Underdogs by Markus Zusak Read Free Book Online Page A

at the edge of the city, right next to it, as if we can reach across and touch the buildings — reach in and turn off the lights that try shining in our eyes to blind us.
    We’re fishing, Rube and I.
    We’ve never fished before, but we are today, through this whole evening.
    Our lines dangle in what is a huge, darkening blue lake with stars dropping up through the water.
    The water is still, but alive. We can feel it moving beneath the old beat-up boat we have hired from some con man on the shore. Onc a while it shifts beneath us. We are unafraid, at first, because although nothing has been totally stable, we know where we are, and things aren’t moving along too rapidly.
    We catch. Nothing.
    Absolutely. Nothing.
    “Bloody hopeless.” Rube initiates conversation.
    “I told y’ we shouldn’t have gone fishing. Who knows what’s in this lake?”
    “Dead souls from the city.” Rube smiles with a kind of sarcastic joy. “What’ll we do if we get one on the end of our line?”
    “Jump ship, mate.”
    “Too bloody right.”
    The water moves again, and slowly, waves start rolling in from somewhere we can’t see. They rise up and jump into the boat, and they get higher.
    There’s a smell.
    “A smell?”
    “Yeah, can’t you smell it?” I ask Rube. I say it like an accusation.
    “I can, yeah, now that you mention it.”
    The water is excessively high now, lifting the boat and us and throwing us back down. A wave hits my face and I get a mouthful. The taste, it’s grotesque, burning, and I can tell by the look on Rube’s face that he’s swallowed some too.
    “It’s petrol,” he tells me.
    “Oh God.”
    The waves die a little now, and I turn to a boat that sits closer to the city, right near the shore. There’s a guy in it, and a girl. The guy steps out onto the shore with something in his hand.
    It — glows.
    “No!”
I stand and throw my arms out. He does it. Cigarette.
    He does it as I see another person doing laps across the bay, intense. Who is it? I wonder, and in another boat still, a man and a woman are also rowing, middle-aged.
    The guy throws his cigarette into the lake.
    Red and yellow rolls into my eyes.
    Oblivion.

CHAPTER 7
     
    On the Thursday of that week, Rube also conned me into making a new exodus — a journey away from our normal robbery expeditions.
    signs.
    That was the new plan.
    It was still afternoon when he thought about it and told me which sign he wanted to get.
    “The give-way,” he said. “Down Marshall Street.” He smiled. “We sneak out, right, say elevenish, with one of Dad’s spanners — the one you can adjust by rubbing that thing on the top …”
    “The wrench?”
    “Yeah, that’s it…. We put our hoods on, walk down there casual as M. E. Waugh in bat, I climb up on your shoulders, and we take the sign.”
    “What for?”
    “What, exactly, do you mean,
what for?”
“I mean, what’s the point?”
    “Point?” He was, what’s the word? Exasperated. Frustrated. “We don’t need a point, son. We’re juvenile, we’re dirty, we don’t have girls, we have noses full of snot, throats sore as hell, we’ve got scabs on us, we suffer bouts of acne, we’ve got no girls — did I already say that? — little money, we eat mushrooms mashed next tomeat almost every night for dinner and drown ‘em in tomato sauce so we can’t taste ‘em. What more reasons do we need?” My brother threw his head back on his bed and stared desperately at the ceiling. “We don’t ask for much, dear God! You know that!”
    So that was it.
    The next mission.
    I swear it, that night, we were like savages, just as Rube had described in his outburst. It shocked me at first that he knew us like that. Like I did. Only, Rube was proud of it.
    Maybe we didn’t know
who
we were, but we knew
what
we were, and to Rube it made acts of vandalism such as stealing street signs seem like a logical thing to do. He sure didn’t feel like considering that we could end up in a police cell