Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley Read Online Free Page A
Author: Ann Pancake
programs! Get your pussy programs!â she sang.
THE FIRST WEEK , Nathan asked Janie to ride with him almost every day. Sheâd only been on a motorcycle a few times before, and soon she understood. The absence of metal, you closer to dying, and how that shouted all the life in you out to your edge. The way you soared into vaults of odors and the tastes that they carried, then left them as rapidly behind, all the layers of real a car kept you from, and the heat of the muffler against the inside of your calves and what happened to your skin if they touched.
Theyâd cross the 18th Street Bridge and ribbon down some of the straightest roads Janieâd ever seen, along the Ohio River on the Ohio side, her looking back across at West Virginia. She loved that on the bike, she didnât have to talk, didnât even have to look at or be looked at by him. Them just hurtling forward, her straddling his hips, the bulk of his jacket against her cheek, the smell of his clean neck, his back to her always. Her riding not just the bike, but his back.
He took her places that sheâd been only dimly aware of before, places her grandmother never passed on their childhood excursionsto Sunday school, to the Remington art museum, to the Alexander Henry. With Nathan, she traveled under horizons of coal power plants, heaving up out of their own steam and effluvium like daymare mirages, menacing unoccupied castles, the cooling towers monstrous squat beakers, some mutation out of a chemistry set. The oil refineries with their perverse metal trees, overtall, spindly, their flares rippling, biblical, each crown a sterile altar. They ripped past hulks of plants even more mysterious, seeping noxious stenches that gummed the roof of your mouth, many of the buildings painted a color that matched their stink, putrescent chartreuses, vomitous creams.
When they didnât ride along the river, Nathan favored an east side outskirt of abandoned or almost warehouses and factories, the streets there usually empty, and always of cops. The structures formed a three-story sheet metal ravine, their echo spectacular, the motorcycle a contained and rainless thunderstorm ricocheting between walls. The deserted hulks seeped not just eeriness, but somehow anger, even surprise, but Janie and Nathan were shielded from all that by the speed of the bike. Them rocketing past enigmatic geometries, cylinders and chutes, cupolas and cones, past towering red letters threatening head injury and limb loss, past windows, if not shattered, so spider-infested Janie could make out webs at fifty miles per hour. These were places that used to make things, not chemicals, electricity, gasoline, but things you could actually touch, and now the vegetation rising, the weeds shrouding, pressing, fecund, wanton, âplantsâ and âplantsâ Janieâd think in her alcohol haze, noticing for the first time how the word had been stolen, but ultimately the first plants had won.
The last evening of that week, they pulled over at a spot Nathan knew along the river. They hid the bike in the brush and pushed down the bank through kudzu and briar. The stillness after the bike shocked Janieâs ears, the chung of insect slowly returning, and Nathan, halfwaydown, remembered to hold back the blackberry vines. At the bottom, they reached a decaying dock over river water the color of dirty tires. Nathan sat cross-legged on the punky boards, pulled out his Baggie and papers, and rolled a joint with ostentatious expertise using a fold in his jeans on the inside of his thigh. He sucked in and held, then passed the joint to Janie, who imitated him, like sheâd been imitating pot smokers since she was fifteen. And instantlyâreflex, too soon for the drug to have reached bloodâher tight places loosened. The pot shortened the distance between Nathan and her, why she smoked, why she drank. It was not, she told herself, escape, but its opposite. To connect her, to
THE FIRST WEEK , Nathan asked Janie to ride with him almost every day. Sheâd only been on a motorcycle a few times before, and soon she understood. The absence of metal, you closer to dying, and how that shouted all the life in you out to your edge. The way you soared into vaults of odors and the tastes that they carried, then left them as rapidly behind, all the layers of real a car kept you from, and the heat of the muffler against the inside of your calves and what happened to your skin if they touched.
Theyâd cross the 18th Street Bridge and ribbon down some of the straightest roads Janieâd ever seen, along the Ohio River on the Ohio side, her looking back across at West Virginia. She loved that on the bike, she didnât have to talk, didnât even have to look at or be looked at by him. Them just hurtling forward, her straddling his hips, the bulk of his jacket against her cheek, the smell of his clean neck, his back to her always. Her riding not just the bike, but his back.
He took her places that sheâd been only dimly aware of before, places her grandmother never passed on their childhood excursionsto Sunday school, to the Remington art museum, to the Alexander Henry. With Nathan, she traveled under horizons of coal power plants, heaving up out of their own steam and effluvium like daymare mirages, menacing unoccupied castles, the cooling towers monstrous squat beakers, some mutation out of a chemistry set. The oil refineries with their perverse metal trees, overtall, spindly, their flares rippling, biblical, each crown a sterile altar. They ripped past hulks of plants even more mysterious, seeping noxious stenches that gummed the roof of your mouth, many of the buildings painted a color that matched their stink, putrescent chartreuses, vomitous creams.
When they didnât ride along the river, Nathan favored an east side outskirt of abandoned or almost warehouses and factories, the streets there usually empty, and always of cops. The structures formed a three-story sheet metal ravine, their echo spectacular, the motorcycle a contained and rainless thunderstorm ricocheting between walls. The deserted hulks seeped not just eeriness, but somehow anger, even surprise, but Janie and Nathan were shielded from all that by the speed of the bike. Them rocketing past enigmatic geometries, cylinders and chutes, cupolas and cones, past towering red letters threatening head injury and limb loss, past windows, if not shattered, so spider-infested Janie could make out webs at fifty miles per hour. These were places that used to make things, not chemicals, electricity, gasoline, but things you could actually touch, and now the vegetation rising, the weeds shrouding, pressing, fecund, wanton, âplantsâ and âplantsâ Janieâd think in her alcohol haze, noticing for the first time how the word had been stolen, but ultimately the first plants had won.
The last evening of that week, they pulled over at a spot Nathan knew along the river. They hid the bike in the brush and pushed down the bank through kudzu and briar. The stillness after the bike shocked Janieâs ears, the chung of insect slowly returning, and Nathan, halfwaydown, remembered to hold back the blackberry vines. At the bottom, they reached a decaying dock over river water the color of dirty tires. Nathan sat cross-legged on the punky boards, pulled out his Baggie and papers, and rolled a joint with ostentatious expertise using a fold in his jeans on the inside of his thigh. He sucked in and held, then passed the joint to Janie, who imitated him, like sheâd been imitating pot smokers since she was fifteen. And instantlyâreflex, too soon for the drug to have reached bloodâher tight places loosened. The pot shortened the distance between Nathan and her, why she smoked, why she drank. It was not, she told herself, escape, but its opposite. To connect her, to
Readers choose
Samantha Holt
Dara Joy
Zoe Forward
Kenneth Robeson
TERESA HILL
Steven R. Burke
Ken Follett
Janelle Denison