We the Animals Read Online Free PDF Page A

one on top of the other, until the top half of the page was filled with black.
    "That there's locusts," he said. "You'll see, by the by, you'll see."
    This was all on the porch; he never invited us any farther into his home than that, but neither did he ask us to leave. It was late afternoon, sunset, dusk, into evening; the late summer air cooled quickly but didn't chill. The porch was screened in; the screens had bits of fabric sewn right into their mesh to patch up the holes and keep out the mosquitoes, but the mosquitoes found their way in anyhow. Old Man called them skeeters.
    We sat around that fold-out table and slapped them skeeters dead on the tabletop or on each other's exposed calves or forearms—we made a game of it, slapping at each other and laughing, but if a skeeter landed on Old Man, we didn't slap or smack but brushed his dry skin with our fingers. Once I stood and blew a gust of air across the back of Old Man's neck, where a skeeter perched to bite, and Old Man winked and nudged me in the ribs.
    "Best medicine for a skeeter bite is to cut a cross, like this," he said and carved a tiny cross onto my arm with his thumbnail. "That way you break up the poison and kill the itch."
    Old Man was from the Ozarks, which was a place in Missouri with sinkholes and caves and backward lightning that rose up from the earth and stretched into the sky.
    Old Man told us we were on the lam. He had all kinds of names for us, castaways, stowaways, hideaways, fugitives, punks, city slickers, bastards. Manny told him we had run away and weren't ever going back, and Joel added that our mother was dead, so there wasn't nobody to call anyhow. He was very old, and he didn't seem to care to call anyone or do anything. He also called us sweets, babies, innocents, poor pitiful creatures, God's own. He strung the words together, and talked mostly to himself, all the while chopping those vegetables into smaller and smaller pieces on the table; what he was doing was this: making us a salad.
    He got up and went into the house to fetch a bowl and plates and forks. He moved very slowly.
    "Old Man's all right," said Manny.
    "He is too," said Joel.
    Joel spotted the yellow of a plastic wiffle-ball bat among some rakes and brooms and shovels, all leaning in a corner.
    "What's he got this for?"
    He dug out the bat and looked around, but there was no ball. He faked a slow home-run swing, filling his cheeks with air and exhaling the moment he imagined making contact.
    "And don't tell lies about Ma being dead," Manny said to Joel. "That shit ain't right."
    It had gotten so dark that the light from the porch prevented us from seeing into the yard beyond. Our Ma was still broken, still dead-eyed, but she was not dead. She'd even returned to the brewery. She'd be there now, working. And our Paps was still disappeared. Manny said he'd picked up with another woman.
    Joel took another home-run swing, then faked the roaring of a crowd. Soon we would have to walk our bikes home in the dark, down that rutted-up dirt road without any streetlights.
    "You hear?"
    "You think you know everything," Joel said, pointing the tip of the bat close to Manny's nose. Manny flared and tensed and Joel smiled. "But you don't know shit."
    "The fuck I don't," Manny said, and the words were barely spoken before the bat was swung, snapping Manny's head sideways. Then they were on the ground, fighting in the worst way—kennel style, Paps called it, all teeth and tearing and snot and blood.
    I yelled for them to stop, that's all I did, yelled that one word over and over, stop, stop, stop. I thought of Ma, whispering that same stop, stop, stop to our father. Manny sucked down the snot from his nose into his throat and spat a lugie in Joel's face, and the mucus slid off, like egg yolk.
    "Animals," said Old Man, " animals. "
    Then Manny and Joel did stop. They stood and panted and pulled their clothes back into shape. Old Man stayed in the doorway to his house and ordered us off his