Hope Between the Pages by Pepper Basham (ebook reader for surface pro .txt) 📕

procedure when we returned to Manhattan, and I wanted to know what I was in for.

VERY LOUD country-and-western music, very loud live country-and-western music, suddenly came from next door, burst forth from next door. Someone was playing a harmonica, someone was playing a guitar, two people were singing, and I could hear them all very clearly even though our windows were closed. They performed a couple of songs and began a third, but they stopped abruptly before finishing it.

“Somebody must have called the cops,” mumbled Albertine.

“And the cops called the musicians and told them to cease and desist?” I asked.

“Mmm.”

“Maybe, but I think not.”

“Mmm.”

“Want to know what I think?”

“No.”

“Aw, come on.”

“Make it short.”

“I think that the musicians rented the house next door specifically for woodshedding, to get their act together before taking it on the road, and that it took only two and a half songs to convince them that they are going to have to pursue alternative career paths if they want to win fame and the love of beautiful women. I think that they have discovered that it’s not as easy as it looks, that, as Cervantes put it, it is not so easy a thing to inflate a dog, and that the inflation of the particular dog that they have chosen is more than they can manage, and that they have retired in their misery to silent drinking.”

“Which means that we can go back to sleep.”

“Yes,” I said, and she did go back to sleep, but I lay there, awake, thinking about motivation, failure, the inflation of dogs and men, and the hundred trillion neutrinos passing through my body without even the slightest detectible effect on any part of me but my mind, which, once it had begun thinking about them, would not stop.

THE NEXT MORNING, I went for a walk on the beach, for my health. While I was walking, I came upon the body of a drowned dog. At first, from a distance, I thought that it was a fender, the protective pad hung over the side of a vessel to prevent chafing when it rubs against a dock, bulkhead, piling, or another vessel, an old-fashioned fender made of braided rope. When I came upon it, I saw that it was instead what had been a dog, stiff-legged now, its body bloated to the shape of a sausage, its eyeballs gone, and insects crawling over it, but still wearing a vivid red braided collar, a festive note, the brightest object on the beach, and I immediately remembered my mother’s saying, “You can’t inflate a dead dog,” and right then, standing there on the windswept beach, I gave her my leaky old clam boat, to use in some venture at which she could succeed.

Chapter 47

The Common Touch

MY MOTHER started the car and began driving slowly home. She hadn’t gone far when she said, “You know what I wish?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Hm?”

“I think I know what you wish.”

“Oh — no — I mean, yes, I do wish that everything had gone the way I wanted it to go, but I know that I can’t change that — what I wish right now is that I could go to Dudley Beaker and ask him what I should do. I think he would know.”

Patti and I exchanged a look.

“But, of course, I can’t ask him because — ”

She didn’t finish.

I waited a couple of heartbeats, then took a deep breath and said, “I think I know what he would say.”

“You do?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said, “because I spent a lot of time listening to him tell me what I should do, and I think I know what he would say.”

It was my mother’s turn to let a few heartbeats pass and take a deep breath.

“What?” she asked.

In Dudley’s manner, I said, “So you have a thirst for fame, do you? You want the admiration of the mob? It isn’t difficult to win. There is only one real requirement.”

“What’s that, Dud?” asked Patti, as she would have if she and I had been alone in Dudley’s living room.

“What is it?” I said with a chuckle. I regretted not having a pipe with me, because this was the point at which Dudley would have spent some time lighting it, and only when smoke wreathed his head would he have said, as I did now, “I think that if you just ask yourself why it is that one man might labor for years to write an elegant treatise on the birth of stars and win only a single admirer, but another can stick a bamboo pole up a dog’s ass, blow the poor cur up like a balloon, and thereby not only delight all the halfwits in the town square, but fill his pockets with their silver, you’ll know the only requirement for winning fame.”

“A dog?” asked Patti.

“No,” I said with another chuckle.

“A bamboo pole? A talent for inflation?”

“No, dear girl,” I said with a wink. “What is required is a talent for vulgarity.”

“Of course!” said my mother, truly startled, turning to look, wide-eyed, at me. “The common touch!”

“I wouldn’t have put it quite that — ” I began.

“You’re right!” said my mother. “The common touch. Good for you!” For her, the Dudley Beaker impersonation was over; she was talking to her son, her little boy. After a moment, she added, “Bert was right,” and after another moment, she added, “Like father, like son.”

Chapter 48

Launching Ella’s Lunch Launch

IT TOOK JUST TWO DAYS (and some more borrowed money) to get Arcinella out of her elegant clothes and into something more comfortable. This time, we didn’t work alone. We recruited friends and neighbors, even my father. Together, we repainted her in tropical colors, fitted her out with a primitive galley (let’s be honest about this — we bolted a barbecue grill to the deck), rigged a canopy for shade, flew bright pennants from a dozen poles, and mounted loudspeakers so that we’d have doo-wop with us wherever we went.

Porky White, at