Free Steal You Away by Niccolò Ammaniti Page B

fields and pushed the bicycle off course and Pietro had trouble keeping it straight and, when a gap opened among the clouds, the moon cast a yellow glow over the fields which stretched far away, right down to the Aurelia. Black shadows chased one another across the silver grass.
    Pietro pedalled, breathed in and sang between his teeth: ‘Bir-dy bir-dy do not fly away! Ta ra …’
    He turned right, went down a rough track across the fields and entered Serra, a little hamlet.
    He shot through it.
    At night he didn’t like that place at all. It was scary.
    Serra: six ramshackle old houses. A warehouse that was turned into a farmers’ club a few years ago. The farm labourers and shepherds of the area go there to pickle their livers and play briscola. There’s a shop, too, but it’s always empty. And a church that was built in the Seventies. A parallelepiped of reinforced concrete with slits instead of windows and a silo-like bell tower at the side. On the façade a mosaic of the risen Christ is crumbling to pieces and the steps below the door are strewn with gilded tesserae. Kids use them as ammunition for their catapults. A dim lamp in the middle of the square, another on the street and the two windows of the farmers’ club. Such are the illuminations of Serra.
    ‘Lit-tle phea-sant do not fly away … Na na na …’
    It was a like a ghost town in a Western.
    Those narrow lanes and the shadows of the houses looming menacingly over the road, that gate banging in the wind and a dog barking itself hoarse behind another gate.
    He cut across the square and came out onto the road again. He changed gear and pushed harder on the pedals, breathing rhythm ically in and out. The light from his lamp lit a few metres of road, and then there was only darkness and sounds: the wind in the olive trees, his own breathing and the tyres on the wet asphalt.
    He’d soon be home now.
    He should be able to get there before his father did and avoida scolding. He only hoped he didn’t meet him driving home on the tractor. When he was too drunk he would stay at the club till closing time, snoring on a plastic chair by the pinball machine, then climb onto his tractor and drive home.
    In the distance, about a hundred metres away, three dim lights were zigzagging towards him. They vanished and reappeared.
    The sound of laughter.
    Bicycles.
    ‘Lit-tle wild …’
    Who can it be, at this time of night?
    He slowed down.
    ‘… boar do not run …’
    Nobody goes out cycling at this time, except …
    ‘… away …’
    … them .
    Goodbye record.
    No. It’s not them …
    They were advancing slowly. Calmly.
    ‘ HEH HEH HEEEEEH HEH HEH HEEEEEH HEH HEH HEH ’
    It’s them .
    That stupid laugh, as piercing as a fingernail on a blackboard and as stuttering as the bray of a donkey, odious, out of place and forced …
    Bacci …
    His breath died in his throat.
    … Bacci .
    Only that idiot Bacci laughed like that. Because to laugh like that you had to be an idiot like him.
    It’s them. Oh shit …
    Pierini.
    Bacci.
    Ronca.
    The last thing in the world he needed at that moment.
    Those three wanted to see him dead. And the ridiculous thing was that Pietro didn’t know why.
    Why do they hate me? I’ve haven’t done anything to them .
    If he’d known what reincarnation was, he might have believed that those three boys were evil spirits punishing him for some wrong he had committed in another life. But Pietro had learned not to worry too much about why misfortune dogged him so persistently.
    After all, it makes no difference in the end. If you’re going to take a beating, you take it and that’s that .
    At the age of twelve Pietro had decided not to waste too much time wondering about the reason for things. It only made things worse. Wild boar don’t wonder why woods burn and pheasants don’t wonder why hunters shoot.
    They just run.
    It’s the only thing to do. In cases like this you have to get away faster than the speed of light and if you