Read Online The Best Part: Short Story by John Mantooth - Free Book Online

THE BEST PART
    Danny and Truck are tossing horseshoes outside Mom’s trailer when Truck says he’s got a moneymaker. “Surefire,” he says and underhands the horseshoe in a practiced arc toward the rusty pole.
    “Surefire, huh?” Danny says.
    “Sure fucking fire.”
    Danny doesn’t believe in surefire, though his lack of belief is less a matter of principal than it is experience. He
wants
very badly to believe in surefire. Surefire would be so much simpler than the chaos the world usually offers. Still, he’s willing to listen. Moving in with his mother last month has made him willing to listen to a good number of things.
    “Last time you told me something was surefire, I ended up in the state pen for twenty months.”
    “I was stupid then. That was insane. This is smart. A clean job.”
    Smart and Truck are not two words that ever belong in the same sentence, but Danny finds himself curious, despite his better judgment. “What are we talking about?”
    “Savannah Ridge, baby.”
    Danny nods. “That’s where Darrin lives, right?”
    “That’s the one. They’re building a new section just behind Darrin’s house. He’s already got some new neighbours behind him.”
    Danny knows about the new construction because a few days earlier, he borrowed his mom’s Intrepid and drove out to the site to ask about a job. The foreman all but laughed at him, said there were grown ass men he’d had to lay off, why would he want to hire a skinny kid?
    Danny hasn’t mentioned this or any of his other efforts to find honest work to Truck. As far as he knows, Truck hasn’t tried to find a job—a real job—since they got fired from the landscaping crew last fall. That had been a good gig. Hard work, but the money was cash and the boss paid every Friday. Truck hadn’t liked working with the Mexicans, but Danny suspects that Truck wouldn’t like working with anyone.
    “So, here’s the plan, Danny-boy,” Truck says, picking up another horseshoe and swinging it a couple of times, as if to test its weight. “Darrin says these new neighbours are some rich pricks. Says they work all the time, up in Birmingham at some uptown ad agency. The husband drives a Beamer. The wife—Darrin says she’s fucking fine—drives one of those gas guzzling SUVs. Wears big jewellery, like she’s a fucking hip-hop star or something. Bling bling and shit. Darrin says there’s no alarm system, no dog, nothing except a dead bolt lock on the front door.”
    Darrin is Truck’s drug friend. He’s a few years older than Truck and Danny, which means he dropped out of high school around ’03 while Truck and Danny both quit in ’06. He married the first girl he got pregnant whose grandfather died a month after they got married and left her sixty-three acres of land on the southside of Wilton. They sold to the highest bidder, and then she died in a drunk driving accident. The kid—a boy Darrin named Shaun—laid in the ICU for four weeks before
he
died. After a whirlwind five months, Darrin wound up with no wife and no kid, but about eight hundred thousand dollars for the land sale, and that wasn’t all. He also got a ninety thousand dollar insurance check for his dead wife. All this explains how Darrin not only affords Savannah Ridge but also why he sits around the house in his boxers all day downloading porn and getting baked.
    “If it’s so surefire, why doesn’t Darrin just do it? Why involve us at all?”
    Truck tosses the horseshoe. It’s a good one, clanging against the metal pole before catching and sliding to the ground. He smirks and leans his head back on his neck, exposing a huge Adam’s apple that makes Danny think about a turkey he saw his father kill once. His dad had big hands and when he laid hold of something, those hands were going to do what they meant to do, and that turkey didn’t stand a chance. Danny remembered being surprised that the bird didn’t call out in pain, but now realizes it had died too fast to even