Wink by Eric Trant

how to do it.”
    “Mr. Cooper?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Is that what you did last summer, too, sat in the attic carving?”
    “You saw me last summer?” Marty rubbed his jeans to wipe some of the dirt and wood dust off the back of his hands.
    “Sure did. I even know how you get up there.” With the length of Bois D’Arc, Sadie pointed at the mimosa tree and outlined Marty’s path up the roof. “I wish I could do that, go up in the attic.”
    “Why can’t you?” The words were out before Marty could stop them, and for a few seconds Sadie stared at him and he stared back. “Yeah. I carved some chess pieces with Uncle Cooper last summer before he died. They’re in the house somewhere. I don’t know where. My mom buried them.”
    “Why did she bury them?” Sadie’s eyes moved to the back yard.
    “Not out here. They’re still in the house, just buried.”
    “Under what?”
    “I dunno. Stuff. My mom likes to collect stuff. She has a lot of it in the house.”
    “Oh.”
    “It’s a knife handle,” Marty said, pointing to the Bois D’Arc.
    “This?” Sadie wiggled the wood at him.
    “Yeah. For this.” He slid the knife out of his belt and showed it to her. “It’s a Jim Bowie knife, like from the Alamo. See how big it is? It’s, like, bigger than my arm. If my mom caught me with this she would beat me senseless. She would slit my throat with it.”
    “Can I see it?” Sadie held up a hand. Marty passed it down to her and she held the new handle against the knife, measuring it the way he had done when he first began carving it.
    “It’s too long,” she said.
    “No it ain’t. I need a piece to hold on to while I work, so I leave a handful at the bottom. I’ll cut it when I split it. I still need to cut it in half lengthwise, carve out a slot for the tang, and then mount it.”
    “What’s a tang?”
    Marty leaned over the hurricane fence and pointed at the metal shaft leading down the length of the knife’s original fake-ivory handle. “That’s the tang. This is a full-tang knife, means the metal of the blade goes all the way down through the handle, from hilt to the very bottom. Some of the cheap knives, they only have a half-tang where the metal stops halfway down the handle. Those break. This one is a tough knife. That new handle there won’t break, not in forever. That’s horse-apple wood, and the Indians used to make bows and tomahawks from that tree.”
    As he spoke Marty heard the screen door slap on the back of his house, and when he glanced back his mother was walking across the yard. Her arms swung and her feet stomped and if she weren’t so small, she might look like a steam-roller about to plow him down.
    When he turned back to Sadie, the knife and the wooden handle were gone, disappeared into some secret place Marty couldn’t see. Sadie’s hands rested on her knees and she smiled as if they had been talking about nothing more than peaches.
    Marty’s mom clumped up behind him, grabbed his shoulder, and pulled him away from the fence. She wedged between Sadie and Marty and said to Sadie, “Who are you? What are you doing to my son?”
    “I’m Sadie. We were just talking.”
    “You’re Kathy Pickens’ daughter, ain’t you?” Marty’s mom pointed at Sadie’s house and Sadie nodded.
    “Kathy Marsh, yes ma’am. She’s my mom.”
    Marty saw the screen door of Sadie’s house open up and realized how similar the houses were laid out. The Marshes had not walled in their carport but left it open, and Sadie’s mom wound around a blue minivan parked under the carport and speed-walked through the back yard. Sadie’s mom was heftier than Marty’s, what someone might call voluptuous, and she held up one of her hands waving to them as if to say, Hold on, hold on, hold on.
    Marty’s mom turned away from Sadie and put her hands on Marty’s shoulders. She twisted him toward the house and pushed him a few steps to get him started.
    “Well, we don’t associate with the Marshes,