Read Online Agnes Mallory by Andrew Klavan - Free Book Online Page A

too?’
    â€˜Or what if you just had to have Miss Truxell forever?’
    â€˜Oh God!’
    The hole was almost two feet deep now, and wide, maybe a foot and a half across. We had set it just at the back gate, which led out onto Chadwick Road, around the corner from our front door. Next to the hole, we had the front page of the Times lying in the grass. LBJ PLEDGES SUPPORT FOR SOUTH VIETNAM , it said. CALLS FOR GREAT SOCIETY . We piled our spadesful of turned earth between our dirty knees.
    â€˜Boy, I am really dying to get to camp,’ Freddy said. ‘I found out yesterday my team is called the Tigers . I’m gonna play second. We’re gonna win the league, I swear.’
    He was going away for the full two months, to a baseball camp. They played a whole season, with two leagues, and then a World Series too. I had to admit it sounded pretty cool.
    â€˜That’s deep enough,’ I said.
    We lay our trowels aside. We lifted the newspaper, carefully, both of us, each holding two corners between thumb and finger. We lay the paper down gently over the hole, like making a bed. It covered the hole and then some.
    â€˜Okay,’ I said.
    We started placing pebbles on the paper’s corners to hold it in place.
    I was only going away to camp for two weeks, at the beginning of August. It was my first time at sleepaway. I was glad it was such a long way off.
    Gently now, gently, we began to spread the turned earth over the surface of the newspaper. Sprinkling it on with our hands at first then using the trowels to spread it thin and even. Fragments of words, photographs, fists, bearded mouths on angry faces appeared through the dirt for a while, then they were covered over. The entire newspaper began to disappear. Our hole began to look like just another section of the yard.
    â€˜Oh man!’ said Freddy. ‘This is great! If Ira comes by here, we’ll just shout something at him, like, “Hey, Ira, your mother wears boots to bed.” Then when he comes running after us – boom! – man, he’s gonna fall right into the trap, he’ll, like, break his leg and we’ll make him lie out here until he starves to death. I mean, you could really do this in a war or something, you know. Like when the Japs came at you, you could just, like, run away …’
    There was still a whole month, I told myself. I shaped the dirt, not listening to Freddy. All of July, I thought, before my camp began. I didn’t think: all of July – with her. I didn’t think about her at all, or about our solemn hoodoos by the stream the night before. Or about all the nights we had been together through that spring. What I did think about – while Freddy, bless him, put paid to Pearl Harbor with a few well-positioned ditches – was afterwards, the walk home from her house alone, the bizarre welling in the long summer dusk of the dreamless quiet inside me, the flamboyant, nearly garish limning of the details without – the barking of a distant dog, the smell of mown grass, house lights through maple leaves – and that dizzying sensation that came and went of the world’s objects loosed from their moorings, floating, my attention lodged within them, toward infinite night and outer space. It was always like that after I’d been with her.
    â€˜Wouldn’t that be great?’ said Freddy breathlessly.
    Really spooky, I thought. A spooky, spooky little girl.
    The bell rang on the last half-day of school and I with the other kids gushed cheering out the doors into the summer noon. We boys shouted to each other in loud, high voices, bursting with exquisite witticisms about Miss Truxell as we strode down the path to the road and freedom. Hilarious puns about trucks and old maids flew back and forth among us. We even stood on the corner an extra few minutes to further abuse that poor, ugly, lorn and probably miserable creature before we finally parted to go home for lunch,