Lost Echoes Read Free Page B

struck violently in the back of the neck by a case of gilt-edged Bibles thrown from the backseat. It was a good shot. It snapped his neck and checked him out.
    After that, there wasn’t much shaking in the Evelyn Gibbons case. There were a few who didn’t think it was Seymour at all. They pursued leads, one or two in particular.
    But it resulted in nothing.
    No idea who.
    No idea why.
     
    A year passed.

 
    6
    So now Harry, he’s thirteen, and he’s got the horny on bad. If they rated how horny he was on a one-to-ten scale, he’d been about an eleven, maybe a twelve. So he’s got this horny on, and he doesn’t know shit from wild honey about such, but he’s got it going and he thinks he knows something, and what he doesn’t know, Joey Barnhouse tells him. Not that all of Joey’s information is right either, but it’s interesting, all this info from shithouse walls and the mouth of Joey and the technique of artful guessing.
    One day Harry tries to steal a kiss from Kayla Jones, the pretty blond who lives down the road from him, on the other side of Joey, but she whips his ass soundly. After the ass whipping, he likes her even more. Kayla, she’s some sack of dynamite. Thin as a reed, hair yellow as the burning sun at high noon, fists like lead. Pissed off because her father yells at her mother a lot, and vice versa, and though Harry doesn’t know it at the time, he’d think back later and consider maybe they had, like, some kind of link.
    Joey doesn’t like her, or says he doesn’t, thinks she’s too tall and too tough. This because he’s about four feet high and one foot wide and growing like dead grass. He’s got big feet, though, says that’s a sign he’s gonna grow, says he’s got a hammer like something Thor would carry, provided he could swing it between his legs.
    Harry knows better. Joey, like him, darts about in the shower at PE, keeps his back to folks when he can, his hand over his privates, quick to grab a towel.
    He ain’t showing nothing. Not like William Stewart, who has a goddamn python. Flaps it about like it might strike, maybe grab someone in the locker room, squeeze him dead, drag him up a tree for later consumption.
    No, Harry figures Joey isn’t any better than him in that department. But it’s cold comfort.
    He’s got that on his mind. Inadequacy. Stuff that his dad at thirteen probably didn’t think about at all, or didn’t have time to, working most of his kid life away, but there it was. His concerns. The worries of Harry Wilkes in all their glories. Late-night rambles over a girlie magazine Joey had given him and he kept hidden under his mattress.
    Yeah, that was him. A magazine in one hand, himself in the other, doing the dirty deed, feeling guilty because of Sunday school and church, a bewhiskered, voyeuristic, smirking, self-righteous God peeking over his shoulder while he brought the juice to freedom.
    It made a fella nervous.
    No doubt about it, he thought as he lay there in bed. I’ve got one of them…what do they call it…?
    Oh, yeah.
    A complex.
    That’s what I got.
    A goddamn complex.
     
    On the morning after Harry battled his complex, he awoke with a plan in mind.
    Bravery. That was the thing.
    Stand up against a ghost, do it in front of a girl. A girl like Kayla. You could show you were tough enough to be the boyfriend of a girl who could beat you like a circus monkey. Going after and seeing a ghost, that had to be worth points.
    That said, he wasn’t that brave. Decided he would have to go down the road and find Joey first. Might be best to have reinforcements. He figured—hoped—he could make an impression with reinforcements. He liked to think it could be done.
    ’Cause, you see, there was a ghost, all woo-woo and ectoplasmic. He and Joey and Kayla had heard about it from other kids, older kids in the neighborhood, and he had even heard his mother talking to Joey’s mother about it. Down the hill and in the tonk. A specter.
    Poor old Evelyn