Through the Hidden Door

Read Through the Hidden Door for Free Online Page B

Book: Read Through the Hidden Door for Free Online
Authors: Rosemary Wells
spindly, half-blind Snowy, I could see him poring over the anatomy books in the library. If he’d had a subscription to National Geographic or Ranger Rick, I wouldn’t have thought twice. But these had nothing to do with the Snowy I knew. These were something I’d never known existed.
    They were back issues, forty or fifty of them, of Soldier of Fortune.
    Soldier of Fortune was crammed full of stories about little wars that I had no idea were going on, all over the world. They certainly never came up in current events class. The men who fought these wars were not sent by the U.S. or any other Western government, they were on their own. Doing it for money and the fun of battling Commies.
    These were stories on killing leftover Vietnamese, patrolling the borders of Nicaragua, driving off Cuban battalions in tiny African countries the names of which I couldn’t start to place on a map, and hand-to-hand combat in the Libyan desert. Was this real? It seemed to be: I read three stories. In them one man was squeezed to death by an Amazon River boa constrictor, two others fell over a waterfall in Tanzania, and five more were blown up in a land mine set by Manchurian insurgents. Just what the Manchurians themselves were insurging about was not clear.
    Snowy had gone over the texts with a yellow highlighter pen and marked everything of interest with exclamation points. Gentle, quiet Snowy. The magazines were loaded with ads for everything from Uzi hand-held machine guns to blow darts. You could buy a half-wolf German shepherd puppy or a complete medicine-growing farm to prepare for the day when all the pharmacies closed down. In among the back pages were printed order forms that he had ripped out. What had he ordered? Tarantula repellent? A bulletproof vest? A tiny microphone that let you listen to conversations a quarter mile away? Yes, yes, I decided suddenly. Something had rung untrue in Snowy’s story about listening to the trustees’ meeting where Mr. Finney had stomped out. The boys’ lavatory did not back up against the common room. There was a broom closet in between. The only way he could have overheard the meeting was in the bushes outside with a seventy-five-dollar listening microphone in the palm of his hand.
    The Soldier of Fortunes had not been mailed to Snowy at school. The address printed on the backs was care of the local post office, general delivery, in the name of Mr. Robert Cobb. I pushed them deep into my closet and piled a bunch of last year’s math workbooks on top of them. I had stumbled on to a secret of Snowy’s. I intended to keep it to myself.
    During the night I woke once, recalling several photographs in the pages of the magazines. They were of groups of men, standing or sitting with weapons in hand, all blurry. All black and white. I couldn’t see their faces well, or even tell what kinds of uniforms they wore. From time to time Snowy had circled one or another with a ballpoint pen, adding a little question mark each time.
    I didn’t find Snowy until Tuesday afternoon, when he’d passed me a note in my mailbox saying to meet him in the old school stables at two thirty after classes.
    There hasn’t been a horse on campus, the gym teacher once told me, since the Second World War. The rose brick stable at the edge of the woods has been a storehouse for the school grounds keepers in the meantime. It is covered with creeper vines, untrimmed, and I could see at least ten birds’ nests hanging empty in the fall sun. Inside, there are twenty lonely stalls. Still, the horseless air smelled of rotting hay, and in one stall a yellow-toothed rat peered out at me from among the cobwebs.
    “Snowy!” I called. No Snowy.
    I began poking around. Opening cupboards. Finding bits of moldy riding gear not quite interesting enough to touch. Am I afraid? I wondered for a second. No. I have my pistol. That morning I had strapped it tight around my upper right thigh and torn out the right-hand pants pocket so I

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