Never So Green by Johnston Tim

Author:Johnston, Tim [Johnston, Tim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: USA
Publisher: New York : Farrar, Straus, Giroux
Published: 2002-06-30T14:00:00+00:00

Chapter 12

The next morning, shuffling into the kitchen, Tex found Farley and his mother at the table much as he’d left them. The birthday cake was out and they both poked at it with what appeared to be the very last of their strength, while Willa May spun the Life dial around and around. The room was full of too many smells—popcorn and frosting and beer and unchanged diaper and sour, just-out-of-bed adults—and the floor was dotted with too many tiny drops of wine for him to go any farther. He returned to his room and waited for Jack to get up.

When she hadn’t stirred by eleven-thirty, he went to her door and knocked. Waited. Peeked in. “Jack?”

A dummy of bedding almost worked, but he knew before he poked it that she was gone. And it wasn’t a dummy at all, he discovered, but only the natural disarray of her sheets. Among the tangle he found her nightshirt, a copy of Sports Illustrated, one dirty sock, and her mitt, the new Spalding tucked inside. He pulled on the mitt and sat on the edge of her bed, producing the squeak he’d heard many times before, through the wall. What did she think of, he wondered, playing catch in the dark?

He returned to his room, threw on his sneakers and his Twins cap, and snuck out the back door. Jack’s bike was gone, but it didn’t take long to guess where she’d go on a hot, overhung Sunday in Iowa. He just hoped she hadn’t worn the polka dots.

But her Huffy was not among the bikes strewn beneath the Galaxy marquee, it was nowhere on Main Street, and Tex dumped his Schwinn in defeat at Manny’s door.

The shop was open, air conditioner running strong. “Haircut?” Manny asked from behind the Sunday Observer.

“Just a soda, thanks.”

Manny grunted. He was waiting, Tex knew, for the movie to let out so he could stand in his doorway and harangue each boy by name: “Hey you, Billy Ivers, how you see through that mop? Get on in here, boy, before you slam that bike in a tree. And you, Jeff Dunovitz, lookin’ more like a girl every day you don’t trim that wig.”

Tex sat in a chair by Manny’s cooler sipping Coke, hoping Jack would pedal by. On the wall above the cooler was a silver plaque engraved with the town’s gratitude to Manfred Henry Tate for meritorious acts in the service of the Lee County Volunteer Fire Department. A long time ago, his father had told Tex, Manny saved a small girl from a burning house.

Manny rattled his paper inside out, gave it a shake. “Your friend was here, while ago,” he said.

“My friend?”

“Had me going, too—right up till I got that cap off. Ain’t nobody held scissors thirty-five years can’t tell boy hair from girl.”

“Jack was here?”

“If that’s her name, then she was here.”

“Was she, um…alone?”

Manny lowered his paper. “Now, how you think she got a haircut if she was alone?”

“I mean,” he

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