Hush Hush Read Free

just a pickup.
    When Mitch had checked the ranges of the two varieties and decided—Western—he looked up again. “I can keep him, Daddy?” And then, when he saw his father’s hesitation: “You want him?”
    Quinn laughed, involuntarily, and shook his head. “No.” He shook his head again. “I was just thinking maybe it’d be better to let him go. You know, sometimes they die, you putthem in a cage.” But he felt uncomfortable, telling the boy he couldn’t have what he wanted, and he tried to find some feeling behind the words, but all he thought was, Sometimes they die when a car runs over them, sometimes they die when a hawk catches them, sometimes …
    “I can keep him, then?” Mitch said. “I’ll take good care of him. He won’t die.”
    “Before winter,” Quinn said, “you have to let him go. He won’t make it through the winter.”
    The boy’s nod, as he reached for the snake, was so slight that Quinn wasn’t sure he’d even seen it.
    “Mitchell?”
    “Okay,” the boy said.
    “October first. And here. We’ll come out here and let him go. Okay?”
    “All right.”
    With luck, Quinn thought, it’ll make it to October. And they walked back to the car.
    •  •  •
    Son of a bitch used to come by once a week, or once a month, and pretend to be my father. Teach me things. He was a Boy Scout all right.
    The guy in the cowboy shirt started to rise, brought a hand around and caught Mitchell’s ear so hard he thought he was going to black out, and he slammed the guy’s head back down against the blacktop. “Fucker,” he said. “You miserable drunken slut.” He held the cowboy’s head down against the pavement, but the man was still.
    If I kill him, Mitchell thought, they’ll put me in Huntsville, I’m not rich enough to get out of it. He felt weak, and tired. His ear hurt. I shouldn’t drink, he thought, not so much. We took the snake back and put it in that aquarium. It died, later. Never took me to let it go. He was afraid of me.
    •  •  •
    Joanne was waiting in the front yard, pretending to be watering, but Quinn knew that she was there because they were late, so he was surprised she didn’t complain, about the time or even about the child’s new pet. Instead she asked him in.
    “Stewart?” Quinn said.
    “He’s not here,” she said, shutting off the hose. She was wearing sandals, and a light cotton dress, busy, blue marked with black.
    She had moved in with somebody, but not until five years after the divorce, and by that time they had developed an easy friendship, so that she would say, We had a miserable marriage, but a happy divorce. Stewart did something with computers and telephone systems. In the wide, light living room, Quinn settled opposite her, on the arm of a big off-white armchair. She was sitting on a couch.
    “You’re sure it’s not dangerous?” she said, when Mitch had disappeared into the back of the house with the snake.
    Quinn shook his head. “If it bites him, put some peroxide on it. Just like any other scratch.”
    “Well, maybe he’ll learn some responsibility,” she said.
    Quinn looked at the carpet. “Jesus, I wouldn’t want to be a kid again. Always getting taught stuff.”
    She looked at him.
    “I didn’t mean anything by it,” he said.
    Her silence was worse, he thought, than any of the things he was imagining her saying, things about responsibility, about his being still more kid than man, about what he should be doing for his child that Stewart was now doing and how good Stewart was at it.
    “I just meant that sometimes I wonder whether what I’m teaching him is right.”
    “You have the leisure,” she said. Then she looked down. “I’m sorry. I wanted to talk to you, I really did. And now we’ve gotten into this. It was a rotten thing to say. I’m sorry.” She shrugged, and showed him her open hands.
    “None taken,” he said, and took her hand, releasing it quickly. “It’s just talk. Relax.”
    “Tell me