Read Blue Hole Back Home: A Novel for Free Online

was certain he’d been misplaced at birth, he’d once confided in me: Though raised in a green vinyl-sided split-level on Pisgah, he was surely conceived someplace else, by someone else, on the city wall of Jerusalem, maybe, by vacationing foreign diplomats, unmarried, stationed in Nepal. He kept gaping at the new girl. “Dreamt of coming here ?”
    “In America, it is everywhere the land of opportunity, my father says.” Farsanna looked around then, unsure of herself, unsure of us, like she’d covered herself in a coat she could tell didn’t fit.
    L. J.’s sneer had sunk, if possible, deeper. “Yeah? ‘Bring me your tired, your poor, your naive, huddled masses …’ So, what else does your father say?”
    Farsanna raised her chin, but her eyes tipped, unsteady. Her voice bunched into clumps. “‘It is the … end … of the rainbow,’ he likes to say,” she told L. J.—though she seemed not to like saying it herself.
    Despite the blow of her saying she liked our town, L. J. granted the new girl another chance. She was after all someone who had seen the world, seen something beyond the too-warm, maternal arms of our mountain.
    “Why don’t you relate pertinent facts about your home?” he suggested.
    Rising from the floorboards of the pickup bed, Farsanna’s line of vision leveled out with his. “This now is home,” she said. And then tried it again, like she was convincing herself, or trying: “ This now is home.”
    L. J.’s sneer dug itself into a scowl. He sat back. I could always read L. J.’s face—most everyone could. It was a shame, he was thinking: He knew little about that part of the world, and he might’ve added it to his Places to Visit Real Soon. Just as Real Soon, our mangy pack knew, as he could break the news to his father, the owner of Waymon’s Feed and Seed (known in three counties), about not sticking around to inherit that millstone of a family business.
    Then L. J. leaned forward, across Jimbo’s body-canoe, nearly in the new girl’s face. “Does anybody peruse, oh, I don’t know, any, say, American history books in Sri Lanka? Or the newspapers, perhaps? Anybody inform your family they were relocating to the South end of the rainbow?”
    Little Bobby Welpler yipped in with “Pisgah Ridge, North Carolina: Pot of Gold, USA.”
    “Sure,” L. J. shot back, “ White Gold.”
    With his left elbow, Jimbo rammed L. J.’s chest back against the pickup’s metal wall. “I hope …” he interjected, “we hope you like it here.” He reached over to pat Farsanna’s forearm, adding, “Welcome.” Then his arm stretched back over his head through the truck cab window to scratch the Big Dog on her remarkably chubby neck.
    We rode for awhile without the social padding of chatter and none of us liked it, not a one of us able to find a comfortable place to set down our legs or our eyes. But the pickup’s bucking over the root-clogged trail down to the Hole gradually knocked loose our tongues. Or maybe it was just approaching the Blue Hole itself.
    Little Bobby Welpler, of all people, saved us that day with his forgettable blather. We laughed with him and at him—and he laughed some too. Even Farsanna joined in once or twice, that iron spine of hers melting almost soft.
    In the Clearing—our clever name for it—just before the logging trail funneled to a single-file path, Emerson pulled alongside a cluster of other pickups and Jeeps. He was blocking in at least three, and we’d soon be blocked in by others. But no matter: Everyone left their windows rolled down and their keys on the seat, and shuffled each other as needed.
    We scrambled out from the truck bed, Bobby Welpler hitting the ground before Emerson put it in park. Propping Em’s guitar against bags of manure, Jimbo turned back to offer a hand to Farsanna, but she’d already lowered her skirt and herself to the ground.
    Her eyes weren’t on Jimbo anyhow. She was watching the truck that had pulled in