Gemini Summer Read Online Free Page B

edges of the rotted blanket. Beau looked at his mother, then at his dad. “I don’t know what to do,” he said.
    “Help your brother,” said the Old Man. Mrs. River turned and left, her shoes scuffing through the spilled earth.
    The boys moved all three of the skeletons. They used Danny’s old wagon for a bier, carrying each of the animals in a big cake of dirt. They dug one long trench behind the house and buried the bodies side by side. Danny got so caught up in the ceremony of it that he forgot his sadness about Billy Bear. He found blankets for covers, and made wooden crosses from sticks that he gathered in the woods. He sang “Jesus Loves Me” in time to the drumbeats of the Old Man’s shovel.
    When it was done, Danny still had the name tag that Billy Bear had worn. He got a piece of string from the kitchen drawer and made a loop to go around his neck. Beau said it was a creepy thing to do, to wear the tag of a dead dog. But Danny said that one day he would have a dog and call it Billy Bear, and then he would hang the tag on its collar. “I think Billy Bear would like that,” he said.

ten
    Old Man River took to his digging with a fever greater than before. He dug in the mornings now, before driving off in the pumper truck. He spent so long in the pit, it seemed to Danny that it was the only place he ever saw his father anymore.
    All the games they’d played—there was no time for those. The Old Man would come in for his supper and go right back out again. He never sat and watched TV, never helped Beau with his model rockets or Danny with his construction sets and card houses. He didn’t come in until the boys were asleep, so there were no more bedtime stories, and
Treasure Island
—half finished—sat dusty on the table between the beds.
    The Old Man and his hole became a curiosity not only in the Hollow but all around the heights. It was a mystery to Danny how everyone suddenly knew about his father’s dream. Danny had told fewer than a dozen people and had made sure they all knew it was a secret. But crowds sometimes gathered, everyone staring down from the edges as though they were watching the fat polar bears in the concrete pit in the zoo. Once Danny saw Creepy Colvig driving by very slowly, his elbow poking out from the window of his wood-paneled station wagon. Even Dopey came and peered into the hole one morning, scratching his bottom with one hand, his round head with the other.
    Danny thought the Old Man would be furious to be watched so much. But, instead, he often stopped his work to explain about the shelter, showing where the food would go and where he’d build the bunk beds. “I’ll tell you what we should have done,” he’d say. “We should have got together and made one big shelter for all of us.” But Danny was glad that hadn’t happened. He wouldn’t have wanted to live in the ground with Creepy and Dopey.
    The only person in Hog’s Hollow who never went near the hole was Mrs. River. It might have been full of crocodiles, the way she avoided it. She parked her car on the road—her big Pontiac with its fenders and tail fins—and went in and out of the house through the side door. She tried not to look toward the window as she made dinner, as she washed the dishes, now in silence. Before the Old Man started digging, she’d sung little Southern songs as she’d worked in the kitchen. She’d sung about Camptown races and shortening bread, and Danny had loved to hear her sing. Now she never spoke a word as she worked, and never mentioned the pit until the thirtieth of August, the twenty-first day of the Old Man’s digging. Suddenly she pushed the window open and shouted at him, “Will you never be finished with that?”
    “Not until it’s done,” he said.
    “Great balls of fire! How deep will you go?” she said.
    “To bedrock,” he answered. “I’m going down to bedrock, Flo.”
    That made Danny shriek with laughter. He was sitting on the porch with Beau, the two of