Leaving: A Novel by Richard Dry Read Free Book Online Page B

the lower windows, and pieces of tar paper ripped off their roofs. The homes were each tilted in some way, collapsing in on themselves as if they’d been punched in their stomachs.
    In a burnt-out house across the street, two young men in black shirts and blue jeans hit the charred pilings with crowbars. One of them was in a wheelchair and had a snake over his shoulders, a thick brown snake like a muscular arm. The other one, with a long braid of hair down his back and a black bandanna in his back pocket, looked up and saw Love in the window.
    Love almost stepped back but caught himself. He looked down and squinted at the young man with the braid, who was maybe eighteen and had dark, swollen triceps. They stared at each other like two cats before a fight. Then the man turned and hit the charred stairs of the house again, breaking the top step right in the middle.
    Love walked back to his bed and dumped his clothes on the home-patched quilt. Sifting through his white shirts, he grabbed a faded black bandanna his mother had given him before he was taken to Juvi. He knew what to expect: they’d know the black rag, know that he was claiming to be down with them; they’d jump him in, beat him up, and then it would be over. He tried not to picture them hitting him or using the metal crowbars. He tucked the bandanna into his jeans and stuffed the rest of his clothes back in the bag.
    The stairs thumped and creaked loudly as he jogged down to the front door. Ruby came in from the kitchen. “Where you off to already?”
    “I got some business, dog.”
    “Don’t you call me dog. I’m not your pet. What sort of business you have already? You just got here. Why don’t you wash up and I’ll fix you somethin. I got some burger I could heat up.”
    “I got to go.” Love opened the front door and stepped out onto the porch. He looked down the street toward the corner liquor store where the two young men had headed. Ruby followed him to the porch.
    “I got these here insects I was gonna give you, but if you just ‘got to go’ to your business, you go on ahead. I can give ’em to someone else.”
    Love looked back over his shoulder. Ruby walked inside and opened a drawer in the vanity. She pulled out a blue denim binder and took it into the living room.
    “What you mean, insects?”
    “Close the door and come sit here on the couch.” An orange-striped cat ran past him and into the kitchen. “That cat’s name’s Lion. You remember Lion?”
    Ruby sat on the couch, opened the book on her lap, and thumbed slowly through the first pages. “You probly never heard a these special names.” She put her finger under the name of a big orange butterfly and tried sounding it out slowly. “Dannaus…”
    “Dannaus plexippus,” Love said. “P-l-e-x-i-p-p-u-s. That’s just a monarch, but they have a heart poison in them so the birds don’t eat them.”
    “What’s that ugly creature?”
    Love came inside to see. He stood behind the couch and looked over her shoulder. Ruby pointed to a cricketlike bug pinned on its side.
    “They only ugly ’cause you’re not used to looking at them up close, and you ignorant about them. That’s a cicada. They the ones that make that high-pitch weeeeeee all night from this drum they got in their stomachs.” Love picked the binder out of Ruby’s lap. He turned the page to a beetle almost four inches long with a nose like an elephant. “That’s a Hercules. Where’d you get this from? They don’t even live around here.”
    “Keep them in that plastic. That man from your old school say to never take them out of that plastic.” Love looked into Ruby’s hazel eyes, swimming and red from years at the sewing machine.
    “No he didn’t. You went out and got these.”
    “He say to give these to you when I went in for a meeting. He say you been like a little brother.”
    Love looked back at the Hercules beetle. It was the longest beetle known to mankind, hidden in shiny black layers of