Summer of Night by Dan Simmons Read Free Book Online Page A

breakfast, gave it up. When the others had scattered for lunch, Duane had stayed in the chickenhouse, making notes, thinking.
    Duane was tired of thinking.
    He jumped down from the pickup and walked to the edge of the woods. Fireflies winked against the blackness. Duane could hear the frogs and cicadas calling from around the creek in the ravine below him. The hillside behind Black Tree Tavern was littered with garbage and junk, black shapes against the blacker background, and Duane unzipped and urinated into the darkness, hearing the patter fall on something metallic below. Heavy laughter came through a lighted window and Duane could pick out the Old Man's voice, rising above the others, getting ready to hit them with the punch line to the story.
    Duane loved the Old Man's stories, but not when he was drinking. The usually humorous tales turned mean and dark, edged with cynicism. Duane knew that the Old Man thought of himself as a failure. Failed Harvard man, failed engineer, failed farmer, failed inventor, failed get-rich-quick businessman, failed husband, failed father. Duane generally agreed with the Old Man's assessment although he thought that the jury might still be out on the last charge.
    Duane went back to the pickup and climbed into the cab, keeping the door open to let the whiskey smell out. He knew that whatever bartender was working tonight would toss the Old Man out just before he got violent. And he knew that he'd get the Old Man into the back of the pickup so he wouldn't struggle or grab the wheel, and then he-Duane, eleven years old last March, a C student with an IQ of 160 + according to Uncle Art, who'd dragged him up to the U. of I. two winters ago to be tested for God knows what reason-then he would drive the Old Man home, put him to bed, make supper, and go out to the barn to see if the parts fit in the John Deere.
    Later, much later, Duane was awakened by a whispering in his ear.
    Even half asleep he knew that he was home-he'd driven the Old Man over the two hills, past the cemetery and Dale's Uncle Henry's place, then out County Six to the farm; he'd planted the Old Man snoring in his bed and set in the new distributor before coming in to cook some hamburger-but he was surprised that he'd gone to sleep with the radio receiver still whispering in his ear.
    Duane slept in the basement, in a corner he'd partitioned off with a hanging quilt and some crates. It wasn't as pathetic as it sounded. The second floor was too cold and empty in the winter and the Old Man had given up sleeping in the bedroom he had shared with Duane's mother. So now the Old Man slept on the daybed in the parlor and Duane had his basement; it was warm down there near the furnace, even when the winds blew across stubbled fields in the cold belly of winter, there was a shower there and only a tub on the second floor, and Duane had brought down a bed, a dresser, his lab and darkroom stuff, his workbench, and his electronics.
    Duane had listened to the radio late at night since he was three years old. The Old Man used to, but had given it up some years before.
    Duane had crystal sets and store-bought receivers, Heath kits and rebuilt consoles, shortwave and even a new transistor model. Uncle Art had suggested that Duane get into ham radio, but Duane wasn't interested. He didn't want to send, he wanted to listen.
    And listen he did, late at night in the shadows of his basement with antenna wire strung everywhere, running up conduits and out windows. Duane listened to Peoria stations, and Des Moines, and Chicago, and the big stations from Cleveland and Kansas City, of course, but he most enjoyed the distant stations, the whispers from North Carolina and Arkansas and Toledo and Toronto, and occasionally, when the ion layer was right and the sunspots quiet, the babble in Spanish or slow Alabama tones almost as foreign, or the call letters of a California station or a Quebec call-in show. Duane listened to sports, closing his eyes in the