33 Snowfish Read Free

shit. His favorite thing to do was to chill in parking lots with his big, long arm hanging over the door to his El Camino. He mostly just hunts little kids. Sometimes he hunts kids who are littler than me. He finds them lost at the mall or stranded down by the Rockdale bus station.
    Once Sidekick found this little half-nigger called Ulysses crying under the big sign at Arthur Treacher’s Fish & Chips. Sidekick gave him a pack of Fleer baseball cards and Ulysses got right in his El Camino like there was about skeighty-eight more packs in the back seat or some shit. Sidekick always keeps Tootsie Rolls and Wrigley’s Spearmint gum in his pockets, too.
    After Sidekick got Ulysses to get in his El Camino he made him put his seatbelt on and gave him a 1999 Susan B. Anthony silver dollar.
    I know all that cuz Ulysses showed me the silver dollar. Susan B. Anthony looks like a man; like her name should be
Dave
or some shit. Ulysses used to come over to Bob Motley’s duplex with Sidekick for the Thursday hearts game. They would stick him in Sergeant Dick’s room with me, and we would watch
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
and he would tell me all the wack shit Sidekick was doing to him.
    Ulysses was only like seven or eight and he talked with a stutter and he had this little purple spot on his neck that looked like a flower. He was a dirty-ass little half-nigger, too — a lot dirtier than me. And he wasn’t dirty in no dusty way, he was dirty in a
skanky
way. Like he was always shitting his pants and sitting down in it and stuff like that. That’s probably why his parents didn’t want him no more.
    Once I asked him where he was from.
    I was like, “Where you from, Ulysses?”
    He just looked at me funny and went, “The United States of America.”
    After a while, Ulysses just disappeared. Whenever I’d ask Sidekick about him he would just say he wasn’t “useful” no more, or how he kept getting “smaller and smaller” till he just “faded away.” Then him and Bob Motley would laugh their stupid laughs and trim up some hurricane on the kitchen table.
    On Thursdays Sidekick would bring other kids to Bob Motley’s, too. It was like you would see them for a while, but then one day you wouldn’t no more.
    That’s how come I’d never get into Sidekick’s El Camino with him — cuz it was like if you got in it and the door closed you would start to disappear. That’s how you wind up on the back of one of them milk cartons you see at the Econofoods in Coal City.
    I ain’t no fucking milk carton kid, I’ll tell you that right now.
    When we got to Sidekick’s crib with the baby the windows was all boarded up and the El Camino was gone and there was this big black X painted on the door.
    Sidekick lived in Bolingbrook over by Old Man Turpentine’s Fun Shop. That sucker always had the pigs or some bill collector looking for him. He’s probably been in thirty different states by now. Or maybe he’s down in Mexico eating a taco or some shit?
    I skated from Bob Motley’s duplex after I found out he was gonna put me in this snuff film. One day when him and his crew thought I was sleeping I heard them talking about shooting the film and how much money they could make and how many hookers they could get and how much hurricane they could buy.
    I was in the kitchen sneaking some Folger’s instant coffee.
    “We could use your boy,” one of them was saying to Bob Motley. “One minute he’s doin’ his thing, and the next thing Mr. Snuffleupagus pays him a visit and it’s all over. He won’t know the difference.”
    Bob Motley was like, “I guess we could, I guess we could.”
    After his crew left I had to hide in the basement till Bob Motley drank his two bottles of Mad Dog and fell asleep in his big corduroy chair.
    When I came up from the basement I peeled away the newspaper, pushed the Louisville Slugger aside, crawled through the Dumdum Hole, and ran all the way through Rockdale.
    That night I slept under a bread truck in