Read Online The Slide: A Novel by Kyle Beachy - Free Book Online Page A

some kind of godshit squirrel carnival up there. I went to the hallway closet that accessed the attic. Tossed winter coats and slid boxes of Christmas decorations into the hall. I lowered the ladder and stared up into the black black black above. Scared. There was a light switch, but it was upstairs in the middle of that darkness, which now seemed absolutely idiotic. Squirrels, I thought, squirrels bite and carry disease . Everyone knows this. I was wearing boxer shorts and nothing else. I climbed the ladder and stood with my shoulders and head through the trapdoor, listening for signs of squirrels. Nothing. Minutes passed, and I climbed the last few rungs until I was fully and completely in the attic.
    From the inside, darkness isn’t as dark. My eyes adjusted quickly to the light from the only window. Boxes were stacked in awkward piles that looked like they might fall at any moment. Here was the only room in the house untouched by my mother’s decoration, the structure in its raw state. Planks for floor, walls and ceiling of poofy insulation. This was my family’s attic, an explosion of data. I wondered what could possibly be inside all the boxes. I inhaled and panned from one wall to the other and back again.
    There was somebody sitting on a box. A person. He was shirtless and shoeless, wearing a bathing suit and water wings. He was sopping wet and dripping onto the floor. And he was feeding squirrels.
    “If you’re going to stare like that this isn’t going to work do you understand.”
    Low and steady, his voice sounded like someone translating words into English that had just recently been translated into some other language, from English. I nodded several times in succession.
    “I’m worried about you,” he said. “You used to be so smart and composed and now look at you you’re a mess. These furry guys will spend all night long with you if you’re holding food look see how they’re waiting for me they will wait all night.”
    I moved a step toward him. The attic smelled like trapped breath. Freddy was in perfectly adequate shape, not fat and not skinny. He looked to have ten pounds on me, no more. But what distinguished him as a character was the authority with which he sat on that box and fed the squirrels. He had a motorcyclist’s ease about him, a formal serenity that gave the impression of someone who knew precisely what was what. I took him seriously—this despite the bright orange water wings around his arms.
    “I have advice to give you if you want it I don’t know if it will help,” he said.
    “You’re Freddy,” I said idiotically.
    There was no doubt that this was my dead brother, grown. Age twenty-seven, a spitting image of my father. He sat on a box with his elbows pressed against his thighs, bent forward, holding what looked like a dinner roll. Five squirrels waited motionless at his feet.
    “I’ve been waiting to give you advice and now you’re finally here.”
    “Do you mind if I sit?”
    “Sit if you want but please don’t stare it’s not polite to stare.”
    I sat a few boxes over, and for the next several minutes that was it. I sat on the box and he fed the squirrels and I had a brother. I tried to steal glances in directions I hoped he wouldn’t notice. Older brother, mine. I looked at his bare wet feet and followed his legs up to his knees and elbows, gliding over the water wings to his forearms and hands.
    “I’m being serious if you insist on staring I’ll have to leave I mean it.”
    “Sorry,” I said, and looked to the floorboards.
    “I expected you would come up here sooner that was the whole point of the squirrels you know but instead you stayed down there and suffered why didn’t you just come up to see?”
    “I was hoping they’d go away on their own,” I said.
    His hands and fingers were thin and pruny, waiflike . The squirrels scurried when he broke a piece of bread from the roll and dropped it to them. The drip off his wet shorts was a steady pulse