When Crickets Cry by Charles Martin Read Free Book Online Page A

close alongside, he turned and asked, "You still having that dream?"
    "Yeah."
    "You figured out what it means?"
    "Not really."
    "You need an interpreter?"
    "Think you can?"
    Charlie shook his head. "No, but if you sleep any less, you'll turn into an owl."
    "Thanks."
    Charlie smiled, treading water. "Well, every time I get up to pee during the night, I can hear you over here tinkering with something."
    "Yeah ... well, school taught me a few things, and how to live without sleep was one of them."
    "Yeah, but that ain't healthy. It's twisted."
    "Tell me about it."
    "I don't know how she ever put up with you."
    "Thanks. Don't let that shark bite you."
    Charlie hummed the theme song to jaws and began pulling again. He wanted to say more, I knew, but he let it go. It was often what Charlie didn't say that spoke the loudest.

     

Chapter 6
    grew up in a hundred-year-old house just a few blocks from the Vinings town square. It was a no-frills, two-story wooden house that rose up out of the earth, tall and narrow, like it had been squeezed during construction. It was surrounded by two wraparound porches-one on each floor-and framed by eight magnolia trees that provided shade regardless of the time of day. From the street, you could barely see the house.
    It wasn't large, only three bedrooms, but had almost as much square footage in porches as it did inside. The huge, sprawling limbs of the magnolias spread about the house like giant arms. When the trees were in bloom, my mother opened every window and reversed the rotation of the attic fan, sucking in the outside air and the scent that emanated from the canopy under which we lived. Some of the limbs swayed and bent in under the porch or rubbed up against it house and trees almost like an old married couple who had grown comfortable with each other's company. We spent a lot of time playing in the coolness on the porch or climbing along the miles of magnolia limbs.
    My father hung bird feeders in every tree, making bird-watching easy. From finch to cardinal, mockingbird, blue jay, crow, hummingbird, martin, and even the occasional owl or red-tailed hawk, our life on the porch was an education in the flying, singing, nest ing, and mating habits of every common bird in northeast Georgia. The most common were the cardinals; at one time we counted eleven nests. The laser-bright male stood proudly and protectively alone against the dark green and brown backdrop, never far from the darker, more blood-colored female with whom he would mate for life. Come nighttime in the spring, the walls of our house echoed with the concert of male and female cardinals, sending out their voices like submarines sending sonar pings from the dark depths of the ocean's floor.

    EMMA AND I MET ON THE PLAYGROUND IN SECOND GRADE. I had just crossed the jungle gym without touching the ground and was still hanging there when I spotted her watching me. She was the new kid, had just moved to town, quiet, usually drawing something in a sketch pad and always watching everything out of the corner of her eye. She was small for her age, maybe even a bit frail, and during recess, when the other kids were playing kickball or climbing on the jungle gym, Emma would sit at the picnic table, open her sketch pad, and take pictures with her pencil. What she could do with fifteen minutes, a pencil, and a blank sheet of paper was almost uncanny.
    One day at the end of recess, she nonchalantly handed me a sketch and returned to her seat on the far side of the room. It was me, dangling like a monkey with a silly look on my face. And she was right, I had been trying to show off. Her sketch had captured that. The next day during lunch, she offered me her chocolate chip cookie, and I gave her my milk. The following week, we moved our seats together in Mrs. Wilson's music class, and I even skipped a kickball game to watch her sketch. At the beginning of our thirdgrade year, her folks moved into a brick home around the block from us, so I