"Chelsea Quinn Yarbro - Frog Pond" - читать интересную книгу автора (Yarbro Chelsea Quinn)

He turned around, grabbing the pipe for balance. I waited till he'd steadied himself, and then I said,
"You're scaring the frogs."

"Scaring the frogs?" he yelled back, sounding like frogs were monsters.

"Yeah, I'm trying to catch some. Can you just sit there a minute?"

I could see he was thinking this over. Finally he sat back on the pipe like he was worn out and said real
quiet, "Why not?" And he leaned his head back and closed his eyes.

I got three frogs while he was sleeping there. They were big and fat. I put a stick through their throats and
let 'em dangle in the creek to keep fresh. I almost had the fourth one when the city guy woke up.

"Listen," he called to me. "Where am I?"

"Rotten Log Hollow."

"Where is that?"

I sure couldn't see the point in yelling all the time, so I told him to come closer and we could talk. "Talk
makes less noise. Maybe I can still catch some frogs if we're just talking."

He hustled off the pipe and scrambled along the shore, splashing dirt and stones into the water.

"Hi," I said when he got closer.

"Hello." He was still awful nervous and had that funny white look around his eyes, sort of like turtle skin.
"What's your name?"

He was really trying to be friendly, and even if Mr. Thompson says in that spooky voice of his that there
ain't any friendly strangers, well, this guy wasn't anything I couldn't handle.

"My name is Althea," I told him, polite like Mom tells me to be. "But mostly my friends call me Thorny.
Who are you?"

"UhтАФ" He looked around, then back. "Stan!тАФStanтАФjust call me Stan."

You could see that he was lying. He wasn't even good at it. So I said, sure, his name was Stan. Then I
waited for him to say something.

"You like this place?" he asked.

"Yeah. I come here lots of times."

"You live around here, then?"

A dumb question. He was really all city. Maybe he thought we had subways out here in the country. He
kept looking around like he expected a whole herd of people to come running out of the pipe.