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

an experience in a washroom in Cleveland hanging over him. He felt ashamed for himself. A hazy noise filled the station. Marginal people sat on the benches, neither looking at him nor away. He felt an urge to go home—back to Sharon Center, to stand in his father’s garage and let the feel of men come into him from the tools, watch the telephone wires cross the street to his house and the barn swallows line up as though waiting for a parade and old Mr. Stanton, blind as a toad, come picking his way from his yellow house a quarter-mile down the road, tap the elm tree at the edge of Millers’ yard, abruptly turn and walk into the open garage door to spend an hour talking to his father about the old days when his grandfather Wilson tracked a chicken thief with his dog clearover to Frytown and up to the house of an old, bitter woman who lived in it with six cats and could hardly have lifted a chicken, let alone carried three of them out of the house, through the briers and back through the woods. No, he thought, I won’t allow myself to feel this way.

When July arrived at his room and turned on the light, a brand-new television set stared at him from the middle of the room. A red ribbon was tied around it and Happy Birthday written on a card in Carroll’s handwriting, though his birthday was not for four months. Upon opening his refrigerator he found it crammed with food and expensive cat dinners. He took out a can of beer and sank into his favorite chair, underneath the pictures of his parents. Butch came over and sat on his lap, but jumped down when a drop of the cold liquid fell on his head. A copy of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams lay half opened on the floor and July picked it up and found the faint pencil mark where he’d left off reading. In his exhaustion he let a couple of sentences flash across his retina, but had no power to decipher them. He thought of himself impersonally, and tried to assess how far he’d come. For a moment, because of the weakness of his mind and body, and the sensation of having finally returned home after an ordeal, he wondered, What is all this worth? What good is learning this? Doesn’t a dog or a baboon live just as well without it? Isn’t it all pretension and snobbish amusement? In the final end result, wouldn’t it be better just to be a libertine, or work as a geek in the circus?

He dragged himself off to bed, and under the pillow found a scrap of paper money. But in the darkness he couldn’t tell its value, and hadn’t enough ambition to get up and turn on the light. Butch jumped up and fell to purring in the hollow of his leg.

He gave Carroll every opportunity to explain the circumstances leading up to the previous evening, and even asked him once. He declined to say anything.

But July’s curiosity was aflame, and though he continued his arduous studies (aside from his job he spent six or seven hours reading, and weekends found him in the museum and library), he still found time to wonder about the mysterious truck. Sometimes late in the evening he’d go into the basement and check the many locked doors, hoping to find one left open by mistake. He scavenged through the offices upstairs in search of keys to open them and papers that might help to explain what he didn’t know.

One afternoon on a trip to New Jersey to look at some kitchen tables whose tops were supposed to withstand setting down a hot frying pan, Franklin said, “You’ve got to stop poking around.”

July drove on without speaking. Carroll was quiet for several miles and the silence between them was disturbed only by the thumping of the tires in the cracks of the concrete highway.

“What do you know?”

“That you have four thieves who work more or less full time for you, and maybe one more in Pittsburgh.”

“What else?”

“The truck I drove to Boston three months ago belongs to you, indirectly.”

“Mmmm.” Franklin turned on the radio, dialed in three separate advertisements and turned it off.

“This country’s run by a set of laws,” he began, his hands beginning to gesture. “A set of laws put together by men of Congress, each and every one of them out for his own interests. A law gets passed when a majority of them can get together in a block and vote legislation in over the opposition of a minority, whom the law will not help. Their interest is money. The President’s interest is money. No President ever leaves office before he’s at least a millionaire. This whole country’s interest, down to nearly every waking moment, is money. People kill themselves and each other because of it. Work ethic, social ethic, business ethic—nothing. Only a money ethic. Wars are fought for it. It’s the only reallysacred thing in the world, but the least talked about. A normal man, during the normal course of each day, thinks about it between three and four hours—that’s an average—and that’s thinking about it directly.” July began to interrupt, but Franklin cut him off. “But there’s very little talking done about it. To live in my neighborhood you’d have to be making—” July was frowning. Carroll’s voice level rose. “Wait a minute. Look, if you think this is all crass, or beneath your comprehension, then you better grow up and look around. Just what do you think ambition means? Or incentive, or security, or well-being, or power, or self-betterment? Name me one smart man who is broke. If money’s of comparatively no importance to you, then you’re comparatively low in the brains department, because it is the most important!”

“There’s religion,” said July stubbornly.

“Pooh! Too many marriages break up because of money problems, or are