What Dies in Summer Read Free

We hoofed it over to Lipscomb just like nothing
abnormal had ever happened, and that was the end of her educational strike. This returned us to a certain level of regularity at Gram’s, and by the time school was finally out for the year
L.A. and I were back in the old groove, kicking around town like we always used to, like we owned the streets and summer was just for us.
    I guess it’s proof of how unreliable the so-called Sight was that it didn’t tell me what was coming. I’ve wondered a thousand times how things might have turned out if it had
only given me a heads-up about what was going to happen, and what I was going to do, before this summer was over.

 
3 | Old Stories
    IT SURPRISED ME a little that Gram was actually in favor of L.A. and me running around loose.
    “You both need the lollygagging,” was how she put it.
    The way I took this was that if we stayed out of any kind of high-profile trouble and got home by suppertime we were in the clear. By now I had been living with Gram a long time—since back
in junior high, in fact—so I knew what she considered high-profile trouble and how to steer clear of most of it. With L.A. this part could have been tricky, but because her special
relationship with disaster was so mysterious and unpredictable that it was useless to worry about it, I decided to leave that whole issue to the universe’s discretion and put it out of my
mind.
    Today we were on our way to Beauchamp’s Liquors over on Lancaster to throw the football around and maybe practice some pass routes, and we were making our next-to-last stop behind the old
Keogh place back under the big oaks and pecans across from Herndon Park. L.A. had gotten down on her hands and knees and was peering into the crawl space under the house.
    “Here, Fangbaby,” she said, clicking her tongue softly. You could’ve fried meat on the street itself, but with the light breeze it was almost cool here in the deep shade at the
back corner of the house. Across the street I heard the bobwhite chirp of the seesaw in the park, and for a second I caught the old-shoe smell of the crawl space. I held my football under one arm
and watched L.A.
    “I hear something,” she whispered, reaching into the pocket of her blue jeans, where I knew she had a fried chicken gizzard wrapped in foil.
    All I could hear besides the seesaw was the birdy-birdy-birdy call of a cardinal somewhere in the bushes behind us.
    “Most likely a rat,” I said.
    But then Fangbaby materialized out of the darkness and edged forward: pink nose, long twitchy whiskers, bright green eyes watching L.A.’s hands carefully. There was no way you could
mistake her for any other cat. She had a white head and neck, orange stripes the rest of the way back and only three legs, like somebody had thrown her together at the last minute out of spare
parts. She was what Gram called feral, meaning everything scared her. One day she’d gotten half eaten by a couple of bird dogs from over on Alabama Street before I could kick them off her,
and now she couldn’t hunt to feed herself.
    Trying to watch L.A. and the gizzard at the same time, she pickily sniffed it over the way cats do, like she hadn’t completely made up her mind about it yet, then took it carefully in her
teeth and went front-hopping back under Mr. Keogh’s house, where she turned around and watched as we eased away.
    “Bet she lets me touch her pretty soon,” L.A. said as we pushed back through our break in the hedge to the sidewalk. This part of Elmore was paved with concrete that had seen better
days, the cracks mended with thick worms of dirty tar that divided its surface into a mystery map of some hot, unknown world. I glanced up at the high cirrus clouds streaking the sky and saw a
silvery commuter plane slanting down toward Love Field across the Trinity. I wondered who was on it, where they’d been and what it would feel like to fly away.
    “Probably bite the shit out of you,” I said,