Free Wink by Eric Trant Page B

every bit of a foot that still wasn’t enough to make it a snake-hunting knife. He would need at least a machete to hunt snakes, and so Marty ruled out snakes on the handle.
    After that he thought spiders but his father already laid claim to that image, and Marty didn’t like spiders anyway.
    He finally settled on either an owl or a lizard. The owl ate snakes and the lizard ate spiders. Why not both? He rolled the handle in his hand and began carving first the owl. Owls are easy. So are lizards and it didn’t take him long to carve a good likeness of each of them.
    When Marty looked up and wiped the sweat from his eyes, he peeked at the neighbor girl’s window. She had not been there a few minutes before, hadn’t been there an hour ago but she was there now, moderately obstructed through the limbs of the oak tree, but not so much that Marty could not see she was holding a sign with letters and an arrow on it.
    She waved when she saw Marty and pointed at the sign.
    Marty squinted and made out the word Peaches? The arrow pointed toward her back yard, where they had a couple of peach trees and the requisite squirrels that chittered about them. Marty pointed to her peach trees and realized he was pointing with the Bois D’Arc handle.
    Sadie nodded.
    Marty said, “Um, okay,” even though she couldn’t hear him.
    She held up her fingers and signaled okay.
    •
    Sweat covered Marty’s chest and back. He was shirtless. On top of the sweat was a layer of attic dust mixed with fine-powdered Bois D’Arc grains from his sandpaper work. His forearms were the worst and the back of his hands. He didn’t think much of it until he was walking across the back yard toward the fence where Sadie had somehow managed to arrive before him. He felt out-of-place, the way a church mouse might feel after shitting beneath the pulpit.
    Sadie wore shorts and a white shirt with ruffles at the neck and arms and was barefoot because there was no reason for her to wear shoes. Her stickly legs were pulled up close to her chest where she sat resting her chin on her kneecaps. Some of the metal parts of her wheelchair had been painted pink, obviously after-market because Marty could see splattered areas at the corners where some of the spray paint had misted the nylon seating. Flowered stickers stuck to the back of the wheelchair and along the arms and legs.
    Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and Marty realized he had never really looked at Sadie up close. She was the neighbor and he sometimes saw her mom pushing her down the road. He also knew her from school when she wheeled by going to real-class a couple of times a week, and from two years ago when she had her legs and still went to school full-time, but they never spoke. When she came to school he parted with the rest of them so poor Sadie Marsh could wheel down the hall with her head down, seemingly focused on her footing where feet no longer walked.
    Her eyes were greenish-brown and big and until you got close, golden.
    “Hi,” Sadie said.
    “Hi,” Marty said. He waved the piece of Bois D’Arc wood at her. The Bowie knife was in his belt with the busted handle sticking out like a pirate’s sword. He didn’t want to leave anything in the attic anymore, not after last night.
    “What are you doing today?” Sadie asked.
    Marty shrugged. “Carving.”
    “Wood?”
    “Yeah.” Only the hurricane fence separated him from Sadie and Marty handed the piece of wood down to her. The top of her head was just about the height of the fence, near Marty’s sternum.
    Sadie turned it over in her hand and rubbed Marty’s owl carving then his lizard. It was a green gecko, the kind that scaled the sides of the house.
    “It’s nice,” Sadie said. She drew the handle along her palm the way someone might sharpen a blade against an Arkansas stone, pulling it across her palm rather than moving her palm along the wood. “It’s real smooth. You carved these pictures?”
    “Yeah. My uncle taught me