The Great Brain #8: The Great Brain Is Back by John D. Fitzgerald

Author:John D. Fitzgerald [Fitzgerald, John D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Juvenile Fiction, Humorous Stories, Historical, Adventure
Publisher: Penguin Young Readers Group
Published: 2016-11-16T10:31:58+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

Smoke

THE MONDAY AFTER Tom put an end to the Adenville dogfights, Papa received an order to print a large number of pamphlets for the Mormons. So Papa put Tom back to work, and I hardly saw my brother at all for the next few weeks.

It was while I was with the other fellows that I first saw a boy my age smoke. That boy was Parley Benson. Parley had been talking about smoking for quite a while, but nobody paid any attention to him until that day.

We’d all gone down to the swimming hole that afternoon. Most of us had our clothes off and were ready to go into the river when Parley stopped us.

“I’m going to smoke a cigarette,” he said.

Danny Forester wasn’t working that afternoon, so he was going swimming with us. His left eyelid flipped wide open, then went half closed again.

“You got tobacco and everything?” he asked.

“Who needs tobacco?” Parley said. He went and got some dried bark from a tree. He crushed it and rolled it in the palms of his hands. Then he took a piece of toilet paper from his pants pocket and put the bark in it. After a couple of tries, Parley had rolled a cigarette. He lit it with a match and then blew smoke out of his mouth.

“Now watch this,” he said.

And I’ll be a frog who can’t croak if Parley didn’t blow smoke out of his nose. It made him cough and sort of sneeze, but he did it.

“I’ll pass it around,” he said as he handed the cigarette to Danny Forester.

Danny took a puff and must have inhaled the smoke, because he began coughing like the devil and handed the cigarette to Herbie Sties.

Herbie took a puff of smoke, held it, and let it out slowly. There was a very strange look on his face as he offered the cigarette to Seth Smith. Seth shook his head, and so did the rest of us. Herbie handed the cigarette back to Parley.

Parley took a few more puffs, blowing the smoke through his nose, and then put the cigarette out in the sand. “You have to get used to it,” he told Danny and Herbie.

“Not me,” Danny said.

Herbie shook his head.

“Afraid to smoke a little cigarette,” Parley teased.

“All it did was make me cough,” Danny answered.

Parley looked at Herbie.

“It made me dizzy,

It made me sick,

I prefer sodas

Or ice cream to lick,” Herbie said.

“Why do you want to smoke anyway?” Jimmie Peterson asked.

“Because it makes you a man,” Parley said.

Danny coughed again. “Cigarettes can’t make you five or six years older,” he said.

“You fellows are just jealous,” Parley said.

But I noticed Parley was a little pale, and he didn’t do much swimming that afternoon. Most of the time he sat on the riverbank.

• • •

Since Tom was putting in full days at the Advocate, I didn’t get a chance to tell him what had happened until he and Papa came home for supper. We were sitting on the back porch steps with Frankie, waiting for Mamma to call us to come to the table.

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