Rock Island Line by David Rhodes (i am reading a book TXT) 📕

got another upholstered chair, and had a print of a brook scene hung beside the photographs. He’d read every paperback in the stand, and it wasn’t uncommon that someone would ask his opinion or advice about them. He did the ordering. He got his own Social Security number, and filled out a tax statement every year. He had a post-officebox which gave him great pleasure to go to and unlock, taking out free things he’d sent away for from ads in the back of magazines. Some afternoons he’d get drunk on whiskey and beer Shavoneck would buy for him, eat huge quantities of greasy food and go to a movie in one of the better theaters. He neither loved or hated anyone except his cat.

It never occurred to him then that more could be demanded from living. Years went by in the same relatively comfortable way: minor ups and downs during the week, leveling off when viewed from the perspective of months. He and Ed Shavoneck became friends, of a sort. They had a narrow band of experiences and thoughts which they offered each other as common ground. On either side of this band, say the red frequency, lay the greater part of their selves, but nevertheless within it they had many perfectly enjoyable and safe discussions.

Through the mornings July would imagine this or that girl had a secret crush on him and thought his shoulders looked powerful and that he must be wild and a man of the world, dealing so effortlessly with all kinds of people, old ladies and hoodlums, and knowing everyone of importance and everything that was going on in the underworld and was very well read too and nobody’s fool, and had an extremely fierce cat. He began smoking cigarettes and wearing shoes with hard plastic heels that made sharp snapping noises when he walked.

He grew quickly during these two years and at fourteen and a half was only three inches shy of six feet, but thin as a rail. He prided himself on being able to say he was sixteen.

His savings had grown into such an enormous wad (he’d been adding to it $3.00, and sometimes $4.00, a day ever since his partnership) that he was sure he could never spend it on one thing. The bills took up three jars instead of one, and to count them all took too much time, especially when he knew there was an even $1400 contained in two of the jars together, so he’d only count the third. It seemed to him childish, too, to want to count the bills out one by one—something he was ashamed of ever having done.

He had a Bible now that he’d picked up from the Goodwill store—a fat one two inches thick, five inches high and four inches wide, tightly bound and almost impossible to read next to the inner margin. He kept his pictures inside it to keep them from curling and yellowing on the wall. His desire to read it was not religious and came upon him only once a month, or less, when he felt lonely and had nothing else to do. It was a way of bringing his parents closer to him. His father had read it; his mother had read it; now he read it, and when he did, time flashed, the voice of his mother and the expression of his father became clear, and it was a very real thing not being alone.

As time went on he began to think this business of reading the Bible was cowardly; needing to have your parents with you was kid stuff, and he gave up doing it. Butch, he reasoned, didn’t have such things, and got along without them; so would he. And the book remained unopened for a long time, even to take out the pictures.

Though it was not a regular practice, he and Franklin Carroll still occasionally ate breakfast together. But lately Carroll had been pushing him around and making him feel uncomfortable.

“So, what did you say you were going to do with your future?” asked Carroll, spreading the butter over his pancakes with a knife, stacking one on top of another.

“I didn’t,” answered July, watching Butch under the table lapping cream.

“That’s what I thought. No consideration of the future. Blind as a bat. Opportunities flying by you,” and one of his hands made a fluttering motion across the tabletop. “Look, what have you got now? Imagine yourself at my age, carrying around newspapers. No, you’re doing all right, don’t get me wrong—here, have some of these sausages. You’re way ahead of where I was at your age—how old are you?”

“Fourteen.” He felt the mounting pride of looking older than he was flare up from his pancakes.

“Oh, you’re well ahead of where I was at fourteen. But you have to always be thinking what you could have. Never let that thought slip away. It keeps you going forward—what I could have. Pardon me, miss, I wonder if we couldn’t have some more tea here, and fried eggs and toast.”

“How would you like them done, sir?”

“Easy over for me, and hard for the boy.”

She went away into the kitchen. July watched a man come into the restaurant, looking very tired, as if he’d just woken up. He came past their table and sat down. Franklin Carroll looked quickly at him, then resumed talking. When the waitress arrived with the eggs, he effortlessly drew out his pen, wrote a couple of words across the corner of the place mat, tore it off, folded it and handed it to her, whispering something which July couldn’t hear. Then he resumed talking as though never interrupted.

“Your cat, for instance, even she—”

“He,” corrected July, watching the waitress carry the paper into a small room behind the counter. A man came out behind her and went back into the kitchen, then returned with the cook, a big man, heavy and bald, wearing a wide white apron. The cook came over toward them