The Boys of My Youth Read Online Free

spotlight. The asphalt sighs in anticipation.
    The car is a late-model Firebird, black on black with a T-roof and a tape deck that pelts out anguish, Fleetwood Mac. My cousin
     looks just like me except she has coarse hair and the jawline of an angel. She’s driving and I’m shotgun, talking to her profile.
     The story I’m recounting to her is full of what I said back to people when they said things to me. She can sing andlisten at the same time, so she does that, nodding and grimacing when necessary.
    She interrupts me once. “What’s my hair doing?”
    “Laying down. I’ll tell you if it tries anything.” Her hair is short but so dense it has a tendency to stay wherever the wind
     pushes it. When she wakes up in the morning her head is like a landscape, with cliffs and valleys, spectacular pinnacles.
    “Okay, go ahead,” she says. I finish my story before my favorite song comes on so I can devote myself to it.
    We sing along to a tune about a woman who rings like a bell through the night. Neither of us knows what that means, but we’re
     in favor of it. We want to ring like bells, we want our hair to act right, we want to go out with guys who wear boots with
     turned-up toes and worn-down heels. We’re out in the country, on my cousin’s turf. My car is stalled in the city somewhere
     on four low tires, a blue-and-rust Volkswagen with the door coat-hangered shut. Her car is this streamlined, dark-eyed Firebird
     with its back end hiked up like a skirt. We are hurtling through the night, as they say, on our way to a bar where the guys
     own speedboats, snowmobiles, whatever else is current. I sing full-throttle:
You can take me to paradise, but then again you can be cold as ice; I’m over my head, but it sure feels nice
. I turn the rearview mirror around, check to see what’s happening with the face.
    Nothing good. But there you have it. It’s yours at least, and your hair isn’t liable to thrust itself upward into stray pointing
     fingers. It doesn’t sound like corn husks when you brush it.
    My cousin, beautiful in the dashboard light, glances over at me. She has a first name but I’ve always called her Wendell.
     She pushes it up to eighty and the song ends, a less wonderful one comes on. We’re coming to the spot on the highway where
     the giant trees dangle their wrists over the ground. In the crotch of an elm, during daylight hours, a gnarled car is visible,
     wedged among the branches.
    Up ahead, the cornfields are dark and rustling. The deer shifts nervously behind the curtain of weeds, waiting for its cue.
     The car in the tree’s crotch is a warning to fast drivers, careening kids. Hidden beneath the driver’s seat, way up in the
     branches, is a silver pocketwatch with a broken face. It had been someone’s great-grandfather’s, handed down and handed down,
     until it reached the boy who drove his car into the side of a tree. Below the drifting branches, the ground is black and loamy,
     moving with bugs. In the silence, stalks of corn stretch their thin, thready feet and gather in the moisture. The pocket-watch
     is stopped at precisely 11:47, as was the boy. Fleetwood Mac rolls around the bend and the deer springs full-blown out of
     the brocade trees. In the white pool of headlights, in front of a swerving audience, it does a short, stark, modern dance,
     and exits to the right. We recover and slow it down, shaking.
    “He could have wrecked my whole front end,” Wendell says. This is the farm-kid mentality. Her idea of a gorgeous deer is one
     that hangs upside down on the wall of the shed, a rib cage, a pair of antlers, a gamy hunk of dinner. She feels the same way
     about cows and pigs.
    We’re in the sticks. Way out here things are measured in shitloads, and every third guy you meet is named Junior. I’ve decided
     I don’t even like this bar we’re going to, that howling three-man band and the bathroom with no stalls, just stools. Now I’m
     slumped and surly, an old pose for