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

must have been then, he judged, to have lived here and actually liked it, even if I thought I was happy. Butch, he noticed, was out of place as well. July put his old ring of keys and the automatic from under the tiny table into his jacket pocket, though some of the keys had melted together with rust.

That day he rented a room in a boardinghouse, leaving him only $5.46, and took a civil-service examination at the post office. Later that week he got a job sorting mail.

NINE

July had renounced, or had tried to renounce, everything in his life that he associated with being in the furniture store. He despised all learning. He renounced all ambition to do anything other than be alive. He receded into himself so far that his own thoughts became an objective entertainment to him and he spent whole evenings sitting and accompanying himself with substanceless daydreams. He made no attempt to fix up his room. He took it as it’d come—bare walls, one overhead light, a dresser and a small table with two mismatched chairs. An iron bed sat in the corner next to a white refrigerator that ran continuously. Butch and the green walls were his friends. He’d given up all hope of ever having a human companion, and all desire to try. If people were meant to be together, he thought, they’d be born in bunches. He used the kitchen in the house only late at night, when the others weren’t likely to come upon him there, carrying his utensils down with him and judiciously cleaning up when he left. With a small heating coil which he kept on the windowsill next to his bed he heated water for coffee in the morning before leaving for work. He drank it in his underwear without cream or sugar, sometimes two cups. He shaved only when the whiskers under his chin began to irritate him, and was careful not to make any noise in the halls. At work he sorted letters and talked to nobody. When he would come close to one of his fellow employees, he’d look away. The supervisor said hello to him every morning, told him anything that he had to know, and was always forgetting his name and covering up by introducing himself with, “Hey there, we have a tracer here on a ...” instead of beginning, “Say, July, we have . . .” July never noticed.

But in spite of himself and all his intentions to live in the most miserable of ways, he found that he truly missed (or needed)several pleasures that he’d acquired a taste for while in the furniture store, and after denying them to himself for many months they began to gnaw at him, so that each day he would crave them more. It’s only a habit I acquired, he thought. A stupid habit I was fool enough to fall into. A bottle of beer is better than any habit. “Three weeks,” he told Butch (because twenty-one days was a magical time for changes). “In three weeks, if the desire isn’t gone yet, I’m going to give in to it . . . in a small way.”

After twenty-one days he still had the craving, so he went to the library and asked to be given another borrower’s card. The librarian, an old woman whose cold gray hair looked as though it hadn’t moved a smidgin since he’d last seen it and remained packed tightly to her head in little furrows, recognized him. They exchanged a silent greeting. He allowed himself only a book a week, but chose with great deliberation.

His second concession was to permit himself a visit to the art museum once a month. And because most of the exhibits lasted that long anyway, he was able to see a variety of work. He loved paintings. The good ones he could live in. A single picture could easily take up ten or fifteen minutes of his interest, and he only let go of it because there were so many others, like the trees and the forest. He tried to come when no one else would be there and he could roam undisturbed, letting his imagination run wild, usually on Tuesday night. Often his taste would not concur with that of the museum, and there were even some paintings in the permanent collection he didn’t care for. But those were usually easy to overlook. Each visit he would choose several to memorize in the greatest detail and many times during the following month—especially while at work—he would think about them; and the more he did it, the easier it got. They were better than daydreams because they had no motion, and better than sleep because he could control which picture he chose. They were a little like death in the way that he would use them.

With working Wednesday afternoon, Thursday and Friday at a dress shop, the occasional visits from her parents on weekends and classes at the Philadelphia School of Art on Monday and Wednesday mornings, Mal Rourke’s only real chance to get to the museum was Tuesday night. She usually went after dinner, leaving her roommate, Carol, to fall asleep on the apartment sofa watching television.

The first time she saw him she thought he must be the janitor, with his hair and eyes as fierce and dark as chimney soot. His face was whiskered and bristling like an old broom. The pocket of his gray shirt (a match for the pants, which together made a kind of uniform) was ripped away and hung down in a triangle with a ragged edge. He was looking at a painting of two ladies snapping beans in an orange field, and as soon as he noticed her he went into another room, looking for a mop, perhaps, she thought.

It was a month before she saw him again, and except for the absence of any other people, the palatial stillness