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Show 407 "Does your mother know you're here?" he asked. The little boy looked up. "Yes." He had dried mucus all over his lip. "She sent us," the little girl said. "Stay away from the cars," Lorin said. "You'll get run over." He left the parking lot and walked down the winding narrow road that led off Highland. There were no sidewalks here, and the houses with their asbestos siding were small and sat close to the road and had cramped lots separated by pyracantha hedges and low fences. The traffic sounds from Thirty-third South were a constant presence in the air, like flies, but the neighborhood pleased him, tucked away out of sight. He had always liked the narrow little streets and the heavy cottonwood trees whose roots had buckled the asphalt. As a kid he had sometimes walked with his father to a neighbor's house to buy eggs, which he got to pick warm out of the coop while the neighbor had held the hen. The street ended behind a frame bungalow in whose front yard an orange school bus was parked. Three hairy young men, one of them wearing a fringed vest over a bare torso, and a girl in a granny dress sat on the front step and watched him go by. He climbed through the fence and entered the school ground, passing the lunch pergola and the tetherball pole. He found his brother standing under an elm tree looking at the monkey bars. Stephen's back was to him, and his hair hung in a tangle over the collar of his blazer. He was wearing grey bell-bottom pants, and if he had gotten mud on the cuffs climbing through the fence Lorin was going to kill him. "Get your ass back inside," Lorin said. "It's time to start." "Show me where you hit that Mexican kid who was out on third base," Stephen said. His stringy beard needed clipping. Lorin had forgotten to tell him to clip it this morning. |
