Once You Break a Knuckle by W. D. Wilson Read Free Book Online Page A

was algae-green with a shin-level strip of sandstone brickwork. Bellows only ate peanut butter sandwiches and a grapefruit, quartered, and he always offered me one of those wedges and I always accepted. For the first time in four highschool years the hicks hesitated to pick on me and for the first time since he could remember Bellows had a friend who didn’t care that he was a JW. I showed him the dirty hollow I used to hide in and he collapsed it with two great guillotine-stomps. He read me a couple verses from his Bible. We hiked Invermere’s main haul and he bristled whenever we passed anyone who might cause trouble. A couple times he thought somebody was making a move and he went stiff, pupils dilating and his heart a-thump like a kid in love.
    At the end of May, Bellows found an ad in the newspaper selling a ’67 Camaro, so we drove to a town called Edgewater to have a look. When we got there, the car was on cinderblocks outside a mobile home – cobalt blue, darker than the desert sky, rust-peppered tinwork. Bellows lowered a palm to the frame like worship. He lifted the hood to stare at the V-8. When he blew across the engine, dust coiled into the air, thick with the smell of carbide. We tried the doorbell but all we got was a Rottweiler’s blood-howl, so deep and throaty it left you scratching your chest for an itch, and we hightailed it out of there. A few days later Bellows took me to his garage, and perched amid the clutter and the freezers full of elk meat was that beautiful Camaro. —My project, he told me.
    Summer got into swing. Beach parties, valediction, a gathering at the gravel pits where guys shotgunned cans of Hurricane like it was coming into style. Me and Bellows spent so much time in his garage that we missed the big happenings around the valley. Some kid wandered out of the gully at the edge of town. A retired highschool teacher signed up for the MMA Tough Guy tournament and shattered a student’s nose. Us: we tinkered with the Camaro. Bellows flung me tools and crooned instructions, and for the first time in a really long time I thought life was going alright. At home, my old man asked me what the hell I’d been getting up to, and I just told him, —Tweaking that car, Dad, and he gave me the eye, as if to say, Is that all? The whole time, Ham drove loser laps along Invermere’s main haul and we saw him with a puckslut riding shotgun, a giant decal on the tailgate that said: UR2SLO.
    In July Bellows fired up the Camaro for its virgin run. His dad helped us with the guts but when we repainted the body Bellows made a point of it only being me and him. Afterward, the cobalt drew the eye like an athlete. We cruised around in that beater-on-the-rise. Bellows pushed a Queen album in the tape deck and we blared “Fat Bottomed Girls.” People gave us looks. At the only red light in town we sidled up beside some hicks in a raised pickup. Their bass drowned ours, but Bellows gave them the eye. They called us fags, and he revved the engine. Then the light greened and Bellows dropped the clutch straight to second and I made a paddling motion out the passenger window as we shot on by.
    Near the end of summer me and Bellows swung by the lake, just bombing around, desperate to scrub up excitement. On the way, we bumped into his friend Charlie, wandering home with a bottle of Crown Royal. She crammed between us – athletic, brown haired, with nice teeth and a smile that showed her molars. At the lake, Bellows parked the Camaro under a street lamp and we hiked with Charlie to the water to circulate the booze. We sat on the sand with our shoes off, dipped our feet in the lake.
    â€” How much that car cost you? Charlie said. She gave Bellows a look, a once-over. I’d have traded anything to be in his shoes.
    â€” About two grand so far.
    â€” You ever wonder, she said, but didn’t elaborate. She tapped her feet against Bellows’. Their knees brushed.