Dreadful Summit Read Free Page B

‘Get out of here,’ I said; ‘Get out of here.’
    One of them started to shove me back, but another one grabbed him. ‘It’s only right,’ he said. ‘Let them alone.’
    So one by one, pushing against each other with their heads still turned back to see, they started to jam out of the door through the people who were crowded around there. The last guy still had some of his beer left and he drank it down before he went out. Then they were all gone and I pushed against the door to get it shut, and then I locked it. After that I pulled down the shade over the door and the big shade over the window, and we were all alone.

Chapter Three
    F IFTEEN or sixteen is a bad age for a kid.
    I don’t only mean because of the way the juice percolates in him and makes him all jumpy about girls and stuff, even if that is one of the worst things about it. I mean when you’re fifteen, sixteen, you’re right in the middle of nowhere.
    Take a little kid. He can be the worst little punk on the block, but everybody says, ‘Isn’t he cute! Where does he get all the energy! Isn’t he full of the devil!’ and they make all kinds of fuss over him.
    Or take a guy gets to be near eighteen. He’s big stuff. He smokes right in front of everybody. Maybe he lays a girl. And when his old man brings him into the bar, everybody says, ‘He’s a better man than his pa,’ and they buy him a beer.
    But a kid fifteen, sixteen, is a pain all around and mostly to himself.
    He always opens his mouth at the wrong time, and he always says the wrong thing, and he’s always doing the wrong thing. And it’s not only that everybody else picks on him, but it’s like he was always walking around with a mirror in front of him, and a phonograph playing back everything he says. He knows he’s acting dumb, but he just can’t seem to straighten himself out.
    I think part of it is girls. First they’re only like washboards running around on sticks and then all of a sudden they’re all curves and lipstick, and every time you see a nice one you get all red in the face and think how it would be to grab her.
    But that is only part of it. The other part is the way a smart kid like me could never open up and let people know how smart he was. I think sometimes it was worse than the girls.
    You know how it is when two people start talking to each other and each one is talking about something different but they don’t know it, and you do? If you’re big you can step in and straighten everything out and maybe get right into the middle of the talk. But if you’re a kid you just have to listen and swallow it. It sticks like a lump in you, but you swallow it just the same.
    I read a lot of books, and plenty of times I could have straightened guys out, but the only time I tried it they said, ‘Shut up, kid,’ and shoved me away. I never tried it again.
    But when I was pushing everybody out of the bar and pulling down the shades, I was making up for all the lumps I swallowed. I was bigger than they were. I told them what to do, and they did it. That was the best time in my whole life up to then, and it all happened because I knew I was going to kill Al Judge. When you’re going to kill somebody, you’re not a kid any more, and when you know in your heart you’re not a kid, somehow or other, everybody else seems to know it too.
    After I pulled down the shades I went back to the end of the bar where Flanagan was helping my father get up. When he got up, he sort of leaned on the bar and shook his head hard. Then Flanagan filled half a short beer glass with the rest of the whisky from the bottle, and my father slugged it all down in one drink. I had a good look at his back then, and when I saw it my stomach knotted up in me, and my heart started to bang so loud I was afraid they would hear it too. It shortened up my breath for a minute so I could hardly take in