Free Lunch-Box Dream by Tony Abbott Page A

stupid little words: “Jerk!” “Shut up!” “Give me that!” “I hate you all.”
    But he didn’t hate them all, did he? He hated something else. Being in the car for days. Being in the bewildering South. Being surrounded by death, everywhere death. Being himself. He felt ashamed, but he didn’t know why. Ricky was a jerk. He was a jerk. That girl in the rug with nothing on. But there was something else he couldn’t name.
    Looking up the hill, Bobby couldn’t stop it coming, the fall of bodies at him and on him. He felt them falling off the hill directly at him, moving through his stinging chest and out his back, taking his breath away, taking little bits of him when they fell. They came on like the whistle of a coming train, the piercing shrill call. The coming of the train in the night, the train passing, the departure of the train, its slow vanishing into the night, leaving him utterly empty of everything but pain.
    I’m sick, he thought to himself, his cheeks hot and dripping. I’m sick and I hate all of this! It was all he could think of, there were no other words, but he knew they weren’t right, they weren’t all of it, but he could find nothing else except to run growling away into the dark trees.
    With garbled curses, no more than animal breaths, he gripped his wooden knife and jabbed it hard into the ground, carving a circle of dirt deeply into it. He pried it up and out, a cone of moist clay tipping over onto the ground, a fresh blossom of earth. Looking down the slope over the car park, he saw his mother marching Ricky tenderly back to the store, her arm cradled around his shoulders, his head bent low. She clutched the stolen bullet in her other hand as if it were a bomb, its fuse the dangling yellow drawstring. Bobby’s eyes fixed on the ground between his knees, and he snapped the knife in half and in half again and dropped the pieces into the hole. Then he replaced the clod of dirt and stamped it down flat, stamped it, stamped it, then he stumbled slowly to the car where his grandmother sat not sleeping but wordless, staring away, with her tilted head against the window.

Twenty
Jacob
    The sun is going down behind the trees, but the air is still warm like a blanket over your face. That’s okay. It’s still cooler than Atlanta. It’s the water always moving in the creeks and the wind in the trees and not so much pavement that makes it cooler.
    A person needs time on his own sometimes. It was just too small and hot in that kitchen, the two of them singing and cooking, Cora and Aunt Irene. So I left them jibber-jabbering at the counter, and see where I am. Fishing was all right today but too short, since Frank had to look for a job, and I want to sit on the bank some more. See, I have his best pole and my box of baits.
    The road is getting long shadows across it now the sun is leaving. Some birds singing. Fewer now than before. Is this the road I walked with Uncle Frank and Aunt Olivia that first day after we left Hershel at the station? It should be the same, but it doesn’t look the same now. Maybe that’s because of the sun going down behind the trees and shade coloring the road. Or maybe there was a road I forgot to turn on.
    I don’t know why Uncle Frank got so mad at me that way. Everyone is always getting mad at me.
    â€œYou shut up and you stop that,” he said. His eyes were small like buttons. “You just stop that!” He yelled it.
    No. I do remember. It was because of something I said about Mrs. and her red lips and her yellow car. That I would drive it someday soon and she would let me. Was that all I said? I say too much. Never mind. It’s only Dalton and I’m from Atlanta. Cora says things to me all the time. No one heard me anyway except some tangle of people at the market counter. I didn’t say anything bad, did I?
    A little farther to the creek. I think I’ll sing to keep