Read Friend of My Youth for Free Online Page A

sitting there, temporarily tame and useless monsters, in the evening. This is where Neil works. He drives these things—he hauls the rocks around, clears the space, and makes the road for Brenda and Cornelius to drive on. He works for the Fordyce Construction Company, from Logan, which has the contract.
    Cornelius looks at everything. He knows what the boats are loading (soft wheat, salt, corn) and where they’re going, he understands how the harbor is being deepened, and he always wants to get a look at the huge pipe running at an angle onto the beach and crossing it, finally letting out water and sludge and rocks from the lake bottom that have never before seen the light of day. He goes and stands beside this pipe to listen to the commotion inside it, the banging and groaning of the rocks andwater rushing on their way. He asks what a rough winter will do to all this changing and arranging if the lake just picks up the rocks and beach and flings them aside and eats away at the clay cliffs, as before.
    Brenda listens to Cornelius and thinks about Neil. She derives pleasure from being in the place where Neil spends his days. She likes to think of the noise and the steady strength of these machines and of the men in the cabs bare-armed, easy with this power, as if they knew naturally what all this roaring and chomping up the shore was leading to. Their casual, good-humored authority. She loves the smell of work on their bodies, the language of it they speak, their absorption in it, their disregard of her. She loves to get a man fresh from all that.
    When she is down there with Cornelius and hasn’t seen Neil for a while, she can feel uneasy and forlorn, as if this might be a world that could turn its back on her. Just after she has been with Neil, it’s her kingdom—but what isn’t, then? The night before they are to meet—last night, for instance—she should be feeling happy and expectant, but to tell the truth the last twenty-four hours, even the last two or three days, seem too full of pitfalls, too momentous, for her to feel anything much but caution and anxiety. It’s a countdown—she actually counts the hours. She has a tendency to fill them with good deeds—cleaning jobs around the house that she was putting off, mowing the lawn, doing a reorganization at the Furniture Barn, even weeding the rock garden. The morning of the day itself is when the hours pass most laggingly and are full of dangers. She always has a story about where she’s supposed to be going that afternoon, but her expedition can’t be an absolutely necessary one—that would be calling too much attention to it—so there’s the chance, always, that something will come up to make Cornelius say, “Can’t you put that off till later in the week? Can’t you do it some other day?” It’s not so much that she wouldn’t then be able to get in touch with Neil that bothers her. Neil would wait an hour or so, then figure out what had happened. It’s that she thinks shecouldn’t bear it. To be so close, then have to do without. Yet she doesn’t feel any physical craving during those last torturing hours; even her secret preparations—her washing, shaving, oiling, and perfuming—don’t arouse her. She stays numb, harassed by details, lies, arrangements, until the moment when she actually sees Neil’s car. The fear that she won’t be able to get away is succeeded, during the fifteen-minute drive, by the fear that he won’t show up, in that lonely, dead-end spot in the swamp which is their meeting place. What she’s looking forward to, during those last hours, gets to be less of a physical thing—so that missing it would be like missing not a meal you’re hungry for but a ceremony on which your life or salvation depended.
    By the time Neil was an older teenager—but not old enough to get into bars, still hanging around at the Five Points Confectionery (the Croatians kept the old name for it)—the change had arrived, which everybody who