In Zanesville Read Online Free

two burn holes into Felicia. He suddenly glances over at Wanda. “You,” he says.
     “Get my gun.”
    Wanda edges uncertainly toward the house, her eyes on Yvonne’s face. “Should I?” she asks.
    Chuck barks out an unpleasant laugh, and the children begin sidling away. Yvonne lights a cigarette on her way into the house,
     letting the door slam sharply.
    “It’s not our fault Derek won’t mind,” Felicia says suddenly, loudly, to the porch.
    Chuck stares at her in disbelief, unfolding his arms. Suddenly he stops, glaring past us.
    “Cah,” Miles says, turning my face toward the street.
    The patrol car glides to a stop in front of the house, lights whirling. The siren burps once, summoning all the neighbors
     to their front windows.
    “You got the law on me?” Chuck asks, his voice low andpoisonous. He hesitates for just a second and then walks slowly toward the cop, who is pulling Derek out of the backseat.
    Inside the house, Yvonne has dumped the sheets down the basement steps and then gone upstairs to change. She comes back down
     wearing cutoffs and a halter top. Her hair has been raked back into a rubber band and it looks like she’s crying a little.
    “He stinks,” she says to me, nodding at Miles, who is still on my hip.
    I go upstairs with Miles while Felicia goes to the basement with the sheets. Even though it isn’t a bad one, I linger over
     the diaper change, peering out the bedroom window to the curb, where the cop is talking to Derek, whose head is down, and
     Chuck, who is staring into the distance and nodding. Miles points to the soiled diaper, to the clean diaper, to the powder,
     and to me.
    “Me,” he says.
    I can’t tell whether we’re fired or not, but I’m starting to hope we are. Down in the living room, Yvonne is smoking and watching
     out the window. When the cop climbs into his squad car again and Chuck turns Derek toward the house with a hand on the back
     of his neck, we all scramble to the kitchen. Yvonne lights a cigarette off the one she has going and then gets a can of beer
     out of the fridge. From the back hall comes the rustling of children, quietly congregating like birds on a telephone wire.
    The front door slams and Miles clings more tightly to my neck, like a baby monkey. A jostling from the back stairs, a sniff,
     and then silence.
    Derek enters the kitchen first, landing against the far wall like a discarded boot. He remains hunched there, head down, hands
     in his pockets.
    “Is this the one you can’t make mind?” Chuck thunders at Felicia.
    She glares at Chuck, her hands balled into fists at her side, refusing to answer. He never even glances at me—one of the benefits
     of being a sidekick—but snaps his fingers at Yvonne, who opens the refrigerator and sets another beer on the table. He pops
     the top, takes a leisurely swig, and stares at Derek’s bowed head.
    “Com’ere, you little turd,” Chuck says.
    Derek shakes his head no.
    We’ve always thought of Derek as a large, overbearing kid who shouts out words we’ve only seen in spray paint. A shin kicker,
     an arm twister, a worm flinger. In fact, we see now, he’s a lot smaller than we are, a narrow-shouldered boy with a big head
     and Yvonne’s dark circles under his eyes.
    “Com’ere,”
Chuck says again.
    From the back stairs, Renee’s voice: “Dad, no!” she cries.
    Back when I was eight, a tall, skinny girl in my gym class named Alma Rupes flung herself into a cartwheel and landed right
     on top of me. It was like being whacked in the side of the head by the long wooden paddles of a windmill—I was stunned, literally,
     and for an hour or so afterward everything I looked at was in high relief, like a 3-D movie. I kept saying to the school nurse,
     “Everything looks funny,” my voice hollow and loud, as though someone had their hands over my ears.
    That’s what’s happening now; the kitchen has become distant and silent, more like grainy footage of a kitchen. Stark,depressing