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

had to walk past her house on the way to school. Most mornings I'd bump into her and her little brother, Charlie.
    Charlie was four years younger and had unusually big arms for a kid his age, which explained why Emma affectionately called him Popeye. Charlie loved to build things and, even more, beat stuff with a hammer. And due to the size of his arms, he could swing it too. He was also real protective of his big sister, and for the first couple years he too watched me out of the corner of his eye.

    Charlie was adventuresome and didn't always think things through, so when he tried to swing from one of our magnolias using his Stretch Armstrong action figure as the rope, he ended up with an ugly amputation and a real mess. Lying in a pile of magnolia leaves next to the porch with Stretch's arm in one hand and Armstrong goo leaking everywhere, Charlie looked to me for help.
    "Curious" and "plays well alone" defined me as a child. From the time I learned that Legos snapped together, I had transformed my room into a maze of my own private construction projects, forcing my mom to all but give up on getting me to clean it. Model airplanes hung from fishing wire pinned to the ceiling, Lincoln Log houses five and six stories high stood in the corners, toothpick forts like the Alamo rested on overstuffed bookshelves, and houses of cards held together with glue took up too much space on my desk. I had taken apart wrecked Matchbox cars and rebuilt new ones with pieces from fifteen different cars; built my own slingshots out of surgical tubing; improved the cranks, gearing, and brakes on my own dirt bike; increased the high speed on the fan in my room; and improved on the rate of twist in a Slinky so that it actually would cascade down a series of steps the way the commercial touted. In short, I liked to tinker, and what's more, I had an insatiable need to know and understand how things worked.
    Especially the human body. If buildings and vehicles were interesting, even fascinating, then the human body was an allencompassing obsession. The walls of my room were covered in posters and diagrams demonstrating everything from bone structure and muscular growth to organ systems and the electronic neural pathways of the brain. Because my hands played a large role in educating my mind, by the age of seven I had already dissected and sewn back together two giant frogs, one fish, a neighbor's cat, an armadillo, and a long black snake-all of which were dead, or quickly dying, before I got hold of them.

    At that age, my dissecting could more accurately be described as digging around, but my sewing showed promise. In order to improve, I practiced. I sliced the skin of an orange and then sewed it back together, careful not to spill the juice. When I had mastered oranges, I graduated to French bread, because the skin is delicate, brittle, and tears easily.
    Having seen my work with at least one frog and the neighbor's Siamese cat, Charlie offered me his limp hero, and I set to work reattaching his arm and then forcing the goo back in so it would regain its shape. After I tied my final knot, I painted the stitching with superglue to seal the wound. Ugly, yes, but it worked, and Stretch survived to be a hero another day. I handed him back to Charlie, who yanked and pulled and then said, "Thanks, Stitch." The name stuck, and so did my friendship with Charlie.

     

Chapter 7
    he morning of the last school day before Christmas break in third grade, I was walking past the O'Connors' house thinking about how much I wanted a Red Ryder BB gun when Charlie hopped out of the bushes and told me that Emma had had a "spell" and his folks had taken her to the hospital. I listened to him tell me what had happened, and then I said, "Charlie, I'm not going to school. I'm going to see Emma. What're you gonna do?"
    He looked back toward the house, then down the street toward school, threw his backpack into the bushes and said, "I'm with you."
    We ran all the way to the