Pokrewne

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Barbara Steiner [The Photogra The Photographer (retail) (epub
Barbara Brooke [Glimmers 01] Glimmers (epub)
Barbara Ann Wright [Katya & S A Kingdom Lost [Bold Strokes FF
Barbara Hambly [Benjamin Janu Dead Water (v5.0) (epub)
Barbara Nadel [Cetin Ikmen 16 Body Count (epub)
Barbara Levenson [Mary Magrud Outrageous October (epub)
Bright Sided How Positive Thi Barbara Ehrenreich
Barbara Monajem [Bayou Gavott Sunrise in a Garden of Love
Barbara Speak [Flawlessly Bro Fearing Regret (epub)
Barbara Seranella [Munch Manc Unwanted Company (epub)

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.“It’s all mushy,” she said, tossing the gooey candy into the drainage ditch.It made a ploink noise and disappeared beneath the muddy water.“What were you doing up there, anyways?” the oldest boy said.Popeye shrugged.“Just looking.”“Ain’t you ever seen a motor home before?”“Not one like that.” Popeye looked over at the shiny, tilted motor home.“At least, not up close,” he added.“It’s a Holiday Rambler,” the boy said.A Holiday Rambler?Popeye loved the sound of that.“You on vacation?” he asked.“Heck, no,” the boy said.“That’s where we live.”“All the time?”The boy nodded.“All the time.”Popeye had never heard anything so glorious.This gang of scruffy kids lived in that silver motor home with the howling coyote and the lightning bolts.“Why’d you come to Fayette?” he said.Elvis shrugged.“Took a wrong turn.”“Where’d you come from?”“Come from all over.”Popeye remembered one of Velma’s vocabulary words.nomad: noun; a wandererPopeye tried to imagine being a nomad in a Holiday Rambler instead of waking up every livelong day in the same old place where nothing ever happened.“You wanna be in our club?” the girl asked.The boy whirled around and yelled, “I’m the inviter of this club!” He punched her in the arm with a knuckle, making her jump around and holler.Loud.When she was done hollering, she kicked him in the shin with the metal toe of her tap shoe.Then they scuffled around in the gravel road for a bit, calling each other names and yanking hair until the girl held her arms up in the air and made peace signs and hollered, “Truce!”The boy turned to Popeye.“You wanna be in our club?” he said.“What club?”“The Spit and Swear Club.”“What’s that?”“A club where you spit and swear,” the boy said, tossing his head back and spitting in the ditch.All of the other kids spat in the ditch.Popeye spat in the ditch.Then the boy let loose with a string of the most amazing and wonderful swearwords, and all the other kids did the same until the air was filled with the swearingest words Popeye had ever heard.He had always thought his uncle Dooley was pretty good at swearing, but these kids made Dooley look like a harp-strumming angel.So Popeye joined in, calling swearwords out into the steamy air beside the ditch.That seemed to please the oldest boy.He looked solemnly at Popeye and said, “Okay, you can be in our club.”Then he pointed at the other kids one by one.“Calvin, Prissy, Walter, Willis, Shorty.” He jabbed a thumb at himself and said, “Elvis.”Popeye jabbed a thumb at himself and said, “Popeye.”All the kids started hooting and hollering and poking each other with their elbows and holding their sides and saying, “Popeye?”Popeye’s face grew hot.Elvis ignored the other kids and slapped a hand on Popeye’s shoulder.“I’m making you senior vice president,” he said.“Hey!” Calvin hollered.“I’m senior vice president.”“Not anymore, you ain’t,” Elvis said.Calvin clamped his mouth shut tight and glared at Elvis.Popeye didn’t want to make Calvin any madder than he already was, so he tried hard to keep his face serious and not all smiley like he was feeling inside.He had started this day as a fly-staring, clockwatching, bored boy.And now here he was, senior vice president of the Spit and Swear Club.4POPEYE SAT on the side of the road and waited.The door of the motor home stayed shut.The curtains stayed drawn.No sounds came from inside.“Guess it’s too early,” he said to Boo.Boo’s tail brushed back and forth in the weeds, still damp with the morning dew.Popeye wanted to see inside that motor home more than anything.The day before, right after he had become senior vice president of the Spit and Swear Club, a window of the motor home had slid open and a woman had called out, “Y’all get on in here,” and all those kids had gone tumbling inside without so much as a goodbye, leaving Popeye to spend the rest of the day alone.Bored.Again.So first thing this morning he had dashed out to wait.“What in the name of sweet Bernice in heaven is that?”Popeye looked up to see his uncle Dooley strolling down the road toward him.Dooley hadn’t seen the stuck-in-the-mud motor home yet.He had slept on the couch all day yesterday and then tried to get his car started about a million times before he gave up and went out back to his trailer to sleep some more.“It’s a Holiday Rambler,” Popeye said.Dooley took his baseball cap off, scratched his head, and let out a whistle.“That thing is some kinda stuck,” he said, examining the big tire sunk deep in the mud.“Yep.” Popeye looked over at the leaning motor home.“It’s a vicissitude,” he said, “getting stuck in the mud like that.”Dooley probably didn’t have much to say about a vicissitude, so he said, “Anybody in there?”“Yep.”“Who?”“A bunch of kids,” Popeye said.“They live in there.”Just then a rattletrap of a car came bouncing down the road and jerked to a stop beside them, sending out a spray of dirt and gravel.Dooley said, “See ya,” and climbed in the backseat with a couple of other guys, and the car drove off, leaving a trail of black smoke behind it.The door of the motor home swung open with a bang.Elvis stomped down the step and walked right past Popeye with his fists jammed into his pockets and his hair flopping over his eyes.Popeye jumped up.“Where you going?”Elvis glanced at him and kept going, right up the middle of the road.Walter (or maybe it was Willis) hollered from a window of the motor home, “Mama said you better get back here!”Elvis shook his fist in the air.Every now and then he hauled off and kicked a piece of gravel so hard he made an oomph noise.“What’s wrong?” Popeye hurried along beside him.Boo trotted behind them with his tongue hanging out, panting.“Calvin is a hog-stinkin’ sack of nothin’,” Elvis said.A hog-stinkin’ sack of nothin’?That was as good an insult as Popeye had heard in a long time.He made a mental note to remember it.“How come?” Popeye said.“He’s just a toe-jam tattletale, that’s all.”A toe-jam tattletale?That was another good one worth remembering.“How come?” Popeye asked again.Elvis stopped suddenly and whirled around to face Popeye.“Let’s do something,” he said.“Like what?”“I don’t know,” Elvis said.“What’s there to do around here?”Popeye looked around.Weeds.Ditch.Trees.Mailbox.House.Shed.Trailer.He shrugged.“Not much [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]