Those Across the River by Christopher Buehlman Read Free Book Online Page A

my throat would hurt all night from it.
    “Thank God some new meat showed up in town. Not your lady. I mean you. I mean conversation. Quite honestly, you’re the only reason I put on this ape suit and pedaled out here.”
    “I’m flattered.”
    “They say you’re educated. A professor of history. Me, I’m self-educated. I like books. I like to talk about books. No offense, but most of the God-fearing folk around here have trouble reading a can of soup. I mean, they’ll whip your biscuits in a game of checkers at the general store, and most of them can quote Genesis and Exodus alright, but chess is right out. The most political they ever got was when half of them wrote letters to Sears and Roebuck when they switched the catalog to glossy paper.”
    “Why did they care?”
    “Because they had to go back to wiping their asses with corn.”
    I laughed.
    “So does a self-educated man find satisfaction in the preservation of dead animals?”
    “Satisfaction? Not exactly. But when I make a good mount I feel like I beat God in a small way. As though the Almighty said, Let thus and such critter be dead , and I said, ‘Fuck You, he can still play the banjo.’ Are you a devout man, Mr. Nichols?”
    “I can’t say that I am.”
    “Excellent. We might be friends. But we won’t hunt together.”
    “I don’t hunt.”
    “I know.”
    “Excuse me?”
    “You make a lot of noise and you don’t see or hear too well. Don’t be offended. You’re a fine dancer. I dance like you hunt.”
    “You figured all this out tonight?”
    “Not tonight. Yesterday. I was setting a trap near the Wheeler house, you know, the place that burned down. There’s a rabbit warren nearby. Anyway, there you came with Lester, stepping on every twig and dried leaf you could find like the whole world was your friend, taking pictures with that little camera. Look close when you bring those pictures out; I’m probably in one of them.”
    Cranmer told me how to get to his cabin and left me with a standing invitation to play chess. He did not speak to anybody else, although he nodded at Lester Gordeau and made a troll face at a towheaded boy who stared at him too long. And then he clambered onto a bicycle and pedaled off into the night. I pictured Martin walking the bike through the rough terrain of the forest in his mismeasured suit, but the image did not make me laugh. No image of Martin Cranmer in the woods seemed improbable. He looked like he had been carved from the hardest tree in them.

CHAPTER SEVEN
    E UDORA DIDN’T WANT me to go across the river on Wednesday.
    “Those woods aren’t friendly,” she said. This as I laced up the hiking boots I had just oiled.
    I played dumb.
    “What are you talking about?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Is it that pig business?”
    “Partly, I suppose. It makes me wonder what else goes on around here.”
    “I understand they tie a nude virgin to the back of a bull to celebrate the equinox.”
    “Oh. Well, I needn’t worry about that.”
    “Unless they ask you to be the bull. Stubborn thing.”
    That was a mistake.
    “Who’s stubborn, Orville Francis? No, I mean it. You’re going no matter what I say or do. If I hung myself on the front porch, you’d just leave out the kitchen door.”
    “Now you’re talking nonsense,” I said. “We have no rope.”
    She just sighed at that.
    “Would you feel better if I took a pistol?”
    “Worse.”
    “May I take your little Brownie camera? I’ll get a picture of the bogeyman for you.”
    “Fine. I don’t care what happens to you anymore; you’re too difficult. But have my camera home by dark.”
    I left soon after that, but her disapproval kept eating at me all the way up to the river.
    Why?
    Because she’s right.
    As I hiked along the path Lester had shown me, I mused about Dora and how she might be spending her day. If there had been anyone around to bet, I would have wagered my best pair of shoes that she was in the study nosing around in my affairs.