Into the Web by Thomas H. Cook Read Free Book Online Page B

his opposite, a kind, sweet, gentle boy who’d wanted so little from life and gotten so much less.
    While I swept and cleaned, he seemed near me, his schoolbooks held together by a worn leather belt as he headed for the yellow school bus on the road, the very bus on which, one bright September morning, he’d sat down next to a shy, slender girl with long blond hair, a girl who’d smiled at him as no girl ever had before, introduced herself, Hi, my name is Gloria.
    She’d just entered the high school that autumn and she must have seen Archie, tall and slender in his sixteenth year, as a worldly, experienced boy, one who knew the mysterious ways of Kingdom County High School, a boy bound for a diploma, while most all the others had dropped out of school as soon as the law allowed, and after that assumed the lives of their fathers as timbermen, quarrymen, haulers of pulpwood and scrap metal.
    To such encouraging prospects, Archie had added his crooning and guitar picking, neither particularly good, but no doubt wondrous to such a girl as Gloria, sheltered as she had always been, crushed beneath the weight of her father’s low regard. “Before Archie saw her,” Lila said to me one night, “Gloria was invisible.”
    But once seen, she rose like a comet in my brother’s eyes. For a moment I imagined a different fate than the one that had followed. What if Archie had never metGloria? Or what if he’d met her but things had never gone so terribly awry? What if, on that snowy night, I had not seen my brother’s car parked beside the dark hedge, then pulled up beside it?
    “You made coffee yet?” my father called from behind the closed door of his bedroom, his voice like a hook, jerking me back to the present.
    I poured the coffee into a mug and took it to him.
    He was sitting in a chair covered with a ragged patchwork quilt. His hair shimmered in the morning light, curiously soft against the unforgiving features of his face.
    “You hear that dog. Barked all damn night.” He took a greedy gulp, wiped his mouth. “Just like that old dog Archie had.”
    In my mind I saw Scooter tied to a fence post at the edge of the pasture, his long tongue lolling in the morning heat, my father’s shadow flowing darkly over the grass, Archie and I following at his side. We’re going hunting, boys.
    “Gimme my gun,” he said now.
    “You don’t have that gun anymore,” I said, remembering the old pistol he’d once had but which I knew must be locked in some storage area now, tagged and marked Kellogg Murders.
    “Sure I got a gun. Twenty-two rifle. In the closet there. Bought it a few months back. Gimme it.”
    I didn’t move. “What do you want with it?”
    “What do you think I want with it? I ain’t gonna put up with that barking no more.”
    I shook my head. “You’re not going to kill that dog,” I told him flatly.
    No more than a month before, my father might wellhave risen from his chair, pushed me aside, and seized the gun himself. Now he glared at me threateningly, then the threat faded away. “Hell, I don’t like to sleep anyway. Waste of time. Your mother was always sleeping. Every chance she got. Sleep, sleep, sleep. Always running to the bedroom. Couldn’t face nothing. Especially that business with Archie. Couldn’t face that, remember?”
    I remembered it well. Toward the end she’d balled up under the covers, her bed little different from her grave.
    My father glanced toward the window, let his gaze linger on the dusty road. “So, what plans you got today, Roy?”
    “I don’t have any plans.”
    “Not expecting to get ‘caught up’ in nothing?”
    “Not that I know of.”
    He gulped the last of the coffee, then thrust the cup toward where I stood beside his bed with such sudden force, I stepped back quickly.
    “You act like you seen a rattlesnake.” He shook his head. “Jumpy. How come you’re always so jumpy, Roy?”
    When I gave no answer, he said, “You know, I’ve been thinking about