Chapters (45)
- Cover
- Blame Iton Paris
- Copyright Notice
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
- Book One
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-one
- Book Two
- Twenty-two
- Twenty-three
- Twenty-four
- Twenty-five
- Twenty-six
- Twenty-seven
- Twenty-eight
- Twenty-nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-one
- Thirty-two
- Thirty-three
- Thirty-four
- Thirty-five
- Thirty-six
- Thirty-seven
- Thirty-eight
- Thirty-nine
“It’s not anyone’s butt,” I said with extreme patience. “It’s a giant peach. You know, as in Peach State. Georgia has the best peaches in the world, and South Carolina thinks it does, so sometimes you see enormous peaches, often over outlet stores. I think they might be used as water towers,” I added doubtfully.
Sébastien sat back. “This is really an amazing country,” he told Fabien. “Just this morning, the news showed a picture of a sixty-foot Christmas tree someone hung over the interstate a couple of weeks ago.” I coughed and kept my eyes fixed on the road ahead. “Can you imagine that? A sixty-foot Christmas tree. Hey, Laura, can we take Fabien by the gas station that has that pink papier-mâché elephant outside bigger than the whole building?”
“No,” I said. “It’s in the other direction. But if you’re good, I’ll show you a shack that’s entirely covered in tires.”
Down in Georgia, big David was waiting for Sébastien. “This time I’ve got a really good wine for you to try,” he grinned. “Kind of an American specialty, you might say.” He disappeared for a moment and came back with a small flask filled with a liquid of a poisonous red color and very clearly marked MD 20/20.
“David, you can’t give him that,” my brother Stefan said. “He might die.”
“No, no, let me try it.” Rising to the challenge, Sébastien took the flask and unscrewed the cap.
By that time, rumor had flown round the house that David was actually feeding Sébastien Mad Dog, and the whole family rushed to the kitchen. Cheers went up as Sébastien tilted his head back and took his first sip. He paused, rolled it around on his tongue, swallowed, and took another sip, this time to gasps of horror. Was he insane? Had one sip of Mad Dog short-circuited his brain? “You know, it’s not bad, actually,” he said. “Reminds me a bit of a cooked wine, something you’d drink before dinner.”
He handed the flask back to David, who looked down at it and shook his head. “You know, I do try, but I don’t think I’ll ever understand wines.” He looked up again, not to be crushed for long. “Hey, Say-bas-tee-YON, Fabio, have you ever been crane-swinging?”
In the yard of his crane operation, only one of David’s cranes wasn’t out on a job, and that one was occupied. “Don’t worry about it,” he called from its cabin, as he lowered a sixty-foot Christmas tree from a two-hundred-foot perch. “I had to check on the strings of lights on this thing, anyway. I think one of them has gone out.”
“How could he tell?” Fabien whispered, craning his head back. The closer the tree got to the ground and to us, the more we could see how big a sixty-foot Christmas tree was.