Read Online Island Boyz by Graham Salisbury - Free Book Online Page A

Ledward start up his Jeep, then drive off.
    Sometime past midnight the rains came. The downpour was deep, full, and heavy, pummeling the earth. By morning dangerous floodwaters would be raging down from the hills, sloshing past my house in the muddy brown canal.
     
    Just after dawn I was jarred awake by an explosion of thunder rumbling across the sky. Massive boulders—settling.
    I threw off my sheet and leaped down from my bunk. Looking out my bedroom window, I could barely see the canal. Everything was smudged by a silvery rain that now fell slanted in the wind. I could make out the golf-course bridge that crossed the canal, or the faint line of it anyway. But beyond that everything was a blur.
    “Yes!” I whispered.
    I tried my radio.
    The power was back.
    I whirled the dial. The storm was for real, all right. And the radio said it was only the beginning. A powerful disturbance was bearing down on the islands from the west. It was going to be a big one, so tie everything down.
    Just before noon lightning began flashing through the cracks in the clouds. Then more thunder, so loud and so close it shook the house. Stella and Darci stood next to me at the big plate-glass window watching the storm swallow the island.
    The canal was now white with raindrops exploding on its surface, the water level rising fast, bulging seaward, climbing the slope of our yard.
    I was itchy to get outside, to run down and get Willy, and roam around in the storm. But first I wanted the lightning to stop.
    “You kids get away from that window,” Mom said. “What if thunder blows it apart and it shatters all over your faces?”
    We stood back. Could thunder really do that?
    When Mom left the room, I crept back to the window.
    Minutes later Ledward drove up in his Jeep, headlights on, wipers slapping on high speed. I could barely see him through the windshield. He parked as close as he could get, then got out and ducked into the garage.
    I ran into the kitchen, where he would come into the house, Darci at my heels.
    Ledward flung open the door, cursing the weather.
    Darci ran back out to the living room.
    “What are you
doing
here?” Mom said.
    Ledward shook the rainwater off his arms, then grabbed a dirty dish towel and wiped his face with it. “I wanted to make sure you all right.”
    “Oh, that’s so sweet,” Mom said, which Ledward brushed off with a frown.
    His T-shirt clung to his body. He couldn’t have been in the rain for more than three seconds, but he looked as if he’d just climbed out of a swimming pool. “Watch the canal,” he said. “It could flood.”
    A two-inch roach scurried across the kitchen floor. Mom took her rubber slipper off and whacked it before it went under the refrigerator. White guts oozed out along its sides. Mom got a napkin and wiped it up.
    “The rain drive ’um in,” Ledward said.
    No kidding, I thought. Bugs run this place.
    “Drives in the centipedes, too,” Mom said. “Isn’t that right, Joey?”
    Ledward turned to me. “You cut that t’ing up yet?”
    I shook my head.
    “How come? Scared of it?”
    “No.”
    “Come. I help you,” Ledward said.
    “Right now?”
    “This minit.”
    Mom and I followed him out to my room. He noticed my combat knife and picked it up.
    “I hate that thing,” Mom said.
    Ledward turned it over, felt the weight of it in his hand, set it back down. Then he took a small bone-handled pocketknife from his shorts and opened it. “So where is it?”
    “I . . . I don’t know.” I pointed to the dark space below the counter. “Probably under there somewhere.”
    Ledward squatted down and looked around.
    I stepped back, expecting the centipede to come racing out like before. Ledward duckwalked beside the counter, looking up under it. Then he grunted and sat back on his heels.
    He grinned. “Look.”
    I squatted down. There it was, sleeping on the rock wall. When Ledward touched it with the knife, it shot away, snaking up the wall at lightning speed,