Friday and Saturday?”
“Yeah, weekend nights for as long as the Oxford stays open. I’ll cook, Mrs. P will bake. That will put us ahead on homemade desserts for Monday lunch when we always need a lot and usually have to switch to storeboughts, so it won’t be a total loss even if no one comes in. But I’ll need someone on the front, and Angie has taken up with a drug-crazed hippie biker—”
“Pop, he just has a motorcycle !”
“—and will want her weekend evenings free. Now—”
“He has a good job. At a bank.”
“I’m sure he’s just casing the joint. Karl, I’m not going to pretend it’s all that promising. I don’t know how long the job will last, and it would just be Friday and Saturday nights, waiter’s minimum plus tips, and you know, like your dad used to say, Lightsburg is the Buckle on the Cheap Bastard Belt; I swear we have the chintziest tippers on the planet. But all that said, the Oxford should last till Thanksgiving even if it doesn’t work out, and I’m guessing we’ll get some decent trade some nights, so at least you’d make some extra gift money for Christmas or something, eh?”
“Well, yeah, I’d be very interested. Show up Friday at—”
“Say six P.M. Got to do the tax paperwork and all, maybe get you outfitted with a spiffy new apron or something.”
“Will do.” We shook on it.
7
Shoemaker’s Kid
I ALWAYS LIKED that time of day, when people were shutting up their shops, putting the town to bed for the night, going home to do normal stuff with their normal families. I wondered if they got to enjoy being normal, to know just how terrific it was, or whether it was just invisible to them like air? Sometimes I got so pissed off at how easy the normal people had it that I just wanted to walk down the street shaking them and screaming into their squishy self-satisfied faces.
In those first few weeks of school, still really summer, it stayed hot till past six. The radiated heat from the redbrick walls could practically give you a sunburn, and the cloudless sky was more gray than blue, as if the heat had baked the color right out of it.
Mom and me and all those fucking cats lived on MacReady Avenue, in what Dad had said was gonna be their starter place back before I was born. Turned out it was his finisher place, too.
MacReady was like every other street in that part of town. The houses, once all Norman Rockwell-y frames and shingles and clapboards, were now your basic Do It Yourself Duct Tape White Trash Shithole, with all kinds of new cheap crappy stuff stuck on—white aluminum siding, rusty iron wire fences on green steel posts, big glider davenports from Sears to replace the porch swing, sheet metal sheds out back with the doors never put on.
I’d been trying to keep our house up. Dad had left me a list, month by month and week by week, when to do all the stuff he’d shown me how to do. I couldn’t always keep up with it, between Mom and the cats. I knew it would all fall to shit the minute I left for the army. Still, mostly, I kept it up. Nights when I couldn’t sleep, I’d just turn on my desk lamp, point it at the wall, and read that list to myself till I knew where I was in the world again.
As I trotted up our front walk, a voice wheezed from next door. “Karl, your place don’t look too bad.” It was Wilson, this real old guy with no teeth who liked to watch me work while he sat out on his porch, smoked Camels, drank animal beer, and talked to anybody passing by.
I leaned over his fence and said, “Well, the window-sills want scraped and painted before winter, and I gotta start on storms this weekend.”
He coughed real hard. When he’d finally forced all the ashes, tar, and goop out of his filthy old lungs, and sucked in what air he could, he wheezed, “Goddam doctors!” Then he set up his favorite joke. “You’re good with your hands, bub, it’s a shame you have such a hard time keeping up.”
I played along—he was a nice old fart.
“Yeah, weekend nights for as long as the Oxford stays open. I’ll cook, Mrs. P will bake. That will put us ahead on homemade desserts for Monday lunch when we always need a lot and usually have to switch to storeboughts, so it won’t be a total loss even if no one comes in. But I’ll need someone on the front, and Angie has taken up with a drug-crazed hippie biker—”
“Pop, he just has a motorcycle !”
“—and will want her weekend evenings free. Now—”
“He has a good job. At a bank.”
“I’m sure he’s just casing the joint. Karl, I’m not going to pretend it’s all that promising. I don’t know how long the job will last, and it would just be Friday and Saturday nights, waiter’s minimum plus tips, and you know, like your dad used to say, Lightsburg is the Buckle on the Cheap Bastard Belt; I swear we have the chintziest tippers on the planet. But all that said, the Oxford should last till Thanksgiving even if it doesn’t work out, and I’m guessing we’ll get some decent trade some nights, so at least you’d make some extra gift money for Christmas or something, eh?”
“Well, yeah, I’d be very interested. Show up Friday at—”
“Say six P.M. Got to do the tax paperwork and all, maybe get you outfitted with a spiffy new apron or something.”
“Will do.” We shook on it.
7
Shoemaker’s Kid
I ALWAYS LIKED that time of day, when people were shutting up their shops, putting the town to bed for the night, going home to do normal stuff with their normal families. I wondered if they got to enjoy being normal, to know just how terrific it was, or whether it was just invisible to them like air? Sometimes I got so pissed off at how easy the normal people had it that I just wanted to walk down the street shaking them and screaming into their squishy self-satisfied faces.
In those first few weeks of school, still really summer, it stayed hot till past six. The radiated heat from the redbrick walls could practically give you a sunburn, and the cloudless sky was more gray than blue, as if the heat had baked the color right out of it.
Mom and me and all those fucking cats lived on MacReady Avenue, in what Dad had said was gonna be their starter place back before I was born. Turned out it was his finisher place, too.
MacReady was like every other street in that part of town. The houses, once all Norman Rockwell-y frames and shingles and clapboards, were now your basic Do It Yourself Duct Tape White Trash Shithole, with all kinds of new cheap crappy stuff stuck on—white aluminum siding, rusty iron wire fences on green steel posts, big glider davenports from Sears to replace the porch swing, sheet metal sheds out back with the doors never put on.
I’d been trying to keep our house up. Dad had left me a list, month by month and week by week, when to do all the stuff he’d shown me how to do. I couldn’t always keep up with it, between Mom and the cats. I knew it would all fall to shit the minute I left for the army. Still, mostly, I kept it up. Nights when I couldn’t sleep, I’d just turn on my desk lamp, point it at the wall, and read that list to myself till I knew where I was in the world again.
As I trotted up our front walk, a voice wheezed from next door. “Karl, your place don’t look too bad.” It was Wilson, this real old guy with no teeth who liked to watch me work while he sat out on his porch, smoked Camels, drank animal beer, and talked to anybody passing by.
I leaned over his fence and said, “Well, the window-sills want scraped and painted before winter, and I gotta start on storms this weekend.”
He coughed real hard. When he’d finally forced all the ashes, tar, and goop out of his filthy old lungs, and sucked in what air he could, he wheezed, “Goddam doctors!” Then he set up his favorite joke. “You’re good with your hands, bub, it’s a shame you have such a hard time keeping up.”
I played along—he was a nice old fart.
Similar Books
