Read Online A Natural History of Hell: Stories by Jeffrey Ford - Free Book Online Page A

me to shoot out in the prairie over by the creek on the way to Mount Chary. But it wasn’t like he did it to get closer to me, more like he was teaching me to take the garbage out to the curb or how to make coffee so he didn’t have to get up quite as early in the morning. Although she never said anything about him, I remember Ma ’ s eyes being red a lot and more than once a big yellow-blue bruise on her neck.
    Mrs. Adler had no man at the time Daddy ran off with her, and Alice never had any stories about her pa or photographs for that matter. The whole thing was a mystery I never got to the bottom of. If I’d asked my ma, I know she’d have told me, but I came to avoid that question, afraid it might leave a wound, like a bullet from the 22.
    I was fourteen the year our family declined by one and then grew by two. Alice Jane was the same age as me, but born in summer while I was born in winter. She had long hair braided into pigtails and a freckled face with sleepy green eyes. I thought she was nice, but I didn’t let on. She could throw a hard punch or climb a tree, beat me in a race. Her brother, Pretty Please, was “something of a enigma,” or at least that’s what I heard Postmaster Scott whisper to Ma when she told him she’d taken on responsibility for the Adler children. We were at the counter and I was standing next to her while Alice and Pretty were standing over by the private mailboxes. Men of all kinds seemed to make my sort-of-siblings both shy and scared. “The girl’s cute enough, but that boy is . . . pe-culiar ,” said Scott. “He just looks a sight,” said my mother, “inside he’s true.”
    I turned and looked at Pretty Please. He was fifteen, and not but an inch or two taller than me, but he had a big old head, full-moon pale and shorn close, looking like a peeled potato with beady eyes. He wore a pair of overalls with no shirt in summer. He seemed always busy, looking around, up and down and all over, rarely fixing on any one sight. Whenever somebody said anything to Ma about him, she’d nod and say, “He’s OK,” as if trying to convince herself. The only words he ever said were “Pretty please” in a kind of parrot voice. We didn’t know where he learned it from, but he seemed to have a vague sense of how to make use of it. Ma asked Alice Jane if he’d always been simple, and she just nodded and confided that their mother used to beat him with a hair brush. His real name, Alice told us, was Jelibai, and Ma asked us to call him that but we didn’t.
    The fact that my ma took in the kids of the woman who ran off with my pa was, even to me, downright odd, and to the rest of the town she was either touched by God or touched in the head. I think some thought she had nefarious purposes in mind, maybe to torture them in the place of the woman who stole her man? But in Charyville the rule was to keep your mouth shut and mind your own business. Things had to get really out of hand for someone to pipe up.
    The first summer of our new family came, and Alice Jane and I were out of school, on the loose. Pretty Please didn’t go to school. The reason Principal Otis gave Ma for not letting him in was, “That poor boy is gone over the hill.” Pretty was delighted for us to be home every day, ’cause usually, when school was in session, he’d have to be by himself, locked up in the basement with my dog, Ghost, a mop head with legs and a bark. Ma would make Pretty peanut butter sandwiches and he could listen to the radio or look at books or say Pretty Please to the dog a hundred times. He liked to draw, and you shoulda seen his pictures—yow—people with scribbledy heads and no eyes.
    There was a bathroom in the basement, and it was cozy enough and lonely enough. Ma just didn’t want him getting to the burner of the stove, where he could leave the gas on and blow the place up or set himself on fire. But when we were on the loose, Pretty was on the loose. We all liked to be free and always