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

then say, “Oh, July, it’s only you.” He began to drop in on July and sit in the large chair they’d dragged in from the storeroom and talk until after midnight, drinking Kool-Aid and telling him stories of his life when he was a boy living on the streets of Philadelphia, and always managing to find a way to leave four, five or six dollars behind when he left, as though keeping a strict moral solvency between the money and the time July spent listening to him.

But these meetings were rare. Carroll was too busy for them except after those infrequent times when he’d arrive unexpectedly at night, talk to men in the basement and come up. He and his wife entertained and had many social engagements. They were interested in horse racing and owned a boat that they kept at Atlantic City. July saw Mrs. Carroll come into the store from time to time and talk to Franklin in the closed office. He was never introduced and was known to the onetime holder of the Miss New Jersey title only as the cleaning boy who lived in the room on the second floor. Frequently they were gone for weeks at a time, and once they went to Japan, leaving Bob Reed, Franklin’s most highly paid salesman, in charge of the store.

Carroll thought July should have an education, and against his will persuaded him to attend night classes at Temple University. After two years of these classes it would be possible to take a test qualifying him, if he passed, for a high-school equivalency certificate. The classes weren’t difficult because he’d already learned to read quickly. But he resented the actual class time spent listening to the dry, underpaid voices of the student teachers from the university, especially one, whose pale face betrayed a life that had dried up at twenty-five—a deal had been made with his soul: “Listen, keep quiet and we’ll survive vicariously in theback rooms of the world.” His gray laughter was frightening. Yet, despite this, July was learning and whole highways of interest opened up around him. If nothing else, those sad teachers could hurl ideas at him thought by men and women who lived forever outdoors and on the summit of experience.

July was growing in a physical sense as well, and although he continued to picture himself still as a small boy, in the eyes of strangers he was clearly six feet tall, rawboned and potentially dangerous. Lugging bulky furniture in and out of trucks and up and down flights of stairs had hardened his muscles, yet he retained the quickness and agility of his age.

Those evenings when he wasn’t at night school he spent reading and studying the planets and the moon from a telescope Carroll had bought for him at an auction. Sometimes when Carroll would come up from the basement the two of them would carry the forty-power apparatus up to the roof and July would focus something in and Carroll would peer through the eyepiece and exclaim, “Magnificent.” But that would be the end of his interest and he’d settle down into one of the two chairs they had up there and, gesturing continually to the night, begin talking. July would try to talk to him about some of the things he was learning that excited him, in a way proving to him that he was actually getting all that could be expected, but Carroll would wave his hands and say, “Yes, yes, that’s all very good. Someday you’ll need that information. For every grain of knowledge you absorb the world will pay you back a thousand times.”

From his interest in astronomy July acquired a fondness for being on the roof, and many times when his purpose would be academic, such as finally seeing the great double star in Perseus, he’d be lulled away from the telescope by the noise from the street, which seemed muted and distant from that height, and the rest of the night would find him walking pleasantly and aimlessly along the perimeter of the roof, sitting and letting the lights and noises and chilly air fill him to the very brink of contentment. But he’d hold these nights against himself: he was inan intense training period, at the end of which he intended to be rich, cultivated and thoroughly attractive to women. A hibernation of work. The time it would take was not definite—certainly longer than it would take to secure the high-school diploma, but how much longer he didn’t know. The only thing he could be sure of was that each day he spent studying and absorbing information and looking into the lives of men like Benjamin Franklin and Immanuel Kant was one day closer.

At the age of seventeen, having ended his classes at the night school, he revisited his old room below City Hall (it was so low that he could no longer stand straight up in it) and when he left he took with him the small, thick Bible and the pictures of his parents. Doing this, he felt as though he were robbing his own tomb. The photographs were showing signs of age. This grieved him. He took them back to his apartment and with Carroll’s help laid them out and rephotographed them and had five-by-eight enlargements made of two; framed them in the shop and hung them in the master position on his walls. He made up his mind to read the Bible from cover to cover as a scholarly endeavor, as he was led to believe it was not only an account of an historical race, preserved from cracked parchment paper, but the symbolic source for all Western poetry and the basis of the Christian religion. He took up the task one evening after coming down from the roof and was immediately filled with a kind of horror which he could neither express nor understand. He put the book away and returned to the roof, thinking that his dinner might