The Girl Next Door by Jack Ketchum Read Free Book Online Page A

between them and cigarettes stolen from Murphy’s store.
    We were all still too young for that, with the water tower all the way over on the other side of town. But that hadn’t stopped us from envying them aloud and frequently until finally our parents said it would be okay if we camped out too as long as it was under supervision—meaning, in somebody’s backyard. So that was what we did.
    I had a tent and Tony Morino had his brother Lou’s when he wasn’t using it so it was always my backyard or his.
    Personally, I preferred my own. Tony’s was all right—but what you wanted to do was to get back as far away from the house as possible in order to have the illusion of really being out there on your own and Tony’s yard wasn’t really suited to that. It tapered down over a hill with just some scrub and a field behind it. The scrub and field were boring and you were resting all night on an incline. Whereas my yard ran straight back into thick deep woods, spooky and dark at night with the shadows of elm, birch and maple trees and wild with sounds of crickets and frogs from the brook. It was flat and a lot more comfortable.
    Not that we did much sleeping.
    At least that night we didn’t.
    Since dusk we’d been lying there telling Sick Jokes and Shaddap Jokes (“Mommy, mommy! Billie just vomited into a pan on the stove!” “Shaddap and eat your stew.”), the six of us laughing, crunched into a tent that was built for four—me, Donny, Willie, Tony Morino, Kenny Robertson and Eddie.
    Woofer was being punished for playing with his plastic soldiers in the wire-mesh incinerator in the yard again—otherwise he might have whined long enough and loud enough to make us take him too. But Woofer had this habit. He’d hang his knights and soldiers from the mesh of the incinerator and watch their arms and legs burn slowly along with the trash, imagining God knows what, the plastic fire dripping, the soldiers curling, the black smoke pluming up.
    Ruth hated it when he did that. The toys were expensive and they made a mess all over her incinerator.
    There wasn’t any beer but we had canteens and Thermoses full of Kool-Aid so that was all right. Eddie had half a pack of his father’s Kool unfiltereds and we’d close the tent flaps and pass one around now and then. We’d wave away the smoke. Then we’d open the flaps again just in case my mom came out to check on us—though she never did.
    Donny rolled over beside me and you could hear a Tasty-Cake wrapper crush beneath his bulk.
    That evening when the truck came by we’d all gone out to the street to stock up.
    Now, no matter who moved, something crackled.
    Donny had a joke. “So this kid’s in school, right? He’s just a little kid, sitting at his desk and this nice old lady schoolteacher looks at him and notices he looks real sad and says, what’s wrong? And he says, waaa! I didn’t get no breakfast! You poor little guy, says the teacher. Well, don’t worry, no big deal, she says, it’s almost lunchtime. You’ll get something to eat then, right? So now let’s return to our geography lessons. Where’s the Italian border?”
    “In bed, fucking my mother, says the little kid. That’s how come I didn’t get no fucking breakfast!”
    We laughed.
    “I heard that one,” said Eddie. “Or maybe I read it in Playboy.”
    “Sure,” said Willie. Willie was on the other side of me over against the tent. I could smell his hair wax and, occasionally and unpleasantly, his bad teeth. “Sure,” he said, “you read it in Playboy. Like I fucked Debra Paget. Right.”
    Eddie shrugged. It was dangerous to contradict him but Donny was lying between them and Donny outweighed him by fifteen pounds.
    “My old man buys it,” he said. “Buys it every month. So I hock it off him outa his drawer, read the jokes, check the broads, and put it back again. He never knows. No sweat.”
    “You better hope he never knows,” said Tony.
    Eddie looked at him. Tony lived across the