Beginning Read Online Free

up. He then went down to a knee.
    â€œCome on now,” Bub said. “It ain’t that bad.”
    The pain crawled through Aggie’s head, down his spine. He paused and listened to the thunder. Saw another flash of lightning. Ava moved to Aggie and knelt beside him. “You all right? Move your hands and let me see.”
    Aggie slid his hands apart and there was a half-inch cut on top of his head, the blood in a small puddle and clumping his hair. She set the hammer on the concrete and pulled a wadded tissue from her sweater pocket.
    â€œHe’s bleeding,” Ava said.
    â€œWell,” Bub said. “He shouldn’t have made fun of me.”
    More lightning flashed around them. The echo of a single gunshot came from somewhere and cut through the wind.
    Aggie pushed Ava’s hand away and looked up at Bub.
    â€œAw hell,” Bub said. “We’ll call it even, Snake Man. I ain’t even gonna hold what you did to my cousin against you. God knows how many kids she’s got anyhow that she don’t know where they came from. Anybody who plays with snakes while shooting his mouth off about hellfire and damnation has probably got a hard head in the first place. Probably dented my damn hood.”
    Bub laughed again, a short and patronizing chuckle. “So we’re good and even,” he mumbled. And then he bent over to pick up the jumper cables that Aggie had dropped.
    â€œMaybe,” Aggie whispered.
    Bub looked up just in time to see the hammer coming at him, Aggie’s fist tight around the handle and fire in his eyes and Bub opened his mouth to shout out but instead fell silent and stunned in a heap onto the concrete. Aggie pounced and busted his head with three more quick thrusts and then came the blood and there went the eyes.
    It was over in an instant. Life there and then gone. And Aggie’s pain dissipated in the charge of adrenaline and satisfaction of vengeance.
    He stood up and looked at Ava, still on her knees where she had knelt to care for him. Her mouth agape. Her eyes hollow. The hammer hung from his hand, and he swung it back and forth as if it were some lethal pendulum. The first heavy, hard drops of rain fell and smacked around them like nickels.
    â€œYou have lost someone,” he said. “Or, you have found someone.”

6
    COHEN HAD WATCHED the road for a couple of hours and decided if they were coming back, it wouldn’t be today. He sat in a beach chair on the porch outside his front door. A stadium cup filled with bourbon and Coke was next to the chair and the shotgun lay across his lap. He watched the storm gathering and he listened to the gunfire that had appeared not long after the station wagon had driven away. He couldn’t tell which direction it was coming from underneath the wind and thunder but he knew it was close. Too close.
    A cluster of shots. Then a pause and a single shot. Two swallows of the big drink and then three more shots. A roar of thunder and a flash of silent lightning and he got up from the chair and walked out to the driveway. He wore rubber boots and he splashed through the water that stood in the yard around the short brick house. When he got to the Jeep he opened the glove box and pulled out a stack of letters.
    He returned to the porch and leaned the shotgun against the wall and then he went through the letters one more time. They were months old. The earliest came from the State of Mississippi and made an offer for his land and property. He had ignored it and then came another with a slightly less ridiculous offer but still a monetary sum that would make his father roll over in his grave. Probably less than what he paid for all this land fifty years ago, Cohen had thought as he laughed at the offer per acre. Then came the letter from the US government that repeated the offer except that it used more emphatic language. Threatened that this was the best opportunity he was going to have. Promised that this was