Truants Read Online Free

spotlight was often misaimed and would clip only the front wheel of the cycle or only him, or sometimes—eerily—only her. It was on her tonight, and she sat alone in the sky in a silver suit, the universe black with noise.
    “How’d you like some of that?” Steele inquired. “How would you like some of that right there, right up there on the trapeze?” He aimed his shovel like a rifle. I looked at him, wondering if someday I, too, would measure all phenomena by its potential for sexual intercourse.
    “Not with all that noise,” I said.

4
    ***********
    Raymond Steele, Mike Rawlins
    At twelve-thirty we walked out back through the fair, the darkened and settling midway, to a shack by the racetrack where the night-shift clean-up crew would be flopped out drinking coffee. Three men sat in Ramirez’—the foreman’s—truck drinking something out of paper cups. Steele and I and Motor Rawlins climbed in the Home van which was the old Chevrolet station wagon. We sat in silence for the hour it took Hall to drive us out to the Noble Canyon Home for Wayward Girls.
    We had tried to talk to Mr. Hall the first few drives back to the Home, but he was useless. He still hated us from last year when we’d tried to electrocute him in woodshop-technical drawing, the course he taught at the Home, and the conversations would die of ill will and inertia, and Rawlins would always mutter, “Well, another day another dollar.”
    I always felt dry and wasted on the ride, leached of any moisture, my mind an old piece of bread. I would watch the luminous green freeway signs rise in the windshield: Camelback, Indian School, Bethany Home; and then later: Thunderbird, Greenway, Bell . I remember those rides as silence, the only silence in our last fall together. Rawlins and Steele were the same age; they were up against it and knew it. This fair thing was the last job the juvenile division lined up for them, and they were both out at the end of September when the fair closed. On their own. Steele faced it with false bravado, and Rawlins didn’t really care. And as odd as they were, and as the times were, those guys were my only friends.
    Motor Rawlins, whose real name was Mike, worked heavy maintenance at the fair, erecting bleachers for ceremonies. He could have lifted tractors while tires were changed. He was capable of doing things singlehanded.
    Whereas my father had lodged me in the Home, Rawlins’s mother did the trick. He had been in the facilities the longest. What got him was that he was adopted. His mother had sued the adoption agency for bad goods. She filed the suit during the late part of a recent decade when this type of litigation was first recourse, not last resort, and she had won damages as well as part of the social security payments it took to keep Mike in the center. He had been in the lower facilities, and now he was in the upper facilities. Next year, he and Steele would graduate from the facilities.
    I found Rawlins silly only at times. He was not significantly short of marbles or loose on screws. I knew he could eat dominoes. I knew he was a bear to wake up in the mornings. In kindergarten he had eaten things: the hands off paper-plate clocks, crayons, edible things really. But his mother did not like that, and she hated that his genes were not her own (she was into genes), and she really hated her husband for not giving her a child. Rawlins said he had no memory of arguments or fights with his mother. She simply picked him up from school one day, and without a word, deposited him at the Home. He was six, and people of that age take what is given.
    It was strange: his papers read the same as mine: “ungovernable” and “incorrigible.” I didn’t feel “incorrigible”; I felt “corrigible,” if anything. Actually, I felt “lost most of the time,” but that wasn’t one of the choices. Luckily for us, Rawlins took all of the events in his life calmly, as if he were moving down a sad, endless cafeteria line,