Gemini Summer by Iain Lawrence

I’ll never get finished at this rate.”
    “Tell them yourself to stay away,” she said, rather coldly.
    “I’ve told them until I’m blue in the face,” said Old Man River. “I’m not here to watch them, but you are. Is it too much to ask that you keep them out of the dirt? Is that too much for you, Flo?”
    He marched off to change his septic-pumping coveralls for his mud-digging coveralls. As he passed her again he said, “Sometimes I don’t know why I bother. There I am, breaking my back for you and the boys, and what do I get? Nothing.”
    He slammed the door behind him and went angrily into his hole, and after that she didn’t bother much with the boys. If they wanted to fill in the pit with their mud bombs and castles, that was fine with her.
    In the last week of April she was in the basement when she heard them at the game. She was writing away in her notebook, scribbling quickly. She was on Chapter 83 and her heroine, Cherry O’Day, was about to slap the daylights out of a meddlesome Yankee.
    She tried to ignore the shouts of the boys. But Danny’s voice came piercing through the walls, and she heard him yell, “Fire one! Fire two!”
    Mrs. River trudged up the stairs and looked out the window. Beau was firing the little rockets from his Christmas toy, and Danny was the target. He was dashing across the mountain, and both of them were laughing. She tapped on the window and caught their attention, then shook her finger and mouthed, “You be careful.”
    Back she went to the basement. She read what she’d written, and started midsentence….
damned Yankee!” screamed Cherry O’Day. Her bosom was heaving
. Flo’s pencil scratched over the paper.
    From outside, through the walls and through the floor, came Danny’s voice again, now angry. “Get out of here! Buzz off, will you!”
    She imagined that Beau had finally hit him with one of the little rockets. So she got up and turned on the washing machine. Its rush of water hid the sounds, and she filled the page and turned to the next.
Cherry O’Day was a redheaded polecat.
    She wrote and wrote, seeing it all in her mind, the carpet bagger holding up his arms as Cherry flew at him with her bodice ripped open. She didn’t hear the whirls and thumps of the washing machine, or the rattle of her chair; she didn’t hear anything but the
slap-slap-slap
of Cherry’s hands, and Cherry’s voice shouting out, “You vahmint! You Yankee!” She saw Cherry wild-eyed, her clothes flapping like flags, her buttoned boots kicking.
    Then it all faded away.
    Danny was screaming.

twenty-six
    Mrs. River took the stairs three at a time, flying up from the basement, out through the house.
    She saw Danny standing on the mountain, bashing his own cheeks with his fists. “Beau!” he cried.
“Beau!”
    She ran up toward him, shouting his name, but he didn’t seem to hear. Her feet sank into the mud, and one of her slippers came away, and then the other one. Twice she fell and caught herself, until her hands were black to the wrists and her fingers were like sausages of mud. “Danny!” she shrieked as she raced up the mountain. “Danny, what’s wrong?”
    He fell to his knees, still hitting himself. He kept shouting, but nothing she could understand.
    As she came up beside him and looked, she spotted Beau at the bottom of the pit, Beau lying all crooked on the concrete, lying in the rain and the mud. Her first thought was that the puddle of water was the color of peach blossoms. Then she saw that Beau had fallen onto one of the reinforcing bars, and that it had pierced right through his chest.
    “Get up!” she shouted at him. “Get up right now and don’t try to frighten me.”
    But Beau did not get up. He didn’t move. His eyes were partly open, his fingers curled nearly into fists. There was a rip in his shirt, and blood was seeping from his mouth.
    Mrs. River dropped to her knees. She grabbed Danny. She pulled him against her, and she felt him go all loose,