She’d been wearing the black dress she had bought two years earlier at Zellers, the only dress he’d ever seen her buy new. He tried now to think of the last time he’d seen Nan alive, but the image of her lying in the cheapest casket Proule’s Funeral Home offered eclipsed his other memories of her. Coming from a woman who’d never swallowed a drop of alcohol in her life, those words had always been funny. The rum had burned their throats, but it took the edge off their rancor and put-as Reef’s grandmother used to say- a bit of a glitter on what otherwise had been a lousy day.įor a moment, Reef could almost hear her voice in his head. Bigger had been worried they’d catch some kind of disease, but Reef and Jinkhad laughed at him, called him an old woman, shamed him into taking the first gulp. Not that it mattered-it wouldn’t last any longer than the one before it.īy the time they got to The Pit, they’d slowed to a walk, sharing swallows from the bottle they’d snagged earlier off a bum on Wickham. From below, the cop wouldn’t know which direction they’d gone, or even if they’d left the overpass at all, but they kept jogging anyway till they’d made it to Patterson, cutting through the empty lot between Fishman’s Mini-Mart and yet another used CD store. He and the others cut across to the other side of the overpass where the cop couldn’t see them, then loped northward up Park Street. Pocketing the rock in his leather jacket, he muttered, Be another one ‘long in a minute. They could see the patrolman behind the wheel take a microphone from the dash, hold it to his mouth and begin talking, all the while looking up at the three teenagers standing by the metal railing that kept vehicles and pedestrians from falling into the traffic below. They waited motionless, watching the white car move toward them, then flash its turn signal and pull over to the curb. Cool it, Reef!Ī white Metro Police car pulled out of Carver Avenue and cruised down Birmingham on a course that would take it under the Park Street overpass on which they stood. Jink grabbed his shoulder a split second before his arm shot forward. He remembered the orange explosions they’d made as they hit the highway, the slash of meaty pulp crushed and dragged along by sliding, squealing tires. He and the others had stolen pumpkins last October and thrown them off the Everett Street overpass. He knew that tangle of emotions well, the sudden transformation from shock to stormy outrage that left you weak and hollow inside, like those Hallowe’en pumpkins that little kids still carved. Saw, as well, the ripple of expressions on the faces of the drivers, who would react first with startled surprise, then fear, then anger.
Saw in his mind’s eye the smooth arc it would make when he launched it out over the busy highway below them.
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