The Wild Inside by Jamey Bradbury

Author:Jamey Bradbury
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-03-20T04:00:00+00:00

10

If I do nothing else before I die, I will see the northern lights.

i’ve seen them, you know. the northern lights.

What were they like?

like p.k. says. only stranger. like the sky is breathing light.

I can’t wait to see them. There’s so much.

so much?

World. Stuff I want to see. Stuff I want to do. Places I want to go.

Two different handwritings. Two different voices, two people talking back and forth. I could see it now that I was really paying attention, not just to what was wrote in the margins of Jesse’s Kleinhaus book but how it was wrote. Both in blue pen, one handwriting smaller than the other. I’d seen Jesse draw plenty, his tiny but neat writing describing the parts of the dog wheel he’d designed, the careful letters labeling the bins he’d organized in the kennel. So one set of notes was most likely Jesse’s. But the other?

It wasn’t late but Dad was already asleep. Helen had stayed after supper a good while, the four of us drug out a board game we hadn’t played since long before Mom died. Then we’d waved Helen down the drive. When the sound of her Jeep’s engine grew faint, Dad give me a look like he wanted to say something. Instead he put an arm round me, give me a squeeze, then announced he was awful tired, he thought he’d turn in early.

I took the Kleinhaus book with me downstairs, out the back door. Jesse’s lamp was lit. I walked the short distance to the shed, lining words up inside my head in neat rows then kicking them apart when they didn’t come out the way I aimed. I was outside his door before I wanted to be, could hear him rustling round inside.

I knocked.

He flushed when he seen me. His eyes gray as storm clouds.

Wordlessly, I held up the Kleinhaus book.

He stepped aside then, and I come in.

He’d found himself a new pack somewhere along the way and though he didn’t have too many belongings, they was all laid out on his table. His notebook and stub of pencil, a couple adventure novels, pairs of underwear and socks. Comb, harmonica.

You taking off? I asked.

He brushed past me and carried on packing.

You don’t have to, I said.

His face was red, sweat trickling down the side. He had to be hot, the sides of the woodstove glowed red, and he was dressed in his usual way, a too-big sweater over a flannel shirt. I had joked to Dad once about Jesse’s uniform, and Dad said, quiet, You ever stop to think that’s all the clothes he’s got? Later, he give Jesse some of his old shirts and a pair of Carhartts that was too small for him but plenty large on Jesse. Now I seen how his clothes was a sort of camouflage. Jesse was like them critters whose coats are brown in the summer but turn white in the winter to match the snow. They’re just about impossible to see even when they’re right in front of you.

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