The Big Both Ways by John Straley Read Free Book Online Page B

suit said, and pushed Slip into the front seat of the sedan.
    “You, logger. You drive,” Avery said, and he pushed Ellie into the backseat, slamming the door behind her.
    As they turned the corner on the darkened street where the meetinghouse stood, Slip looked up and saw Annabelle in the top window. She had the yellow bird resting on her index finger. The light from the window slid down the side of the building and spattered out onto the street like paint. As they turned the final corner, the yellow bird ruffled its feathers and looked as if it were going to fly.

THREE
 
    Annabelle loved staring at the yellow bird. She could spend hours looking into his black doll’s eyes, thinking about what it must be like to fly through the eucalyptus forests of Australia. Buddy was from Australia, or at least his parents were from there. The lady from the pet store said that Buddy had been born in the store and had never known any other life. He was a cockatiel and he would live a very long time.
    Annabelle had won Buddy in a contest. All she had had to do was write her name very carefully on the back of a lid from a box of birdseed and put it in a jar. Ellie had given her the money to buy the birdseed in the first place. Ellie was good for those kinds of things. Surprises. Unexpected parties. Like buying a box of birdseed just out of the blue without much explanation.
    Ellie was Annabelle’s aunt, and though she was a good speech maker she wasn’t much like a mother. Ellie was fun, but ever since her mother had died Annabelle had learned to do things for herself.
    Annabelle loved Buddy even though when she first got him he would bite her hard enough to break the skin. Annabelle even suspected that the pet store lady had given him away in a contest because he was such a bad-mannered bird. Then the girl decidedthat it must have been a result of somebody being horribly mean to him. So Annabelle chose to be exceedingly nice to the cranky yellow bird. She fed him exactly what the books said to give him: nuts and sometimes some pieces of fruit. She gave him his food by lying for hours on the bed with the seeds cupped in her hand and her hand extended into the cage. For the first day Buddy would only shriek and hop from perch to perch, but the little girl would lie still, murmuring his name and saying, “It’s okay, it’s okay.” By the third day he was eating out of her hand, and by the end of the week she could put him on her shoulder while she read a book.
    Annabelle rarely spoke to anyone. It wasn’t out of unfriendliness or fear. It was just that she felt that her words were like money and she wanted to spend them wisely. She loved reading books. In books there was a surfeit of words and to her a library was a kind of Fort Knox. She particularly loved books about animals. More than books and words she loved the animals themselves. There was a drawing of a leopard above the window where she stood and watched the man put Ellie and that other man with the sad face in the car.
    They had been living in Seattle for a couple of years. Ellie had been in Aberdeen when Annabelle first came to live with her. They lived in her grandpa’s bar, which worked out fine for a while but Ellie wanted to give speeches in Seattle. Leaving Aberdeen seemed to have been a mistake. There were fewer and fewer men turning out for her aunt’s speeches, and more and more men coming around late in the evenings with whiskey on their breath. It had often occurred to her that one day Ellie might not be there in the morning, and this thought didn’t particularly frighten her. It didn’t frighten her like thinking about Buddy flying away, or thinking about Buddy flying into a windowpane, swooping down from some perch looking at that other yellow bird coming at him in the exact same motion. Annabelle knew about being alone. She just didn’t want Buddy to die or become lost.
    So when she heard the men breaking down the door, she took Buddy and hid underneath