Thumbsucker Read Online Free PDF Page B

it’s too dull, too sheltered there. Well, he can afford to—he’s a great big man. Women and children can’t risk that attitude.”
    I turned on the motor home’s AM radio and listened for a clue to our location. Stations came in from everywhere: crop news from Omaha, polka from North Dakota, a Bible show all the way from Colorado. We were out on the plains, where all the signals cross.
    “I think we need to turn around,” I said. I rooted around in the glove compartment, looking for a map, but all I found were empty asthma inhalers and a crime magazine whose cover showed a woman bound and gagged with black electrical tape.
    Grandma’s head began to droop and sway; I braced myself to snatch the wheel from her. The only other vehicles on the road were pickups driven by hunters in orange caps. They steered with one finger, smoking and drinking coffee, and when the motor home drifted under forty, one of them honked at us and shook his fist.
    All of a sudden, Grandma was fast asleep and I was pressed tight against her, steering us. I felt the Horizoneer’s bulk, its sluggish tonnage, and I called outfor Grandpa. Joel woke up instead. He cleared his throat, said, “Don’t,” and fell asleep again.
    Keeping us straight required constant adjustments. There were crosswinds to fight and high spots in the highway. Our speed was a steady forty-three, governed by Grandma’s wedged-in throttle foot. In time I got the hang of things. My pride rose. I managed to get settled on the seat and nudge Grandma’s foot off the pedal with my own. I’d always suspected that I knew how to drive.
    Moments later I heard Grandpa waking. I pumped the brakes and eased us toward the shoulder. He staggered forward, lost his footing, and ended up sideways in the passenger seat as I brought the vehicle to a stop. I waited for him to acknowledge my heroics but he was groggy and didn’t have his glasses on.
    I had to explain the situation for him. All my finest moments went unwitnessed.
    “The woman gets confused sometimes,” he said.
    “She said she was driving to Buffalo.”
    “She’s delicate.”
    “Mike says she’s faking.”
    “He knows better than that. Your grandmother’s nerves aren’t her fault. She struggles with them. The people who should have loved her weren’t always kind to her. Tough neighborhood. Tough family. Tough men. It wasn’t a tea party, Irish Buffalo.”
    Grandpa took Grandma’s hand and tugged her upright. Waking up, she muttered a string of curses—notthe four-letter words that I was used to, but the ugly, peculiar ones you seldom hear.
    “We know,” said Grandpa, smoothing her tangled hair back.
    “Cunt hole,” said Grandma. “Prick.”
    “It’s me. It’s Max.”
    I excused myself, opened the door, and stepped outside. After so much venison and tension, the retching was a relief. It came in waves. And though I might have been able to swallow it back, I let it come up until it was all gone—not just the food but the desire for food, whatever that space was that the food had filled.

    They were gone—to Florida, they told me, to join a convoy of other Horizoneers—when Mike returned with the gutted doe that morning. After I helped him unload it from the station wagon, he slit the tendons of the doe’s back legs and threaded baling twine between the bones and hung it from a rafter in the garage.
    I watched with gritty, tired eyes, my mouth still raw and sour from stomach acid. I knew better than to tell Mike where I’d been all night and turn him against his parents even more. My adventures had never interested him anyway. With Mike, there was no way to get around the feeling that everyone’s in the middle of his own life and at the edge of everybody else’s.
    “She’s a beauty, isn’t she?” he said. “She ran for almost two miles, I don’t know how. I only wish Momand Dad were here to see this.” He ran a hand along the doe’s stiff flank, leaving a trail of fluffed-up, muddy fur. In