Read Black Angus for Free Online

thread spools and old toothbrushes and string and screws and rusty hinges and even walnuts and pecans left over from a past Christmas—picking through the clutter for the magical items that this time would fire his child’s mind and set him playing on the floor, creating his own drama in front of the forgotten one on television. Again like a child, only the commercials would distract him, claiming his attention for brief periods of instruction in the arts of treating bad breath and indigestion and rectal itch.
    For some reason Tommy always kept a safe distance from the TV set, possibly because he believed that the figures he saw in it were real people who lived there in miniature, in all their fury and violence. In any case, he never touched the dials, never even asked to see a different show. So Blanchard could only assume that, alone, his brother maintained the same distance, playing in the same place or just sitting there and watching the shows until he fell asleep finally, curling up on the floor where Blanchard or Susan would find him later, when they returned from wherever they had been. The fact that he would have been alone in a creaky old house on a hill in thetrees, almost a mile from any neighbor, never seemed to bother him. At least he never mentioned it. Still Blanchard felt uneasy about leaving him, worrying most about the possibility of a fire, and what he would do in such an emergency.
    So when Blanchard left finally, driving his pickup down the long hill and turning onto the blacktop, he felt more anger and guilt than he did relief or anticipation. He should have stayed at home, he knew, both because of Tommy and because Susan had asked him to be there when she and Whit returned. But there had never really been any choice for him, never a moment when he had seriously considered not going to the Sweet Creek—and Ronda. The thought of going to bed with her later in her frightful mobile home was attraction enough, but it was not the only thing that drew him this night. Just as important was the simple fact of getting away, getting off the ranch, which lately seemed more and more a crucible designed solely for the purpose of testing his will to survive. And he was getting tired of the test. This night even the prospect of drinking with Rock County men and listening to their whining country-and-western music had a certain appeal. So as he drove on, pushing his rattling pickup along the narrow blacktop, between the twin walls of oak and cedar, he began to lose the feeling of guilt, just as he had on so many other nights in recent months. Once again, debt and ranch and family—and now brucellosis too—all of it fell steadily behind.
    The Sweet Creek Inn, named for the stream that ran behind it, was located on a gravel road, almost ten miles from his ranch. Pronounced sweet crick by the locals, it was one of four taverns in the county and served only beer and setups, no hard liquor at all. Nevertheless it was easily the most notorious of the four, possibly because the building it occupied once had been a Southern Baptist church, a small clapboard structurewith a cemetery on one side and the creek behind, almost as wide and deep as a river at that point and thus ideal for the old-fashioned baptizing the tiny church had carried out over the generations, until the congregation built a new cement-block edifice close to Rockton. Now only drunks took the plunge, often carrying rifles and shotguns, and spraying the surrounding woods with random fire, just as many of them had done in Vietnam, in case someone happened to be out there.
    There were seldom more than a dozen cars and pickups parked in front, under the flashing Blatz Beer sign, and this night ran true to form. Among them was Shea’s Continental, which Blanchard was not overjoyed at seeing, for it meant that his friend probably had scored a few hundred from Pipkin in Little Rock, and that in turn meant that he would not likely be sober for