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Show 67 piled on Jimbo Funster's porch roof. Funly and Jimbo were leaving the next day to spend two weeks at the Funster's hunting cabin. I tried to be optomistic. I'd never seen a dead person outside a funeral parlor. So I walked into the orchard. It was a black kid all right. He had on a green flannel shirt, khakis, and two different colored high-top sneakers with an orange shoelace in the kx black one and a black shoelace in the white. Up close now the face looked blue. Then he opened his eyes. "Who said you could watch me," he said. "What?" "I been watchin you watchin me and I want to know who said you could watch me." He said it real slow like he wasn't in any hurry to get it out at all. "Who said you could watch me?" I said. "That is a good question," he said. He licked his lips. "I guess I was here first." We didn't say anything to each other for awhile. He closed his eyes, opened them, then licked his lips again. "What are you aax doing up there?" I finally said. "I am makin a dollar a minute." "A dollar a minute. How are you making a dollar a minute?" He blinked again. "I am not," he said. "That was a joke. I am experimentin wif deaf." He raised his arms slowly and grabbed the rope, then pulled himself onto the limb. He pulled the noose over his head. "I do not get paid nofin, but if you ask me, I will tell you it is important work." "You seem to hear okay to me," I said. "My name is Willie." "How can you hang yourself and not be dead?" "I can fall from this tree and land on my head. Deaf is not interested in me. I am interested in deaf, though my mother has told me that deaf has no personality, it is just blackness." "You talking about dying?" "Not exactly," said xxiia Willie. "I would say I haf been dying se-feral times, myself, but that was not deaf. You, yourself, do not xxxx fink about deaf, I can see." "I almost died once." "Mfrybu bcforo yon igere born you knew somefin." |