Удушье (Choke)

But instead of all that, I just lied to Miss Lacey and said, 'How can I reach you?'

I tell the fourth-graders that they call it cancer because when the cancer starts growing inside you, when it breaks through your skin, it looks like a big red crab. Then the crab breaks open and it's all bloody and white inside.

'Whatever the doctors tried,' I tell the silent little kids, 'every little boy would end up dirty and diseased and screaming in terrible pain. And who can tell me what happened next?'

No hands go up.

'For sure,' I say, 'he died, of course.'

And I put the poker back into the fire.

'So,' I say, 'any questions?'

No hands go up, so I tell them about the fairly bogus studies where scientists shaved mice and smeared them with smegma from horses. This was supposed to prove foreskins caused cancer.

A dozen hands go up, and I tell them, 'Ask your teacher.'

What a frigging job that must've been, shaving those poor mice. Then finding a bunch of uncircumcised horses.

The clock on the mantel shows our half hour is almost over. Out through the window, Denny's still bent over in the stocks. He's only got until one o'clock. A stray village dog stops next to him and lifts its leg, and the stream of steaming yellow goes straight into Denny's wooden shoe.

'And what else,' I say, 'is George Washington kept slaves and didn't ever chop down a cherry tree, and he was really a woman.'

As they push toward the door I tell them, 'And don't mess with the dude in the stocks anymore.' I shout, 'And lay off shak­ing the damn chicken eggs.'

Just to stir the turd, I tell them to ask the cheesemaker why his eyes are all red and dilated. Ask the blacksmith about the icky lines going up and down the insides of his arms. I call after the infectious little monsters, any moles or freckles they have, that's just cancer waiting to happen. I call after them, 'Sunshine is your enemy. Stay off the sunny side of the street.'

Chapter 29

After Denny's moved in

, I find a block of salt-and-pepper granite in the fridge. Denny lugs home chunks of basalt, his hands stained red with iron oxide. He wraps his pink baby blanket around black granite cobbles and smooth washed river rocks and slabs of sparkling mica quartzite and brings them home on the bus.

All those babies that Denny adopts. A whole generation pil­ing up.

Denny carts home sandstone and limestone one blocky soft pink armload at a time. In the driveway, he hoses the mud off them. Denny stacks them behind the sofa in the living room. He stacks them in the kitchen corners.

Every day, I come home from a hard day in the eighteenth century, and here's a big lava rock on the kitchen counter next to the sink. There's this little gray boulder on the second shelf down in the fridge.

'Dude,' I say. 'Why's there a rock in the fridge.'

Denny's here in the kitchen, taking warm clean rocks out of the dishwasher and swiping them with a dish towel, and he says, 'Because that's my shelf, you said so.' He says, 'And that's not just a rock, that's granite.'

'But why in the fridge?' I go.

And Denny says, 'Because the oven is already full.'

The oven is full of rocks. The freezer is full. The kitchen cabi­nets are so full they're coming down off the wall.