Read Online Country of Cold by Kevin Patterson - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Kevin Patterson
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her and smiled and she smiled too and I scooped a spoonful of ice cream. And bit down. On a maraschino cherry.
The arc of partially melted ice cream, bananas, sprinkly bits, and syrup shone like a rainbow, such was its multihued splendour. My head was a mortar tube, recoiling with successive discharges, and the first three rows of spectators were enveloped in a barrage of splits and Kentucky Fried Chicken and rolls that had turned to paste and grey gravy and coleslaw. And my paroxysm-racked body coiled and spun like a dropped fire hose and then I was on all fours and the river of rapidly liquefying ice cream was running down the sloped front lawn of the DQ and again and again and again, my eyes were shut. And finally someone put a wastebasket under me. And I nearly filled that too and finally there wasnothing more. And it was dry heaving and it felt as though my body was turning inside out like a sport sock and then, nothing. I closed my eyes and groaned. A hand was on the small of my back, another on my shoulders. I reached into the garbage basket and picked out my glasses. I lifted my head and turned to her. Him.
“How are you doing?” Albert asked, smiling gently.
I nodded.
“Wanna go home?”
I nodded.
We stood and someone called my name and I looked around for her and the photographer from the
Dunsmuir Enterprise
leaned into me and flashed my photo, which ran on the front page that week under the headline “Miracle Comeback Pukes Out.”
And Albert took me home and cleared some room among the beer bottles and put me to bed. I spent the rest of that weekend lying there, listening to him clean up.
Part Two
The Dunsmuir and District Community Hall is used for dances, auctions, parades on rainy days, and particularly popular funerals. Albert and I had been in it probably a hundred times before our high school graduation dance.
The decorations committee, headed by Patti Nixon, six feet tall, three wide, and hair like Betty Crocker’sCreamy Vanilla Icing, did a fine job all that week beforehand, disappearing from the imponderably slow late-June-after-exam classes. In those languid days the decoration committee’s excuses were not challenged, even when they returned in their boyfriends’ cars drunk and voluble. The teachers competed with us students in distractibility, those last weeks: the college kids were already identified as such and they knew where they were heading and what really mattered. Which was to say: not this. And for the rest, the same. Nothing could have seemed to have less to do with the rest of our lives than those last weeks of empty silent hallways and lockers being cleaned out. There were half a dozen weddings planned for that summer; when the teachers shook their heads about these the maids of honour rankled indignantly. The brides said nothing at all, just sat there, frozen.
And my brother, who had learned that he hadn’t after all won the chemistry prize or the history prize, but was headed off to a scholarship and an apartment of his own nevertheless, was suddenly possessed of an equanimity serene and confident, looking evenly at and smiling widely in the faces of the puffed-up gym teachers and princes and princesses of fashion in the cafeteria.
Every day in the shop that week Mr. Budwinski excused himself even earlier than was his habit and my friend Lester and I would make our way out to Lester’s car in the student parking lot. Lester had decided tojoin the air force and had gotten his letter of offer a month previously; he knew for sure where he was headed. We sat out there in our smoky haze, considering our futures and the ripped interior of Lester’s ’64 Malibu four-door.
“The thing is.” Cough. “Life is way. Longer. Than we think.” Cough. “Here you go. We’re so young we think that each moment is absolutely crucial. But life is long and you’re allowed to change your mind. Thanks. If you don’t. Like your first choice. You do something else.”
“I
The arc of partially melted ice cream, bananas, sprinkly bits, and syrup shone like a rainbow, such was its multihued splendour. My head was a mortar tube, recoiling with successive discharges, and the first three rows of spectators were enveloped in a barrage of splits and Kentucky Fried Chicken and rolls that had turned to paste and grey gravy and coleslaw. And my paroxysm-racked body coiled and spun like a dropped fire hose and then I was on all fours and the river of rapidly liquefying ice cream was running down the sloped front lawn of the DQ and again and again and again, my eyes were shut. And finally someone put a wastebasket under me. And I nearly filled that too and finally there wasnothing more. And it was dry heaving and it felt as though my body was turning inside out like a sport sock and then, nothing. I closed my eyes and groaned. A hand was on the small of my back, another on my shoulders. I reached into the garbage basket and picked out my glasses. I lifted my head and turned to her. Him.
“How are you doing?” Albert asked, smiling gently.
I nodded.
“Wanna go home?”
I nodded.
We stood and someone called my name and I looked around for her and the photographer from the
Dunsmuir Enterprise
leaned into me and flashed my photo, which ran on the front page that week under the headline “Miracle Comeback Pukes Out.”
And Albert took me home and cleared some room among the beer bottles and put me to bed. I spent the rest of that weekend lying there, listening to him clean up.
Part Two
The Dunsmuir and District Community Hall is used for dances, auctions, parades on rainy days, and particularly popular funerals. Albert and I had been in it probably a hundred times before our high school graduation dance.
The decorations committee, headed by Patti Nixon, six feet tall, three wide, and hair like Betty Crocker’sCreamy Vanilla Icing, did a fine job all that week beforehand, disappearing from the imponderably slow late-June-after-exam classes. In those languid days the decoration committee’s excuses were not challenged, even when they returned in their boyfriends’ cars drunk and voluble. The teachers competed with us students in distractibility, those last weeks: the college kids were already identified as such and they knew where they were heading and what really mattered. Which was to say: not this. And for the rest, the same. Nothing could have seemed to have less to do with the rest of our lives than those last weeks of empty silent hallways and lockers being cleaned out. There were half a dozen weddings planned for that summer; when the teachers shook their heads about these the maids of honour rankled indignantly. The brides said nothing at all, just sat there, frozen.
And my brother, who had learned that he hadn’t after all won the chemistry prize or the history prize, but was headed off to a scholarship and an apartment of his own nevertheless, was suddenly possessed of an equanimity serene and confident, looking evenly at and smiling widely in the faces of the puffed-up gym teachers and princes and princesses of fashion in the cafeteria.
Every day in the shop that week Mr. Budwinski excused himself even earlier than was his habit and my friend Lester and I would make our way out to Lester’s car in the student parking lot. Lester had decided tojoin the air force and had gotten his letter of offer a month previously; he knew for sure where he was headed. We sat out there in our smoky haze, considering our futures and the ripped interior of Lester’s ’64 Malibu four-door.
“The thing is.” Cough. “Life is way. Longer. Than we think.” Cough. “Here you go. We’re so young we think that each moment is absolutely crucial. But life is long and you’re allowed to change your mind. Thanks. If you don’t. Like your first choice. You do something else.”
“I
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