Water Dogs Read Online Free PDF Page A

in high school when Littlefield completed the transformation from rich kid to local—from a boy who’d trained hard for their father’s ski team, earning all-state honors in ninth and tenth grade, to a kid who sold an ounce of weed every week at the privateschool where their mother worked part-time as a counselor. When Littlefield finished school, he started learning how to build houses and started caring less about what the family thought of him. The change happened not long after their father died. Bennie and their sister, Gwen, helped their mother run the house, but Littlefield had always battled with Eleanor, so he moved in with Pete and Skunk Gould, sleeping on the couch in their trailer until she moved up to a place in Clover Lake. When she moved, she left the family’s house to the kids. That was when Gwen packed up, too, and started her life in Brooklyn.
    They zipped up their tan coveralls as they walked over to the office. Usually, Bennie liked watching Littlefield pull the headgear down over his face, the rigid mask with built-in goggles, and he admired Littlefield for his toughness, his stubbornness, his fierce approach to the game. He’d always been in awe of this, actually—Littlefield’s ability to stay focused, to take the game seriously, to want to win, always, to never let the thought of losing distract him. Watching Littlefield check his gun this time, though—making sure the reloading action was working, lining up the sight, pumping a few gumballs at a nearby spruce stump—reminded Bennie of how pigheaded his brother was in general, how he took himself so seriously. Littlefield had isolated himself after their father’s death—he’d become much more stubborn and smug—and while there were times when Bennie was envious of Littlefield’s confidence, this was not one of them.
We’re playing a game. Take it easy
.
    Through the scratched, fogging plastic of his own mask, Bennie saw the urchiners. Their masks were down, too, and they wore belted white snowsuits. They held their guns tight against their stomachs, each in the same way. They were rugged, but with their new matching snowsuits, they looked like happy snowmen.
    “Here’s the thing,” Julian whispered. “They’ve got a new guy. I don’t even know his name.”
    “LaBrecque,” said Littlefield. “Ray LaBrecque. The one in the middle.”
    Boak and Shaw were the veterans of the urchiner team—they weresquat and muscular—and LaBrecque, the tallest of the snowmen, towered between them like an older brother.
    “Yeah, okay. Well, he’s their weakness,” whispered Julian.
    The game was better in summertime because more shots were fired and you sprinted around the course like a spooked dog; the anxiety about getting shot was heightened because you wore fewer layers and the paintballs left bigger welts. This was something the rookie paintballers didn’t consider: the incentive to avoid your opponents’ fire went far beyond just wanting to stay in the game. Getting shot was not like getting tagged in touch football. Getting shot hurt, like getting snagged on a barbed-wire fence. With paintball, you were always just one stupid move away from the shockingly sharp sting of humiliation and loss.
    In wintertime, this fear was lessened because of heavier clothes and snow bunkers, but the starkness of the weather added to the drama. The margin for error was small. There was no greenery, and the drifts were difficult to run through.
    Bennie and Littlefield’s understanding of each other was best in evidence at the Flying Dutchman. Their father had been a marine, which made running around with guns especially appealing to Littlefield. (It didn’t seem to matter to him that their father hadn’t gone to Vietnam but had instead served stateside as a “logistical specialist,” driving trucks.) Bennie, on the other hand, didn’t care for paintball itself, but he liked the camaraderie—most of the time, he liked being on his brother’s team.