Keeping Things Whole Read Online Free Page B

I called the Thunder Bowl, Kate spotted its doggie potential without a word from me. This leafy, dirt-walled bowl spilled down off the trail and was about the size of an Olympic swimming pool. Vood was rarely happier than when he was running in it, around it, or up and over its metre-high dirt walls. “Hey, dog,” she called out spontaneously, “you run in here?” And they were off, all chase and feint, old smugsy me bringing up the rear. I didn’t get proprietary and call him to me, just joined in the communal chase. I’ll get you; no, no, you get me. Only when a panting, ecstatic Voodoo finally rolled over at her feet, her hands rubbing his traitorously exposed belly, did I too bend down and get a piece of Mr. Fluff. Our fingers repeatedly brushed each other’s across his soft, white belly fur. We were closer to the ground, catching its mossy smell. “This is where you kiss me,” she said, unlocking me with a grin. “Lightly.”

7. (This) Ant Farm
    Nominally and legally, if not biologically, I’m Antony Williams, third-generation Windsorite. This much you may have been told.
    Each generation, including the one that brought us here, Gran and ol’ Bill, had its war. Peg and Bill started out English, grew up around Manchester, miners and miners’ wives. Young widows and a lot of coughing in cramped company houses. The widow part proved true even on this side of the Atlantic. In the Great War, William Williams was a tunneller, a former Manchester clay-kicker exempt from basic training ’cuz Jerry was always digging through from the other side.
    There’s that scene in
Goodfellas
. No, not the garlic and the razor blade. One where he comes home from prison to an apartment he’s been paying for but hasn’t seen. Guy’s been peddling inside. Decent bread, apparently. He’s not in the apartment five minutes before he says,
Pack your bags, we’re moving
. Swap the war for prison and across the Atlantic for across the state, and you’ve got Bill and Peg in pasty-faced England after the guns went quiet. Legend is Bill couldn’t come home from thousands of men dying every day to slog out a life no different from that of his parents, didn’t want to bring children into the same old mould. So across the Atlantic they went, all hopes pinned to the beaver.
    Windsor didn’t prove different enough, the automotive assembly lines too much like that insatiable, mechanical war or simply intolerable after it. In the early 20s, Ford personnel managers did evening spot checks on the homes of line workers. Bill had watched bloated rats gleaming with midnight blood eating their way out of teenaged corpses. After that, how was he to endure his employer inspecting his icebox and linen closet? Gran didn’t just sit through all this with her hands in her lap. The same Windsor-Detroit ferry that smuggled in America’s first copies of Joyce’s
Ulysses
also carried my great-grandmother with bottles of whisky strapped beneath her skirts. When she showed Bill the money she’d been making, he quit the line and began digging a different kind of tunnel from their riverside basement. We’ll get to that gold mine and grave in a bit.
    Then we had our lost generation, Victor-Conrad, my brief, maybe grandfather. Peg and Bill’s only child, raised big and strong on New World bounty. His meat-and-potatoes chest caught a bullet in WW II, though not before he supposedly left something behind with a French working girl. In 1946, Gran, already a widow and now mourning her only child, replied to a French curate’s letter by sailing to France with a suitcase full of butter, nylons, sugar, and cash. Came home with a baby she had christened Gloria, her glory, survival plan for her grief, and legal if not biological heir.
    The wars changed and so did we. Gloria, definitely my mother, possibly Gran’s granddaughter, came of age in the late 60s beside,