Read Online Mink River: A Novel by Brian Doyle - Free Book Online Page A

twice today is sitting on his back stoop smoking a cigarette. Anna Christie is serving steaming plates of pasta with clam sauce to her husband and the twin girls Cyra and Serena but George notices that she has not filled a plate for herself. The boy who was beaten twice today is eating frozen waffles straight from the box as he stands in the kitchen with the refrigerator door open. No Horses is hunched over with her arms wrapped around her legs and her nose pressed into her jeans through which she smells her skin, which smells like as Owen says cinnamon and firelight. The old nun licks her top lip, the last time she will ever do so. Cedar finds three salmonberries in his pocket and pops two into his mouth. Maple Head eats three salmonberries from the windowsill. The banker sips his coffee as he drives home. Worried Man stepping through the last pair of trees on the top of the hill walks right into a spider-web and gets a strand in his mouth and tastes it smiling and looks up to see that he is under a deck or patio from which the pain is emanating. The O Donnell brothers and their father Red Hugh are eating steak that one of the brothers has overcooked because he never cooked steak before. Sara feeds her daughters grilled-cheese sandwiches and apples. The man who lied in court is drinking beer on the beach near the wreck of the Carmarthen Castle . Michael is rubbing salt and oregano into a chicken for dinner with Sara after the girls are in bed. Rachel is in the shower with her head back and her mouth open and the hot water cascading into her mouth and between her breasts. The two cooks at the diner are eating stew in the kitchen before the dinner rush. Rachel’s boyfriend Timmy is eating his dinner, a chocolate bar. The woman who sells insurance during the day takes a salted roasted cashew from the bowl on the bar and chews it slowly. Daniel whizzing through the dark on his bicycle is chewing gum. The doctor finishes his last cigarette of the day on the porch and then stands at the cutting board in his kitchen and very slowly cuts a pear into small cubes and then very slowly eats each cube and then brushes his teeth and turns the heat down and checks the locks and turns out the lights and disrobes and gets into bed and takes off his spectacles and folds them carefully on his night-table and then he lies awake for hours with his eyes glinting in the murky dark.
    35.
    Daniel knows he is running late for dinner and he’d like to get home to change his clothes so he goes even faster than usual, which is astonishingly fast, and he also takes the dirt path through the woods rather than the road, because it’ll save him at least three minutes depending on how fast he can go in the dark. It’s full dark now and there’s no moon. The first segment of the path in the woods is a straight shot, flat and padded with spruce needles, and he leans down and pumps his legs as fast as they can go, and it seems even to Daniel who is a connoisseur of speed in all forms that he has never gone faster in the whole long length of his whole entire life. The wind is seething behind him and the spruce trees are waving. His braids come loose from the exhausted rubber band he’s been using to bind them and his hair flies out behind him like comets’ tails red black brown. He goes so fast his backpack flaps and flaps against his back. At the end of the straight section of the path there’s a tight turn to the left where the hill runs out of hill and there Daniel slows down a little, leery of missing the turn, which would mean a hell of a fall, and he puts both feet down to use his heels as rough brakes, and he makes the turn cleanly, skidding and skewing only a little in the needles, but just as he comes out of the turn and leans forward again to get back into overdrive for the last slightly uphill portion of the path his long red braid catches for maybe a tenth of a second on a prickly spruce branch, which is enough to make even Daniel lose his