Lost Between Houses by David Gilmour Read Free Book Online Page A

just fine.
    And at the end of the dance she kind of stepped back, like she was going to tell me she should go find her sister, you know the number, but I didn’t want it to end like that, me leaving the dance figuring she’d got to know me a bit and then split. So real quick, before she could say anything, I said, “Thanks for the dance,” and then I spun around and walked off. I mean maybe I looked like a madman but I didn’t want to end up feeling like a loser. Not when everything was going so well. Let her wonder a bit, I thought. It’s always the guys who do the wondering. Besides, that way when she saw me next Saturday, she’d know I was all right, it was cool to say hi to me, I wasn’t going to latch onto her like a fucking lamprey for the rest of the night.
    I beetled on out of there. Harper was hanging around outside on the patio.
    “Let’s split,” I said.
    And he said, “Well, not yet.”
    We stayed out there for awhile, bitching about stuff. I made sure not to go back inside. It’d been a pretty good goodbye, I didn’t want to water it down with another one.
    After awhile, Harper looked around and sort of sucked his lips and said, “Well, maybe we should like
oubliez-la,”
which was his way of saying, let’s go.
    It was around eleven-thirty when we got back to our dock and tied up the boat, Harper sort of laughing about what a shitty night it had turned out to be and me saying, well, what the hell, and then the two of us heading up from the boathouse. We walked up through the swamp, the moon yellow and round, and came out under the stars in the open field and started towards the house. The lights were on in the living room, we could see them from the bottom field, and it made the place look all cosy. Just to freak myself out, I imagined I was a stranger, that I didn’t know the people in the house, I’d just been sort of
clonked
there, in the middle of nowhere. You know, what would I do? Would I knock on somebody’s door, would I make my way into town? I got so absorbed in thinking about how lonely it’d be out there that I just about jumped out of my pants when Harper spoke to me.
    “Did you notice the old lady hid all the guns?” he said, sticking a blade of grass in his mouth.
    I caught up to him.
    “What?”
    “She hid all the guns in the basement.”
    “What for?”
    “The doctor told her to.”
    “Whose doctor?”
    “The old man’s doctor.”
    “Jesus.”
    “Great eh?”
    “Where’d she hide them?”
    “Under the stairs, the little place at the back with all the mousedroppings in it. You’re not supposed to know, by the way. It’s a secret.”
    “What’d he say?”
    “Said he was going to shoot himself.”
    “Really?”
    “He was pissed, I think.”
    “The doctor was pissed?”
    “No,
he
was pissed when he told Mother and
she
told the doctor. Christ, Simon, can’t you follow anything?”
    “Do you think he’d really do it?”
    “No way. You got to have a real pair to stick a gun in your mouth.”
    “I suppose you’re right.”
    “Well like don’t sound so disappointed, Simon. He’s your father you know.”
    “So you don’t figure we should leave the basement door open? Leave a round in the chamber just so he doesn’t have to make another trip downstairs.”
    Harper laughed in amazement.
    “Nice talk, Simon. Like real psycho stuff. This family, I mean it. Sometimes I feel like they brought the wrong baby home from the hospital. Everybody here seems so
warlike.
I don’t think I’m going to be happy until I’m fifty. I’ve always thought that. Even when I was a kid.”
    He went quiet for a moment. “I wonder why Annie Kincaid wasn’t there tonight?”
    We went into the house. He went up to his bedroom and lay on the bed and turned on the radio and listened to a baseball game.
    I went downstairs, made myself a ham sandwich. Then went out the back door and swatted deer flies in the garage. They were big as bolts. You had to hit them really hard to bring