Free As Good As Gone (9781616206000) by Larry Watson Page A

to ask him what it will take for Will to become a cowboy. Maybe he’ll ask his grandfather if, when Will’s parents return from Missoula, he can go live with his grandfather for the rest of the summer. After the latest trip down to the river with his friends, Will feels he has to get out of Gladstone.
    The beer that Will stole never got very cold, and when Will took his turn sipping from the can, the warm, bitter foam bubbled astringently back into his throat and he began to cough.
    â€œFor Christ’s sake,” Stuart said, “whiskey’s supposed to do that to you, not beer!”
    When they lit fat, cigar-­sized chunks of driftwood and attempted to smoke them, Will had to puff while trying—impossibly—not to breathe through his nose. If dog shit could be set on fire, it would smell, Will was certain, like burning driftwood. They waded through a waist-­high channel—shrieking when the icy water hit their genitals—hoping to get to the very edge of a sandbar where they could cast their lures into the river’s main current. Before they reached their destination, however, they came upon a pothole teeming with frogs.
    The hole, shallow and not much bigger around than a kitchen table, must have been created when the river shrugged and left a tiny pond behind. A good rain upriver would probably allow its warm, stagnant water to join the rest of the river, but for now it—and its frogs—had nothing to do but steam under the summer sun.
    Will wasn’t sure whose idea it was or if it even began with an idea, but soon they were picking up lengths of driftwood and killing frogs. Someone flipped a frog in the air with a stick, someone else took a baseball swing at a flying or leaping frog, and soon dead or dying amphibians were everywhere, the pink loops of their intestines littering the sand and their blood swirling in the water. Will didn’t actually kill any frogs himself; when he pretended to spear them with the forked end of his stick, he was actually prodding them toward the water, the sanctuary most of them seemed to seek. But this ruse didn’t work for long. Bobby Mueller started beating the pond’s surface, yelling, “Frog soup! Frog soup!” as he flailed away. At that point, Will simply backed away from the boys. They didn’t even notice he was no longer with them.
    And yet it was not until after all this—the taste of warm beer, the stench of burning driftwood, the sight of the blood-­slaughter of frogs—not until they were walking their bikes through the soft sand on the way back up to River Road, that Will’s disgust with those boys, boys he couldn’t find a way not to call his friends, became so great that he determined there was no other solution for him but to leave the place where he had lived all his life.
    Stuart turned his bike around from the head of the line and came back to Will. “Hey, Sidey,” Stuart said, “have you come up with some kind of deal so’s we can spy on your sister?”
    â€œDeal . . . ?”
    â€œYou know. So’s we can watch her naked in her bedroom or in the biffy even.”
    â€œBiffy?”
    â€œI got to tell you, the bathroom would be cool because when I was jerking off last night that’s what I was thinking about. I was in your bathroom with the shower curtain closed almost all the way, but when your sister came in and started to strip I was watching her the whole time. Then she opened the curtain and seen me there, and she wanted it bad as me, so I fucked her right there, the both of us slipping around like . . . like . . .”
    â€œLike frogs?”
    â€œFrogs! Shit, Sidey, what’s with you? Frogs . . . Hell no, not frogs. Do you even know what people look like when they screw?”
    â€œWe don’t have a shower curtain,” Will said. “We have a sliding door.”
    â€œA sliding door? A
sliding doo
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? Jesus Christ, I was just