Free The Thicket by Joe R. Lansdale

business, child.”
    “I am sixteen,” I said.
    “Good for you,” he said. “May you make seventeen.”
    He said all this without so much as removing his eye from the telescope. Then he did, and said, “Like to take a look? Just put your eye to it, and leave your hands away from it so as not to destroy my setting. I have it lined up just right.”
    I went over and took a look. What I saw was a lot of moon. There were shadows on the moon. I said, “What are the shadows?”
    “Craters. Mountains, perhaps. I read a story in a magazine of recent, or recent to me. A man in Hinge Gate, at the general store, used to save magazines for me that did not sell. He gave them to me. In that one story I read, a man goes to Mars by just holding out his arms and wishing he were there. He went, and he saw a strange world with strange beings and monsters. I really enjoyed that story, and standing here one night, with Mars, not the moon, in my scope, I considered doing the same. Then it occurred to me, what if it worked and I went? It would be worse than here, all those monsters he wrote about, and me out there on Mars, and it being dry and no trees. I liked reading it, but decided I would not like living it after all, having enough problems without compounding them with Martians. Besides, I have long ago given up on wishes. Perhaps there is something out there on those worlds. Something like us, or something better. I dream sometimes of a world not where I am the height of others but where everyone is my height. But that is a dream, not a wish. I know better. Wishes do not come true, and there is no such thing as true love and a happy hunting ground when we cash in our chips.”
    “I don’t know. I believe that,” I said, standing back from the telescope. “About true love, anyway. I think it exists, and there’s someone for everyone, and you just got to wait till they come along.”
    “That so?”
    “My folks were much in love.”
    “Were?”
    “They died.”
    “How did they die?”
    “There was an illness, and it got them both,” I said, being careful not to describe their death too clearly, for fear Shorty might think I was carrying smallpox around with me, ready to cough it on him. “That’s why Lula and I were with our grandpa, heading toward Kansas.”
    “And he left you all that farmland to sell?”
    “He did. He didn’t plan on coming back home.”
    “He was correct in that assumption.”
    “I guess he was,” I said.
    “Your folks got along, but that does not determine in my mind true love, or love at first sight, or someone waiting in the wings for you. Here I am, high in my forty years, and I have yet to find a woman with long legs who is ready to let a dwarf nestle between them on a regular basis unless she is paid for the service. So true love? I do not think so. There can be a getting used to, I believe, and some might call that love, but I do not believe in love at first sight, or the ordained love that I have read of in books. You might make something called love between the two of you, like creating a stew, but I do not accept that love is lying in wait for you, except in your mind. Lust at first sight, or availability that might become love, but nothing ordained.”
    “Seems like a sad way to be,” I said. “Just figuring everything is by accident, or of your own making, and there is no divine plan.”
    “That is what you call it? A divine plan?” Shorty shook his head. “As for it being sad, well, that is the nature of man, I believe. As for sad about there not being true love and not thinking it is all preordained, quite the contrary. It avoids a lot of disappointment and false expectations.”
    “I believe God has plans for all of us,” I said.
    “Set plans?”
    “Yes.”
    “Predestination?”
    “Yes.”
    “So the tornado coming along and sinking the ferry, your grandfather shot and killed, your sister nabbed and taken away, and you nearly drowned are all part of his plan?”
    “I