The Last Exit to Normal Read Online Free

him to see that we’re not a threat.”
    Edward smiled. “Yes, we must educate and enlighten, not intimidate and alienate.” He looked at Dad. “Didn’t Liberace say that? Or was it the Pope? I distinctly recollect somebody in the entertainment business saying that.”
    I remembered the deer hanging by its heels, then shrugged. “Well, at least he didn’t alienate himself or anything. God knows we wouldn’t want that.”
    Edward smiled. “You have batter running down your forehead.”
    I wiped at it. “Your mom beat me up with a wooden spoon.”
    Edward laughed. “Don’t mouth her.”
    “How’d you know I mouthed her?”
    He raised his beer and clinked bottles with Dad as they enjoyed some inside joke about me being abused by an old woman with cooking utensils. “Hurts, doesn’t it?”
    I nearly told them she stole my cigarettes, but remembered our deal. If I broke it, she’d probably sneak into my room tonight and eviscerate me with a paring knife. “What’s a rube?”
    “She called you a rube?”
    “Yeah.”
    “A rube is an idiot.”
    I rolled my eyes. “Very funny. Supper’s almost ready.”
    Dad looked at me. “Supper?”
    “Whatever. That’s how they say it around here, and you didn’t just have your knuckles broken by a crazy old bag.”
    Dad lowered his voice. “Respect, Ben. You know . . .”
    Edward laughed. “Paul, if there is one thing my mother is, it’s a crazy old bag. Just don’t say that around her or you’ll wish for the spoon.”

CHAPTER 3
    T he first week of imprisonment at the Redneck Internment Camp for Teenage Degenerates began in my room because I didn’t want to go outside and be lynched. I liked pretending it was a sauna, because if I didn’t, it would be considered an oven. I wondered why the whole town, even situated in a hollow as it was, didn’t shrivel up and crumble to dust in the heat. No wonder Miss Mae’s face looked like a slab of dried leather. Anything would, after eighty years in this heat.
    I didn’t even know how long we were going to be here. Every time I asked Dad, he shrugged and told me that he didn’t know. Wasn’t sure. We’ll see how things go. That—coming from my dad, who was the most consistent and scheduled person in the world—was one thing: bullshit. What it meant was that he didn’t want to tell me, and the only reason he wouldn’t want to tell me was because I’d go off the deep end if I knew. And going off the deep end meant
permanent.
Or at least until I turned eighteen and skated this joint myself.
    And that meant the grim and dim possibility of school. My grand and supposed-to-be-wonderful senior year. I pictured Rough Butte High School as a one-room clapboard building with a corral instead of a parking lot. Hitch your horse to the rail, step in, and learn your numbers, boy. I’d take my lunch to school in a tin pail just like Laura Ingalls on
Little House on the Prairie.
Yahoo.

    Life in Rough Butte consisted of two things: being bored and coming downstairs when Miss Mae yelled that it was time to eat. I did see the kid next door, Billy, take a dead cat by the tail, open the gate in the rear of the backyard, and disappear into the fields with it. Pure entertainment.
    By the time I decided I should venture out into no-man’s-land, I’d sweated at least a swimming pool. I couldn’t stand it anymore, and the whopping three channels we got on the TV didn’t cut it, because even if there was a show on that I liked, every time Miss Mae walked by, she grumbled and turned it off.
    Miss Mae was nothing but misery. She didn’t smile about anything, and I wondered if her face would fall off if she did. The last time she walked by and turned the TV off, I turned it back on before she got out of the room. Hellfire and damnation erupted in the house. She spun around quick as a cat, her eyes burning into me. “You got a problem with my television being turned off when I turn it off, Benjamin?”
    “Yeah. I was watching