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

Pause.

“None.”

“Fine. It’ll be good to have someone here at night. We had two break-ins last year. Yes, I’m sure we’ll get along just fine. Now you’ll have to excuse me, I’ve things to do. Why don’t you go get your stuff? I’ll see if I can’t have a lock put on this door here opening into the storage area, and sometime next week we’ll get a fellow to put in a bathtub. Where do you want it?”

“Well, I don’t know,” began July.

“Well, think about it and let me know.” He gave the room a quick last look. “Oh yes, might not be too bad a little room, fixed up. Is there anything else? Now I must run. I’ll see you later.”

July was left alone in his new room. He couldn’t believe he was so lucky.

It wasn’t entirely true that leaving his cement room underneath City Hall was without complications. He knew there would be some as soon as he was down on the first landing, and by the time he could hear the trolleys running, he felt like aninsect—the kind of person who could abandon a place that had seen him through all his trials, that had sheltered him and belonged only to him—had known no one before and would know no one after. To give it up in exchange for a room owned by someone else, whose location could be known to anyone . . . Refrigerator, hot and cold running water, a bathtub, electricity, toilet, winter heat and windows—all these seemed like the ear-marks of misplaced priorities—luxuries owned by people who cared nothing for the real things in life—the old things, the safe things and the sacred things—by people who forsook their pasts and lived without feelings.

He slipped underneath the landing and went back to his room. Butch was there. July closed the cardboard door, lit his lamp, set it on the table, lay down on his pallet looking up at the conduit pipes and decided to go back to being a newsboy and let Franklin Carroll get in his bathtub and sail down the river. He fell asleep. Terrifying thoughts filled his dreams, causing his body to sweat and jerk.

When he woke up there was a specter in his chair. He could see the orange-and-yellow light flickering through her bones. She was quite old and dressed in a fashion common to a much earlier age. Butch was walking back and forth in front of her on the table, blocking the lamplight, then letting it through, her face darkening, then growing brighter. There was something about her that was very comical, and though he couldn’t put his finger on just what it was, he knew it had something to do with her eyes; for that reason he was careful not to look into them for fear of laughing.

“So it’s back to the newspaper business,” she said, picking up his deck of cards and trying to get them to fan out in the way of cardsharps, but having a hard time of it.

“I guess so,” said July.

“It’s not a bad business. I mean, it’s pretty good money. You should get yourself a new deck of cards; these stick together something fierce.” She put them down and frowned at them. Butch walked around them because they were in his path.

“Would you like something to drink?” asked July, sitting up. “I’ve got a little whiskey here.”

“You know I can’t eat or drink anything—testing me, no doubt. Now see here, young man, don’t think you shall impress me with this drinking business. What seems to be the matter with this cat here—walking back and forth like some prowling monkey?”

“He’s sort of suspicious by nature. He was kidnapped once.”

“Well, I’d never take him, you can depend on that, and I wouldn’t think you’d worry about his being stolen in the future. That one time must have been a fluke. After all, who’d want such a suspicious, prowling cat? It’d make me nervous.”

July, trying as hard as he could, was unable to keep from snorting out a little laugh.

“And what seems to be so funny?”

“Nothing.”

“I’ll have you know this is the first time in maybe one or two thousand years that anyone’s laughed at me. A little too sure of yourself, I’d say, for such a young snip . . . or impudent. Hey now, what’s this taped under here?”

“That’s my pistol. It used to belong to my mother. Take it out and look at it if you want to.”

“Heaven forbid that I’d ever touch such a thing. What ghastliness! Whatever use would you have for such a thing? It has a white handle, of all things—utterly ghastly.”

“It’s a belly gun.”

“What!”

July simply couldn’t help it and began laughing again. It was like having the most perfectly naïve person imaginable right there before him, reacting in just the way you’d imagine; but at the same time (and this is where the humor came in) her unworldliness was so invulnerable that nothing could ever penetrate it very far.

“It’s a gun for close shots—right in the gut.”

“Someone should have taken a stick to your mother when she was your age. But come now, what is it about this room thatmakes you think it’s so special? It doesn’t look so hot to me. In fact, I don’t think I’d want a son of mine living in it for even one night . . . and the noise of those trolleys is awful.”

“Ever since I came to the city I’ve lived here. It’s my home. Butch and I, we like it just fine.”

“Probably why he’s so suspicious. It’s too damp for a cat.”

“He doesn’t mind.”

“He tolerates it, is what you mean. Face the facts: it’s not ideal. And anyway, what was it that fellow said about you and being a paper—”

“He said, ‘Paper boy. Charlotte, really, a paper boy!’ ”

“I thought it was something of that order. So if he feels like that, isn’t it a pretty good sign other people do too?”

“Who cares what other