Heathcliff by Barry Rachin (books for men to read txt) 📕

of a master. Everything else is second-rate crap.”
The dean chuckled and grinned self-consciously. “I don’t like them either,” he muttered almost as an afterthought.
“Who don’t you like?”
“Most contemporary novelists. I’m much more partial to the Victorians.” Dean Templeton raised his hand and pointed at the boy’s chest. “Your tie…. Is that a Windsor knot?”
Shawn reached up self-consciously and fingered the symmetrically perfect inverted triangle. Unsatisfied with the way he son fashioned the knot originally, Mrs. Mariano draped the thirty-dollar silk tie around her own neck and wove the intricate series of loops. “Yes, a Windsor knot - that’s what it is,” he replied without looking the man directly in the face.
“Try as I might, I’ve never been able to get a tie looking quite that nice.” Fifteen minutes later he rose and shook Shawn’s hand robustly before seeing him out.

* * * * *

The next day it snowed all morning well into the afternoon. “Your father’s working late,” Mrs. Mariano announced as Shawn came through the front door. “Maybe you could tidy things up so he doesn’t have to kill himself when he gets home tonight.”
“Okay.”
“It’s quite cold. Don’t go back outside like that.” She pointed to his flimsy jacket. “Always dress in layers during the winter months.”
Shawn went to his room and draped a sweatshirt over a cotton shirt. Back in the foyer, he pulled his warmest winter coat from the hall closet. “Much better!” His mother shook her head approvingly.
Out in the shed, he primed the Ariens two-stage snow blower, adjusted the choke and press down on the electric starter button. The engine coughed, sputtered, belched, burped spastically and gave up the ghost. He primed the engine a second time with more gasoline and the bright orange machine fired up. Backing the snow blower out of the shed, Shawn cut a path toward the driveway hurling the heavy snow thirty feet across the lawn in a shimmering arc.
Always dress in layers during the winter months. He was perfectly warm despite temperatures hovering in the low twenties. Mrs. Mariano had dozens of clever maxims and cautionary injunctions.
You’ll have plenty of time for you-know-what with you-know-who when you’re finish with college. That was another one of her favorite dictums. You-know-what was an unambiguous euphemism for sex, lechery, debauchery, lust, wanton depravity, lewd and lascivious behavior. Shawn was unclear if his mother was speaking from personal experience or idle speculation. Every so often, he heard the bedsprings creaking unnaturally loud two doors over. There were never any accompanying noises, only the rhythmic rasping of the queen-size mattress. Kachunk. Kachunk. Kachunk. Kachunk. Kachunk. No groans, moans, whimper, sighs or passionate terms of endearment. In the morning his parents didn’t look or act any different.
The previous July, a friend from the varsity baseball team fixed Shawn up on a blind date with his seventeen year-old cousin. After the movie let out, they grabbed something to eat and, later still, went parking in the woods. The girl was passably pretty. She let him touch her privates. She had bad breath, a god awful, garlicky halitosis, such that every time she moaned in ecstasy, Shawn thought he might pass out from the putrid stench.

At the top of the driveway, the snow blower busted a shear bolt on a scrap of lumber buried in a knee-high snowdrift. Trudging back to the shed, Shawn located a pair of pliers and a replacement bolt. Standing the snow blower on its side, he wiggled the broken pin from the auger shaft and inched the new one through the mating holes. He had to remove his gloves while tightening the nut and his frostbitten hands were burning with pain. Putting his gloves back on, he brushed the snow off his pants, fired up the engine again and made the first pass down the length of the driveway.

Just before he left work earlier in the day, Trudy cornered him over by the cash register. “That obnoxious forest ranger’s got no class, no social graces.”
“Okay,” Shawn muttered. The waitress was pathologically obsessed.
“Come back here fifty years from now,” Trudy was pointing at the stool that Pearl Singleton had been warming with her derriere seven hours earlier, “and she’ll be sitting there all wrinkled like a dried up prune and drooling into her home fries.”
Since the same could be said about any of the customers who frequented Ryan’s Diner, the gratuitous remark made no sense. Pearl Singleton never knew her father, grew up in grinding poverty and witnessed a mother die young. Social graces - it was miracle enough she crawled out of bed each morning to do battle with a shitty world that victimized young people at every turn. Of course, that wasn’t what Trudy wanted to hear. “What you got against her anyway?”
“She’s a hateful, vindictive bitch!” Her chest heaved with rage. “What else you need to know?”
“Nothing,” he said meekly. Whatever unspeakable atrocity Pearl had committed, Trudy wasn’t going to spill the beans.
The woman in the pea-green uniform was loutish and low class. But she was pretty as hell. Shawn would give a hundred blind dates with teenage babes suffering from chronic halitosis and loose morals for one romantic romp with Pearl Singleton. But that wasn’t going to happen. She had that ‘settled’ look of a twenty-something with a full-time job, domestic obligations and grownup responsibilities. About the time Shawn would be even remotely in a position to do you-know-what with you-know-who, Peal Singleton would have slipped inelegantly away into her early thirties. And, worse yet, according to Hugh, the woman had no carnal use for men.
A large truck with a V-shaped plow rumbled onto the street just as Shawn finished his final pass with the snow blower. Wheeling the machine back to the shed, he grabbed a shovel to clear away the icy debris that the plow left barricading the front of the driveway.

* * * * *

The first Tuesday in March, the teaching staff at Brandenberg High School took a professional day and the students got to sleep late and do as they pleased. Shawn rose early and was moving briskly in the direction of the front door when Mrs. Mariano flagged him down. “Where’re you off to this early in the morning?”
“Down the Cape to a nature preserve.”
Mrs. Mariano turned to her husband who had just entered the room with a newspaper tucked under his arm. “In this brutal weather, your son’s on his way to Cape Cod so he can visit a nature preserve.”
Mr. Mariano shrugged and glanced out the bow window. “The sun’s shining and it’s not really that cold out.”
“You see how he’s dressed,” his wife was not to be denied, “with that flimsy coat and no hat or gloves?”
“If it makes you happy,” Shawn countered I’ll go back upstairs and grab some extra clothing.” He disappeared and returned a moment later with a woolen sweater and stocking cap.
“What’s down the Cape?”
“I already told you. There’s a wilderness preserve with a three hundred foot walkway that extends out into the wetlands.”
“Who are you going with?”
“Nobody. I’m driving down alone.”
“To look at trees and soggy marsh in the middle of winter?”
“The winter is over.”
“How much money you got?”
“I got a full tank of gas and plenty of money.”
Mrs. Mariano looked for support from her husband, but he was already curled up on the sofa perusing the sports section. “In case of emergency, do you at least have your cell phone?”
“Yes I have it.”
“Show it to me.”
Shawn fished his cell phone from a back pocket and held it up in the air. “I’ll see you later this afternoon.” He fled out the door before his mother could mount a rebuttal.


Shawn located Pemberton State Forest about three miles before the Bourne Bridge spanning the Cape Cod Canal in Buzzards Bay. He followed a ribbon of asphalt another three-quarters of a mile until he reached a rustic parking lot then picked his way down a gravel path to a swampy bog. The air smelled of pine and acrid clay. The sun was shining but the temperature hadn’t drifted much above freezing. Remnants of the last snowstorm were evident in the murky wooded areas where snow and ice still lingered embedded in a spongy mat of decaying leaves and coppery pine needles. Only a small handful of diehard birdwatchers and nature enthusiasts were out on the narrow walkway that snaked far out into the chilly bog. A burst of frigid air cuffed his cheek as Shawn pulled his collar up around his neck.
“Should have brought a warmer coat,” a feminine voice floated down to him from a ridge. The boy glanced to his right. On a granite outcropping near a rough-hewn cedar bench, Pearl was leaning against a leafless oak. She wore her wide-brimmed ranger’s hat and dark green winter jacket over her forestry uniform.
Shawn smiled. “Who’s in charge of tours?”
Pearl climbed down from the rocky ridge. “I can take you out on the bog, if you like.” The stony-faced woman didn’t seem any friendlier, just less remote. She moved off in the direction of the pressure-treated walkway leading out into the open wetlands. The harsh winter had beaten down all of the bright flowers and delicate plant life but Pearl pointed out some of the more robust species. “This rust-colored grass is called broomsedge. It grows all over the eastern United States in narrow clumps that can reach upwards of forty inches. In the summer, the young plants don’t look anything like this.”
“How’s that?”
“They’re bright green,” Pearl explained. Further along she pointed out some bishop’s weed, which was in the carrot family even though the leaves were quite flat and broad. Although the delicate ferns had, for the most part, died away by early winter, there were six species – maidenhair, ostrich, sensitive, osmunda cinnamomea (cinnamon) and royal – that Pearl could identify on sight and point out to visitors during the sultry summer months. They were halfway out in the water now. She indicated a pile of debris eighty feet away. “A family of beavers lives underneath all those muddy branches.” There was nothing to be seen. Either the beavers were resting comfortably, hibernating or foraging elsewhere. “Sometimes I come out here, especially in the spring, and watch them going about their business,” she added.
Back on dry land, Pearl said, “Are you in a hurry to get back?”
Shawn glanced at his watch. It was still early, but a fast-moving bank of clouds had scudded across the sky obliterating the sun and carrying off much of the late morning warmth. “What did you have in mind?”
Pearl lead the way down a gravel path to the bottom of a ravine then headed up a steep incline. When they reached the summit of the ridge, a huge wooden structure about a mile away and still higher up came into view. “That’s the fire tower. In the dry, late summer I pretty much live in that rooftop villa.” She struck out across the rock-strewn ground. Fifteen minutes later they reached their destination. “It’s raining,” Shawn noted. He wished he had brought his sweater. The temperature had dropped ten degrees as soon as the thickening clouds arrived.
A set of stairs lead to the upper level, which stood comfortably above most of the surrounding treetops. The door was secured with a thick security lock. Pearl selected a brass key from a chain fastened to her belt and undid the lock. But for the spitting clouds, from their vantage point they would have been able to see all the way to the Cape Cod Canal and beyond.
“What’s that?”