"THE PENNY, Work in Progress" — © 1987 - 1999 by Charles Dobie

THE PENNY : Page 6

The boy picked up the guitar and held it the way Bradley had shown him. He tried to press his fingers straight down to make the notes, but it hurt even more than before. It was then that he knew he would never play the guitar, just like he would never fly. But maybe, if he could only get Bradley to show him again, he could learn to fart with his armpits.

The boy heard his mother and grandmother in the garden, laughing and talking with the new neighbours, and he wondered if he should tell them that Bradley was asleep on the floor, but he thought Bradley might get mad at him if he did. He knew that boys as old as Bradley could do almost anything they wanted, so he would just have to let him sleep.

The boy picked up his favourite Hardy Boy book: Hunting For Hidden Gold. He bet he'd read it a hundred zillion times. It was all about a lost gold mine and how the Hardy Boys found it and helped their father catch some robbers, and stuff like that. He would read out loud to Bradley until he woke up.

He had read only a few words when he heard a grunt. Then Bradley turned over, and the stool turned over too, because their legs were still tangled. Slowly, Bradley got his legs out of the stool, then used it to pull himself to his feet. The boy was horrified to see that he was crying.

Bradley wiped his mouth with his hand, and a thick rope of drool clung to his thumb as he staggered and flailed his arms to grab the stool again. He spoke like his tongue was too big for his mouth: "Gotta go home."

The boy nodded, stunned.

"An' don't you tell. Don't you tell nobody 'bout what happened, or you'll be sorry."

"But . . . . but I didn't do nothin'! What did I do?"

"Just don't tell nobody, y'hear? If y'do . . . ." Bradley clenched a wet, trembling fist and pressed it against the boy's nose. "Gonna tell?"

"No!" wailed the boy. "I won't tell. I'm sorry for what I did. I'll never tell no one! I promise!"

The front door of the little blue house burst open, and a fat woman in black slacks and a tight, white sweatshirt charged onto the porch. She screamed shrilly in French, and aimed a swat at the girl, who ducked easily out of the way. The woman looked up and down the street, then glared suspiciously at the rusty, blue Honda in front of her house.

He waved at her, then drove to the end of the street, which as in the photograph, still ended at a lush, grassy field rolling downhill to the river.

The river! It looked more like a drainage ditch; choked with weeds, hardly wide enough for two canoes to pass. He craned his neck to look for their old boathouse, but saw only some rotten posts sticking out of the water. The boathouses were all gone. All of them. The whole row. Didn't people around here own boats anymore? Didn't they go fishing? On picnics? Were the fish all dead? Had the crud from the mine finally killed them? Wasn't there someone around here he could ask? Why hadn't he ever learned French? Maudit colis, indeed!

He backed the car around. Time to leave. Too depressing. He waved to the woman again as he passed; the children were nowhere to be seen.

He found the heat in the car intolerable. He drove slowly up the hill toward the Anglican church, comparing each house with its former image in the photograph, each resurrecting a cascade of long forgotten sound and smell and light and heat, until a host of grubby, phantom children swarmed like dreams before his eyes . . . .

THE END

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"THE PENNY, Work in Progress" — © 1987 - 1999 by Charles Dobie