Shiner by Amy Jo Burns

Author:Amy Jo Burns
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2020-05-04T16:00:00+00:00

VERSE

It was strange for Flynn to witness his best friend transform from boy to legend, but even he couldn’t deny Briar’s new dimension. His blighted eye had a wizened sojourner’s look to it, like he was an old man telling stories of war. Under easier circumstances Flynn would have made a joke of it—called him Pap, offered to knit him an afghan—but it had been a while since Flynn had found himself in a joking mood.

Briar was just so damn proud of it, was the thing. He didn’t realize lightning was unkind. It ought to have sent him into a coma, like Brother Arledge’s nephew, who took a fall in the gorges and never opened his eyes again. And that could have been Briar, should have been him, to hear folks talk about his miracle recovery. His trust in God was so cavalier, so self-satisfied, that Flynn almost wanted to remind Briar that his daddy had chosen a saw blade and a tent over him and his mother. Not to hurt him but to show him that his heart still remembered how to bleed.

Flynn had a flurry of questions for his friend—like how could Briar see out of that white eye, for starters—but Briar didn’t feel like explaining. What Briar did feel like explaining, in copious detail, was his infatuation with Ruby. Flynn and Briar had been taught by hunters and loggers and farmers that a young woman was an uninhabited land until a man laid claim to her. Both boys saw Ruby as territory to be conquered, each of them its rightful pioneer.

Flynn came by those illusions honestly—the Sherrod boys had long been the country kings of their mountain. Sherrod set his own working hours, spent his time and his earnings as he chose. He lived by his own apothegms: Never leave the woods, never cut your hair, never tell a lie. Speak in code, work outdoors, pay in cash. Sherrod never referred to the still as a still. She was a woman. She’s cooking good today, he’d say. The still was his mistress, Flynn’s mother his hen. That’s what he called his wife: Hen. Half of Trap had forgotten that her real name was Patricia. Sherrod loved his wife and yet never remembered her birthday. He’d worn the same pair of overalls and driven the same Chevy for so many years that the rivets on his back pockets had left a cavalry of miniature bullet holes in the driver’s seat. His beard had seen more Christmases than Flynn had. Sherrod had fashioned a good life by never leaving the hills that had borne him. He worked harder than anyone Flynn had ever seen, and for the first time in his life Flynn found himself wanting to work that hard for something, too.

But as much as he hoped to emulate his father, Flynn still possessed a trait his father did not understand: hope in the face of doom. He wasn’t ready to give up yet. If only he could get Ruby alone again, he thought.

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