Thieves I've Known by Tom Kealey Page B

abandoned in their backyard for almost as long as the boy can remember. The boy had shoveled leaves and twigs—a bird’s nest?—from the seats before they’d entered. The windshield is cracked in the corner—no hair or blood, simply a crack, a rock left on a road years before. Unlike his grandfather, who is gaunt, mostly bones, skeletal, Winston is a big boy, bigger than most in his school. Fat. Fat fingers, fat toes. He’s only eleven but thinks as he gains age he might gain the person inside himself whom he wishes to be. The old man, his name is Winston too, coughs, and Winston wipes again with the handkerchief.
    The truck is not going to turn over. The engine in the truck—the starter—is not going to turn over. Winston looks out the windshield and sees, in the distance, the sunflower fields bending with the wind. To the left he sees the lights—green and red—of the Ferris wheel of the traveling carnival. From this distance, a long distance away, it looks slow, but when he’d sat in one of the cars with his father, it had seemed fast, rising and falling above the lights of the spook house and the ticket merchants—and he hopes, if the starter turns over, that he and his grandfather might drive there. Might ride the Ferris wheel together. In his pocket he carries all the money he has to his name (seven dollars and change). But the starter won’t turn. Winston, the grandson, knows little about trucks or cars, but thinks, as his grandfather turns the key, that something is being burned out. That the more the key turns, the more something is being lost.
    He’d ridden the Ferris wheel only once. Had not budgeted—his father’s word—correctly, and had left that seven dollars and change athome. He’d blown most of his money on the spook house, which his father had refused to ride with him. He’d sat alone, that first time, in the front car, had screamed when the dragon had bent at the entrance, fire glowing in its belly, and had assumed (Winston) that he’d be scorched before he even got inside the house. The pirates had swiped their sabers above his head, a witch boiled the skulls of children in her cauldron, and the bony white hands of skeletons had barely reached him, clicking against the top of the rail car. The giants appeared after that. I want it to be quiet in here, the man in the car behind him had said, and it was only then that Winston could hear his own screams, had felt for a moment outside himself, had wondered, hearing that man’s voice, what his classmates might think of him. I can’t help it, he’d said, I’m scared. Had said that with the weight of the two dollars he’d paid for the ride. Two dollars, he felt, earned him the right to scream. More pirates had been next, and the goblins after that. Finally, the ghosts, white sheets, through which he could make out the people, and he did not feel so afraid. But he continued to scream, wanting his two dollars’ worth, until the cars exited the house and he saw his father waiting near the ticket booth, arms crossed, the Ferris wheel turning in the black sky behind him.
    Looks like you were scared, said his father.
    No, Winston had said. I loved it.
    The starter turns over. Winston looks behind him, through the glass of the rear window of the truck. A thick cloud of smoke—as big as a giant’s fist—blows out into the air. Beyond, Winston can see an orange glow, not the sun, which was setting in the opposite direction, but something else, something almost as big, glowing and stretching toward the sky.
    His grandfather says nothing, has said nothing for almost a week. He switches the gears into Drive, and the truck sets off across the yard, spitting a trail of white smoke and mud.
    A boxer’s defense is designed to prevent the jabs, hooks, and crosses of her opponent from reaching the vulnerable areas. It is also intendedto leave her in a position