Going Where It's Dark Read Free

answered.
    “Alone?”
    “Yeah. Wish D…D…David was here.”
    Without looking up from his plate, Dad said, “Good chance to make friends with some other boys.”
    “Way out here?” Buck said.
    Dad’s voice was as deep as he was big. He and Mom made quite a pair, because she was five foot two and he was six foot one. “You got a new bike, and you ride all over the county. Not like I work you to death.”
    That was true, and they’d lived here all Buck’s life. Not like he was new in town either. But David was easy. With David he could talk or not talk. If he stuttered on a word, David didn’t get antsy. Didn’t jump in and say it for him.
    Gramps, though, had turned the conversation to the sawmill. “Think sometimes I should’ve gone into the plywood business. Can’t hardly keep it in stock. Used to be we could make a living out of the wood we cut. Now we’ve got to sell plywood too, and I don’t know what-all.”
    Buck gratefully reached for his iced tea. His grandfather had the typical Anderson face—narrow, with an especially long distance between the nose and upper lip. “A horse face,” he’d once said of himself. But a gentle horse, Buck thought. There were lines on both sides of his mouth, so deep they’d hold a penny, Buck figured.
    Mom and Katie, with their round faces and puffed cheeks, were the exception, but everyone shared at least a few characteristics with the others—smile or hair pattern or the way they laughed.
    So how was it that out of the six members of this family—seven if you counted Uncle Mel, twenty-three if you counted Grandma, who was gone, and all of Buck’s assorted aunts and uncles and cousins—he was the only one who stuttered? For the rest of the family, talking was as natural as breathing.
    “How hard is it to just open your danged mouth and get the word out?” Dad had asked Buck once in exasperation.
    Harder than anyone knows,
Buck had thought.
    •••
    He had texted David right after dinner and was waiting for him to answer. Now he sat on the edge of his bed, trying to stop the jitters in his chest. He felt like he had the day he and David jumped over a four-foot gap in the rocks with a twenty-foot drop below. The same way his heart was thumping when he balanced his way across Hazard Creek on a poplar that had fallen over in a storm.
    How could everything in his room look so ordinary when he felt so different inside? The small red radio on the top of his bookcase was the same; the catcher’s mitt and the photo of him and Gramps holding a string of fish. The racing car model, the football helmet Uncle Mel had worn back in the eighties, and the
National Geographic
poster of mountain climbers next to the window. His excitement dimmed a little as his eyes scanned the Baltimore Ravens calendar above the dresser, because it was almost summer, and his goal had been to stop stuttering by his last semester of middle school. That was only one year off, and he wasn’t even close.
    But that was beside the point at the moment. He had to plan. Carefully. The right time. The right stuff. His eyes traveled back to the football helmet Mel had given him as a souvenir of his quarterback days in high school. He wished he had a caving helmet with a headlamp, but he didn’t. For now his bicycle helmet and flashlight would have to do.
    Okay. What else? Professional cavers were equipped with rope, duct tape, electrical tape, knives, headlamps, flashlights, wet suits, gloves, canteen, knee pads, elbow pads, matches, goggles….He sure could have used a headlamp when he was down there today, and wondered how much they cost. Dad was going to pay him a dollar a row to keep the garden weeded, and each row reached from the edge of the backyard to the creek. It might take all summer before he could afford one.
    Buck opened his notebook and started a list.
    •••
    What was taking David so long? When he hadn’t immediately responded to Buck’s text, Buck had simply thumbed in the