Excerpt from Too Shattered for Mending by Peter Brown Hoffmeister, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Light east- west wind, the clouds running laterals in the opposite direction. I looked over at the house, stick frame propped on cinder blocks after being moved from Weippe. A four-foot ground gap. If I crouched down, I could look under the house and see the cemetery at an angle. The cemetery out back. A garden of the dead. All those planted and none to spring up. I'd come outside to pee in my favorite spot, out by the stop sign, but seeing you made me forget.

It was three days after, and I could still feel my hands shaking. I looked down and my fingers wouldn't straighten.

shantytown

I drive south through town over the rise, past the Timber Inn, the Outback, and Sammy's, head south to the 250 split, the Judge Town road. It's not far out but I pass the main houses and the one good place with the fish pond, up the road toward the old Cardiff Mill, past Brown's Creek.

There's a few places I could ask, but some I wouldn't want to, and I roll up on gravel to a place I've been to with Big twice before. It's a yellow house with a five- foot TV satellite dish in the middle of the driveway on 8" x 4" wood blocks, and I stop the truck in front of the dish.A man walks out, duck-footed, feet pointed in two different directions and his head craning all ways to see if I've got anyone with me in the cab or laying flat in the back.

My window's already rolled down. I don't get out. I say, "Have you seen Big McCardell?"

"Who's asking?"

"Little McCardell."

The man's finished looking in the cab and the bed of the truck, and he knows I'm alone now. He rubs his eyes with the palms of his hand. "Not for a bit," he says. He keeps rubbing at his eyes.

"You know what he was last doing here? What he was running?"

This is what I really came to ask. The man stops rubbing his eyes. Looks at me close. "Hey now. Those ain't the kinda questions people ask around here." He shifts one hand behind his back and holds on to something I can't see. Says, "You know who's in that cabin behind me?"

I shake my head.

"Right," he says, "you don't. And you don't wanna know. 'Cause people that know, well, they sometimes disappear."

"But I gotta ask. I gotta know about my own granddad's business."

"Kid, I don't think you understand what all I'm sayin'."

I look at the house. See movement at a window. A blind pulled down quick. The man says, "I seen real young before, and I get that. That's how we all growed up. Just don't mix young with stupid. Right?"

He still has one hand behind his back. I pop the truck in reverse. "I'll go ask around elsewhere." I start to back up, and the gravel under the tires crunches.

The man calls out, "It don't matter for me 'cause I ain't affected, but I wouldn't ask too many elsewheres if I were you. You understand?"


The next three places I stop are abandoned, no cars and no answers at the door, and Judge Town isn't a place where you check a door and walk in if it's unlocked. You never know what you might find inside a house, and you wouldn't want to get caught by whoever's staked a claim. So I drive back home to my trailer to eat, to get some sleep, to head to school in the morning

born to lose

Dyslexia in school is like trying to ride a four- wheeler with the back axle broken. If I can get it to drive at all, it's just a matter of time until a bump takes the wheels off.

Grade school, I remember seeing other kids excited and raising their hands, asking what we were doing next, and I was just hoping to God there wouldn't be anything next because I didn't have a chance of finishing what was in front of me.

Excerpt copyright © 2017 by Peter Brown Hoffmeister. Published by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children's Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.