Just North of Nowhere Read Online Free

jerked his head over his shoulder to show her the bridge, the night. “I'm here. You getcherself to Bluffton, there, and see Einar in the morning. He’s probably still up, but he’s a little goofy, nights.”
    Then he was gone and the bridge released her.
    She rolled into town. Into Bluffton, Pop. 671 . Green sign, white letters, potted with buckshot-rust.
    “Thanks,” she said to the night.
     
     

Chapter 2
THE STREGA CRISTOBEL AND OLD RATTLER KEN
     
    Maybe the Old Rattler Ken, needed just that little bit of a nudge to start seeing again. Maybe Cristobel could do magic. What the hell, who knows?
    Old Ken had been blind since just after the century's turn. That’s the OLD century, damn near a hundred years, that long. He was that old.
    Blind, maybe, but Ken kept pictures of his life. The pictures were in his head and they moved like a flicker show at the Kiddorf’s Magic Light. Ken had never seen a flicker show, but he'd heard about them. Anyway, the Kiddorf was gone since 1950-something, but the pictures of Old Ken’s life moved like he figured the Magic Lights had done.
    Now, the movie picture he sees in his head every morning of his life is about an hourglass—one of those old things, counts time. His daddy had one. The hourglass in Old Ken’s head-picture hangs in blackness. It shines and doesn't much move. Here's how it works: Every morning the sun rises over the bluff. Day crawls down the town from stock pens to the bend of the river. By and by it gets to Old Ken's flop on upper Slaughterhouse Way. When it reaches his window, sunlight slips into his hotbox room through a rip in the shade – just a squiggle of bright day, about the length of a bloodworm. That warm beam wipes itself on the old guy's sleeping face.
    He doesn't see it, no he doesn't, but he feels how hot. When the heat gets him, he remembers what sunlight was; remembers rosy warmth on his cheeks from almost a century back when he was a boy. When that happens, Old Ken's body jerks, remembers a boy's urge to be out, up among the trees, or walking the furrows on the Amish farms. He remembers hunting snake. God! Hunting snake!
    Memory jolts his body. The pain that follows drags him awake, plops him into the smelly bed he's flopped on these last decades, into tar-stinking morning beneath the asphalt roof of the dump he lives in on Slaughterhouse and at that moment. . .
    KERRRR-THUD
    . . .one thick yellow grain of hourglass sand falls from the nearly empty top to the almost full bottom.
    That is the movie picture of Old Ken's life.
    Bedded in his own stink, Old Ken takes the fingers of both hands, pries open his caked-shut lids, turns his face to the heat, already starting to wiggle off to other parts, and confirms: “Ya, still blind!”
    Then he hauls himself up, gets moving.
    When he'd been a young shit, the Rattler's morning picture was something else. Need a sunbeam to wake him ? A boy ? A boy brings his own sun to each damn day. Mornings were a thumping blaze of hot spit, flapping shirts and snake-taking gear, ready to fly and flail; something else, again! In Ken’s mind's eye, aged eleven and running, life was diamondback and timber snake, their skins nailed, pretty much living, to daddy's parlor walls. In his head, he saw bluff snake, hognose rattlers, snakes seven, eight feet and longer! Sixteen rattles flicking at the end of some, a dry-bone, hailstorm to chatter the dead awake. All them critters, every one, shaking like life, alive and writhing as they'd been one twitch before he’d stripped the meat out of them and tossed it to the hogs.
    That was a moving picture to keep in your head!
    Cold-blood, be damned! In Young Ken the Rattle-Killer's dreams, the hot living skins shook daddy's parlor walls, ceiling to floor. Snake he'd shot, speared, gaffed, fish-hooked, trapped, pinned, stoned, back-snapped, whip-cracked, or just plain stared down to the death shivered the whole damn house. Cold-blood? Ha! In Ken's young dreams, each vengeful