Free The World Made Straight by Ron Rash

skin.
    Travis’s alarm still hadn’t gone off, so in a few minutes Leonard went inside, stood close to where the boy slept. Travis was trying to grow a mustache, but the fine blond hairs on his upper lip reminded Leonard of wisps on a baby’s head. The bruise on the boy’s left cheek was a mere dull-yellow tinge now, nothing like last week when purple stained his face like a birthmark. That first night he’d shown up, Travis had told Leonard about his father slapping him. The boy also volunteered what had really happened to his foot. Probably nothing more than an attempt to gain sympathy, Leonard suspected. No good could come from the boy being here, especially if Carlton Toomey found out, which was why Leonard had driven to the Toomeys’ farmhouse last night to get his monthly quota of pills early.
    He spoke the boy’s name, and Travis’s eyes opened.
    â€œYour alarm didn’t go off,” Leonard said.
    â€œAin’t it Sunday?”
    â€œI guess so,” Leonard said, though he wasn’t sure since no calendar hung on the trailer wall.
    Travis raised to a sitting position and brushed the long blond hair from his gray eyes. The boy’s face was all jut and angle, as though the features had been outlined but not yet filled in. A lanky build but strength in the shoulders and arms, the muscles wiry and tough like wisteria vines. He’d probably grow another inch or two in height, Leonard figured, maybe reach six feet.
    If he lived that long. After their first encounter, Leonard had written Travis off as just another smirking loud-mouthed punk, no different from the majority of adolescents he had dealings with. Casualties of his own prideful recklessness, they ran vehicles into trees and bridge abutments, crippled themselves in rock quarries, got knifed or shot in roadhouse parking lots. Easy enough to argue that Leonard performed a public service by selling them alcohol and drugs, merely speeding up the process of natural selection.
    But Travis had shown him something besides arrogance and recklessness. The boy wanted to know things. His first night in the trailer Travis had asked for the book with the Shelton Laurel chapter. Leonard hadn’t felt like searching through the boxes filling the bedroom closet, so the boy had pulled a thick tome about Gettysburg off the shelves instead. Travis had finished that volume last night and asked again about the other book.
    â€œThe book with the Shelton Laurel chapter, that’s it on the coffee table,” Leonard said.
    Travis sat on the couch and opened the big brown hardback to the chapter Leonard had marked. Thirty minutes passed before he looked up for anything other than a word to be defined.
    â€œSo they just shot them like dogs,” the boy said.
    â€œThe lucky ones. The rest got bayoneted.”
    â€œWhy’d they kill a twelve-year-old?”
    â€œBecause a nit makes a louse, or so one of the soldiers stated.” Leonard paused. “You know that saying?”
    â€œI heard my daddy use it,” Travis said, “but I never knew exactly what it meant.”
    â€œA nit is a louse’s immature offspring. The soldier was saying kill the offspring before they get big enough to kill you.”
    â€œSounds like you know more about it than is in this book,” Travis said. He closed the book slowly, carefully, respecting not just the physical book but its contents, Leonard believed. “They just left them in that ditch to rot?”
    â€œYes,” Leonard said. “It was their own kin who buried them the next day.”
    The boy slipped on his shirt and stood up, left leg bearing most of the weight. He ate a bowl of cereal while Leonard drank a second cup of coffee. Travis ate quickly, his head down, free arm cradling the bowl.
    â€œI want to go see where it happened, where they buried them afterward,” Travis said when he’d finished. “I want to go this