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She was crying now, not sobbing but crying steadily, and she leaned over to pull him away from his pillows, hugging him up against her. She cupped his head to her shoulder, rocking them, shushing like a mother would. Just an old woman holding an old man, maybe both of them remembering when they’d been young together in this very house, clinging to each other because they were frightened by something just beyond what they could express.
Eleven
HE WAS UP on his knees in the truckseat, turned sideways, with the seatbelt slanting down under his arm and across his ribcage. “When the Boogeyman peeks in his closet,” he said, his voice chattering because the roadbed had deteriorated to a dry washboard, then he started giggling and couldn’t stop.
They jounced down through the cattleguard and he pivoted around facing forward, straining against the seatbelt like he’d fallen upon a guitar string, singing out, “Boing, boing, boing.”
“Goddamnit, Ke
“You don’t know, do you?” He was still giggling. “You don’t know what the Boogeyman was checking for?”
“Sit down like you should.”
McEban hunched forward over the steering wheel to let the air get at his back, and Ke
The boy a
His feet didn’t quite reach the floormat and the dashboard was heaped up with catalogs and receipts, a single workglove, a pair of vise grips and an ante
“The Boogeyman was checking to see if it was Chuck Norris who was in there.” His voice a shrill vibrato.
“I was going to say Chuck Norris.”
“I’ll bet you weren’t.” He pinched a quarter out of the coins in the ashtray, slipping it into his front pocket. “I can’t see where we’re going.”
“You know where we’re going. Look out the side window if you need something to see.”
“You were going to say Superman.”
“No, I wasn’t. If you’d have given me a minute I would’ve said Chuck Norris.”
Ke
After breakfast McEban had perched him on a kitchen stool with a bath towel safety-pi
“I like how it feels,” he said.
“I could freshen it every couple weeks if you want.”
“That’d be okay in the summer.” He still had his hands up, dabbing. “Could you make a pie out of clover?”
“I couldn’t.”
“Could somebody?”
“Maybe Chuck Norris could.”
The boy smiled, poking through the clutter on the dash until he found a pair of sunglasses. He wiped the lenses on his shirttail and put them on. “I don’t know why I can’t get up on my knees. You said if we ever got in a wreck the airbag would squish me no matter how I was sitting.”
“When did I say that?”
“When I was littler.”
“Well, you’re bigger now. You won’t squish if you’re sitting down like you are.”
Curtis Hanson was whipping weeds in the borrow ditch behind their row of mailboxes, his two stocky blue heelers jackknifing in the air at his sides, snapping at the flying weedstalks. Curtis waved and McEban waved back, turning onto the county road. It was hot enough that the macadam felt greasy under the tires and the truck slewed and caught.
“You know why Chuck Norris’s dogs pick up their own poop?”
“I think that’s probably something I knew last week.”
“I’ve told you this one before,” the boy said, staring right at him.
“You look like some kind of bug in those glasses.”
He lowered the glasses, narrowing his eyes, speaking each word distinctly: “Because Chuck Norris doesn’t take shit from anybody.”
“I think you better put that quarter back in the ashtray.”
They stopped in the alley behind the Ace Hardware and McEban backed around to the end of a rusted Quonset hut. The double doors were slid fully open on their tracks, below a faded sign reading JOEY’S WELDING. They dropped the tailgate, and Joey came out and shook McEban’s hand and then the boy’s and stood with them.
He wore a leather apron over a stained sweatshirt that was baggy in the elbows, the sleeves dotted with burn holes. They all stared at the broken sickle bar in the bed of the truck.
“You find the same rock you did last year?” Joey coughed productively and turned and spat against the side of the building.
“It was a different rock this time.”
“You think about buying new?” He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
“I would if you told me I had to. I’m not sure I can afford new.”
Joey nodded, leaning over the sidewall. His welding helmet, hinged back on his head, was skull-shaped and bright red with yellow flames painted on the sides to represent ears. He ran the pad of a thumb over a jagged end of the sickle bar. “I guess you won’t have to just yet.”
They carried in each half, going wide around the other men at work with their torches, and set the pieces up on an angle-iron-and-sheet-metal worktable. Ke
“I forgot how hot it gets in here.” McEban’s face was flushed, and he tipped his hat off and cocked an arm up, digging his forehead into the angle his elbow offered.
“It’s not as hot as working over a grill in Mississippi.” Joey peeled away the yellow customer copy from the work order and handed it to him. “I did that once, and it was hotter.”
They started back toward the truck.
“Or unloading boxcars, or ru
They stopped on the cement apron in the sun.
“A bakery’s no fun in the summer, either.”
“How long do you figure?” McEban asked.
“How about Friday?”
“Morning?”
When Joey nodded, the welding mask came down, its dark lens flashing in the sunlight. He pushed it back up. “Late morning, to be on the safe side.”
Ke
They dropped off a pair of boots at Burke’s to have them resoled and -heeled, and stayed longer in the bank than was necessary, enjoying the central air. When they felt refreshed, they walked across Bighorn Avenue to the Carnegie Library and stood on the plastic ru
Ke