Float Up, Sing Down by Laird Hunt

Author:Laird Hunt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Hank

Hank Dunn’s day had started elsewhere, far from thoughts of death and year-old lunches. Decent breakfast at home. Coffee at the diner in Bright Creek. Someone’s sweet new wheels to whistle at. And then off. So many things to do. Even in retirement. Especially in retirement. This morning the main thing involved his granddaughter, Della. Crabapple of his eye. Slab of C4 snugged deep inside his skull. Della was smart as a tack and she had a mouth on her and good goddamn could she run. Quicker than snot was not an expression he favored, but he’d heard someone say it about Della that very morning at the diner and it just wasn’t anything but the truth. Hank had had an earful between his decent breakfast and his coffee in town about her that morning. To do with Della and the Henry boy. To do with Hank needing to help his daughter, Bethie, rein Della in. Hank had said he would look into it. Had said he would do some talking. But not to Della. Whom he already knew had plenty of head on her shoulders. Ergo his fixing to run into town, to the Marsh grocery, where he had extracted from Tammy Henry that her son, Sugar, when he wasn’t playing get-naked games with Della, had a job.

Getting himself acquainted with Della’s partner in crime was his main order of business that day, but the boy’s shift didn’t start for a while and anyway Hank had his fields to consider. One hundred and sixty acres of Indiana prime. Not a ditch or a lane or a fence anywhere to interrupt his happy design. Half corn, half soybeans. He’d had the acreage from an aunt back when he was still running up and down the roads with a pistol on his hip. For the first years he’d just more or less let them rise and fall as they liked. But then he’d taken an interest. He had two bins in the northwest corner. Big one for corn and small one for beans. You could see all you needed to from the top of either, so he generally flipped a coin. Today the sage of Monticello decreed he climb the long ladder. This suited him fine. He might have leaned closer to ninety than to eighty if anyone had dared to count, but Hank Dunn still enjoyed his exercise. He’d had fresh gravel poured and spread just last year, so his walk to the bins came with a side of crunch. The crunch made him think of something, but he couldn’t put his finger on it and it floated away. The ladder was on the shady side of the operation and the sun hadn’t hit its stride anyway, so the rails were still cool. His right knee wasn’t what it had once been and he supposedly had a date with a doctor who was going to enact some miracle on his left rotator cuff, but he could still work a ladder with respectable speed.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.