The Boy Read Online Free Page B

because she’d had no trouble identifying him as Richard Strand’s son the night before.
    His father had come around within minutes of her arrival with skewered shrimps on a tray.
    “Eat,” he’d said.
    “Why me?”
    “Because I made them and no one’s eating them.”
    She’d picked up a skewer. “You’re going to watch me?”
    “I’m thinking about it.”
    “Don’t think. Move on. You’ve got a crowd to please.”
    Richard Strand had picked up a skewer and bitten into the impaled flesh with animal relish. “What’s wrong with these fucking people?”
    “They’re your friends.”
    He’d waved a hand. “Ghosts. Mere shadows.”
    “Kick them out.”
    “I’m thinking about it.”
    “Call the cops.”
    “I’m thinking about it,” and he’d moved on, turning women’s heads as he went. Few men at this dry end of the Rockies dressed like Richard Strand, with a crisp linen shirt, always white, over faded jeans and soft Italian-leather shoes.
    “It’s obscene, the way people dress around here,” she’d said to him once, not long after they met.
    “I know.”
    “Let’s all go back to the jungle. Tarzan and all that.”
    “You get all worked up.”
    “I’m not worked up.”
    “Why do you get all worked up?”
    They’d met late one afternoon in a bowl of dust, down in the canyon, down by the river. The wind was picking things up and throwing them around with bald malevolence as Anna stood on the side of the road with her new life, her new truck, a flat tire—and no idea where the spare might be.
    “You don’t know where it is?”
    “No.”
    “Meaning you might not have one.”
    “Possibly.”
    “You’re driving around without a spare tire.”
    “No, not necessarily. I’m assuming there’s one somewhere.”
    “But you don’t know where.”
    “No.”
    Then by chance she had moved right next door to Richard Strand, on the same side of the Rio Hondo, which ran cold and fast into the Rio Grande and there crashed and bled—thinned out, forgotten—to the Mexican border. Richard Strand’s house was bigger than hers. It was full of flowers, full of birds in small cages, fish in aquariums, walls with memories twenty years thick, children’s laughter somewhere in the back, so she had quickly formed the habit of going over.
    Richard Strand was a man without prejudices, a quality never more apparent than when he spoke to his youngest children—Matthew and Mickey, respectively nine and six—to whom he would say, “You’re right, buddy, they suck! Sharp corners suck! What are we going to do about this one you keep hitting your head on?” Or, “I couldn’t agree with you more, bud, it’s a hot oven, a really hot oven, I’m not surprised your hand hurts.” And once, sensationally, “I know, buddy, I know. Who put these steps here? That’s what I want to know. Who put these steps here?”
    But Richard Strand was also a man of fixed emotions. Anna had never seen him angry or upset, she’d never heard him swear or raise his voice. Despite the cinematic, almost hypnotic appearance of various girlfriends in various getups, Richard’s house had become the closest thing to a sanctuary Anna could think of.
    “It’s like you’re a private signatory to the Geneva Convention,” she’d said with feeling once, seconds before a girl barely out of high school streaked across the living room screaming, “Chinga la puta de tu madre!” and slammed the front door behind her. Richard had let out a sigh.
    “You pick them too young.”
    “I know.”
    “Why do you pick them so young?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Stop picking them so young.”
      
    The parking lot of the food store was full, which put the estimated shopping time for a gallon of milk and a dozen eggs at roughly half an hour. There were going to be the mothers, a clear-eyed, hard-calved army in Birkenstocks and socks, a few fathers, many with the lowered stares of the routinely prevailed upon, a few casual acquaintances in need