Read Blue Hole Back Home: A Novel for Free Online Page B

start in, but Jimbo motioned for him to lower his voice.
    That left Farsanna to me. “Well,” I said, “I reckon accidents happen.” I had no earthly idea if I was telling the truth, and the truth was beside the point just then. “And you gotta know that had nothing to do with you.” I could see from her eyes that consolation was a mistake, that it might not have occurred to her to think the shot could be about her. And now I’d put the idea in her head.
    The boys walked back to where we stood, none of them, Emerson or Jimbo or L. J., looking too much at ease, and L. J. was all but staggering, his glasses perched cockeyed and low on his nose. Bobby Welpler tagged behind.
    Jimbo must’ve caught the new question on Farsanna’s face. “Reckon it wasn’t too much on purpose, as much as a Beckwith ever purposes anything much,” he told her. “Don’t reckon that old son of a swamp sucker was aiming to hurt anybody. Mort’s too mean to let life alone, and too soft to much injure it up. He’s just expressing his views.”
    What the new girl made of that, I couldn’t say.
    We now had nothing to do but walk on—a little closer to each other than we might have done ten minutes before—like we knew now what we hadn’t before: that we were moving somewhere underneath a bullet’s spiraling run, or inside whatever kind of grace explodes and leaves you seeing things for what they are but hoped they weren’t.
    _________
     
    From the Clearing, the footpath to the Blue Hole threaded through boulders in a slow descent and then, without warning, tilted cliff-steep almost, tumbling hikers into a slide from tree to tree and rock to rock. Every summer, we’d dared each other to run down it and we’d later signed each other’s plaster casts.
    At the top of the tilt, last in line behind me and the boys, the new girl studied L. J.’s and Emerson’s and Bobby Welpler’s descents.
    I kicked off my flip-flops. “Here’s where the shoes come off,” I said to the new girl.
    She looked from my bare feet to the jumble of sneakers and sandals beside me to the vertical path, covered in root webs and rocks, that dropped like a slide from where we stood.
    “It’s what we do here,” was how I explained.
    But Jimbo wouldn’t leave it at that. “Gotta go barefoot on holy ground,” was how he tried to make it make sense. Stomping on his sneaker heels to remove them, he flung them with a swift kick over his head to the heap of unclean shoes behind him.
    The new girl just stared at the drop, then back up the path to the Clearing.
    I could guess what she was thinking, that her choices just then both looked pretty bleak: to return up the path where a gun might go off any minute, or go forward, where the path fell away now in a nearly ninety-degree angle. So I tried to help. “Now don’t be letting Mort Beckwith bother you any, him and his toys. He’s always pointing that thing at whatever’s smart enough to look scared. He’s harmless, though.”
    Jimbo had fallen in beside me. “Ain’t none of us harmless,” he said—like that was helpful somehow.
    So I pointed down at Bo’s huge feet, for something to say. “How in heaven’s name do you run on those things?”
    “Turtle, you wound me. You don’t reckon the glass slipper’ll fit when my prince comes someday?”
    “Glass-bottom boat, maybe. One for each foot.”
    He grinned at me before starting down and then, holding a towel out to the new girl, glanced back over his shoulder at her. “You all dine and fandy?”
    “Fine and dandy,” I translated without looking at her, and gave back Bo’s smile.
    And my heart pinged in my chest, an engine all off rhythm, when he reached one arm back to pat the back of my calf.
    Farsanna accepted the towel Bo held out to her, but shook her head at his offer: “Haul on down beside me if you’re feeling scared.”
    “This,” she said, “I can do by myself.”
    Which, I had to admit, was a point in her favor. And that was with