Free The Second Son by Bob Leroux

Buster would take off, every time, leaping off my bed and onto Andrew’s. When I would get fed up and try to hold him back he would only start barking. Then it was my mother’s turn to get fed up, finally banning the dog from the bedroom. Andrew blamed me, claiming I did it on purpose — that if I couldn’t have the dog, he wouldn’t either. He was wrong. I just wanted to be first with someone.
    Andrew didn’t have to worry about that. It wasn’t just the dog that came easily to him. He was altar-boy good, Andrew was. If he wasn’t doing his schoolwork, he was performing his church duties, or helping our dad down at the store. It’s not that he was perfect — he just wanted to be. And when he couldn’t be, he took it hard. Part of the trouble was that big imagination of his. He’d get a picture in his head of how everything would go and he’d expect it all to work out, just like he had planned.
    I remember one Christmas, when he was eight and I was seven, he got a pair of skis for his big present. Since there wasn’t enough snow yet to use them, he did pretend-skiing on the carpet in the living room — until Mom got mad and chased us out to the front lawn. Then a good six inches of snow fell on a Friday night. The next morning he dragged me out of bed and made me hurry up my breakfast. There was a decent hill in the farmer’s field down the road from our house, and I was supposed to accompany him with my sled. We were out on the front porch and he was strapping those skis to his galoshes when I asked, “How’re you gonna get down the steps with those things?”
    He was beaming with energy and confidence. I can still see that big smile and those bright blue eyes, with that lock of blond hair escaping the edge of his toque. “Don’t worry, I’ve got it all figured out.”
    “But — ”
    “Just wait and see,” he said. “It was in that book Mom got me about skiing.” He had me there. I wasn’t even reading yet and he was soaking up everything in print that came into the house. Well, there must have been something in that book about how to go sideways, one step at a time. He even made it over the snowbanks on either side of the road, and across to the pasture. I was impressed. Then we hit the wire fence.
    I looked up at that fence, and down at those long boards tied to his feet. “You can’t climb a fence with those things on. You’ll have to take ’em off.”
    “I’ll never get these crazy straps back on. My hands’ll be frozen.”
    He had a point about those straps. Still, I couldn’t see how he’d do it. “You think you can climb in those skis?”
    “I figured it out, you’ll see.”
    I’m sure he had. He had likely been lying awake for a week, planning this all out, picturing himself getting from the porch and over the fence to the pasture, then flying down the hill with the greatest of ease. That’s why I was along, to witness his triumph. Of course he couldn’t get over that fence. He tried for half an hour, damning the skis and damning the fence. Every time he got one foot partway up, he would slip back down again as he tried to swing the second leg up and got hooked in the wire. And each time goddamn this and goddamn that would start all over again. That’s the only time you ever heard Andrew swear, when he really lost his temper.
    “C’mon,” I coaxed him, “just take ’em off. It’s not that cold. I’ll help you.”
    “No,” he fumed, “I can do this myself!”
    Well, he couldn’t. And he yelled and he swore until the skis fell off his feet. Then he cursed them all to hell and threw them halfway across the road back toward our place. That was Andrew. If it didn’t work out the way he had planned, he wouldn’t do it. And that temper. He got so mad at those skis I thought he was going to break them in half. He finally threw them under the porch and wouldn’t look at them for weeks. Me, I snuck them out of there a few times, put them on after I got over the fence,