What Dies in Summer Read Free Page A

tossing the football up with one hand and catching it in the other, not really believing my own words. Wild cats are a tough sell, true,
but L.A.’s magic with animals wasn’t something you wanted to bet against.
    “We’ll see,” she said. She unwrapped a sucker, popped it into her mouth, then balled up the wrapper and threw it at me. We angled across the concrete to Beauchamp’s, a
one-story yellow crackerbox with a wide empty lot beside it that we used for a practice field.
    An old green Fairlane two-door with the windows cranked all the way down sat tucked into the shade under the big-leafed catalpa at the back corner of the store. From the rearview mirror a little
black shrunken head with stringy hair and stitched lips dangled like a piece of rotten fruit.
    This meant our friend Froggy, the lady who owned the store, was here.
    Inside, it was cool and dark, with a smoky spilled-whiskey smell and neon beer signs in various colors shining down like alien moons. Froggy was perched on her stool by the register, where she
sat all day smoking Chesterfields and watching the customers with those spooky pooched-out eyes of hers.
    “Hi, Froggy,” said L.A.
    “Junebug!” croaked Froggy. “Jasper! Come on in here and get you a couple RCs. There’s plenty in the cooler.” Probably not realizing we’d gladly stay anyway,
she usually bribed us with stuff like this or maybe pickled eggs or chunks of fried boudain to hang around and listen to her yarns about three-day parties and gunshots in the dark and famous
uncontrollable people she’d known, like Meyer Lansky and Ava Gardner and Ernest Hemingway. She seemed to use as many different words as Gram did but hers were quicker and edgier, going off
like strings of firecrackers in her stories.
    L.A. went into the cooler, came back with two cans of RC and handed me one. When it was later in the day we could sometimes get a beer out of Froggy if she was in a good mood and had a broken
six-pack in the cooler, but I figured this time the sun was still too high for that. For some reason Gram wasn’t happy about us coming down here, but we liked the place and naturally we liked
Froggy because she took us seriously and seemed to get a kick out of talking to us. We brought the returnable bottles we found to her for the refunds because we enjoyed the way she always messed up
her count and argued with us that we had a dollar’s worth more than we really did. She also pretended not to notice the occasional Chesterfield we filched from her pack.
    “What are you two shady characters up to today?” she said. Her hair was like orange steel wool and she wore heavy flashing rings on her little crooked fingers. Her nails were long
and lacquered blood-red.
    “Pass routes,” I said, sipping cola. I noticed a man working his way up the middle aisle behind us. He wore a Celtics muscle shirt and was kind of hollow-bellied, with big knuckly
white hands that had freckles on their backs. He was looking at all the different kinds of liquor bottles, like he couldn’t make up his mind whether he was a whiskey drinker or a gin man.
Like he thought it didn’t show when you’re looking for a chance to steal something. I figured him for a bum, or maybe a transient, like Gram would probably say—anyway a white man
without a job—but to me he didn’t really seem very old for a bum in his sneakers and baseball cap turned backward. There was a big gap where his two upper front teeth should have been,
and even though he had a mustache and a pointy Adam’s apple and needed a shave, something about him reminded me of the kid on the cover of Mad magazine.
    Froggy blasted off into a story about some hairy-eared husband she used to have.
    L.A. said, “I didn’t know you were married, Froggy.”
    “Why, hell, Junebug, one time or another I married about every knuckle-draggin’ potlicker and swingin’ dick in Texas,” she said. “Sucked ’em all dry as gourds
too!” She cackled