Everything but the Squeal Read Online Free Page B

more than a decade since he'd sought either cosmic enlightenment or comic relief in anything that had to be snorted or injected. Jessica and Luke, the kids on whom he and Annie had collaborated, had a lot to do with that.
    I was the least interesting person present. For one thing, I was drunker than Wyatt. For another, I was thick and stupid from lack of sleep. Even if I'd been at my best, though, I'd have thought twice, or at least one and a half times, before I opened my mouth. The folks who'd gathered to celebrate Wyatt's unlikely survival into his forties could be a critical bunch. Everybody had lived through something that emphatically did not have the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.
    “Looking around this room,” said Miles Brand, who'd been our graduate adviser when Wyatt and I had been taking our doctorates in English, “I feel like I'm with the survivors of the Children's Crusade.” Miles, as ever, both glittered and soothed. The glitter was candlelight refracted off his steel-rimmed spectacles, and the soothe was the influence of yet another of his apparently infinite number of cashmere tweed sport coats. Miles was the only member of the UCLA faculty whose family owned a Texas bank, and the town that went with it. He made the most of it.
    “The Children's Crusade?” asked Joyce as Bernie gave up trying to stand on one leg and collapsed to the floor beside her. “What was that?” Joyce, a gerontologist, had come relatively late into Bernie's life. Bernie had gone to college with Wyatt and me. The difference among us was that Bernie was still going to college, working on his fifth or sixth degree, and would probably stay until Gabriel blew the trumpet for the Great Matriculation. Thanks to Joyce, he now lived in an actual apartment. For years, the address for Bernie in the UCLA alumni handbook had been the gas station where they'd let him sleep in his car. At the moment, he looked like he was thinking about going to sleep on Joyce's shoulder.
    “One of history's sadder footnotes,” Miles said, a bit more dramatically than was probably necessary. “Twelve-twelve or thereabouts, wasn't it, Wyatt?” Miles believed in sharing the stage.
    Wyatt looked up from pitching lengths of pine and oak imprecisely into the cast-iron stove. There were large pieces of wood on the floor. “Poor little buggers,” he said. “A bunch of French and German kids, wandering around in the rain trying to find the Holy Land.”
    “Well,” Bernie said, reviving, “at least they were foreigners.”
    “Pipe down, Bernie,” Joyce said in the tone of one who paid the rent. She folded her arms across her swelling stomach. “What happened to them?”
    “They were eaten alive. Not literally, or at least I don't think so.” Wyatt looked over at Miles, who made a show of searching his cluttered mind and then shook his head no. “But that was about all they weren't. Betrayed by Christians and captured by infidels. No leadership except a couple of cracked kids.”
    “Sounds like the Democratic party,” Bernie said in a melancholy tone. He closed his eyes.
    “Steven the something or other,” I said from what seemed like a great distance. I felt like I had to say something. After all, I'd been invited.
    “Of Cloyes,” Miles said. “That was the French one. And Nicholas of Cologne leading the Kraut column,” he added, secure in the knowledge that there were no Germans in the room.
    “Where were their parents?” Joyce said indignantly. “How come I've never heard of this?”
    “You're a gerontologist,” Bernie said. “If there'd been a senior citizens' crusade, you'd probably be dazzling the whole room now.”
    Wyatt slammed the door of the stove and looked to Annie for approval, but she'd gone into the kitchen in search of yet another bowl of her avocado-and-clam dip, with a bunch of mean little red chilies thrown into it as an unwelcome surprise. Two bowls had already turned brown at the edges and there was still no