“Okay, okay.”
I head-lifted the bundle, stepped up, and shoved it aside. I pushed away the bundles on either side, having to work slowly because my left arm wasn’t up to much （it’s better now but will never be what it was in my football and baseball days—thanks, Petra, you bitch）。 Radar gave a few more barks, just to hurry me along. I had no problem slipping between the boards I’d laid over the well’s mouth—I had lost a lot of weight during my time in Empis, most of it in Deep Maleen—but I had to wriggle out of the pack first and push it across the floor. By the time I got out, my left arm was singing. Radar popped out after me with disgusting ease. I checked the deep divot Petra’s bite had left, afraid the healing wound might have broken open, but it looked okay. What surprised me was how cold it was in the shed. I could see my breath.
The shed was just as I’d left it. The light I’d seen from below was filtering through the cracks in the sides. I tried the door and found it padlocked shut on the outside. Andy Chen had come through for me. I hadn’t really believed anyone would check on the abandoned backyard shed for me （or my dead body）， but it was still a relief. It meant, however, that I would have to use the sledgehammer. Which I did. One-handed.
Luckily, the boards were old and dry. One cracked on the first blow and broke out on the second, letting in a flood of Illinois daylight… and a fine swirl of snow. With Radar barking encouragement I broke through two more. Rades leaped through the gap and immediately squatted to pee. I swung the sledge one more time and knocked out another long piece of board. I tossed my pack through, turned sideways, and stepped out into sunshine. Also into four inches of snow.
3
Radar bounded across the yard, pausing every now and then to bury her snout and fling snow into the air. It was puppy behavior and made me laugh. I was overheated from my climb up the spiral stairs and my work with the sledge, so by the time I got to the back porch I was shivering. It couldn’t have been more than twenty-five degrees. Add the strong breeze blowing, and the real temperature was probably half that.
I got the spare key from its spot under the mat （which Mr. Bowditch had called the unwelcome mat） and let myself in. The place smelled musty, and it was chilly, but someone—almost certainly my dad—had turned the heat up a little, to keep the pipes from freezing. I remembered seeing an old barncoat in the front closet, and it was still there. Also a pair of galoshes with red woolen socks flopping from the tops. The galoshes were tight on my feet, but I wouldn’t be wearing them long. Just down the hill. The gunbelt and revolver went on the closet shelf. I’d put them back in the safe later… always assuming the safe with its secret stash was still there.
We went out the back, around the house, and through the gate I’d had to climb over that first time, in response to Radar’s howls and Mr. Bowditch’s weak cries for help. That now seemed like at least a century ago. I started to turn toward Sycamore Street Hill, but something caught my eye. In fact I caught my eye. Because it was my face on the phone pole at the intersection of Sycamore and Pine. My Junior Class Photo, it so happened, and the first thing that struck me about it was how young I looked. There’s a kiddie who didn’t know nothing about nothing, I thought. Maybe he believed he did, but nah, nah.
In big red letters above the picture: HAVE YOU SEEN THIS BOY?
In bright red letters below them: CHARLES MCGEE READE, AGE 17.
And below that: Charles “Charlie” Reade disappeared in October of 2013. He is 6’4” and weighs 235 pounds. He was last seen…
Et cetera. I got stuck on two things: how weatherbeaten the poster looked, and how wrong it was about my current weight. I looked around, almost expecting to see Mrs. Richland staring at me with her hand shading her eyes, but it was just Radar and me standing on the salted sidewalk.
Halfway to the house I stopped, caught by a sudden impulse—wild but strong—to turn around. To go back through the gate at 1 Sycamore, around the house, into the shed, down the winding stairs, and finally into Empis, where I would learn a trade and make a life. Apprentice myself to Freed, perhaps, who would teach me to be a sawbones.
Then I thought of that poster and all the others like it, everywhere in town and all over the county, put up by my father and my Uncle Bob and my dad’s sponsor, Lindy. Maybe all his other AA friends, too. If, that was, he hadn’t resumed drinking.
Please God, no.
I started walking again, the buckles of a dead man’s galoshes jingling, and the dead man’s rejuvenated dog at my heel. Trudging up the hill toward me was a little boy in a quilted red jacket and snowpants. He was dragging a sled by a piece of clothesrope. Probably bound for the sliding hill at Cavanaugh Park.