Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town by Cory Doctorow (phonics books TXT) 📕

grew in
proliferation on Carlos's west coast. He sailed the raft through
treacherous seas for a year and a day, beached it on their father's
gentle slope, and presented himself to their mother. By that time, the
corpse had decayed and frayed and worn away, so that he was little more
than a torso and stumps, his tongue withered and stiff, but he pled his
case to their mother, and she was so upset that her load overbalanced
and they had to restart her. Their father was so angry that he quaked
and caved in Billy (Bob, Brad, Benny)'s room, crushing all his tools and
all his trophies.

But a lot of time had gone by and the brothers weren't kids
anymore. Alan was nineteen, ready to move to Toronto and start scouting
for real estate. Only Doug still looked like a little boy, albeit a
stumpy and desiccated one. He hollered and stamped until his fingerbones
rattled on the floor and his tongue flew across the room and cracked on
the wall. When his anger was spent, he crawled atop their mother and let
her rock him into a long, long slumber.

Alan had left his father and his family the next morning, carrying a
rucksack heavy with gold from under the mountain and walked down to the
town, taking the same trail he'd walked every school day since he was
five. He waved to the people that drove past him on the highway as he
waited at the bus stop. He was the first son to leave home under his own
power, and he'd been full of butterflies, but he had a half-dozen good
books that he'd checked out of the Kapuskasing branch library to keep
him occupied on the 14-hour journey, and before he knew it, the bus was
pulling off the Gardiner Expressway by the SkyDome and into the midnight
streets of Toronto, where the buildings stretched to the sky, where the
blinking lights of the Yonge Street sleaze-strip receded into the
distance like a landing strip for a horny UFO.

His liquid cash was tight, so he spent that night in the Rex Hotel, in
the worst room in the house, right over the cymbal tree that the
jazz-drummer below hammered on until nearly two a.m.. The bed was small
and hard and smelled of bleach and must, the washbasin gurgled
mysteriously and spat out moist sewage odors, and he'd read all his
books, so he sat in the window and watched the drunks and the hipsters
stagger down Queen Street and inhaled the smoky air and before he knew
it, he'd nodded off in the chair with his heavy coat around him like a
blanket.

The Chinese girl abruptly thumped her fist into the Russian boy's
ear. He clutched his head and howled, tears streaming down his face,
while the Chinese girl ran off. Alan shook his head, got up off his
chair, went inside for a cold washcloth and an ice pack, and came back
out.

The Russian boy's face was screwed up and blotchy and streaked with
tears, and it made him look even more like Doug, who'd always been a
crybaby. Alan couldn't understand him, but he took a guess and knelt at
his side and wiped the boy's face, then put the ice pack in his little
hand and pressed it to the side of his little head.

"Come on," he said, taking the boy's other hand. "Where do your parents
live? I'll take you home."

#

Alan met Krishna the next morning at ten a.m., as Alan was running a
table saw on the neighbors' front lawn, sawing studs up to fit the
second wall. Krishna came out of the house in a dirty dressing gown, his
short hair matted with gel from the night before. He was tall and fit
and muscular, his brown calves flashing through the vent of his
housecoat. He was smoking a hand-rolled cigarette and clutching a can of
Coke.

Alan shut down the saw and shifted his goggles up to his forehead. "Good
morning," he said. "I'd stay on the porch if I were you, or maybe put on
some shoes. There're lots of nails and splinters around."

Krishna, about to step off the porch, stepped back. "You must be Alvin,"
he said.

"Yup," Alan said, going up the stairs, sticking out his hand. "And you
must be Krishna. You're pretty good with a guitar, you know that?"

Krishna shook briefly, then snatched his hand back and rubbed at his
stubble. "I know. You're pretty fucking loud with a table saw."

Alan looked sheepish. "Sorry about that. I wanted to get the heavy work
done before it got too hot. Hope I'm not disturbing you too much --
today's the only sawing day. I'll be hammering for the next day or two,
then it's all wet work -- the loudest tool I'll be using is
sandpaper. Won't take more than four days, tops, anyway, and we'll be in
good shape."

Krishna gave him a long, considering look. "What are you, anyway?"

"I'm a writer -- for now. Used to have a few shops."

Krishna blew a plume of smoke off into the distance. "That's not what I
mean. What *are* you, Adam? Alan? Andrew? I've met people like you
before. There's something not right about you."

Alan didn't know what to say to that. This was bound to come up someday.

"Where are you from?"

"Up north. Near Kapuskasing," he said. "A little town."

"I don't believe you," Krishna said. "Are you an alien? A fairy? What?"

Alan shook his head. "Just about what I seem, I'm afraid. Just a guy."

"Just about, huh?" he said.

"Just about."

"There's a lot of wiggle room in *just about*, Arthur. It's a free
country, but just the same, I don't think I like you very much. Far as
I'm concerned, you could get lost and never come back."

"Sorry you feel that way, Krishna. I hope I'll grow on you as time goes
by."

"I hope that you won't have the chance to," Krishna said, flicking the
dog end of his cigarette toward the sidewalk.

#

Alan didn't like or understand Krishna, but that was okay. He understood
the others just fine, more or less. Natalie had taken to helping him out
after her classes, mudding and taping the drywall, then sanding it down,
priming, and painting it. Her brother Link came home from work sweaty
and grimy with road dust, but he always grabbed a beer for Natalie and
Alan after his shower, and they'd sit on the porch and kibbitz.

Mimi was less hospitable. She sulked in her room while Alan worked on
the soundwall, coming downstairs only to fetch her breakfast and coldly
ignoring him then, despite his cheerful greetings. Alan had to force
himself not to stare after her as she walked into the kitchen, carrying
yesterday's dishes down from her room; then out again, with a sandwich
on a fresh plate. Her curly hair bounced as she stomped back and forth,
her soft, round buttocks flexing under her long-johns.

On the night that Alan and Natalie put the first coat of paint on the
wall, Mimi came down in a little baby-doll dress, thigh-high striped
tights, and chunky shoes, her face painted with swaths of glitter.

"You look wonderful, baby," Natalie told her as she emerged onto the
porch. "Going out?"

"Going to the club," she said. "DJ None Of Your Fucking Business is
spinning and Krishna's going to get me in for free."

"Dance music," Link said disgustedly. Then, to Alan, "You know this
stuff? It's not playing music, it's playing *records*. Snore."

"Sounds interesting," Alan said. "Do you have any of it I could listen
to? A CD or some MP3s?"

"Oh, *that's* not how you listen to this stuff," Natalie said. "You have
to go to a club and *dance*."

"Really?" Alan said. "Do I have to take ecstasy, or is that optional?"

"It's mandatory," Mimi said, the first words she'd spoken to him all
week. "Great fistfuls of E, and then you have to consume two pounds of
candy necklaces at an after-hours orgy."

"Not really," Natalie said, *sotto voce*. "But you *do* have to
dance. You should go with, uh, Mimi, to the club. DJ None Of Your
Fucking Business is *amazing*."

"I don't think Mimi wants company," Alan said.

"What makes you say that?" Mimi said, making a dare of it with hipshot
body language. "Get changed and we'll go together. You'll have to pay to
get in, though."

Link and Natalie exchanged a raised eyebrow, but Alan was already headed
for his place, fumbling for his keys. He bounded up the stairs, swiped a
washcloth over his face, threw on a pair of old cargo pants and a faded
Steel Pole Bathtub T-shirt he'd bought from a head-shop one day because
he liked the words' incongruity, though he'd never heard the band, added
a faded jean jacket and a pair of high-tech sneakers, grabbed his phone,
and bounded back down the stairs. He was convinced that Mimi would be
long gone by the time he got back out front, but she was still there,
the stripes in her stockings glowing in the slanting light.

"Retro chic," she said, and laughed nastily. Natalie gave him a thumbs
up and a smile that Alan uncharitably took for a simper, and felt guilty
about it immediately afterward. He returned the thumbs up and then took
off after Mimi, who'd already started down Augusta, headed for Queen
Street.

"What's the cover charge?" he said, once he'd caught up.

"Twenty bucks," she said. "It's an all-ages show, so they won't be
selling a lot of booze, so there's a high cover."

"How's the play coming?"

"Fuck off about the play, okay?" she said, and spat on the sidewalk.

"All right, then," he said. "I'm going to start writing my story
tomorrow," he said.

"Your story, huh?"

"Yup."

"What's that for?"

"What do you mean?" he asked playfully.

"Why are you writing a story?"

"Well, I have to! I've completely redone the house, built that soundwall
-- it'd be a shame not to write the story now."

"You're writing a story about your house?"

"No, *in* my house. I haven't decided what the story's about
yet. That'll be job one tomorrow."

"You did all that work to have a place to write? Man, I thought *I* was
into procrastination."

He chuckled self-deprecatingly. "I guess you could look at it that
way. I just wanted to have a nice, creative environment to work in. The
story's important to me, is all."

"What are you going to do with it once you're done? There aren't a whole
lot of places that publish short stories these days, you know."

"Oh, I know it! I'd write a novel if I had the patience. But this isn't
for publication -- yet. It's going into a drawer to be published after I
die."

"*What*?"

"Like Emily Dickinson. Wrote thousands of poems, stuck 'em in a drawer,
dropped dead. Someone else published 'em and she made it into the
canon. I'm going to do the same."

"That's nuts -- are you dying?"

"Nope. But I don't want to put this off until I am. Could get hit by a
bus, you know."

"You're a goddamned psycho. Krishna was right."

"What does Krishna have against me?"

"I think we both know what that's about," she said.

"No, really, what did I ever do to him?"

Now they were on