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

July stopped across the street and tucked himself into a shadow beneath an awning, as dark as the inside of a pocket. Whenever a figure crossed the lighted window his heart would flare up, thinking it was she. But it was always unclear, moving aimlessly, a kind of phantom shape. He waited until he was thoroughly dissatisfied with himself and began walking back home, keeping on the edge of his senses, looking for signs of that trouble she’d said would find him if he walked her home. Underneath the platform with Butch he let his memories open and felt himself dissolve into the concrete.

The following day was Friday, and he worked through the morning in a daze, selling papers and making cheap talk like a madman who decides to have nothing to do with his exterior self and lets it function without him.

She’ll never come, he thought. She never wants to see me again—that’s simple. But then the memory of her kiss would come back, and because of the depth of feeling it produced in him, it seemed to say to him, One event, one emotion—the same feeling would have to be in her.

He quit work early in the afternoon and went down and talked to Butch for an hour, sounded all his thoughts and counted all his money out onto the pallet—even the jars that he knew contained $700 each. He began to fill one jar up again, reconsidered and stuffed it all, down to the $7.00 from that morning, into a brown paper sack: $2073. Butch overlooked all this activity with measured disapproval. Carrying the bag as though it were lunch, accompanied by his cat, July went up onto the street and headed for the several jewelry stores that he knew uptown.

Barney Snells owned and operated the Snells Jewelry Store by himself. In the past he’d tried to employ other people, but it had never worked out. He had no friends and few enjoyments. He disliked eating, and whenever he and his wife would attend a back-yard party of one of her acquaintances in the suburbs, he would ask for his steak very well done, just to watch his hosts wince and shake their heads in pity for his bad taste. He would go out of his way to buy a tie or suit that would make him look older and more drab than he was. He read nothing but science fiction, and one of the reasons none of his help had lasted was that he resented the extra companionship and noise. He played chess by mail with someone in Alaska he’d never met; and had his playing board set up in the back room of the store, and each day he would confront it as a way of waking himself up. Both of his children had run away from home when they were sixteen and he’d never heard from them again; he imagined his wife corresponded with them in secret and sent them money from hisaccount, but he didn’t hold it against her. He prided himself on having no opinions except about jewelry.

His greatest love was diamonds. He appreciated them beyond anything—the way they held the light, their purity, their rarity and strength. Breaking down a crudely cut diamond into smaller stones, eliminating pores and feathers, polishing each facet (especially on a King Cut) and making the set was an adventure in which each fiber of him participated, and he spent days at a time with his eyepiece held in his eye, turning a diamond this way and that, letting the light spray out of the facets into spectrums, his mind lost to all thought. He could recall dreams—long, complicated dreams—which were composed of diamonds turning in light, other diamonds coming in, clashing, breaking, splintering, and more diamonds growing up. One dream that he remembered with particular pleasure had begun with only the color blue and out of it had come the nine large stones of the Cullinan, and later starred the Florentine yellow.

He was an authority on diamonds. His chess set had a diamond (Magna Cut) set into the top of both the white and the black king. At the end of the game the winner held the matched pair.

He carried a small diamond replica of the Koh-i-noor (New Cut) in his watch pocket.

He was a wealthy jeweler because the experience of buying from him always proved satisfactory—he never seemed to want to let anything he had go, whatever the price.

When July came in he had the eyepiece to his eye and was painstakingly tearing apart a setting on a wedding ring that he’d come upon in trade during a trip to New York the weekend before—a wedding set which had been made to resemble the famous set made for Henry VII by Leopold with the main stone offset by four smaller ones around it—the purpose being to focus essentially red light from the facets of the larger and through the smaller, accentuated by the gold, producing small red light veins at thirty-two places along the circumference. But the job had been sloppy and many of the facets were ground at the wrong angle to catch thered spectrum band. He put the eyepiece down and stood up, looking with wary circumspection at July, his cat and the soiled brown sack which he set on the glass case.

“Watch that cat there,” he said, “and mind he doesn’t jump up on anything.”

“Here, maybe you better wait outside,” said July, and opened the silent door for Butch, who indignantly stepped back onto the sidewalk and sat down.

“Now, what can I do for you?”

“I want to buy something for someone,” said July, and abruptly stopped talking, as though to offer any more information would in some way compromise his feelings. Barney Snells looked him over closely and thought he looked barbaric—his hair shaggy and long, his ears dirty, his clothes unpressed, shoes dry-splattered with mud, and a quite ruffianlike way of standing, looking down into the cabinet, his dirty bag