In Zanesville Read Online Free Page B

route is stepping through
     a hedge and sliding down a steep terrace; mine is a scurry along someone’s back walk, past their windows, eyes averted, and
     down their front steps.
    Over on my block, the semi-interesting people include a woman who comes outside and washes her dog’s face with a dishcloth
     every hour or so, and a widowed man who is so gigantic he needs a kitchen chair to get to his car, alternating between using
     it as a walker and sitting on it to rest. He calls himself Pudgy, and we call him that too. One coincidence: we also have
     a neighbor named Fudgy, or Uncle Fudge, a barber with no hair of his own. Next door is Old Milly, whose middle-aged drunken
     nephews come over and make trouble at her house. My sister and I, from our upstairs bedroom, can lookdown at night into Old Milly’s kitchen and watch what’s going on, the staggering and shoving. Once very late at night we saw
     her niece, a stout, red-faced nurse named Shorty, kissing a man in a way that made us sick.
    Otherwise, not much fascinating. A lot of dogs: the clean-faced Jeffy; a white dog with a blue eye named Chief; a black toy
     poodle named Trinket; our own dog, Tammy, a rat terrier who bites when cornered; and Curly, Old Milly’s thick-shouldered,
     bowlegged, and unpredictable dog. All the dogs in the neighborhood are tied out, so there’s a lot of ambient barking and animals
     on their hind legs at the end of chains, staring at back doors. Curly is the only one who never gets to come inside. He’s
     pumpkin colored with a gnarled head, and he lives in a four-foot dirt circle underneath an apple tree, with a lean-to for
     cover. Old Milly is the only one who goes near him, feeding him every morning from a rusty cake pan. A few times each winter,
     if it’s going to get thirty or forty below, she’ll snap a leash on his collar and drag him to the cellar door and push him
     down there for the night. That’s his entire life, twelve years and counting.
    He lifts his orange face as I go up the back walk, and then settles it back on his paws. Our dog, Tammy, is inside, tethered
     to the basement door, up on her hind legs watching everyone eat dinner. She runs immediately under the table when I unclip
     her leash.
    Dinner is fried chicken, mashed potatoes, creamed corn, hot rolls, et cetera. My dad is sober, it looks like. He’s wearing
     lawn-mowing clothes, listening to my mother tell him about the fire. She stops, chicken leg in hand, when she sees my face.
     “Now they’ve had
you
crying?”
    “No,” I say. My older sister, Meg, looks me over briefly andthen goes back to her book and her sculpted tower of mashed potatoes. My brother has a full plate but is eating from a bowl
     of cornflakes and milk. Tammy has stationed herself underneath him so he can pass things down to her—a dinner roll, a glob
     of potatoes, and a leaf of iceberg lettuce, which she is standing on.
    “You should’ve seen this crew,” my mother tells my dad. “Kids running loose everywhere. Boy, she must be a real doll, that
     woman.”
    “Uh-oh,” he says.
    My dad is a door-to-door siding salesman. He is tall and tanned, with the haunted brown eyes of someone who does something
     terrible for a living. Some days he can’t even bring himself to leave the house, but sits at the kitchen table clearing his
     throat and making notes on a clipboard that he keeps pushing back and forth, lining it up with different edges of the table.
    “Don’t ever be afraid to call the fire department,” my father says to me. “It’s those guys’ job, they don’t mind.”
    “Firemen can do kung fu,” my brother, Raymond, says. He is seven and has a light brown forelock and the same warm, shattered
     eyes as my father.
    “That older girl was a snot,” my mother continues, reaching behind her to the cluttered counter to take a drag off a cigarette.
     “And the baby looked half-anemic.”
    The front of my T-shirt is stretched out from Miles gripping it. I’m