Read Online You Have the Wrong Man by Maria Flook - Free Book Online

just missing his teeth.
    Watching that kid, I thought of my own father. Once, my father had me dismantle a stone wall on the east side of our property and move it over to the west side of the house. It took a week to move all the elliptical stones to the other side of our lot, and then it was impossible to figure out how to rebuild the wall. It wasn’t as easy as piling stone upon stone; I had to choose the rocks individually for correct balance and extension. There must have been some kind of mathematical pattern to follow and I didn’t have the knack for it. I even stopped in the middle of the job to go the library to find an architectural text about building stone walls. I read a passage that claimed that because of “the whims of the glaciers,” every Yankee landholder owned acres of melon-sized stones, too small to use as lookouts or landmarks, too large to ignore. As a result, there are crooked stone walls everywhere in New England, even in the heart of Boston. I couldn’t get the hang of it.My wall kept lurching to the left or right and when I had a few feet of it, the whole thing toppled. My father kept swearing at me. When I saw the boy outside Lane’s cottage, splitting and stacking the new wood, I told her not to add so many logs to the stove. The place was sweltering.
    That was the week we slept together in the same bed. I kept far over to one side of the mattress and tried to imagine lying between railroad tracks like I did when I was a kid. We lived a half-mile east of the B&O, and my friends and I knew the schedules pretty well. We counted the whistle blasts to determine if the train was coming fast or slow, if the boxcars were empty or carrying a load. If it was a heavy load, the engineer would lay on the horn extra time, a few shorts and then the long. If the string was too long to try to stop, they gave good warning, repeating the long phrases. We would lie there between the rails as if stretched out on our own living room sofas. As the train approached we could feel the vibration; we watched the grit on the tracks start to dance, but we were always seen in plenty of time. That was the whole point. To get the train to brake and come to a full stop. As the train slowed, the diesel chugged haltingly, as if remarking on the nuisance we created. The brakemen would shoot down after us, but we would be gone. Once, we had the idea to lie in the shade of a highway overpass where the trainmen couldn’t see us in the darkness and we were further obscured because of the bend. This was the way we dared one another for weeks, and finally I took my turn. I didn’t stay put between the rails, but I leapt to my feet so near the last, fatal instant, I could feel the breath of heat panting off the engine. It was one of those stupid moments of childhood, but I knew I would think of it often in my later years. HereI am again, using it as a metaphor for a greater stupidity—lying here, playing dead beside Lane.
    We were in the double bed, surrounded by the new paper dragon and kites I had tacked to the ceiling. I hadn’t done a very good job, and the room had an anticlimactic feel, like a ballroom at the end of the night when the crepe-paper decorations begin to uncoil from the rafters. I felt lonelier than ever with her so near, inches away. She stretched beneath the sheet and sighed; she turned over with a luxurious rotation of her hips. She faced me and smiled. “You don’t really mind, do you?” she asked. “That we don’t do it?”
    “No problem,” I said, something beaten. Shouldn’t these small, sour moments be questioned, rebuked? I was fully awake, as if a snowball rested on my forehead. No matter how I tried to separate my impulses from my actions, it was impossible to ignore my own needs. I recalled an iron lung I’d seen on display at a medical library and I tried to imagine I was encased in its rigid shell.
    “You’re full of shit,” I told her, at last, and I got up, dressed, and went outside.