Where You Once Belonged by Kent Haruf Read Free Book Online Page B

over to see what you’re going to do about it.”
    “What the hell is there to do about it?”
    “Well. The paper said somebody named Curtis Harris filed charges against you. That you stole his radio.”
    “That’s a lie. Hell, he wasn’t using it so I just borrowed it for a while. And then I didn’t give it back to him yet.”
    “Are you going to?”
    “Not now.”
    “How come?”
    “Because. I don’t have it no more. The police have it. They took it for evidence.”
    “All right, then. But what do you think’s going to happen?”
    “I already told you: I don’t know. Besides, what difference does it make?”
    “They might kick you out of school. That’s one thing.”
    “I’m sick of school.”
    “How do you know that? I mean, Jesus, you haven’t even been to classes yet.”
    “I’ve been to enough. It’s just talk.”
    I continued to look at him. There were dark bruises on his arms from practicing football and there was a scab on his nose between his eyes. Looking at him, he seemed exactly like a kid who’d fallen off a bicycle, like a great big kid who was now consoling himself by watching television from the living room couch.
    “But listen,” I said. “Think about it for a minute. Isn’t there something we can do about this?”
    He stopped watching TV, briefly. He looked at me. “Yeah,” he said. “You can loan me some money. I missed breakfast. You can do something about that if you want to.”
    So I did. I gave him a couple of dollars. I was glad to do that much for him and was ready to do more, although I couldn’t have said then what it might have been. He folded the bills I gave him and put them away in his jeans pocket. I watched him for a while longer. But when he didn’t say anything more I left. He was still lying on the couch watching somebody else win money in a California studio. That seemed to please him.
    Then on Friday, when his hearing came up, the student judiciary found against him. It was an open-and-shut case and after they had heard the evidence they recommended that he be expelled from school. There had been a number of thefts on campus already that fall. Consequently the administration accepted the students’ recommendation and decided to make an example of him. But it didn’t matter to Jack what they did; he didn’t contest the charges or even defend himself. In fact he didn’t even attend the hearings. Instead that morning he had gone to the Army recruiter on campus and had enlisted; so now he was obligated to two years of military service, and the Army was glad to have him swell their numbers.
    He came over to see me before he went back to Holt. He said he didn’t have to report to boot camp until the end of October and he thought he’d go home in the meantime and work at the elevator and see Wanda Jo Evans. He wasn’t dissatisfied by the turn of events at all.
    “Well,” I said. “Maybe it’s for the best.”
    “Why not?” he said. “I might even learn something in the Army.”
    “Take care, then.”
    “But just a minute. You got any more money?”
    “Probably.”
    “Because I could use something to get home on.”
    S o Jack Burdette went back to Holt County where he was still a hero and where no one knew about Curtis Harris’s radio, or would have cared very much if they had known about it; and then at the end of October he went off to Texas, to boot camp at Fort Bliss. I doubt that the irony of that name occurred to him since he wasn’t one to pay much attention to such things and I don’t suppose the Army is either. Anyway he was there for almost two months. Then I saw him again just after boot camp was finished. Before being reassigned he had come home on leave and I had gone home at semester break. It was Christmastime. Jack looked thinner and harder now, although it might have been just that his head had been shaved; his cropped head made his neck look taller and now his ears stuck out. In any case all the time he was home he insisted