Read Online Graphic the Valley by Peter Brown Hoffmeister - Free Book Online

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    I said, “Old stories.” I made another bad move.
    Lucy leaned forward. Double-jumped me. “Old stories?”
    I jumped her back, once, but I had to open up a back-line square.
    Lucy said, “Have you dated many girls, Tenaya?”
    “No,” I said.
    She slid another stone to the edge. “How many?”
    “None,” I said.
    She said, “None at all?” She flicked my hand. “Are you kidding?”
    I said, “I’ve hung out with girls, been around them in Camp 4 or at the bridge, but I never dated anyone.”
    Lucy smiled and nodded.
    I moved a checker but with no game plan. Moving just to move. I said, “You’d have to understand my parents. What they believe and where we live. If you saw it, you’d understand.”
    Lucy tapped a rock on the slab, two beats. Three, then four.
    I said, “How would I meet a girl?”
    Lucy set up another double jump.
    I moved to block her.
    “You’d meet a girl in Tuolumne,” she said.
    “Right.”
    She leaned across the board and kissed me. “And you’d be so happy.”
    “Yes,” I said.
    Lucy was playing outside in, keeping my checkers in the middle. The game wasn’t close.
    She said, “You want to keep living like that?”
    “No,” I said, “I mean, maybe…” But I didn’t know.
    Lucy leaned across and kissed me again. She sat back and crossed her arms. “When will you know?”
    I stared at the board. There was no way to win this checkers game. I was already down four.
    Lucy said, “Your move.”
    I moved, but I had no strategy. Each play worse than the one before.
    “Some of these things…” she said. “Some of these things are…” she jumped me again, “they are what they are.”
    I was losing by five now.
    I looked at the board trying to think of something to do, but saw nothing there.
    Lucy’s arms were crossed, her biceps strong. I admired her shoulders. I looked at her face then, the way her lips were set as she stared at the board. Her eyes and dark eyelashes over her sunburned cheeks. The only girl.
    I moved a checker and said, “We could get married.”
    She’d had her head down, following my moves, but her head popped up when I said that. She said, “Are you joking?” She put her fingers to her mouth and pinched her bottom lip.
    I tapped one of my rocks on the board. Looked out at the camp and the lake. “No,” I said. “Actually I’m not. Do you want to get married?”
    She said, “Really?”
    I looked right at her. The flush in her face. The way she held that lip with her finger and her thumb. She let go, and I saw her hand shake. “Really?” she said again.
    “Yes.”
    Lucy folded her legs underneath her and sat back on her ankles. Closed her eyes.
    I said, “What are you thinking?”
    “Okay,” she said. Her eyes were still closed. She nodded. “Okay,” she said again. She opened her eyes, leaned across the board and kissed me. Then she stood up. She had my checkers in her hand, the rocks that she’d won. She took a rock and threw it at the road sign down below. And missed.
    I stood up next to her. “So, yes?”
    “Yes,” she said. She threw a second rock, and that one hit the sign with a clank.
    Lucy hopped forward and screamed.
    I screamed too. Then I began to throw my checkers at the sign.
    One by one, we threw the rocks out at the yellow road marker. A few of them hit the metal, clanking, and we screamed like lit gasoline.
    • • •
    I came into my parents’ camp as the sun set on the bottom of the nimbus. Sky like the underbelly of a pink ocean.
    The ’46 Plymouth was in the high grass near the creek. Full gas can next to the tree. In winter, my parents slept on the bench seats, front and back, inside the car, but their summer tarp-tent was hung off to the side of camp now.
    My father was sitting in front of the car, shaping a figurine out of a chunk of incense cedar, working ticks off with his sheath knife. The soft, straight-grained wood whittled off in dips.
    I hadn’t seen him in almost two months. He looked