This Boy's Life Read Online Free PDF

the giddiness of flight. My knees shook and I felt myself grin. Everything was racing. I said, “What about Roy?”
    She kept on packing. “What about him?”
    “I don’t know. Is he coming too?”
    “Not if I can help it, he isn’t.” She said she hoped that was okay with me.
    I didn’t answer. I was afraid of saying something she would remember if they got back together. But I was glad to be once more on the run and glad that I would have her to myself again.
    “I know you two are close,” she said.
    “Not that close.”
    She said there wasn’t time to explain everything now, but later on she would. She tried to sound serious, but she was close to laughing and so was I.
    “Better check your room,” my mother said again.
    “When are we leaving?”
    “Right away. As soon as we can.”
    I ate a bowl of soup while my mother finished packing. She carried the suitcases into the front hall and then walked down to the corner to call a cab. That was when I remembered the rifle. I went to the closet and saw it there with Roy’s things, his boots and jackets and ammo boxes. I carried the rifle to the living room and waited for my mother to come back.
    “That thing stays,” she said when she saw it.
    “It’s mine,” I said.
    “Don’t make a scene,” she told me. “I’ve had enough of those things. I’m sick of them. Now put it back.”
    “It’s mine,” I repeated. “He gave it to me.”
    “No. I’m sick of guns.”
    “Mom, it’s mine. ”
    She looked out the window. “No. We don’t have room for it.”
    This was a mistake. She had put the argument in prac tical terms and now it would be impossible for her to argue from principle again. “Look,” I said, “There’s room. See, I can break it down.” And before she could stop me I had unscrewed the locking bolt and pulled the rifle apart. I dragged one of the suitcases back into the living room and unzipped it and slid the two halves of the rifle in between the clothes. “See?” I said. “There’s plenty of room.”
    She had watched all this with her arms crossed, her lips pressed tightly together. She turned to the window again. “Keep it then,” she said. “If it means that much to you.”
     
    IT WAS RAINING when our cab pulled up. The cabby honked and my mother started wrestling one of the suitcases down the steps. The cabby saw her and got out to help, a big man in a fancy Western shirt that got soaked in the drizzle. He went back for the other two bags while we waited in the cab. My mother kidded him about how wet he was and he kidded her back, looking in the rearview mirror constantly as if to make sure she was still there. As we approached the Greyhound station he stopped joking and began to quiz her in a low, hurried voice, asking one question after another, and when I got out of the cab he pulled the door shut behind me, leaving the two of them alone inside. Through the rain streaming down the window I could see him talking, talking, and my mother smiling and shaking her head. Then they both got out and he took our bags from the trunk. “You’re sure, now?” he said to her. She nodded. When she tried to pay him he said that her money was no good, not to him it wasn’t, but she held it out again and he took it.
    My mother broke out laughing after he drove away. “Of all things,” she said. She kept laughing to herself as we hauled the bags inside, where she settled me on a bench and went to the ticket window. The station was empty except for a family of Indians. All of them, even the children, looked straight ahead and said nothing. A few minutes later my mother came back with our tickets. The Phoenix bus had left already and the next one didn’t come through until late that night, but we were in luck—there was a bus leaving for Portland in a couple of hours, and from there we could make an easy connection to Seattle. I tried to conceal my disappointment but my mother saw it and bought me off with a handful of change. I