Free The Mary Smokes Boys by Patrick Holland Page A

as a flaw. It made him smile. She was not self-possessed, though some mistook her gestures for self-possession. Her deepest desire was to be possessed by another. He discovered she was incapable of achieving a boast. Try as she might, even a comment on her own desirability sounded like the unartful, uncertain plea of a child to have an adult notice something special about them.
    But they lived in different towns. She was flighty. She stayed in the city through the university year and she had difficult parents. All the boys of the district but Grey had long ago given up on her. Though he was her favourite among the boys west of the mountains, they were not quite involved in a romance. He wondered what she got up to in the city. She assured him he was her favourite here and everywhere else.
    A sedan screamed past on the highway and broke his meditation. Vanessa’s eyes brightened.
    “Did you hear about the man who was killed here last week?”
    “Only that much.”
    Grey had read it in the paper. The man was killed when his car was shouldered off the road by another vehicle and smashed in a ditch. People who had heard the crash suggested shots had been fired, but that was not proven; it may have been tyres blowing. There was no mention in the newspaper report of who the man was or where he was going or coming from; no mention of what motive his attackers might have acted on–if they were attackers. Likely the motives were unknown. It was as though
these things were inessential to the event that belonged to the highway alone: a place where destinations and purposes were irrelevant, where random accidents were the way of things. A place as violent as it was dull and forgettable. Only the departure speed of the vehicle, the location it left the road, and the possibility of two shots being fired were recorded.
    “They’re gone now,” said Vanessa of the possible attackers. She indicated the highway west with a flick of her hand, as though any search for them beyond this point must be futile. “You can’t help but wonder who’s driving around.”
    Grey had not noticed Irene go off by herself and sit down on the side stairs of the Sundowner. She held her chin in her hands and stared across the highway. She was staring at horses that stood sleeping beside the bus. The mountains behind the horses were lost to the dark.
    “Poor kid,” said Vanessa.
    Only then did Grey realise she was not with them. He felt a regrettable relief at not having her in his shadow for the moment. “She acts a little strange though, you must admit. She’s so quiet.”
    “She has no mother–or father,” Grey justified.
    “I heard what one of her schoolmates said to her the other day. What was it … ?’ Vanessa had heard because Grey had told her and he did not feel like hearing it again. “If he had a dog that poor he’d give it away,” she answered herself. “Boys are so awful.”
    In fact what had been said was much worse than that.
    “Do you think it upset her very much? She seems the kind of girl who could get used to it.”
    Grey looked up from his steak pie. Whatever Irene was, she was not a “kind’. He wanted to say her whims were all her own. And the idea of her being teased at school upset him greatly. He had gone to the boy’s father’s house and demanded the man make his son apologize.
    “What’s wrong?’ Vanessa asked him.
    The look on her face showed she had meant nothing at all
by what she said. There was never any malice in her words, however ill-chosen.
    Grey smiled.
    Vanessa loved to talk and Grey was sure it was simply the sound of her own voice that gratified her. He liked the sound of it too and was content to listen. It was a voice that, despite a few trivial, personal insecurities, was certain of the shape of the world. In Vanessa’s conversation, misfortune only possessed the power to affect other people, people beyond her circle. A voice made by the big stone house and mahogany furniture and landscaped