year he’d begun to stutter, he told her how the kids laughed at him and she’d prayed the stuttering would go away. It hadn’t. The asthma either. Both got worse. In the third grade the class read aloud and Larry dreaded reading days. When he stuttered the other boys laughed and his teacher thought he was doing it on purpose and fussed at him. “It’s my reading day tomorrow,” he’d say as his mother sat on his bed. “Lord,” she would pray, “thank You for Your grace. Please help Larry read good tomorrow, take that stuttering away, and please help his breathing tonight, and send him a special friend, Lord, one just for him.” Eventually the prayers worked, but on a delayed schedule. “God’s timing,” his mother said, “is His own.” The stuttering stopped late in the fourth grade, almost overnight, and only rarely recurred. His asthma subsided gradually, gone entirely by the end of the summer before sixth grade. And then Silas had come. A friend. Silas, who was the first answered prayer he couldn’t tell her about, knowing that the chilly mother who’d given Silas and Alice Jones those coats would return, that she would do something to make them leave the cabin in the woods. Now her prayer had become, “Dear Lord, thank You for Your grace, and thank You for healing Larry’s stuttering and his asthma. Please send him a special friend, one just for him.”
Was continuing to pray for something you already had wrong? He’d even begun to worry his stuttering, his asthma, might return.
“Son?”
He was still against the wall and she took her hand from his shoulder.
He didn’t answer.
She sat for a while longer. He breathed the smell of his room, the dust behind his bed.
“Larry?”
Finally she sighed and he felt her hand on his shoulder again. “Dear Lord,” she prayed, “thank You for Your grace. Thank You for healing Larry’s stuttering and his asthma. Please,” she said, and he heard that she was trying not to cry, “please, God, send him a special friend. One just-one just for him. Amen,” she said, and left.
WHEN HE WOKE in the morning his teeth were gritty. He’d gone to sleep without brushing. His mother was in the kitchen cooking breakfast, as if nothing had happened. Through his window he saw Carl’s truck gone and wondered if he’d stayed at Cecil’s all night.
He slipped outside without eating breakfast and trotted all the way to Silas’s with the book in his back pocket. From his spot behind a tree, he saw Silas’s mother’s car parked in front of the cabin and waited until she came out of the house in her Piggly Wiggly uniform and a hairnet. An old cat that had been sleeping in the sun on the car hood rose and stretched as she scratched behind its ears. Then she shooed it off and got in the car, an old Chevy Nova with rust spots and no hubcaps. She turned its engine over a few times but it finally started and she backed up, the cat sitting in the dirt road watching.
Presently Silas came out and hopped off the porch and began to throw his baseball. He had a glove now, somehow. Larry came out of the woods and walked up to where Silas stood waiting.
“Hey,” Larry said.
“Hey.”
Larry looked around. Then he thrust out his hand. “I brought you this.”
“I know you don’t like to read, but these are all short stories, some just a few pages, so maybe you’d like to try em.”
Silas popped his ball into his glove and took the book and looked at it.
“I need the.22 back,” Larry said.
“How come?”
“I just do. Please, Silas.”
“Tell me how come. You got a lot of em. I ain’t got but one.”
“I told you. I want it back.”
“No. We need it.”
“It’s my daddy’s.”
“ ‘It’s my daddy’s,’ “ Silas mocked.
Larry had a lockblade knife in the right back pocket of his jeans, and he slipped a finger into that pocket knowing he’d never use the knife, suddenly even having it was a disadvantage.
“You got-” Silas said then stopped. He looked past Larry toward the trees, and Larry followed his eyes, knowing what he would see.
It was Carl with a bottle of bourbon, walking toward them. “Hell,” he yelled, “I followed you, boy. Just right behind you, you never seen me. Not once. Drunk I followed you, boy.” He stumbled but came on. “You ain’t got the slightest idea what’s around you, you and your monster books. In the olden days you’d a been dead a long time ago. Some Indian cutting your throat or some gook with a grenade. You got it easy. Momma’s boy reading the livelong day. Watch your cartoons, play with your dolls, read your funny books. But you can’t unscrew a god dang bolt to save your life, can’t charge a dad blame battery. And here when it comes to knuckles, you can’t even get your own daddy’s gun back from the boy that stole it.”
He’d arrived before them and looked down at Silas. “You don’t like that do you, boy?”
Silas folded his arms over his chest, the glove in his right hand. He wouldn’t look at Carl.
“Answer me, boy.”
“Naw.”
“Naw, sir.”
“Naw, sir.”
“Why not?”
Now he looked Carl in the face. “Cause I ain’t stole nothing.”
“Well, if you ain’t stole nothing then don’t be offended.” He took a long pull from his whiskey and screwed the lid back on and wiped his lips with his fingers. “And if you ain’t stole nothing I’ll take it all back.”
He looked from one boy to the other. “Well now,” he said. “Peers like we got us a dispute between the races, here.” He looked at Silas. “How old are you, boy?”
“Fourteen.”
“Tell me who your daddy is.” He waited. “I ain’t gone ask you again.”
“He dead.”
“Dead! Well, ain’t that sad. And he didn’t leave you no gun? Ain’t that one of a daddy’s duties? Leave his boy a firearm?
“Tell you boys what.” Carl walked over to the tree and placed his hand on its trunk, scuffed from Silas’s baseball, and eased himself down until he sat at its base with his legs crossed.
“So. Yall both want the rifle. You remember in the Bible? Story of King Solomon? Wisest man ever? Two women come before him with a baby both claiming it. Know what he says? Says cut that sum bitch in two, give each woman half.” Carl mimed sawing through a baby and giving Larry one side, Silas the other, all the while talking. “The one woman says, ‘Good, do it,’ and the other says, ‘No, don’t kill that youngun. She can have it.’ And boom, mystery solved. What I’m getting at here, boys, is that yall have put me in the position of Solomon. I got to slice me a baby.”
“I’ll get the gun,” Silas said.
“Don’t be so hasty, boy,” Carl said, unscrewing the lid. “I just need me one of them lightbulbs to go off over my head. Then we can figure this out. Wait-” He coughed and wiped the back of his hand over his mouth. “I got it. Yall got to fight it out. Man to man. White to colored. Whichever one of yall wins gets the gun.”
At first Silas folded his arms and turned to go, but Carl said if he did he’d go tell his mother, that when she came home tired from her two shifts she’d find Carl Ott waiting inside the house, a mite drunker, too.
“Fight,” Carl said.
Neither boy spoke.
“Now Larry here’s a little older, but on the girly side, so I figure it’s even.”
Silas said, “You can’t make me.”
“Oh I can’t?”
“Naw.”
“Naw,
Carl started forward with the belt back and Silas came at Larry and pushed him, not too hard, and Carl stepped
