Scowler Read Free

effortlessly. The removal of horns, though, was a feat of carnage that haunted Ry each day. Sometimes when the first blast of water hit him in the morning shower he mistook it for the jets of black blood that would strike his face during the dehornings. The steers knew what was coming; they lowered their heads as if trying to elude the holocaust stench. It did not help. A hired worker would pull the animal into position and Marvin would regrip his implements and take aim. It was Ry’s job to apply caustic to the deep and spurting wounds, and he’d do it pretending that he was merely reaching his hands into another womb, that this was the torture of birth, not the first stage of an ignominious death.
    Beyond the pasture stretched three hundred acres of dead farmland. Each field was ruthlessly named after the farmer from whom it had been purchased, a litany of conquest: the Costner Eighty, the Strickland Sixty, the Bowman Plot, the McCafferty Forty. And beyond that was Black Glade—the largest forest in the state, a place without light, the origin of a hundred schoolyard legends. Ry had only gone past its edges once and it wasn’t something he liked to think about, not ever.
    The only thing not pelted with dust or rust on the entire farm was the For Sale sign, which whistled sweetly in the breeze. Ry heard it, blinked himself awake, and hid his eyes so that he would not have to see it. This was the Burke farm, over four hundred acres of nothing, and he was terrified to leave it.

14 HRS., 11 MINS. UNTIL IMPACT
    T he screen door sounded like another angry bird. Jo Beth Burke’s shoulders dipped side to side as she walked into view, as if she were carrying an extra fifty pounds of weight, and her muscles, even those in her face, slouched toward the earth. But she had a good face—nothing could change that. Her eyes were heavily lidded and that was their burden, but in the rare moments that those lids fully withdrew, you became sure she was going to reach out and tickle you. And all throughout his youth she had done just that. It was yet another thing that Sarah was missing.
    “Why do you make me walk all the way down here?” Jo Beth’s arms hung slack at her sides; this was her most exasperated posture, as if even posturing were a wasted effort. “Just open the window so I can ask you. I can’t open it from my side—that’s the problem.”
    “I know what the problem is.” He looked away from her and across the yard. The doghouse next to the garage was empty; the coiled-up, never-used chain where the dog usually rested his muzzle sat undisturbed, as did the chain’s padlock, which had lain open since the key vanished a decade ago. Sniggety had never recovered from his master’s abandonment and was just riding out his time, sleeping for twenty hours a day, deaf and twitching in the shade. His absence was unusual.
    “And you’re going to fall,” Jo Beth said. “Look at you.”
    “You want to do this?” He bucked his back so that, for a moment, only his heels touched the ladder. It was a deliberate incitement and he saw Jo Beth draw back in fear. Instantlyhe regretted it and took a firm grip of the top step. “I’m not going to fall.”
    “If you could just raise it an inch,” she said. “Then I could grab it from the other side and we could try together.”
    “And then what? Have you thought this through? Then you’ll have a window that won’t close. The wood’s all warped. If I get it up, it’s not going to come back down. When it rains it’ll get all over your floor. You really want that?”
    She sighed and wiped hair back from her sweaty temples. She spoke quietly, perhaps to herself. “Yes.”
    He wondered if it was true. Because the more things went wrong around the farm, the more his presence was required. This was the terrible unarticulated truth. Jo Beth Burke was thirty-eight, which meant she had been Ry’s age when she gave birth to him. At nineteen she was married, living with her