'He said, a??Dog's no good for birds for the rest of the day and we probably ain't either.' So we went home.'
'And he never said what a
'He said I was smart because I'd lived to hunt another day. Then we went home and sat at the kitchen table with Patrick and Cash and I told them about what happened. Cash got up and got a bottle of scotch from the kitchen cabinet and four glasses. Then my father poured scotch in three of them and some Coke in the fourth. And we drank together.'
'You'd acted like a man,' Susan said. 'So he treated you like a man.'
'In his way,' I said.
Susan smiled.
'a??That brown liquor,'' she said, 'a??which not women, not boys and children, but only hunters drank.''
'William Faulkner,' I said.
'Very good,' Susan said. 'For a man with an eighteen-inch neck.'
'I told you they read to me a lot.'
She said it again, 'a??Not women, not boys and children.''
'Sounds sort of sexist, doesn't it?' I said. 'Ageist too.'
'Maybe we can have his Nobel Prize revoked,' Susan said.
'Good thing was, that whenever I was in trouble, I'd think about that bear and it helped.'
'Because you were brave then?' Susan said.
'I guess, although to tell you the truth, I really think more about sitting around the table drinking soda while my father and my uncles drank their scotch.'
'The ritual,' she said. 'More than the event.'
'I guess,' I said. 'I thought a lot about it when I was in the woods with Jeannie.'
'Jeannie?' Susan said. 'In the woods?'
'It wasn't what you think,' I said.
Chapter 12
I was hanging outside the variety store with Pearl and some guys when Luke Haden's car pulled up at the stoplight, with Jeannie in the front seat. I had never seen her riding with her father before. She saw me through the rolled-up window and mouthed the word
There was a trash truck behind it, much slower to move.
'Pearl,' I said. 'Go home.'
Then I stepped up onto the back of the trash truck. There were plenty of places to stand and plenty of places to hang on. We used to ride the trucks a lot. See which of us could get the furthest before some cop spotted us and pulled the truck over and made us get off. I knew from experience that the drivers normally had the right-hand rear-view mirror set wider so they could see the next lane, and, therefore, they never saw us. I stayed on the right-hand side of the truck, peering ahead at Luke Haden's car. It wasn't much of a car, a big old Ford sedan, with cardboard taped over the back where the rear window got smashed in. It had been maroon, maybe, when it was new. But what with dirt and rust and stuff it was a little hard to say what color it was now.
The car turned right, onto River Street. I knew that River Street was short, and as the truck slowed at the intersection, I jumped off and ran downhill after the car. When I got to the end, the Ford was parked on the side of the road, empty. There was a path that led to the river. I went down it, moving slower, being more careful. At the end of the muddy path was a little jetty with a couple of rowboats tied to it. I heard the sound of an outboard motor. I stepped out onto the jetty and looked. Jeannie and her father were in a bass boat with her father in back at the motor and Jeannie sitting sort of hunched up in the front.
