Offspring by Jack Ketchum Read Free Book Online

coming from Campbell was high praise. David knew next to nothing about lumber but he was glad to hear it.
    “But we gotta get ’em down fast,” Campbell said. “A day in the sun and they’ll warp like swizzle sticks. They’ll do the trick, though. Now these . . .”
    He stepped over to a much larger pile about four and a half feet high by four feet wide, a mix of spruce and balsam. Two-by-tens mostly, ranging from eight to twenty feet long. This was the framing lumber, the underpinnings for what was going to be the firststory flooring.
    “. . . these are
fine,”
he said.
    “Fine?” He smiled. He’d never heard Campbell use the word.
    “Good local stuff right out of the Big Woods. Hardly any reaction wood at all that I can see. Good and regular.”
    “What’s the Big Woods?” asked Luke. He stood in the door of the shop, a claw hammer in his hand that was much too heavy for him, pounding awkwardly at invisible nails.
    “You’re in it, son, sort of,” said Campbell. “Scrappylittle part of it of course, way out here on the coast. But from Bangor on up’s all Big Woods territory. Old growth. Logging country. Red spruce, black spruce, white spruce, cedar. Rivers, lakes, streams. You can pull trout out of the streams and you can flush a bear or a moose if you’re of a mind to.”
    “You can?”
    “Sometimes.”
    “I want to see a bear!” Luke took a wider swing, hammering a bear skull.
    Campbell laughed. “In the wild? No you don’t.”
    “Yes I do.”
    “A bear can move fast as an automobile over short distances and start up even faster. Think you can outrun a car, son?”
    Luke frowned and thought about it. “Well, maybe if I was standing kind of far away I’d like to see one. Like through binoculars.”
    “Maybe then,” said Campbell. “Sure. Why not?”
    “Look over on the first shelf there,” said David. “Right behind you.”
    Luke walked into the shop. The shelf, David knew, was just about reachable for him. He was tall for his age, with long thin arms like his mother’s. They watched him look around and find them. He started to reach up and then caught himself, stopped and turned.
    “Can I?” he asked.
    “Sure you can,” said David.
    The binoculars were his father’s too, old and not particularly high-powered, but in working order.
    Luke looped the thong around his neck, droppedthe claw hammer noisily into the toolbox and looked through the lenses.
    “Know how to focus?” said David.
    Luke shook his head. David walked over and showed him.
    “See, you’ve got two images here. Now you break the lenses either toward your nose or away from your nose until you’ve got just the one image,” he said. “Only one. Then you turn this knob until whatever you want to see is good and clear.”
    Luke tried it, pointed them at Campbell.
    “Hey!” he said, smiling.
    “You got it, huh?”
    “Yeah!”
    “Good.”
    He turned the lenses out toward the field and focused again.
    “Radical!”
    Our Turtle friends again
, thought David. He wondered who Luke’s favorite was, Michelangelo or Donatello. Personally he leaned toward Leonardo, though he guessed that basically Turtle Power was Turtle Power. As opposed, for instance, to the Power of Greyskull.
    “You like ’em?”
    “Yeah!”
    “I’ll loan them to you for the duration.”
    “What’s a duration?”
    “As long as you’re here.”
    “And then I have to give them back again?”
    “We’ll see.”
    Luke looked hopeful. David guessed he was at that age when kids got very much into possessions.
    “I’m gonna go look around, okay?”
    “Go ahead.”
    He headed through the oak trees out into the field, stopped and turned and focused on the windows of the house. Campbell lit a cigarette and they watched him for a while.
    “Seems like a nice boy,” said Campbell.
    “He is,” said David.
    “I’m not the sort of man who minds kids,” said Campbell. “If he wants to hang around some when we start working it’s okay by me.