Milk Chicken Bomb Read Online Free Page B

pickle. Each time he tells me to leave it alone. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, he says. I told him an ounce of prevention is the whole cure and he hung up on me.
    Our hot water is fine, says Mullen’s dad.
    Our hot water is fine too, says Pavel. Vaslav makes a face. Pass me the herring, he says.
    You left work early, says Solzhenitsyn.
    Mullen’s dad opens another bottle of beer. Shrugs. Sometimes you’ve got to leave work early. Solly drums his pencil on his knee.
    I can’t tell who’s skinnier, Solzhenitsyn or Mullen’s dad. It’s hard to imagine the two of them with sledgehammers, ina steel room, smashing blocks of ice. It must get slippery in the ice room. The floor must get slushy and deep, like outside the curling rink in March, when the weather starts to break.
    Earl Barrie got hit by a side of beef just before three o’clock, Soltzhenitsyn says.
    What?
    A frozen side of beef. Took a wrong swing and hit him in the head. Luckily, his hard hat –
    And he’s …
    Jarvis and I drove him to the High River hospital. Had to clear all the empty egg cartons out of the cab and lay him across our laps. His head in Jarvis’s lap and his feet sticking out the window. To keep his head steady. He got conscious every now and then, went on and on about spanking his wife. Lord, just let me spank my wife again, he’d say. Jarvis had to put the talk-radio station on.
    Earl hates talk radio.
    Right. Kept him awake. So he went off about how much he hates talk radio, and how he wants to spank his wife, all the way to High River.
    Why does Earl Barrie want to spank his wife? asks Mullen.
    His dad glares at Solly. I don’t know, Mullen. He must have taken quite a bump. Pretty delirious.

Days I can’t find Mullen I like to walk over to the gully and throw rocks. There’s this grocery cart in the gully I like to throw rocks at. Rattles real good when you hit it. Or I like to walk over to the football field and watch them building houses in the new subdivision. Some of them wearing hard hats, with stickers: Safety First, and 1,000 Consecutive Hours. They’ve got heavy belts and hammers. If Mullen and I had hammers and tools like that, we could build all sorts of stuff. We could get shovels and dig out the back wall Underground. Dig tunnels and other rooms: a library for our comics and a workshop for all the building we’d do. We could build shelves, put down a plywood floor. We could put down roofing felt so we could take off our shoes and not get slivers. We could build a wall, like the fur-trading forts in social studies class, with sharpened logs, and a drawbridge. Then we could just stay down there and do whatever we wanted. Grown-ups from the school could come by and hammer on the log walls and we’d just ignore them from inside our underground fort. They’d fall into the sharpened logs underneath our drawbridge and we’d laugh and laugh.
    After recess, all the Dead Kids stop what they’re doing: hanging up coats or unlacing boots or popping open the rings of their new binders. They start to point and then realize what they’re doing, and stand there, looking awkward. A few binders pop, like grasshoppers jumping.
    Jenny Tierney walks to her coat hook. Hangs up her black leather purse. Takes off her black jean jacket. She looks around the hallway and all the kids have to pretend like they weren’t staring at her, get back to taking off their boots or getting their textbooks off the shelf.
    Jenny Tierney is the only kid who gets sent up more than me and Mullen. But me and Mullen get sent up for dumb stuff, like wallpaper paste and soap flakes and racing toilet-paper rolls down the staircase. Jenny Tierney told a kid to stick scissors into an electric socket, and he did. Jenny Tierney is twelve years old and still in the fifth grade, like us. She’s two inches taller than me and four inches taller than Mullen. Jenny Tierney hit a kid