Read Zero at the Bone for Free Online Page A

a clock,” I said.
    â€œYou mean I have to move my body?” she said. She said that last word carefully, deliberately spacing it apart, baw-dy .
    My dad had big plans for the backyard. A pile of gravel glowed in the light from the kitchen, next to a small mountain of sand. The gravel was gradually scattering outward, the peak growing shorter with the months, and neighborhood cats loved the sand.
    Stakes and staves laid along the ground marked out where Dad was going to put in a sidewalk. Walking around back there, I was always tripping over a bag of cement or some of Dad’s cement-working tools, the scabby hoe and the assortment of trowels, all of them getting rusty where the cement had blistered away.
    She treated me to a moan as she rolled over and announced, “It’s 10:05, Cray. And thirty seconds.”
    Paula once told me she could speak five languages. She could insult someone’s mother in phrases from all over Europe. She knew Cantonese slang for white person , and knew the word for whore in languages I had never heard of. She could fire off delicious-sounding syllables and say, “That’s Japanese for Don’t touch me there. ” I can say, “The red house behind the tree is very handsome,” in Spanish, except I forget the word for behind .
    â€œTomorrow night,” I said. I felt like telling her, “I am not having a conversation with you. You are talking. But I am watching an airplane glide overhead, red lights winking.”
    â€œEight,” she said. “Seven-thirty.”
    Strangers in Safeway see me, a tall, broad-shouldered kid, built like a lumberjack, and they smile. And I smile, too. And I mean the message smiles send out to people: I am nice, and you can trust me.
    But sometimes in the back of the smile, behind the real niceness that fills up 98 percent of my mind, there is a small room with a gray creature in it, someone broadcasting nonstop, twenty-four hours a day, the Cray Buchanan World Service.
    Detras and atras . They both mean behind .
    I didn’t think Paula had ever heard of either word.
    As I was heading into the house I could hear him coming from a long way off, making his noise. I hadn’t seen him for days, and I stood there marveling in an absentminded way that he was still alive.

7
    Anita had said we could not have him fixed because it wasn’t natural, castrating a cat. He ran toward me through the dark, stiff-legged and crippled. I couldn’t see him yet, but I could tell what he was doing, avoiding the chain-link fence along the hill, taking the long way around the blackberry hedge. He probably fell down once or twice. And he kept up his noise all the while, a very old and stubborn creature saying, “Ow, ow,” over and over.
    I felt sorry for Bronto, but I didn’t like to pet him. He had little scars in his head where you usually scratch a cat. He couldn’t even stand straight in the porch light, leaning into my pant leg, purring. I scratched him a little, with two fingers.
    My dad was sitting with his head thrown back, his glasses crooked, his mouth agape like someone very old or very sick.
    The television was on with the sound off. My mother stared at it with her arms crossed in front of her chest. It was the usual TV mishmash, the Pope followed by an ad for denture cream. Big words jumped across the screen; people with the sound off weren’t going to miss anything important.
    â€œThe beast is alive,” I said.
    My mother gave me a look: It meant either, You must be kidding, or, What on earth are you talking about?
    I didn’t call him Bronto in front of my mother because that was Anita’s name for him. My mother called him Saucers. Five years ago, when the cat was a kitten, Mom had taught him to drink, nudging his face down into plates of milk. Anita said we should gave animals names that smacked of authority.
    â€œHe looks awful,” I said.
    Mom found a can opener beside the