Excerpt from El Paso by Winston Groom, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

they'd been back at Laura Bostwick for a week after camp when things began to go sour for Mick. Until the snakebite he'd never known pleasures like those at the camp, in the wilds of the countryside, and coming back to the city depressed him. Summer at the orphanage was drudgery anyway. the boys were made to scrape paint and whitewash walls and scrub floors and kitchen equipment—clean out the jakes. the chores weren't so bad but there was half a summer to go and Mick was fed up. Late one afternoon, as Mick and Arthur were walking down a hot filthy street, Mick stopped to look at his reflection in a shop window. He studied it for a long time, as Arthur stood patiently by.

"Arthur," Mick said finally, "we can do better on our own."

"What's that mean?" Arthur asked.

"We can do better. I met some fellers a few days ago on Dorchester. they were just like us, but living their own way. they got a shed to stay in and nobody tells them what to do or to go to school or when to go to bed and all that. Why, they're free as birds."

Arthur was puzzled. "How do they eat? Who—"

"they got jobs, see, when they want them. they feed themselves."

"What kind of jobs?"

"All kinds." Mick told Arthur that if a guy at the barbershop wants a pint of cold beer, one of the street guys runs and gets it for him—and gets a tip. Or if somebody wants some numbers run, "You stop in the shop and get the money and the guy picks his number—and all you got to do is take it back to the main runner. there's lots of things like that."

the notion made Arthur hesitate, but it was exciting, too.

"the beauty of it," Mick continued, "is you don't gots to do it unless you want to—work. You want to go down to the river and fish, it's up to you. Way it is now, we work all the time and don't gets a dime for it."

"We got a home," Arthur answered.

"A home? Yeah, a damned orphanage! Nobody's gonna take us, Arthur. We too old. All they want is babies—you've seen that. I figure we need to get started in life. those guys, some of them, they even got girls."

A few days later, Arthur and Mick took a few of their things in paper bags, planning to sneak back into the orphanage later and get the rest, what there was of it. the first night they used a few of their saved-up pennies to buy a loaf of bread and some bacon, and when the sun had set they made a fire and cooked over rocks in a park along the shore.

the night was deep and starlit, until a pumpkin moon eventually rose up over the water. It backlit the islands in the harbor and the two of them speculated that many of these might not be inhabited and that maybe they could find a way out there on a fishing boat. Once they arrived, they could build themselves a cabin and fish all summer; winter was not discussed. At dawn the next day, they set out, full of hopes, for Dorchester and the streets paved with gold that awaited them.

It turned out, however, that the Dorchester Avenue boys Mick knew were part of a vicious Irish teenage gang that didn't take kindly to strangers. Even with Mick's toughness, the Bostwick lads were no match for these thugs, who chased them off their turf all the way north to Summer Street. After three days of squandering their tiny hoard of coins, Arthur and Mick were reduced to hanging around the docks and fighting rats for the spoiled vegetables left on the piers.

Still, they fished in the harbor and Arthur was usually able to scrape up some kind of dinner of flounder, clam, or crab stew. Once Mick killed a seagull with a stick after tempting it with a piece of moldy bread and even that went into a stew. But, within a few weeks, Mick seemed to be getting morose and lost so much interest in fishing or scavenging that these tasks were left to Arthur, who had constructed a little shed for them out of washed-up boards he found along the beach.

Excerpted from El Paso by Winston Groom. Copyright © 2016 by Winston Groom. With permission of the publisher, Liveright Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved.