Country Hardball by Steve Weddle Read Free Book Online

measure, two Phillips-head screwdrivers, a handful of loose, picture-hanging nails no one needed.
    She shut the drawer, pulled it open again to tuck the ribbon back in. Closed it shut. “You’re ten years old. Whyn’t you go outside and play?” she asked. “I got some cleaning up to do.”
    • • •
    The boy held the barrel of his Daisy pellet gun, dragging the butt along the dirt and gravel road toward the cutoff for the oil well. Cans. Bottles. Line ’em up and knock ’em down. He held the barrel of the gun at the end, swung the rifle like a golf club, sweeping chunks of rock from one side of the road to the other.
    The white clouds blew like lace across the pale blue sky. Just before he got to the turn, he saw a chicken hawk on the wires above him, at the edge of the clear-cut field. The boy held the rifle in the fold of his arm, reached into his pocket for the white, plastic box, slid a handful of pellets into the butt of the gun, twisted closed the opening. He lifted the rifle, set the sights at the bird’s back. He took a deep breath, and when he’d finished the exhale, he pulled the trigger, heard the spit of air as the pellet flew toward the bird. The bird stayed still, and the boy pulled the trigger again. And again, stepping forward.
    • • •
    Averdale Tatum went through the mail she’d taken from her brother’s house that morning. Important Information Enclosed. Reply Today. Sign Up and Save. She pulled the only bill from the stack, slid the rest into the kitchen garbage.
    Standing at the refrigerator door, she pulled off a photograph of Champion Tatum and his son, standing on the church steps in Easter shirts and ties. “I have to pay your damn electric bill and watch the boy? Might as well just have the damn current shut off.”
    She sat down in the chair, still holding the got two catchers, should have beenpicture. “I don’t mind watching the boy,” she said. “Just wish I knew when you were coming home. If you were coming home.”
    She looked at the picture, creased the picture in half, folded the boy away so she was just talking to her brother. “I know she shouldn’t have just left the two of you like that, but people got problems, Champ. Ain’t nothing you can do to hold them. You just gotta listen.”
    She tossed the photograph onto the table with the electric bill, the card shuffler, the mismatched salt and pepper shakers. “Did you listen?”
    Then she shook her head, walked over to the window on the east side of the house, looked out at the little shed where she and her baby brother would head out for blocks of frozen peas, frost-fuzzed and stacked on wire shelves in the rusted icebox. She thought of the time they had walked in and looked up to rafters dripping with milk snakes, all red and yellow and black, swinging above them along the bicycle tires and broken chairs. She had left Champion on the cinderblock steps, eased across the floor planks, and come back with a rock-hard bag of purple hull peas held above her head.
    “I shoulda done better by you, Champ,” she said. “I shoulda looked after you after Eleanor did that to herself. I shoulda made you tell me where you were going, what you were up to, running off like that.” She lifted her arm, wiped her nose on the shoulder of her housecoat. “Who am I talking to?” she asked out loud.
    • • •
    The boy walked over to where the bird had fallen, lying in a heap of briars and broken limbs. He watched the bird for a moment, waiting for it to try to fly away, but it didn’t move. The boy used the barrel of his rifle to turn the bird onto its back, looking into its eyes. Deep black marbles that shone like a coffin.
    When the bird blinked, the boy fell backward, but got up and walked back over to the bird. The bird twisted its neck at an angle, the way you’d ask someone “Why?” The boy wondered if maybe the bird had broken its neck.
    He waited for something to happen. The bird would fly away. Maybe the bird would