The Scorpio Races - Maggie Stiefvater [48]
I pedal off the gravel road and onto the asphalt, glancing behind me to make certain no cars are coming. They rarely are, but since Father Mooneyham got knocked into the ditch by Martin Bird’s truck, I’m careful to look.
The wind is coming straight across the hills as I pedal. I have to lean against it to keep the bicycle from tipping. Ahead of me, the road winds to avoid the more formidable outcroppings. Dad said that when they first paved the road, it looked like a scar or a zipper, black against the muted browns and green hills around it. But now the asphalt and the painted lines on it have faded so that the road seems like just another part of the crooked, angular landscape. There’s patches on the road, too, where craters have opened up in it and been sealed with darker tar. It’s like camouflage. At night, it’s almost impossible to stay true to it.
Behind me, I hear the sound of an engine separate itself from the sound of the wind, and I pull over to the side to let them pass. But instead of passing by, the vehicle stops. It’s Thomas Gratton in his big sheep truck, a Bedford whose headlights and grille make it look like Finn when he’s making his frog face.
“Puck Connolly,” Thomas Gratton, ruddy faced as always, says through the open window. He’s already opening his door. “Where are you headed on that?”
“Hastoway.”
I can’t quite figure how I make it off the bicycle, but the next thing I know, Gratton is lifting it over the side of the truck bed for me and saying, “I’m headed down there myself.”
I know good fortune when I see it, so I climb in the passenger seat, moving a tin, a newspaper, and a border collie out of my way before I settle.
“Also,” Thomas Gratton says, pulling himself into the truck with a groan, as if it takes a bit of doing, “have some biscuits. So I don’t eat them all myself.”
As we drive off down the road, I eat one and I give one to his dog. I cast a sly look to Thomas Gratton to see if he’s noticed — and if he’s noticed, if he minds — but he’s humming and gripping the steering wheel as if it might get away. I think about him and Peg talking about me and wonder if I’ve made a mistake trapping myself here in the cab with him.
For a moment we ride in comparative silence — the truck rattles as if the engine is climbing out of the compartment, so quiet is not exactly the word for it. I’m pleased to see that the cab is cluttered with cough drop wrappers and empty milk bottles and bits of mud-smeared newspapers made brittle by age. Neatness makes me feel like I have to be on my best behavior. Clutter is my natural habitat.
“How’s that brother of yours?” Gratton asks me.
“Which one?”
“The heroic one with the cart.”
I sigh so deeply that the collie licks my face to cure me. “Oh, Finn.”
“He’s a dedicated one. Do you think he’s up for an apprenticeship?”
An apprenticeship with the butcher would be a very wonderful thing indeed. It pains me to say, “He can’t stand the sight of blood.”
Thomas Gratton laughs. “He’s picked the wrong island.”
I think, not fondly, about the dead sheep I investigated earlier. And also about Finn haunting Palsson’s bakery. If he could apprentice anywhere, I’m certain it would be there. Where he could put salt in his hot cocoa. They’d have to apprentice someone else to pick up the kitchen after him, though.
“Oh, what have we here?” Thomas Gratton says. It takes me a moment to spot what he does, which is a lone dark figure picking its way parallel to the road. Gratton stops the truck and rolls down his window.