Three Miles Past Read Online Free Page A

they were.
    William had started breathing hard, too hard, and returned with fertilizer, Bermuda grass seeds, finally flowers. They all died, until he understood: the ground was dead, it needed life. William had nodded, unzipped his pants, and, over the course of five weeks, left enough of his seed on the graves that the soil took on a richer color, and then a plant of some sort raised its head. William named it Baby Green, thought about it when he wasn’t there, then watched it stand up straight, establishing itself.
    Once, William reached down to touch it, just once, but then saw something watching him across the field.
    It was a dog, her teats heavy, dragging.
    William stood and she didn’t move, didn’t move. Like she knew.
    Four weeks after that, going back to check on Baby Green, sure that a raccoon was digging the girls up for their silver rings, William’s headlights caught eleven perfect little puppies walking across the road. Their shadows were taller than his headlights could reach.
    William opened his door, stepped down, and the mother dog came for him from the tall grass, and it was all slow motion, overfull with meaning, with detail.
    At the last moment he pushed her aside with his boot, stepped back into the truck. Rolled forward carefully, respectfully.
    After that, he started noticing all the dead animals along the interstate.
    Baby Green was still out there too, William knew. A fairy tale beanstalk he could never see again, because the graves were probably staked out by patient men with mirrored sunglasses.
    In the parking lot of the hospital, William opened a fifth beer. Some of it splashed onto the leg of his jeans and he stood up. It made it to the seat of his pants anyway. The crack of his ass.
    She would never talk to him now.
    Her name was Julia. A caramel-colored nurse.
    William had got her name off her nameplate by timing his entrance with her exit a week ago, then done it again, in case she’d just been borrowing somebody’s ID that night.
    Julia.
    She got off every night at eleven. Wore a series of headbands, probably to keep her hair out of patients’ faces. Or to keep them from falling in love with her.
    Tonight, William watched the waist of her aquamarine scrubs for a zip key, a handheld radio. The best forty-five seconds of the night were her, stepping across the crosswalk, dipping her head down for the cell phone, the call she only made once she was outside the magnets and radiation of the hospital.
    There was never any blood on her scrubs, never anybody walking with her. Just Julia, Julia.
    William smiled, nodded, and turned his truck on just after she’d passed, so his brake lights could turn her red in his side mirror.
    She never looked back.
    William drank the fifth beer down, eased out of Visitor Parking, past the security booth which pulled the blinds down at five-thirty, and out into the road. For a moment at thirty-five miles per hour, there was a squirrel in the road, flattened to the pavement.
    William said it aloud: “Squirrels.”
    They didn’t hold anything.
     
    ~
     
    What he needed now, and what he knew he didn’t need, was a camper shell for the Chevy. The one in his apartment he had pieced up with a hacksaw and a pair of tin snips, then finally just carried the last four big pieces away in the bed of his truck, left them in four different alleys, upside down to catch rain, become a nuisance, a mosquito pool, the edges sharp enough that only the garbage men with their thick, city-bought gloves would be able to lift them. And garbage men didn’t care about anything. William knew; it was one of the jobs his father had taken, after the Army, before all the wine coolers that didn’t count as drinking, that didn’t break any promises.
    Again William remembered building forts with his brother in the living room.
    Their father was always the Indian. The one who had taken their mother away.
    William slammed his fist into the horn of the Chevy. It honked. The man in the