked.
    “Thanks.”
    Shadow bounced a little in place.
    “I got you something better, homes.”
    “Yeah?”
    “Simón, güey. Step out here.”
    Junior stepped out on the porch.
    “Check it,” Shadow said, pointing to his mom’s station wagon. It had an aluminum canoe tied to the roof. “Sweet, right?”
    “Shadow!” said Junior. “Where’d you get that?”
    “I stole it!”
    “What?”
    “I went out driving. I can’t sleep, man. Can you? I can’t. Yo, so I went driving, right? They got this Boy Scout camp up on Otay Mesa. Around the lake. Like, all these tents with sleeping Scouts. I snuck in and stole it. For you!”
    “You’re crazy!”
    “I stole some paddles, too. They’re in the car.”
    They regarded the canoe.
    “What are we supposed to do with a canoe?” Junior asked.
    Shadow smiled.
    “Louie and Clark, homes. Like, let’s go discovering.”
    *  *  *
    The marshes and creeks were to the east and the south of Big Ángel’s house. Between the barrio and the border, pretty much. The sloughs.
    Back in the day, crabs were attracted to the clotted blood-water that oozed out of the little slaughterhouse about a quarter mile from the gravel parking lot at the bottom of the barrio hill. Big Ángel could catch some supper down in there. Nowadays, nobody went down there except maybe Chango. If Chango was there, nobody else wanted to go there. But Shadow could take Chango any day or night.
    They carted the canoe over their heads, the gunnels breaking their shoulders. It weighed about nine hundred pounds, in Junior’s opinion. “How can a piece of shit that weighs as much as a car,” Shadow wanted to know, “float on the water?” They staggered down the dirt road and skirted the gravel lot. Old motor oil in the dust still gave up its aroma of engines. Soda cans crushed flat in the gravel had faded pale orange in the relentless sunlight. Somebody had spray-painted tags on an old truck. Grasshoppers burst out of the weeds as the boys advanced, blasting through the air with clackety ratchet sounds. Jimmy noted the rolling passage of a tumbleweed.
    Across the sloughs, the little slaughterhouse almost looked nostalgic. Occasional tides of blood and offal still pulsed out of there, making the sloughs stink worse than usual. It looked like the blood wasn’t flowing that morning.
    They heaved the canoe into the sludge that passed for water, and it hit with a flat smack. Shadow had to push it with his foot, hopping along until it seemed like it was bobbing. They watched to see if it would sink.
    “There you go!” Shadow said. “Hop in!”
    He steadied it, and Junior climbed in. Then Shadow climbed in. Their weight sank the bottom of the canoe into the muck and they sat there, moored like a commemorative statue of two idiots setting out for an adventure.
    “Okay,” said Shadow. “So we ain’t Lewis and Clark.”
    They got out. The rancid blood-mud released the canoe with great sucking