Brando Read Online Free Page A

convinced I was the only onein the world who was still alive. For a twelve-year-old—for anyone—it was frightening.
    At home I was always on skinny rations when it came to praise. I never received accolades or adulation, not even encouragement. Nobody ever thought I was good for anything except a few kindly teachers. One was my shop teacher at Julius C. Lathrop Junior High, a man whose name I’ve forgotten but whose words of encouragement affect me to this day. Once he gave me a piece of metal with the assignment to make something with it. I pounded it on a forge into the shape of a screwdriver, put it in a box of wet sand to make a mold, melted some aluminum and poured it into the mold. I had made a screwdriver, and he praised me for it. For the first time in my life, I had done something of which I was proud.
    I also discovered at Lathrop that I wasn’t bad at sports; I won the school decathlon championship and set a record by doing a thousand push-ups without stopping. I was still going when the coach stopped me. He said I had to stop because if I didn’t, I might damage my heart.
    Even now, I still get a thrill savoring these small successes so long ago.
       After almost two years, my mother decided to reconcile with my father, and we moved to Libertyville, Illinois, a small town north of Chicago near Lake Michigan. Once again, we all looked forward to a fresh start.
    Almost sixty years later, I can still feel the rhythm of the train that returned us to Illinois. While it rocked and swayed, I walked to a vestibule between two cars and felt the energy of the wheels rattling across the steel joints in the tracks. Spontaneously, I started banging on the doors and walls with my hands, grooving to the beat of the train as if it were a jazz quartet. After that, I was a changed boy: I wanted to be a drummer. Never again did I ride a train without getting the urge topound my hands and fingers against something in accompaniment to the melody of the rails, and whenever I heard a train whistle in the middle of the night, I’d rise up on my elbows in bed and listen for the clack of wheels against rails and look out the window for a trail of steam. Long before I knew anything about the Doppler effect, I tried to figure out where a train was headed and how fast it was traveling by listening to the fading sound of its whistle and the steely song of its wheels. I really miss those old trains.

4

    WES MICKLER WAS BALANCED in his chair, leaning against the barn by the tack-room door when I rode up. I was riding Peavine Frenzy. She was lathered a bit and flaring her nostrils.
    “Was you
runnin’
that horse, Bud?”
    “Maybe a little.”
    “If you do that again I swear I’ll knock a fart outta ya.”
    My face jerked while I tried to suppress my laughter.
    “Can’t you see that old horse is goin’ lame?” Wes asked.
    “I didn’t notice it, Wes.”
    “Wut the hell’s amatter wichu?”
    The way Wes said almost anything made me laugh.
    He was part owner of a farm on Bradley Road, where my family rented a house five miles outside Libertyville, It wasn’t a full-time farm anymore; it was more a horse ranch where people could keep their horses or rent them for a day. Wes’s partner, Bill Booth, was the horse trader, always making deals and trucking horses to one place or another.
    Wes loved horses, and even though my family owned Peavine, he made me feel she was his.
    I pretended to adjust the stirrup on Peavine’s far side so Wescouldn’t see my face wrestling with a smile. He almost always broke me up. He said things he didn’t intend to be funny, and the more serious he got, the more my throat tightened, fighting to suppress a laugh. I realize now it probably didn’t mean a damn to him whether I laughed or not, but at the time I thought it might make him angry, so I coughed and spit a lot trying to mask my laughter.
    When I was cleaning the stall of a new boarding pony one day, Wes stood outside looking through the