Anybody Can Do Anything Read Free Page A

off Betsy’s legs.”
    “Not both legs,” Mary said. “Only one.” I had been very brave up to this point but now I began to bawl. “I don’t want to have my leg cut off and only wear one roller skate,” I sobbed.
    Mary said, “Never mind, Betsy, dear, we’ll make a little tiny roller skate for your crutch and in winter I’ll pull you to school on the sled.” Which, to her dismay, only made me bawl louder.
    Then the doctor arrived, examined my foot and gave me a tetanus shot; Daddy came home, examined my foot and gave Mary a spanking with the bristle side of the brush; Mother wiped away my tears, said of course my legs weren’t going to be cut off and called Gammy an old pessimist, which immediately cheered Mary and me because we thought pessimist was a bad word like bastard.
    My next memory of being Mary’s test pilot was the following summer, while visiting friends who lived in a small town in the mountains near an abandoned mine. “Don’t ever go near the mine,” we were cautioned. “There is no place as dangerous for children as a mine. Any mine. Particularly an old one with deep, dark, rotten shafts and rusty unsafe machinery.” “We won’t go near the mine,” we promised and we didn’t.
    We went wading in the creek. We went fishing. We stuck leeches on our legs because Mary believed it purified us. We picked Indian paintbrush and Mariposa lilies. We took our new pocketknives and made willow whistles. We watched out for rattlesnakes and bulls and we did not go near the mine.
    Then one lovely hot summer’s day, Mary and I decided to go huckleberrying. Dressed in overalls and straw hats and each swinging a little lard pail, with a lid, by its wire handle, we started off. It was a wonderful day. The sun was hot and the air was filled with the delicious smell of hot pine needles and huckleberry juice. We found a big spruce gum tree and pried off mildewed-looking hunks and chewed them. We found the bitter pitchy flavor of the gum mixed well with the tart huckleberries. We also found that we could lie on our backs under the huckleberry bushes and scrape the berries into our buckets. The berries went plink, plink, plunk, and it was as easy as shelling peas. We moved from bush to bush by sliding along on the slick brown pine needles. Chipmunks chattered at us and bright green darning needles darted around our heads. We chewed our big wads of spruce gum and were happy.
    Then Mary saw the flume. “What’s that big thing over there?” she said, rolling over on her stomach and pointing below us on the mountainside. It looked like a long gray dragon slithering down the side of the mountain. We decided to investigate. We put the lids on our little lard pails and started down the hill.
    The flume, used to carry water down to the mine, had once been up on high supports, but just at this point, a small rock slide had knocked the rotting supports away and the flume had broken in two and the bottom part now slopeddown the mountainside like a giant clothes chute. The inside, stained a cool green (by the water it used to carry) was actually very hot and as slippery as glass with the dry pine needles that had drifted into it.
    Side by side, Mary and I knelt down and peered into the flume. I could taste the salty perspiration on my upper lip as I chewed my spruce gum and wondered if the flume was endless. From where we were it seemed to go on forever, growing smaller and smaller until it was just a tiny black square in the distance. Mary shouted into it and her voice came back to us with a hollow roar, “Ahhhhh,ooooo.” Then Mary said, her voice tight with excitement, “What a wonderful place to slide. Just like a giant chute the chutes!”
    I said nothing but my stomach had a funny feeling. I backed out of the mouth of the flume and sat down on the rock slide in the hot sun. Little rocks, loosed by my feet, went clittering off down the mountain. Far overhead in the bright blue sky an eagle circled in big lazy