Читать книгу Palaces - Simon Jacobs - Страница 8

I.

RICHMOND, INDIANA

THE VERGE OF DECEMBER: OUT BACK, AFTER THE show, a late-high school kid native to this town with his ears stretched to the size of clementines, Casey, shrieks and skips back and forth in the middle distance, just slowly and deliberately enough to let each firecracker hit him.

Beyond, skies like you don’t see except in the middle of flat states like Indiana, where the only visible landscape—here, the tops of distant pine trees—is too far back to seem like real life, to be taken seriously, and this kid flickering up from below, a giggling blot on the horizon.

A buddy of yours, I think the frenetic banjo player, offers me a firecracker in the spirit of camaraderie, of inviting a stranger into their midst. “John, right?” he says. I don’t like that he knows my name, that he got it from elsewhere. I hold the firecracker in my hands like a priceless flute.

“Y’all just pull it,” he says. The Southern accent is fake.

Instead, I pass it off to you, unfamiliar at this point but standing incidentally beside me, a presence I haven’t fully processed yet, and shove my hands into my pockets. You take it like a favor and, with a practiced hand, fire away.

It cracks out of your fingers and hits Casey’s bright red leather jacket in a splash of tiny sparks—he yelps and stumbles to the side, the frosted grass crunching beneath his feet. Someone calls out: “Make him dance!”

We watch the display of loud, harmless explosions as your friends let loose, all the ostensible rage and frenzy from an hour before now dispersed into something that seems almost quaint and wholesome, edging on nostalgia. I stand stock-still and feel sweat trickling down my sides, starting and starting.

From that night on, we never stopped running.