The Sign of Seven Trilogy Read Free Page A

was in a drunken sleep.
    The room stank of beer sweat and stale smoke, causing Gage to wrinkle his handsome face. He took the half pack of Marlboros off the dresser. The old man wouldn’t remember if he’d had any, so no problem there.
    Without a qualm, he opened his father’s wallet and helped himself to three singles and a five.
    He looked at his father as he stuffed the bills in his pocket. Bill sprawled on the bed, stripped down to his boxers, his mouth open as the snores pumped out.
    The belt he’d used on his son the night before lay on the floor along with dirty shirts, socks, jeans.
    For a moment, just a moment, it rippled through Gage with a kind of mad glee—the image of himself picking up that belt, swinging it high, laying it snapping hard over his father’s bare, sagging belly.
    See how you like it.
    But there on the table with its overflowing ashtray, the empty bottle, was the picture of Gage’s mother, smiling out.
    People said he looked like her—the dark hair, the hazy green eyes, the strong mouth. It had embarrassed him once, being compared to a woman. But lately, since everything but that one photograph was so faded in his head, when he couldn’t hear her voice in his head or remember how she’d smelled, it steadied him.
    He looked like his mother.
    Sometimes he imagined the man who drank himself into a stupor most nights wasn’t his father.
    His father was smart and brave and sort of reckless.
    And then he’d look at the old man and know that was all bullshit.
    He shot the old bastard the finger as he left the room. He had to carry his backpack. No way he could put it on with the welts riding his back.
    He took the outside steps down, went around the back where he chained up his thirdhand bike.
    Despite the pain, he grinned as he got on.
    For the next twenty-four hours, he was free.
    Â 
    T HEY’D AGREED TO MEET ON THE WEST EDGE OF town where the woods crept toward the curve of the road. The middle-class boy, the hippie kid, and the drunk’s son.
    They shared the same birthday, July seventh. Cal had let out his first shocked cry in the delivery room of Washington County Hospital while his mother panted and his father wept. Fox had shoved his way into the world and into his laughing father’s waiting hands in the bedroom of the odd little farmhouse while Bob Dylan sang “Lay, Lady, Lay” on the record player, and lavender-scented candles burned. And Gage had struggled out of his terrified mother in an ambulance racing up Maryland Route 65.
    Now, Gage arrived first, sliding off his bike to walk it into the trees where nobody cruising the road could spot it, or him.
    Then he sat on the ground and lit his first cigarette of the afternoon. They always made him a little sick to his stomach, but the defiant act of lighting up made up for the queasiness.
    He sat and smoked in the shady woods, and imagined himself on a mountain path in Colorado or in a steamy South American jungle.
    Anywhere but here.
    He’d taken his third puff, and his first cautious inhale, when he heard the bumps of tires over dirt and rock.
    Fox pushed through the trees on Lightning, his bike so named because Fox’s father had painted lightning bolts on the bars.
    His dad was cool that way.
    â€œHey, Turner.”
    â€œO’Dell.” Gage held out the cigarette.
    They both knew Fox took it only because to do otherwise made him a dweeb. So he took a quick drag, passed it back. Gage nodded to the bag tied to Lightning’s handlebars. “What’d you get?”
    â€œLittle Debbies, Nutter Butters, some Tasty Kake pies. Apple and cherry.”
    â€œRighteous. I got three cans of Bud for tonight.”
    Fox’s eyes didn’t pop out of his head, but they were close. “No shit?”
    â€œNo shit. Old man was trashed. He’ll never know the difference. I got something else, too. Last month’s Penthouse magazine.”
    â€œNo