Why Dogs Chase Cars Read Free

desk.
    â€œWhat’re you doing in here, Mendal Dawes?” she asked me.
    I said, “Before-and-After.”
    Shirley said, “Too bad we didn’t take a picture when you were a virgin, and one after. I guess they don’t want to put a picture of you in the yearbook with your eyes closed both times all Chinesey. Like a moron or something.”
    Sergeant Penny Yingling—who would see her way out of Forty-Five via the military—got on the intercom and started the Pledge. I stood there bent over Miss Ballard’s desk. I looked down her dress front, at first by accident. Miss Ballard stood up and chimed in about “… and to thepublic.” I leaned closer to make sure that she said, “… under God, in the visible,” and so on, like I knew she would. I looked back at Shirley Ebo, who, like me, didn’t even try to mouth the words. Shirley stood up like everyone else, but stared at a poster of a cat and a pigeon sniffing each other’s faces that Miss Ballard kept tacked on the wall.
    I left my real photo on the desk and walked out during the Lord’s Prayer. I knew that I had upwards of an hour before my first-period class would start, that I could go out to the parking lot, get in my Jeep, drive to Rufus Price’s Goat Wagon store, buy an eight-pack of Miller ponies, drink half of them, and get back in time to say
“Buenos dias”
to my new Spanish teacher, a woman named Senora Schulze who thought we should all take a field trip to
Brazil
one day to perfect our Spanish.
    I would think, Ic ump, ic ump, ic ump, the entire morning, and wonder if it meant anything in Latin.
    Rufus Price was only three feet tall. He didn’t have legs. He had stumps and had named his own little neighborhood store after the eight billy goats he liked to team up to trot him all over Highway 25 before, after, and during his hours of operation. Rufus Price’s beard resembled his goats’ faces—a long, long train of wild, wiry, grayish hair that came down in a point above his sternum. He wore a porkpie hat, always, and sat in a wheelchair once his goats brought him back to the storefront. Unfortunately for my father, Mr. Price had sold off some fifty acres of his own land to HarleyFuneral Home, and they made a perpetual-care cemetery out of the place, behind the Goat Wagon, before anyone could plant fake toxic drums. I said, “Hey, Mr. Price,” when I came in.
    He said, “School not out again?”
    I said, “Yessir,” and walked past the cans of pork brains in milk gravy, Spam, Vienna sausages, Hormel Deviled Ham, and various other potted meats. I passed the penny gums and the pork rinds. I walked around a display of watch-bands and another for Putnam Dyes. “I’m just taking a break before my first period.”
    â€œRunning a special on day-old bread, Mendal. You can get you carbohydrates out of bread, day-old or not.”
    I was pretty sure that my father had asked Rufus Price to take care of me, but I didn’t know for absolute sure. I said, “I’m getting something for Dad. I thought I might as well get it now than have to wait until after school. You might have a big rush between now and then.”
    He creaked his wheelchair forward. Out beside the shotgun-shack building, Rufus Price’s goats bleated and shuffled and banged their horns against the wooden slat exterior. He said, “Your daddy might want some gum, too. He might want some gum or Life Savers. He ain’t starting up a pulpwood business these days, is he? I won’t sell to pulp-wooders. You know why.”
    As I pulled out the eight-pack, I wondered if my friend Compton would show up like normally, but rememberedhow his art teacher had asked her students to come in early for an entire week so that they could go out on the football field and make a chalk collage of the history of Forty-Five Mills. The president of the place had promised to donate a