Free The Obsidian Blade by Pete Hautman Page B

Inn?”
    “Yeah. Flipping burgers.” He carefully placed a few raspberries around the rims of the salad plates and set them on the table. “’Course, nobody ever got food like this at the Drop.”
    “How come you left Hopewell?”
    “You kidding me? Why would anybody stay in Hopeless?”
    “What were you like when you were my age?” Tucker asked.
    Kosh thought for a moment. “I had a minibike. Later on I had a dirt bike. I mostly hung out with Ronnie Becker and some other kids.”
    “What was my dad like?”
    “When I was your age? Adrian must’ve been about twenty-four. Had his nose in a Bible most of the time.”
    “So he was always religious?”
    “Pretty much, especially after our dad died.”
    “Was Mom his girlfriend then?”
    “That came later.”
    “Were you, like, a juvenile delinquent?”
    “I got in my share of trouble. Why? You considering that as a career path?”
    “I heard Ronnie Becker got caught growing marijuana behind their barn. Were you guys, like, drug dealers?”
    Kosh laughed. “Ronnie was growing ditch weed and selling it to college students in Mankato. I had nothing to do with it.”
    “Did anything weird happen when you lived in Hopewell?”
    “Weird like what?”
    “I don’t know. Weird.” He was thinking about the disk, and the ghosts.
    “There was this one time. . . . I was seventeen.” Kosh put the salads on the table. “I was downtown when I heard this banging noise coming from the old boarded-up hotel, and all of a sudden this guy kicks his way out, right through the front door. Somehow he’d gotten stuck inside. He comes stumbling out onto the street, a big bearded guy dressed in a long black wool coat and a black hat even though it was about ninety degrees out, and he was talking really fast in some language I’d never heard before. I figured he was drunk. He runs right up to me and starts tugging at his beard and yelling gibberish, and I was like,
Huh?
Then he throws up his hands and takes off running down the road.”
    “Then what happened?”
    “He just ran off. I figured from the hat and coat that he was Amish or something, or maybe one of those Jews like they have in New York that dress like the Amish. Except the Friedmans were the only Jews in Hopewell, and they dressed just like everybody else, and the nearest Amish people lived way over in Harmony. Either way, nobody could figure out what the guy was doing in Hopewell, or how he’d got in the hotel.”
    “What happened to him?”
    “Chuck Beamon said he saw him running across his soybean field being chased by a pig, but you couldn’t trust anything Chuck said. As far as I know, nobody ever saw him again.” He looked at Tucker. “That weird enough for you?”
    “Mom told me she was once grabbed by a couple of guys dressed in black. They stuck something in her mouth, then ran off.”
    Kosh nodded. “She told me about that. She said it was a dream.”
    “What was it like when your dad died?”
    Kosh didn’t speak for a very long time, then he said, “I was ten. It was bad.”
    “What was he like?”
    “He was . . . well, he was my
dad.
What can you say about your dad at that age? He was the center of the universe. After he was gone . . . it was like somebody tore the heart right out of me.”
    Tucker didn’t know what to say to that. Kosh put the potpies on the table. They sat down. Kosh picked at his salad. Tucker tasted one of the nasturtium blossoms. Peppery.
    “I heard you ran off with Ronnie Becker,” he said.
    “We took off about the same time, if that’s what you mean. Hung out for a while, then went our separate ways.”
    “Did you and Dad have some kind of fight?”
    Kosh’s mouth tightened. “It was a long time ago. Let it go. I did.” He pointed his fork at Tucker’s plate. “Shut up and eat.”
    Tucker dug into his potpie. It was delicious. He set down his fork.
    “What’s the matter? You don’t like it?” Kosh said.
    Tucker’s eyes were burning; he set his jaw,