What Dies in Summer Read Free Page B

herself off into a long coughing fit.
    When she was recovered enough she took another drag on her cigarette, then suddenly her look went hard as she watched the man coming up behind us. I turned around in time to see him raise both
hands in surrender and disappear toward the back of the store. L.A. saw this too, and I could tell she was having one of her mysterious thoughts as she watched him go, but of course there was no
telling what it was. Not then, anyway.
    What I did know was that something significant, something I myself couldn’t see, had just happened, and that we were a long way from being through with this guy.

 
4 | Catches
    AFTER WE FINISHED the RCs and heard about how Froggy had caught one of her husbands, the guy with the hairy ears that she told the most stories about,
in bed with her manicurist and shot off one of his thumbs with her derringer—“Ain’t what I meant to shoot off!”—we walked back out into the blazing sunlight.
    When our eyes readjusted, we set up at the back of the lot with me at quarterback and L.A. at flanker, going out on my count for the timing pattern and playing it like she played everything,
like her life plus the fate of the galaxy depended on it. She had just reached back on the run for a bad throw when, sure enough, the guy we’d seen inside came around the corner from the
front of the store, stopped and smiled when he saw us. He stood there in the sun for a while, not even seeming to feel it, just smoking and watching us like somebody who didn’t have anyplace
in particular he needed to be.
    And naturally with an audience on hand L.A. and I started hot-dogging a little, heat or no heat. It was one of those times when things come together for you. I was getting a lot on the ball and
L.A., with the sucker in her mouth, was pulling the ratty old Wilson in from every kind of impossible angle. When I led her too much on one route she dove and got the pass anyway, doing a
tuck-and-roll as she hit the ground and coming up with the ball. The guy put his Camel between his lips and slowly applauded as L.A. raised her arms to the imaginary fans and bounced around in her
victory dance. A trickle of red had started from the road rash on her elbow, but I knew she’d bleed out altogether before she’d show her pain to anybody, much less this character.
    “Y’all pretty damn slick,” he said. “Reckon you could hit me with one a them bullets?”
    I looked at him for a second, then said, “Sure, come on. You can run a post.”
    “Post.” He nodded, moving the pack of cigarettes from the waist of his jeans to his sock. “You got it, podner.” He leaned out over the line of scrimmage, dangling his arm
down and shaking his fingers to loosen them up, exactly like a real wide-out.
    “On two ,” I said. Looking over the defensive set, I yelled, “Hut! Two!” and slapped the ball. The guy dug out, juked left once and then cut in the afterburners,
showing hellacious speed for an adult. He looked back after a dozen strides with the cigarette still in his mouth, and when I let the ball go he watched it spiral up, made a little adjustment to
his route, got under it and cradled it in thirty-five yards downfield.
    “Yeehawww!” he crowed, strutting like a rooster as he came back to the huddle.
    “Where’d you learn to play?” I asked.
    “Cornhole U.,” he said, leaning aside to spit. “Down Huntsville.”
    We ran a few more patterns and the guy only dropped one ball.
    Finally he said, “You troops wanta go out for a couple? See if I still got a wing here?”
    “Sure, okay,” I said. L.A. looked down for a second and then nodded, dusting off her Levi’s.
    “Okay, y’all, this here’s Niggers-Go-Long. Wide right,” he said with a strict look at each of us. “We are fixin’ to go down town .”
    We positioned ourselves to his right, and when he called, “Set!” then, “Hut! Hut!” and slapped the ball, we hauled ass. I did a little juke of my own to the