The Rifle by Gary Paulsen Read Free Book Online Page B

learn how to be a master carpenter.
    In some respects the boy’s life in Missouri was the same as it had been in Colorado. They had a nice house in a nice neighborhood, and he had a yard to play in that was safe and the collie came with them. By now he had, of course, quit holding on to Sissy but she had changed drastically and loved him completely—possibly more even than his grandfather—and spent every waking hour watching him, waiting for him to move so she could be with him. She slept next to him on his bed, even went into the bathroom with him, and made him feel at home even though he was in a strange neighborhood where he didn’t know anyone.
    On the right of their house there was a small frame dwelling painted a spotless white and occupied by an elderly couple. The boy heard that the man had been a fighter pilot in the Second World War but didn’t talk to him until he was of an age to make models, and the man came into his backyard and saw Richard holding a plastic model of a P-51 fighter near the low fence.
    â€œI flew one of those,” the man told him, looking over the fence. “You had to be careful in a dive because if the airspeed exceeded the limits the aluminum would start peeling off the upper wing. That’s what happened to Johnnie . . .”
    And the man told Richard stories of flying in the war, talking to Richard not as if he was a boy but a man, telling him things because he seemed to need to tell these parts of his life to somebody. Richard was fascinated and listened raptly, and from that time on always said hello to the man when he saw him.
    On the other side of Richard’s house lived Harv Kline. Harv was as nice to Richard as he was to everybody and Richard liked him as much as everybody liked him. He had two children, a boy and a girl, but the boy was three years younger than Richard—the girl still younger—and when Richard was eight the other boy was only five, too young for good playing. The fence between their two yards was only a foot high, a wooden rail, and anytime she couldn’t be with Richard, Sissy—who after the years with Richard had decided she was supposed to watch
all
young people—could be found in the Kline’s yard playing with and watching Harv’s two children.
    There were other children on the block and Richard met them and came to know them and one of them became his best friend, a boy named Dennis, and another of them became his first girlfriend when he was nine years old. Her name was Peggy, and it wasn’t the same as when he became older, twelve and then thirteen when she became his real girlfriend but even so, even so this first girlfriend business was very serious and he spent hours talking to Dennis about it, telling Dennis how much he loved Peggy though he hadn’t told Peggy and indeed would not tell her of his love.
    It was all very complicated and Richard thought twice that it would lead to breaking his heart because Peggy didn’t seem to notice him and he could not, for the life of him, bring himself to talk to her. He had found that until they moved to Missouri, his life without girls to play with, his life with Sissy the collie had left him almost debilitatingly shy when it came to talking to girls.
    It is impossible to guess how long it would have taken him to tell Peggy how he felt but Dennis was a good friend and teasingly told Peggy that Richard loved her and she broke the ice by talking to Richard. She was thin and had a spray of freckles across her nose and straight brown hair that hung down alongside her face, and Richard’s tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth whenever she was near.
    â€œHi,” she said. “Dennis said you want to be my boyfriend.”
    Richard stared at her. “Is that right?”
    He nodded. “I guess so. I mean . . .”
    â€œOK,” she said, shrugging, and it was done.
    Richard had waited for some change but as far as he was