“Look here, Dale,” said Grandpa. “I don’t mean to get in your business. But just so you know how I know, my old man used to push me and my sisters around too.”
There was a pause. A heavy june bug attached itself to the screen near Fish’s face and nearly caused Fish to reveal his presence. Fish’s grandpa stood, reached for his pouch of tobacco.
“And I know how it goes if other people poke around in it, how it can make it all so much worse. So. But if you ever need a place to go, ever, you come right straight here. You run straight through the corn if you got to. Understand?”
“Yes sir.”
“Good.”
The three of them sat in the quiet, Fish on one side of the screen and his grandpa and Bread on the porch. The sun was all the way down now, and the fireflies were starting to lift out of the grass and float past the apple trees, speaking silently about whatever it is fireflies have to say to one another.
“None of it means you can’t grow up good, Dale, a hell of a lot better than your old man. You’re going to be a good one, you and Fischer are both going to be good.” He stood now, walked across the porch boards, spat chew over the railing, and adjusted the green fatigue cap that always sat on the back of his head, its stout brim skyward. Fish was pretty sure he got the hat in Korea, but he never asked. It never left his head unless he slept, or used it to wipe sweat from his brow. “You boys are good, and strong enough to make it. You just keep going. Do you understand?”
“Yes sir.”
In the distance, a pack of coyotes announced their hunt. The yipping howls lifted into the night and fell away just as quickly.
“Plenty of coyotes this year,” he heard his grandpa say, to change the subject. “Plenty of hungry coyotes.”
Fish joined his grandpa and friend on the porch, where he drank his water and watched the stars emerge in the new sort of silence. The stars hummed. Fish’s blood hummed. The bad envy was gone, and a new light emerged. At Fischer’s mom’s church, congregants often “spoke over” one another. It’s how they talked—spoken over, spoken to, words from the Lord, for a brother. Fish never minded it, but now he seemed to understand it. Bread and Fish had just been spoken over. His grandfather knew that all was not well in the world, that it was a choice to bear it quietly, and something grave and peaceful rose like a moon in Fish’s heart.
THE SIDE STREET LEADING TO BREAD’S HOUSE WAS GRAVEL; THE town tore it up the previous summer to fix some pipes and never got around to repaving it. Bread said his math teacher said the roads and lots of other things would change for the better now that President Clinton was in office. All Fish knew about President Clinton was that he seemed to smile a lot and played a saxophone on the TV. Fish didn’t know how much help a smiling man with a saxophone would be about a gravel road in Claypot. Fish’s grandpa didn’t know either.
Bread’s house was the last on the left, and while none of them were nice, Bread’s house was the worst. It had peeling paint like the rest, but it seemed to peel back in a meaner sort of way. The siding curled away in places, revealing bits of pink foamboard and blackened wood, like lips peeled back from bad gums and teeth. The grass was cut only when Bread was there to cut it, and even then, only when there was enough gas to run the smoking mower. Overgrown lilacs grew against the windowpanes. His dad’s shop sat adjacent to the house. The two buildings were separated by a weedy patch of gravel, stained black where his dad dumped oil pans. Halves of car transmissions and rusted motor blocks leaned against the cinderblock shop. A flat-bottomed duckboat lay hull-up across bald tires.
The boys stopped walking their bikes as they approached. The house was silent. Dusk was coming. A few bats flew anxious circles between trees overhead. Fish gripped his handlebars a little tighter as he paused, listening. Bread shivered, even though it wasn’t very cool. He did that sometimes when he got around his dad, or when his dad spoke to him. It was a visible rattling Fish pretended to ignore. It reminded Fish of the way a calf looks when it gets too bothered by flies on too hot a day. He hated it, for Bread’s sake, he told himself.
“Maybe we can trap some coyotes,” whispered Fish, “and we can loose ’em in your house.”
Bread shrugged. “Maybe,” he stammered.
“We could starve ’em first.”
Two weekends ago, the boys found one of Grandpa’s calves lying dead inside its own fence. The coyotes typically hunted rabbits and fawns, but after hard winters like the last one, the rabbits were picked thin and fawns scarce, and the coyotes were forced to go after larger prey. The coyotes peeled back the calf’s hide and ate most of what they could. Grandpa got his deer rifle out of his closet. Killing
