Read Online Chinese Handcuffs by Chris Crutcher - Free Book Online

read too many stories about little sisters or moms, or whoever, finding diaries hidden in the dresser drawers underneath the underwear or back in the closet behind the shoes, but since there’s no one alive to tell about it, I have to tell it to you just so I can look at it myself. Besides, when Mom hit the road, Christy went with her, and Dad wouldn’t be caught dead in my room.
    See, I might have known. I mean, when we got the guns and headed for the old cemetery, maybe I really knew you were going to do it. And if I did know, well, if I did know, then I’m the one who put the gun in your hands. Literally. Even as messed up as I’d seen you in your life, as broken down and scared and depressed and confused as you were when you first tried to kick the drugs, I’d never seen you like you were the day you shot yourself in the head. If a part of me knew, then another part wanted to let you go ahead. I mean, I wouldn’t have wanted to live your life. The one crazy thing about being your brother and having you look so much like me—or vice versa, I guess you looked this way first—was that sometimes it was like seeing myself with everything off. You may well have been what I’dbe were I stripped bare of my sense of humor and my willingness to fight; of my tenacity; even of my legs.
    If my memory’s right, it was the end of your junior year when you bought the Harley. God, I think you still had the first dollar you ever earned hauling groceries for that old woman down the block from us when you were seven. You could have had any bike you wanted with the bundle you had put away. I remember Mom and Dad almost crapped their drawers in parental crisis when you said you were going to get it, but you stood on the family rule that whatever money we kids earned was ours to do with as we pleased. I’ll bet they’d change that one if they had it to do over again. I think it was meant for allowances, not ten-thousand-dollar savings accounts. I remember once he was resigned to the fact that his firstborn son and odds-on favorite to provide him grandchildren before fifty was going to be a biker, Dad tried to talk you into a Honda or Suzuki, because he saw the glaze in your eye every time you said the words Harley-Davidson, but you were dead set on that Sportster. God, and what a monster it was. I never did know much about motorcycles, as hard as you tried to educate me, but I didn’t have to know much to know you were in front of me one second and a long ways down the road the next. And it sounded like you were strafing an airfield when you went by. This was one big, loud bike, my man.
    I think Mom and Dad’s anxiety went down a little after you’d been driving six months or so and your skin was still there to hold your body parts in, instead of laid out like a hairless bear rug on the freeway, but what they didn’t know was you were busy connecting with the Warlocks. And as you well know now, no matter how sharp a bike you’ve got, there’s only one way to hook up with the Warlocks if you’re eighteen years old and 135 pounds, and that is to sell their wares.
    At least they drummed out the jerk who steered you between those two semis. Your “initiation” move, right? God, Pres, you were smarter than that. You were. How bad did you want in with those creeps? You get to be a full member if you pulled off that move? Man, you must have been sky-high. Wolf himself told me you were crazy out of your gourd to follow Indian Red. Bikers may be a few bricks shy of a load sometimes, but they have more respect than that for hard pavement and fast trucks.
    I’ve been thinking about the day you did it, Preston, and I gotta tell you, it rips up my insides, even now, but it also pisses me off so bad that if you hadn’t succeeded, I’d probably have killed you. At least the way I feel today. I remember it like it was yesterday.
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    It was a day like few seen in