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    The Summer Boy
    The Summer Boy
    The Summer Boy
    Ebook29 pages28 minutes

    The Summer Boy

    By Bernard Fancher

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    excerpt:

    Now the road north steamed beneath the headlights, illuming a path through a lush growth of small trees and bushes lining both sides. Eventually he turned one last time east, crossing a stream, before heading northward again. By the time he reached the outskirts of Dudley he was ready to stop. And he needed gas anyway. He pulled into the Quick-Fill and stood for a moment in the artificial light holding the palm of one hand to his lower back before lifting the nozzle away from the pump with the other. He let his back go to turn the selector to regular grade and raise the safety switch, after which the pump clicked to life and the gas flowed, cooling the handle.
    As he held the grip trigger he looked around, noting the empty lot across the road where the Mobil garage had stood before burning. He remembered the red winged horse set in the front gable and reproduced on the white globes atop the gas pumps. Not so long ago he had hung out there with his friends on weekends—washing and polishing cars, changing oil or the occasional tire. But except for the missing garage and the new Quick-Fill everything else in Dudley seemed the same. Adopting a philosophical attitude, he supposed change was either good or bad, depending on how you defined progress.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBernard Fancher
    Release dateMar 27, 2011
    ISBN9781458047113
    The Summer Boy
    Author

    Bernard Fancher

    I live on a small and mostly defunct farm in western New York, where the events of a typical day include writing and walking my dogs--items not necessarily listed in order of priority. (At least not from the dogs' point of view.)

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      Book preview

      The Summer Boy - Bernard Fancher

      The Summer Boy

      by

      Bernard Fancher

      Smashwords Edition

      Copyright 2011 Bernard Fancher

      All Rights Reserved

      Smashwords License Statement:

      This ebook is licensed by Smashwords, and may not otherwise be reproduced or disseminated without the author’s permission.

      Disclaimer:

      The story that follows is fiction. Except where clearly historical, the people, places, and events portrayed are works of the imagination.

      *********

      The Summer Boy

      When it finally came after threatening all day, the rain fell in sheets that moved across the windshield like a fast moving stream. At one point, unable to see, he slowed almost to a stop at the side of the road, but then as suddenly as it started the downpour ended. So he lowered the window and drove with his arm resting once more on the sill of the car door, feeling the cool night air pushing back the cuff of his pin-striped long sleeve shirt.

      In the cool sprinkling wake of the storm he felt content and relaxed, anticipating with growing eagerness the dwindling distance before him, remembering Whitey said there was no chance of his getting called up so he might just as well head on home. Hell, son, he’d drawled through a mouthful of wet tobacco, giving him a heavy pat on the shoulder. Baseball just ain’t all that important. Go see your father.

      So he packed up, said goodbye to the other players and coaches on the Avalanche, most of whom he suspected now he would never hear word of again, and headed up through Indian Creek Gap into the still imposing hills of Pennsylvania. The first night he stayed overnight with friends in Pittsburgh before trekking again north on a route he’d never traveled before, making the trip feel like an adventure. Going up into southwestern New York his voyage became a back road tour through small busted boom towns that hadn’t changed much in decades. In one place he drove uphill past a riveted black tank connected by a gangly network of pipes and gauges to a pair of small jack pumps cranking slowly but incessantly away in adjacent front yards hardly large enough to hold them. Gradually the foot hills smoothed out into softly rolling farmland where he stopped for the night at a place called the Colonial Inn

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