Everyone Dies Famous in a Small Town by Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock (general ebook reader .TXT) 📗

leaving the girl staring openmouthed at him as he bolted, scattering scree down toward the river’s edge with his long legs.

He could feel her eyes on him as he squatted next to an eddy where the river formed a little bowl. He crouched near the small pool, but to reach it he still had to bend again, like folding a towel in thirds the way his mother did.

Over and over again he scooped the icy water into his cupped hands and then splashed it on his face.

Watching from the car, the girl shivered and fingered her knife, opening and closing it as if in a trance, running her hand lightly over the blade.

He was sitting on a rock when she finally got out and slowly walked toward him. He wasn’t sure if he was scared of her or if it was the other way around. He was watching a small animal with funny ears scurry across a fallen tree and cross over to a patch of something pink blooming on the opposite bank.

It stood up when she got close and wrinkled its nose in the air so its whiskers waggled. Its tiny paws were folded in front of it, as if in prayer, but as she got near, it let out an earsplitting shriek.

“Marmots are so cute,” she said, her hands over her ears, “but he’s loud, isn’t he?…Or she?”

She looked terrified, as if she hadn’t meant to say the word “cute.” Ben felt that familiar sensation he got, even around people he didn’t know. Always the pleaser, sensing everyone’s moods and needing to make people feel comfortable.

Trying too hard was how Conrad described it.

“That’s a pika,” he said, tapping a stick against his leg, “not a marmot.”

“Oh. What’s the difference?”

Seriously? They were going to pretend to care about pikas versus marmots?

“Um, well, pikas look more like little rabbits, but no tail, and they’re rounder and fuzzier.”

It was the longest sentence he’d uttered since he’d picked her up.

“Marmots don’t have that high-pitched alarm call like pikas do,” he went on. “And they hibernate for almost seven months in their dens, all curled up with each other, their hearts beating once every hour or so….” He trailed off when his voice started to sound irritating in his own ears, too know-it-all.

“I wouldn’t mind sleeping for a few months,” she said.

The circles around her eyes gave the impression that she’d been asleep for decades. He’d seen zombies in movies that looked better than she did.

“Well, there’s a dark side in the marmot world,” he said, thinking of beauty and light, not wanting to sound too much like a pleaser. “If the teenage-girl marmots come back to the den pregnant, after doing whatever they do with the boy marmots, the mothers will punch them with their fists until they abort. They just don’t have room for extra bodies all winter.”

The girl looked at him with an unreadable expression.

“I’m sorry. That was blunt,” he said, taking her blank face for horror. “It’s not really about morality in the animal kingdom.”

He wondered if she was one of those animal-rights-type people as she turned her back on him.

She crumpled like a paper bag in the wind, and he thought maybe she was crying or perhaps even sick.

Ben looked away, giving her the only privacy he could, that of not watching. But after a few minutes he couldn’t stand it.

He went over and stood in the shallow pool next to her, shaking out a handkerchief and soaking it in the clear, cold stream. He wrung it out and handed it to her.

When she finally turned around he realized she was laughing. Maniacal, sleep-deprived laughter that looked painful. She took the handkerchief and buried her face in it, her shoulders shaking uncontrollably.

What the hell? He turned abruptly back to the car.

By the time she’d dragged herself up the bank, she was completely composed, once again the sullen introvert he’d picked up.

“How far are you going?” he asked.

She had pulled the hoodie strings so tight around her face she looked like a lumpy purple Mr. Potato Head, her lips pursed out like a fish.

“I’m going to hell. Straight to hell,” she whispered in a singsongy cadence. She was badly in need of ChapStick.

“How about I let you out in Baker?” he said.

“Fine. And don’t worry, I couldn’t care less about morality in the animal kingdom.”

Baker was forty miles away, which seemed like a long time to have to sit next to her.

The only radio station he could get was run out of the basement of mountain man Coyote Jones. It was definitely not FCC legal, but somehow Jones managed to stay on the air, fuzzy reception in and out of the local towns scattered all the way to the Wyoming and Nebraska borders.

Ben kept it on, because even static inside the Mustang was more comforting than being totally alone with a lunatic, although there were rumors about the sanity of Coyote Jones as well. There’s a difference between a familiar lunatic and one you know nothing about. As he’d often heard his mother say, “The people here are crazy, but they’re our kind of crazy.”

Ben was fairly certain that “our kind of crazy” did not include being gay. Not in 1995 in Granville, Colorado, anyway. Maybe in some far-off city like Los Angeles or New York, where there were enough people that you could slide between hundreds of bodies and be virtually unnoticed, but not here, in the middle of nowhere. There was no anonymity in a small town. Especially if you stood out at all.

No, he should never have kissed Conrad. And probably Conrad wished he had never kissed him back.

“Well, folks, we’ve got a hot spot burning just south of Granville. Looks like it’s picked up some traction on the western ridge, where all that fuel has been waiting to be kissed by some red-hot love.”

Coyote Jones often used these kinds of analogies to describe the weather, and usually people thought it was funny. But just now, with