Read The Colorado Kid for Free Online

word for everyone he meets, never forgets a name or which man drives a Ford pickup and which one is still getting along with his Dad’s old International Harvester. He’s a caricature right out of an old nineteen-forties movie about small-town hoop-de-doo politics and he’s such a hick he don’t even know it. He’s got one jump left in him—hop, toad, hop—and once he gets to that Augusta lilypad he’ll either be wise enough to stop or he’ll try another hop and end up getting squashed.”
    “That is so cynical,” Stephanie said, not without youth’s admiration for the trait.
    Vince shrugged his bony shoulders. “Hey, I’m a stereotype myself, dearie, only my movie’s the one where the newspaper feller with the arm-garters on his shirt and the eyeshade on his forread gets to yell out ‘Stop the presses!’ in the last reel. My point is that Johnny was a different creature in those days—slim as a quill pen and quick as quicksilver. You would have called him a god, almost, except for those unfortunate buck teeth, which he has since had fixed.
    “And she…in those skimpy little red shorts she wore…she was indeed a goddess.” He paused. “As so many girls of seventeen surely are.”
    “Get your mind out of the gutter,” Dave told him.
    Vince looked surprised. “Ain’t,” he said. “Ain’t a bit. It’s in the clouds.”
    “If you say so,” Dave said, “and I will admit she was a looker, all right. And an inch or two taller than Johnny, which may be why they broke up in the spring of their senior year. But back in ’80 they were hot and heavy, and every day they’d run for the ferry on this side and then up Bayview Hill to the high school on the Tinnock side. There were bets on when Nancy would catch pregnant by him, but she never did; either he was awful polite or she was awful careful.” He paused. “Or hell, maybe they were just a little more sophisticated than most island kids back then.”
    “I think it might’ve been the running,” Vince said judiciously.
    Stephanie said, “Back on message, please, both of you,” and the men laughed.
    “On message,” Dave said, “there came a morning in the spring of 1980—April, it would have been—when they spied a man sitting out on Hammock Beach. You know, just on the outskirts of the village.”
    Stephanie knew it well. Hammock Beach was a lovely spot, if a little overpopulated with summer people. She couldn’t imagine what it would be like after Labor Day, although she would get a chance to see; her internship ran through the 5th of October.
    “Well, not exactly sitting ,” Dave amended. “Half-sprawling was how they both put it later on. He was up against one of those litter baskets, don’t you know, and their bases are planted down in the sand to keep em from blowing away in a strong wind, but the man’s weight had settled back against this one until the can was…” Dave held his hand up to the vertical, then tilted it.
    “Until it was like the Leaning Tower of Pisa,” Steffi said.
    “You got it exactly. Also, he wa’ant hardly dressed for early mornin, with the thermometer readin maybe forty-two degrees and a fresh breeze off the water makin it feel more like thirty -two. He was wearin nice gray slacks and a white shirt. Loafers on his feet. No coat. No gloves.
    “The youngsters didn’t even discuss it. They just ran over to see if he was okay, and right away they knew he wasn’t. Johnny said later that he knew the man was dead as soon as he saw his face and Nancy said the same thing, but of course they didn’t want to admit it—would you? Without making sure?”
    “No,” Stephanie said.
    “He was just sittin there (well…half-sprawlin there) with one hand in his lap and the other—the right one—lying on the sand. His face was waxy-white except for small purple patches on each cheek. His eyes were closed and Nancy said the lids were bluish. His lips also had a blue cast to them, and his neck, she said, had a kind