Unraveled Read Online Free

wreck.”
    â€œIt’s on the other side of what was the creek.”
    The engineers had dredged and straightened Sander’s Creek at the spillway, I reckon so water could get away from the dam pretty fast when the lake was high. It stayed straight for a quarter mile until reaching the woods they hadn’t knocked down, and then turned back into a wiggly creek. The bridge was a mile and a half from there.
    â€œTop, you beat all. We can walk down to the bridge and after we cross, it won’t take us no time to get there.”
    â€œThey’ll all be gone by then.”
    â€œRight. That’s the idea. They didn’t want us there in the first place, but I want to see where the car landed.”
    â€œIt’ll just be a big old gouge.” I wasn’t sure about going back. I figured it would be a lot like seeing the highway after a car wreck, some scuff marks and maybe a piece of chrome or two.
    â€œWell dammit. I’m going alone, then.”
    She was always like that, coming up with ideas that usually got us in trouble.
    We waited an hour before drifting off the porch and across the yard to the corner fence post behind the house where we played in a deep sand cut when we were little. The cut overlooked the highway and we got in trouble one time for throwing clods at the cars passing below. Even when we missed they hit the road and grass with an explosion of sand and dust.
    Most folks never noticed because our aim was so bad, but I got hold of a good solid clod one day and led a truck just right. It hit square on the hood of an International and Mr. Floyd Cass slammed on the brakes so hard he almost threw Mrs. Cass through the windshield. He pulled right up our drive and when Miss Becky stepped out on the porch to see who it was, he told her what happened.
    We got in pretty bad trouble over that, but didn’t get a whippin’, mostly because she didn’t tell Grandpa. He found out a couple of days later up at the store, but by then it was too late. He was pretty mad, but she’d already made us cut the yard and clean out the chicken house as our punishment.
    I think I’d rather have had the whippin’, because it would have been over a lot quicker and chicken houses stink like butt.
    Grass had spread over most of our play pile in the past couple of years and it was almost grown over. I kicked at the loose sand for a minute, thinking. When I glanced back up, Pepper’d started down the slope. “Hey. We’re gonna get covered in sandburs.”
    I knew that for a fact, because when we were about eight, we decided to roll all the way down that same hill. We’d only made about two turns when we both jerked up from the sharp pain of hundreds of sandburs stuck in our clothes. My dad and Uncle James laughed loud and long while we cried and they picked the stickers out one at a time.
    â€œI guess you’ll learn to think before you act,” Dad said. I recalled his voice that day, but was surprised when I realized that many of those details were already starting to fade. The sound of his voice was getting away from me since he and Mama died.
    Pepper led the way. Gravity grabbed us both and we jumped a couple of times to the bottom of the hill to keep our balance. She darted across the highway without looking, but that was okay, because you could always hear cars hissing down the pavement long before they arrived. Instead of following the road like she said, she cut down a deer trail through the woods.
    I saw the cuffs of her jeans were full of stickers. Mine had just as many. “Hey, this won’t take us to the other side.”
    â€œI know a way. We’re gonna have to cross that big ol’ foot log over Center Springs Branch, though. C’mon!”
    â€œWatch for snakes.”
    She slowed down some. Folks in Center Springs were killing snakes left and right since the lake started filling up. We’d seen more rattlers and water moccasins