Wild Child by Boyle T. C

Author:Boyle, T. C. [Boyle, T. C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Adult, Collections
ISBN: 9780670021420
Publisher: Viking
Published: 2010-01-21T00:00:00+00:00

Wild Child

ASH MONDAY

He’d always loved the smell of gasoline. It reminded him of when he was little, when he was seven or eight and Grady came to live with them. When Grady moved in he’d brought his yellow Chevy Super Sport with him, backing it into the weeds by the side of the garage on a sleek black trailer he must have rented for the day because it was gone in the morning. That first night had fallen over Dill like an absence, like all the nights then and most of the days too, a whole tumble of nothing that sparked with a particle of memory here and there. But he remembered the trailer, and Grady—of course he remembered Grady because Grady was here in this house till he was eleven years old—and he remembered seeing the car mounted on cement blocks the next morning as if it had gone through a wall at a hundred miles an hour and got hung up on the rubble. And he remembered the smell of gasoline. Grady wore it like perfume.

Now Dill was thirteen, with a car of his own, or at least the one he’d have when he was old enough to get his learner’s permit, and when he tried to picture Grady, what Grady looked like, he could see Grady’s hat, the grease-feathered baseball cap that had a #4 and a star sign on it in a little silver box in front, and he could see Grady’s silver shades beneath the bill of that cap, and below that there must have been a nose and a mouth but all he could remember was the mustache that hooked down over the corners of Grady’s lips, making him look like the sad face Billy Bottoms used to draw on every available surface when they were in fifth grade.

At the moment, he was in the yard, smelling gasoline, thinking of Grady, looking at his own piece-of-shit car parked there by the garage where the Super Sport had sunk into its cement blocks till his mother had it towed away to the junkyard. He felt the weight of the gas can in his hand, lifted his face to the sun and the hot breath sifting through the canyon, but for just a fraction of a second he forgot what he was doing there, as if he’d gone outside of himself.

This was a thing that happened to him, that had always happened to him, another kind of absence that was so usual he hardly noticed it.

It irritated his mother. Baffled his teachers. He wished it wouldn’t happen or happen so often, but there it was. He was a dreamer, he guessed. That was what his mother called him. A dreamer.

And here came her voice through the kitchen window, her caught-high-in-the-throat voice that snapped like the braided tail of a whip: “Dill, what are you doing standing there? The potatoes are almost done. I need you to light the fire and put up the meat right this minute!”

His mother was a teacher.

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.