Truants by Ron Carlson Read Free Book Online Page B

balance, and my stomach rose with the insistent twist that completed the loveliness for me. I could see my spoony reflection in the hubcap of one car, my hair and eyebrows white with dust, my earless head distorted in a nauseous balloon. I sucked on my fist trying to settle, while my stomach parachuted to safety.
    I stood up. The rancorous Steele was still leaning on the load switch by the cab of the truck, and the sawdust spilled over the bed like soapsuds. He was utterly gone. When I could feel blood in my knees again, I walked carefully over to where he stared at the snowing sawdust. I grabbed his shoulders and pulled him off the button. Before the last flake could fall, I set him up, knowing it was taking unfair advantage, so that he stood like a mannequin before me, his palms open, as if to say, “What?”; and I punched him as deeply as I could, right below the breast bone. My fist went in four inches, and he folded around it like the wet-shirt assassin that he was.
    As he moved through the phase: dead man in the fetal, dead man with spasms, dead man with only eyeballs and sucking noises, alive man with genuine retching, I didn’t feel a twinge. I wanted to kick him—I think you’re supposed to kick the first guy who tries to kill you—but I didn’t. I climbed in the driver’s seat and waited for the remnants of Steele to join me in the cab so that we could return to the fair. In a fair fight, Steele would make rags out of me, but I knew he wouldn’t get a chance. He wouldn’t come in for a landing now until midnight, maybe later, and by that time I would be in California having a leisurely dinner with my father. Something like that.
    The return trip was four times, exactly, as acidic and morose because of my inability to shift the gears or time the clutch. I jerked us fairwards in a thousand stalling heaves, the truck squealing in leaps at such punishment.
    I dropped Steele off by our gate and told him to go back in orderly fashion and resume the shoveling. The cows, having had an afternoon, would have created a backlog that would take some seeing to. Inexorable as time, cattle continue their wet organic discourse in the universe. Steele was subdued, his eyes pulsing a little from the stroke I had delivered his way, and he went into the barn wordlessly.
    I drove over to the horsebarns and backed to the diminished sawdust pile. Ramirez, the fair foreman who ran those barns with his son, Hector, came out to direct traffic. He always called me the “orphan” which, coming from him, did not disappoint me. As we untied the canvas, in preparation to dump, he called from across the truck:
    “How goes the little orphan today? Did you have a good lunch?” Ramirez was always checking to see what people had eaten. He felt that being well fed was to be well in all the ways. Both he and Hector had wonderful stomachs, like hubcaps in their shirts, and they talked food all the time. We threw the canvas down to Hector who began folding it, and I opened the cab and pulled the hydraulic dump lever.
    The three of us unloaded the last bits with shovels. When we were finished sweeping the truck, Ramirez jumped down and said, “Our skinny orphan!” Then he signaled me with a wave. “Come on, Orphano, it is an opportunity to break now.”
    I followed them over to the shack adjacent to the raceway. Ramirez opened the little round-shouldered refrigerator where the men kept their lunches, and he withdrew a paper bag. He handed Hector a wrapped package, and then handed one to me. They were burritos his wife had prepared. We sat on the two couches in the office, which were really old bus seats, and ate the moist and spicy burritos passing a quart of sharp cold beer among us.
    “This makes you better. Though you will never be well.” When Ramirez said the word well , he patted his stomach.
    “Very good,” I said. “Your wife makes excellent burritos.”
    “Excellent everything,” he said.
    “What will you do after the