The Times Are Never So Bad by Dubus Andre

Author:Dubus, Andre [Dubus, Andre]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Itzy, Kickass.to
ISBN: 9781453299425
Amazon: B00BBPW8X0
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2010-11-21T05:00:00+00:00

In the woods near the road he and Mark lay face down in the shadow of trees and looked through branches and brown needles of a larger fallen branch of pine; Mark had dragged it from deeper in the woods, where their bicycles were chained to a tree. Moist dead leaves were cool against Walter’s flesh. Out in the sunlight the white handkerchief hung: folded over a length of fishing line tied to trees on either side of the narrow road, it was suspended three feet above the blacktop, motionless in the still air.

‘It’s like waiting in ambush,’ Walter said.

‘It’s better at night. It looks like a ghost at night.’

‘It looks like one now.’

The first car that came around the curve down the road to their left was green and foreign; Walter pressed his palms and bare toes against the earth and saw a second shape behind the windshield, a woman, and then two more figures in the back, and now the driver’s face: a man beyond the hood, wearing sunglasses, right hand at the top of the wheel, peering now, shifting down, flowing and slowing, the woman’s hands in front of her, pushing toward the windshield, then her head out of the window saying ‘What is it?’ and the children leaning forward, arms and hands out of the windows, and the man stopped and got out, he was tall and wore a suit, and Walter pressed against the leaves and watched him holding the line and looking down both of its ends; then breaking it, and watching the handkerchief fall, and standing with fists on his hips, turning his head from one side of the road to the other as he spoke: ‘I want you boys to think about something while you’re in there laughing and having your fun. You could kill somebody. You could make somebody swerve into another car. I’ve got two kids in mine. You could have caused something you’d regret for the rest of your lives.’ Then he went back to his car. Before he got in, his wife said: ‘Don’t just leave it in the road.’

‘I don’t want to touch it.’

She opened the door but he said ‘Let’s go’ and got in and shifted and drove slowly by, his wife hunting the woods, her eyes sweeping the fallen pine branch. Then the car was hidden by trees, and he listened to it going faster up the road, and laughing, he stood and squeezed Mark’s shoulders and hopped and skipped in a circle, pulling Mark with him, forcing the sound of his laughter faster when it slowed and louder when it lulled; he stopped dancing and laughing, but still quivering with jubilance, he squeezed Mark’s shoulder and shouted: ‘I don’t want to touch it.’

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