Gargoyles Read Free

stage voice, even cupping his hand to one side of his mouth. Winking as if to say,
You can have a beer no matter what your mother says
, he pops the rings of two cans and places them on the table. Then he removes a fish-knife from a sheath on his belt along with a sharpening stone from its own little case also on the belt.
    Tyler is still angry with Kim but has said nothing, preferring instead simply not to speak to him at all. On the path back to camp Kim had shouted “Cougar!” and scared the hell out of him. It was such an easy juvenile prank that it wasn’t funny at all, despite Kim’s minute of laughter and pointing. Tyler is dreading tonight. How long can you sit around a campfire with your mother and a man named Kim Lynch?
    â€œHe can have one beer,” his mother says, just as overloud, though she is serious.
    Something in him wishes she had said no to the beer. But mostly Tyler wonders if anyone besides him is aware of the absurdity of this discussion at all, how since he turned fifteen his mother, convinced of his social awkwardness, encouraged him to “have a couple and relax” at any of the infrequent parties he went to, whether there would be alcohol there or not. In any case he has had his share of beer; once he had two plus a shot of rum.
    â€œI don’t want one,” Tyler says. He has turned his back on the opened beer can and is about to add that beer doesn’t seem to go with the art of fly-fishing, but then Kim would have to respond to this, and Tyler doesn’t want him to talk.
    It’s by far the worst thing his mother has ever said. They are sitting around the picnic table, finished with chili and trout,which was excellent together, and they are quite jolly. Tyler has silently gone to the cooler himself, twice, and he is finishing his second beer. His mother and Kim have had more than that. They have been trading repulsive romantic glances and such for a few minutes now, and then she says it.
    â€œTime for you to take a little walk, Tyler.”
    His mother looks at him like a buddy. She might as well have thrown him a shitty wink. Tyler is so tight in the stomach that he can’t talk.
    He goes to his tent for a few deep breaths and a sweater. Maybe socks and runners instead of these sandals. No. Maybe the Dostoevsky. No. With a foot he kicks his pillow and is surprised by what is under it. He stoops. Still in the hardware store bag, his forbidden reading light. His mother has smuggled it along and hidden it here for him.
    Emerging from his tent, deliberately not doing up the bug zipper, he sees Kim at the picnic table, red-faced, stiffly repositioning the clean dishes, his pinched and painful smile.
    Tyler hates only his mother who, not looking at him, hums a tuneless song. Tyler walks past her, close, hitting her hair with his elbow. He bends at the cooler and grabs three cans of beer. Two he stuffs in his pockets and the other he pops open.
    â€œTyler could go fishing,” Kim says helpfully to the dishes.
    Tyler tilts the beer can back as he walks away. He doesn’t know why he does it, but he pats Kim’s SUV on what would have been its fat ass.
    Aside from the one to the fishing spot there are no real paths, so Tyler strikes out along the vehicle track that will eventually reach the logging road. This narrow track is only two ruts for tires, with stiff grass and shrubs growing two feet high in themiddle, which, as they drove in, loudly brushed the underbelly of the SUV, making Kim close his eyes and hiss, “Yes, there!
Ohh
yes!” and so on, wriggling in his seat as if this was where all the scratching was taking place.
    Walking, sipping beer, Tyler decides that slapping the SUV is exactly something his father would have done. He has never met his father, and hardly thinks of him — well, how can he? — except when he does something slightly surprising. Grabbing these beer was the father-in-him too. When Tyler used to bring up