Jim the Boy by Tony Earley

Author:Tony Earley [EARLEY, TONY]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780759523197
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

King

FIRST JIM and Uncle Zeno passed Abraham’s ancient truck clacking up the state highway toward New Carpenter. Abraham waved out the window as they sped by. Then they passed the convicts: two lean white men burned the color of dirt by the sun, their shirts tied around their heads like turbans, digging beside the highway with long posthole diggers. The convicts were chained together at the ankle, but Jim didn’t see that until the last moment before the truck passed, when, just as he noticed the chain, one of the convicts glanced up and for a long heartbeat looked him in the eye. As Jim wheeled in the seat and watched the two convicts, and the sleepy-looking guard who watched over them, grow smaller in the rear glass, he felt deliriously frightened. He worried for a moment that the convicts, who, with each hole they dug, got closer to Aliceville, were chained only to each other, and not to anything else.

Beyond the convicts, they passed the conical, evenly spaced piles of earth that marked the holes the convicts had dug. Each hole would eventually hold a tall, black pole; each pole would hold up the wires that brought electricity to Aliceville. The convicts, whom Uncle Zeno had nicknamed Coran and Al, had been digging the holes all summer, although as of yet, not one of the holes had sprouted a pole.

The day was a Saturday, an Indian summer day so bright and warm that it made Jim want to roll around in the grass and stretch like a cat. He and Uncle Zeno were on their way to New Carpenter with the windows rolled down. The trees on the far sides of the fields were gold and yellow and orange, which became — when Jim squinted enough — a fire on a western prairie. Uncle Zeno, as usual, had to see a man about a dog. Jim told Uncle Zeno he would help him put the dog in the truck.

Three miles outside of New Carpenter they topped a slight rise in the road and saw in the distance, for the first time, a long line of black power poles tottering toward them like giants, the cross pieces that would support the stretched wires sticking out to the sides of each pole like short, stiff arms.

“Well, well, well,” said Uncle Zeno. “Looky coming here.”

He slowed down and pulled off the highway up next to the dirt pile marking the last empty hole before the lines of poles began. He and Jim got out and walked to the front of the truck to take a look. The poles seemed alive to Jim, vaguely ominous in their great, skinny height, standing still only because he was watching them. He found that by moving his head a little to one side, he could make all the poles disappear behind the nearest one; that by leaning far to one side, and then quickly to the other, he could make the whole line wag like a tail.

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.