Ghost Medicine Read Free Page B

remembering it, this was about as perfect a place as I had ever seen.

    Reno woke me in the morning with his usual wake-up-and-feed-me call, that laughing and untiring sound that horses make to let you know they’re ready even if you’re not. I slipped my feet into my shoes and went out into the bright, clear daylight. Reno was still in his pen, patiently waiting for me as though to say he approved of our new home. I untied the rope and let him go free and he ran out toward the pond, kicking his back legs like he was shaking something unpleasant off of them.
    By noon I had already caught three nice-sized trout and left them tied on a rope stringer at the edge of the pond. I wasn’t hungry, and would save the fish for later. I walked back to the cabin, where Reno was slurping up water from the steel trough.
    â€œTime to do a little cleaning up, bud. I smell more like you than you do.”
    I always brought the same standard supplies with me when I camped out for more than a day with Tommy and Gabriel: one extra change of clothes, and a bar of soap and toothbrush, which I kept inside an old metal Boy Scout mess kit. I washed my dirty set of clothes with the bar soap in the pond, and hung them out to dry on the windowsill of the cabin. I brushed my teeth and bathed in the cold water at the edge of the pond. I dressed in my only dry clothes, still dirty and bloodstained from my fall. I’d wash that set of clothes tomorrow. Then I sat out under a tree with my canteen and some Oreos I’d brought, and began reading the Hardy book. That would please my dad; I knew I’d have to read it in twelfth grade, if I survived the eleventh, and with the way things had been going for me this past week, and knowing I’d have to deal with people like Chase Rutledge back at school, that was a gamble anyway.
    I know now that when I rode up the mountain alone that time, I was telling myself I was mad at my father, and I just didn’t want to look at him for a while. But it was all so confusing, too. I hadn’t spoken to him for days, since the fight we’d gotten into the night my mother died, and I was so frustrated at how he could just go on and not show that things bothered or hurt him, even if they did. And if that was what being a man meant, I guess I didn’t see the point at all.
    He was always like that. I knew he grew up here with Mr. Benavidez, and that when they were boys they were best friends. But when he grew up and moved away that time to start work as a teacher, they just stopped talking to each other. And when we came back here after my brother died, my dad and Mr. Benavidez treated each other so politely, like they were members of the same stamp club or something. Maybe Mr. Benavidez was afraid because he didn’t know what to say to a friend who’d lost a son, but both of those men just seemed to me like they never wanted to show how things really affected them, and it always made me wonder about the cost of growing up.
    And I wondered why I couldn’t see my father’s grief. Or why he wouldn’t show it to me.
    After a couple hours, the wind had picked up and big black thunderheads began rising behind the crest of the mountain. There’d be a storm coming in soon, so I penned Reno back into the rope corral and quickly set to cleaning my fish with my Dawson knife at the pond’s edge. By the time I had finished, the first explosion of thunder rolled down the mountain, and a flash of lightning electrified the air from the other side of the pond.
    Reno chuckled nervously from his corral as I ran to the doorway, and the first big gobs of raindrops began splattering down. Rain poured, bringing with it that honey-thick smell of summer thunderstorms, and the sky dimmed to twilight in an instant. I sat in the cabin as the rain bucketed down, eating the fish I cooked on the stove, and reading as long as the light held.
    I read all day and just let the time slip by. I enjoyed