The Last of the Savages Read Online Free

the river. And at that time the delta you heard most about was the Mekong.
    “Some say it’s the flatness of the land and the isolation and the heat. I say it’s karma.” He paused and looked out through the wall; this, I would soon discover, was a habit of his—to fall into a reverie in mid-speech. He seemed to count on the fact that you would wait for him to continue, or rather, he didn’t really care. “I fully expect to be dead before I’m thirty,” he said suddenly. “Drinking and firearm violence run in the family.”
    He frowned, pushed the hair out of his eyes. Then he announced: “My little brother’s dead.” Clearly it was something he’d been saving, a fact he considered vital to his own story.
    Not knowing what to make of any of this, I said I was sorry. Then, amazing myself, I said that I had a sister who died.
    “How did it happen,” Will asked.
    “We were playing kick-the-can and she ran across the street and got hit by a car.” I couldn’t quite believe I was lying so fluently. I’d never had a sister—my mother had been unable to conceive after my birth—and I was borrowing her from my friend Jeff Toomey. “She was seven,” I added.
    “A.J. was fourteen,” Will said after a respectful pause. “I was supposed to come east last year but he got killed in a hunting accident and I had to stay home with my mother. It was my fault,” he added, tantalizingly, and then we were called down for our first house meeting.
    That night we were walking to the dining hall together when Will stopped to stare at a cement mixer on the site of the future science building. There was nothing to see but a hole in the ground and a big yellow cement mixer. “What is it,” I asked.
    He didn’t answer right away. “I don’t know, I’ve always had a thing about them.”
    “Cement mixers?”
    He nodded.
    I looked around, worried that somebody might see us here staring at a big yellow truck. “Well, so did I when I was a
kid.
” This was the first chance I’d had to act superior to Will, but he didn’t seem to notice.
    “I dream about them sometimes.”
    Again I worried that there was something wrong with my roommate. He certainly
seemed
a little crazy. It would be a terrible curse, starting out my new life with a cracked roommate. Finally we resumed walking.
    “Someday I’m going to buy one and make a little room in the back cylinder,” he said, “and cut a window to look out while somebody drives me around.”
    My faith in Will’s social value was restored when an older boy with a southern accent greeted him warmly in the food line, inquiring about mutual acquaintances.
    Everything was so new to me that I no longer clearly remember the sequence of events, but a day or two after we arrived we passed a group of five or six boys lounging in the shade of the big chestnut tree observing us with intense indifference. A small, acne-speckled kid I would later know as Henson said, “Johnny Reb and the Townie,” and the others laughed. At that moment I longed to be transported back to my second-rate hometown high school, where at least I could look down on the boys who tormented me. It had been crazy, hubristic, to think I could fit in here.
    Will walked up to the group and stood looking down at Henson, who cocked and bobbed his head nervously. Then he turned to the largest boy, whom I already recognized as Jack Stubblefield, a linebacker on the football team, and punched him in the face. Stubblefield fell like a tree, wobbling and bowing slowly to the ground, and Will started calmly back to the house.
    “Are you crazy,” I asked, exhilarated, after I caught up. “Why’d you hit the big guy? He didn’t say anything.”
    “Ever heard of Lester Holmes,” Will asked. “Guitar player, played withElmore James and Muddy Waters, I met him a couple of years ago on Beale Street. He told me he’d been thrown in the pen, he was in a cell with about ten other mean, hungry-looking specimens. Right away he