Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren't very new after all.
Abraham Lincoln
ePub
A4Chapter 3
2
0She was sitting at the counter of J’s Bar looking ill at ease, stirring around the almost-melted ice at the bottom of her ginger ale glass with a straw.
“I didn’t think you’d show.”
She said this as I sat next to her; she looked slightly relieved.
“I don’t stand girls up. I had something to do, so Iwas a little late.”
“What did you have to do?”
“Shoes. I had to polish shoes.”
“Those sneakers you’re wearing right now?”
She said this with deep suspicion while pointing at my shoes.
“No way! My dad’s shoes. It’s kind of a family tradition. The kids have to polish the father’s shoes.”
“Why?”
“Hmm...well, of course, the shoes are a symbol for something, I think. Anyway, my father gets home at 8pm every night, like clockwork. I polish his
shoes, then I sprint out the door to go drink beer.”
“That’s a good tradition.”
“You really think so?”
“Yeah. It’s good to show your father some appreciation.”
“My appreciation is for the fact that he only has two feet.”
She giggled at that.
“Sounds like a great family.”
“Yeah, not just great, but throw in the poverty and we’re crying tears of joy.”
She kept stirring her ginger ale with the end of her straw.
“Still, I think my family was much worse off.”
“What makes you think so?”
“Your smell. The way rich people can sniff out other rich people, poor people can do the same.”
I poured the beer J brought me into my glass.
“Where are your parents?”
“I don’t wanna talk about it.”
“Why not?”
“So-called ‘great’ people don’t talk about their family troubles. Right?”
“You’re a ‘great’ person?”
Fifteen seconds passed as she considered this.
“I’d like to be one, someday. Honestly. Doesn’t everyone?”
I decided not to answer that.
“But it might help to talk about it,” I said.
“Why?”
“First off, sometimes you’ve gotta vent to people. Second, it’s not like I’m going to run off and tell anybody.”
She laughed and lit a cigarette, and she stared silently at the wood-paneled counter while she took three puffs of smoke.
“Five years ago, my father died from a brain tumor. It was terrible. Suffered for two whole years. We managed to pour all our money into that. We
ended up with absolutely nothing left. Thanks to that, our family was completely exhausted. We disintegrated, like a plane breaking up mid-flight.
The same story you’ve heard a thousand times, right?”
I nodded. “And your mother?”
“She’s living somewhere. Sends me New Year’s cards.”
“Sounds like you’re not too keen on her.”
“Yes.”
“You have any brothers or sisters?”
“I have a twin sister, that’s it.”
“Where is she?”
“About thirty thousand light-years away.”
Saying this, she laughed neurotically, pushing her glass to the side.
“Talking bad about one’s family is definitely no good. Makes me depressed.”
“Don’t worry too much about it. Everyone’s got some burden to bear.”
“Even you?”
“Sure. I’m always grasping cans of shaving cream and crying uncontrollably.”
She laughed happily at this, looking as if she hadn’t laughed that way in who knows how many years.
“Hey, why are you drinking ginger ale?” I asked,
“Did you swear off drinking?”
“Yeah, well, that was the plan, but I think it’s okay now.”
“What’ll you have?”
“Chilled white wine.”
I called J over and ordered another beer and a glass of white wine.
“Hey, what’s it like to have an identical twin?”
“Well, it’s kinda strange. Same face, same IQ, same size bra, you’re aggravated all the time.”
“People mix you up a lot?”
“Yeah, ‘til the time we were eight. That was the year I lost a finger; after that, nobody mixed us up again.”
Saying that, like a concert pianist concentrating, she set her hands down on the counter, her fingers lined up neatly. I took her left hand, and gazed
at it carefully in the light from the recessed lighting. It was a small hand, cool as a cocktail glass, looking completely natural, as if it’d been that way
since birth, four fingers lined up happily. That naturalness was almost a miracle, at least it was more charming than if she’d had six fingers.
“My pinky was cut off by a vacuum cleaner’s motor when Iwas eight years old. Popped right off.”
“Where is it now?”
“Where’s what?”
“Your pinky.”
“I forget,” she said, laughing, “you’re the first one to ever ask me that.”
“Doesn’t it bug you, not having a pinky?”
“Yeah, when I put on gloves.”
“Other than that?”
She shook her head.
“I’d be lying if I said I never worried about it. Still, I’m only as worried about it as other girls are about the thick hairs growing on their necks.”
I nodded.
“What do you do?”
“I’m in college. In Tokyo.”
“You’re visiting home.”
“Yeah.”
“What’re you studying?”
“Biology. I like animals.”
“Me too.”
I drank the rest of the beer in my glass and nibbled on a few French fries.
“Hey…there was this famous panther in Bhagalpur, India who, over three years, managed to kill 350 people.”
“And?”
“So they called this panther hunter, an Englishman, Colonel Jim Corvette, and he shot that panther and one hundred twenty-five panthers and tigers.
Knowing that, you still like animals?”
She snuffed out her cigarette, then took a sip of her wine and gazed at my face as if admiring it.
“You’re definitely a little strange, you know?”
21
Half a month after my third girlfriend died, I was reading Michelet’s La Sorciere. I knew that book well. In it, there’s a line that goes something like
this:
“In the Lorraine region, there was a prominent Judge Remy who burned eight hundred witches, and was jubilant in his ‘Purge of Witches’. He’d say,
‘My justice is widespread, the other day we caught sixteen persons, and without hesitation we drowned them posthaste.’”
-Shinoda Ichiro, Translator
If I say my justice is widespread, it might be better to say nothing at all.
22
The phone rang.
My face was sunburned from my trip to the pool, and I was in the midst of cooling it off with calamine lotion. After letting it ring ten times, I brushed
the checkerboard of neatly cut cotton strips off my face and rose from the chair to take the receiver.
“Afternoon. It’s me.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“You in the middle of something?”
“Nope, nothing at all.”
I took the towel draped around my shoulders and wiped my stinging face.
“I had fun yesterday. Most fun I’ve had in a long time.”
“That’s great.”
“Hm, yeah…you like beef stew?”
“Yep.”
“Imade some, but it’d take me a week to eat all this all by myself. Wanna come over and eat some?”
“If it’s all right.”
“Okay, be here in one hour. If you’re late, I’m pitching it all into the garbage. Understand?”
“Yes…”
“I just hate waiting, that’s all.”
Saying that, she hung up before I’d had a chance to open my mouth.
I lied back down on the sofa and stared at the ceiling for about ten minutes, listening to the Top 40
on the radio, then I took a shower and shaved my face cleanly with hot water, then put on a shirt and Bermuda shorts just back from the dry
cleaner’s. It was a pleasant-feeling evening.
Watching the sun set parallel to the beach as I drove, I stopped at a place by the highway on-ramp to buy chilled wine and two cartons of cigarettes.
She’d cleaned the table, and in the space between the shining white dishes, I was using the edge of a fruit knife to wrest the cork out of the bottle.
The moist steam from the beef stew made the room humid.
“I didn’t think it’d get this hot. It’s like Hell.”
“Hell is much hotter.”
“Sounds like you’ve been there to see it.”
“I heard it from someone. As soon as you’re about to go crazy from the heat, they move you somewhere cooler. As soon as you recover a little, they
toss you back into the heat.”
“Just like a sauna.”
“It’s like that. But sometimes, when people go crazy, they don’t put them back in.”
“What do they do with them?”
“Drop ‘em off in Heaven. Then they make ‘em paint the walls.After all, the walls always have to be perfectly white. They get real upset if there’s even
a single spot. Hurts their image.
“Thanks to the constant painting from morning ‘til night, these guides usually ruin their windpipes.”
She didn’t ask any more after that. After carefully picking the debris from the cork from the inside of the bottle, I poured us two glasses.
“Cold wine, warm heart,” she said when we toasted.
“What’s that from?”
“A television commercial. Cold wine, warm heart. You ever seen it?”
“Nope.”
“You don’t watch television?”
“Iwatch it a little. I used to watch it all the time. My favorite was Lassie. The original Lassie, Imean.”
“You really do like animals.”
“Yeah.”
“If I had the time, I’d watch it all day. Anything. Yesterday, Iwas watching this panel discussion with biologists and chemists. You see it?”
“Nah.”
She took a sip of wine and then shook her head slightly, as if remembering something.
“You know, Pasteur had a lot of scientific intuitiveness.”
“Scientific intuitition?”
“…what Imean is, normal scientists think this certain way. A equals B, B equals C, so it follows that A equals C, you know what Imean?”
I nodded.
“But Pasteur was different. He already had A equaling C in his head, is what I mean. No proofs or anything. But the correctness of his theories was
proven by history; during his life he made countless useful discoveries.”
“The smallpox vaccine.”
She set her wineglass on the table and narrowed her eyes at me.
“Um, wasn’t Jenner the one who made the smallpox vaccine? You sure you’re in college?”
“…rabies antibodies, then pasteurization, yeah?”
“Bingo.”
She managed to laugh without showing her teeth, a seemingly practiced skill, and then she drank her glass dry and poured herself a new one.
“On that panel discussion show, that’s where they called it ‘scientific intuition’. Do you have it, too?”
“Almost not at all.”
“Don’t you wish you did?”
“It’d probably come in handy for something. I’d probably use it when there’s a girl Iwanna sleep with.”
She laughed and went into the kitchen, then came back with the pot of stew and a bowl of salad and some rolls. Little by little, a cool breeze finally
started to blow in through the open window.
We took our time eating while we listened to her record player. During that time she mostly asked me about college and my life in Tokyo. Nothing
too terribly interesting. About the experiments where we used cats (of course we don’t kill them, I told her. mostly just psychological experiments, I
said. However, in truth, in eleven months I killed thirty-six cats, large and small.), and the demonstrations and strikes. Then I showed her the scar
from when the riot policeman knocked out my front tooth.
“You ever wanna get him back?”
“Not really,” I said.
“Why not? If Iwere you, I’d find him and knock out a few of his teeth with a hammer.”
“Well, I’m me, and it’s the past now, for everybody involved. More importantly, all those guys looked the same, so there’s no way I’d ever find him.”
“So you’re saying there was no reason for any of it?”
“Reason?”
“The reason for going so far as to get your tooth knocked in.”
“None.”
She grunted boredly and took a bite of her beef stew.
We drank our after-dinner coffee, washed and stacked the dishes in her tiny kitchen, then went back to the table and lit cigarettes as we listened to
Modern JazzQuartet.
Her shirt was so thin I could clearly make out the shape of her nipples, her cotton pants hung comfortably around her hips, and as an added bonus
our feet kept bumping underneath the table. When this happened, Iwould blush a little.
“Was it good?”
“It was great.”
She bit lightly on her lower lip.
“Why don’t you ever say anything unless you’re answering a question?”
“Just a habit, I guess. I’m always forgetting to say important things.”
“Can I give you some advice?”
“Go ahead.”
“If you don’t fix that, it’ll end up costing you.”
“You’re probably right. Still, it’s like a junky car. If I fix one thing, it’ll be easier to notice something else that’s broken.”
She laughed and changed the record to MarvinGaye. The hour hand was almost pointing to eight.
“Is it okay if you don’t polish the shoes tonight?”
“I polish them at night. Same time I polish my teeth.”
She rested both of her skinny elbows on the table, then with her chin resting pleasantly on top of them, she sneaked peeks at me as we talked. This
made me pretty flustered. I pretended to look out the window as I lit a cigarette, constantly trying to avert her gaze, but then she gave me an extrastrange look.
“Hey, I believe you.”
“Believe what?”
“That you didn’t do anything to me that night.”
“What makes you think so?”
“You really wanna hear it?”
“No,” I said.
“That’s what I thought you’d say,” she laughed and poured wine into my glass, then looked out the dark window as if thinking about something.
“Sometimes I think it would be wonderful if I could live without getting in anyone else’s way. You think it’s possible?” she asked.
“I’m not sure.”
“Am I getting in your way?”
“You’re okay.”
“This time?”
“This time.”
She gently reached her hand across the table and set it on my own, and after leaving it there for a while, she drew it back.
“I’m going on a trip tomorrow.”
“Where you going?”
“I don’t know yet. Iwant to go somewhere quiet and cool, for about a week.”
I nodded.
“I’ll call you when I get back.”
* * *
On my way home, sitting in my car, Iwas suddenly reminded of the first girl I ever went on a date with. It was seven years before.
The whole time we were on this date, from beginning to end, I feel like I kept asking, ‘Hey, isn’t this boring?’ over and over.
We went to see a movie starring Elvis Presley. The theme song went something like this:
We had a quarrel, a lovers spat
Iwrite I’m sorry but my letter keeps coming back So then I dropped it in the mailbox
And sent it special D
Bright in early next morning
It came right back to me
She wrote upon it:
Return to sender, address unknown.
Time flows pretty quickly.
23
The third girl I slept with, she called my penis my
‘raison d’etre’.
* * *
I once tried to write a short story with the theme being each person’s raison d’etre. In the end, I never finished the story, but for a while I kept thinking
about people’s various reasons for living, and thanks to that it went from a strange habit to an obsession. It was a habit that had absolutely no effect
on anything. This impulse stuck with me, chasing me for roughly eight months. Riding the train, the first thing I did was to count all the passengers, I
counted the stairs in the stairwell, and if I’d had enough time I’d have counted my heartbeats. According to my records of that time, from August 15,
1969 to April 3, I went to three hundred fifty-eight lectures, had sex fifty-four times, and smoked six thousand, nine hundred and twenty-one
cigarettes. During that time, when I counted everything, I seriously considered telling someone about my habit. So I told as many people as I could,
giving them what I thought were very reliable numbers. However, naturally, the number of cigarettes I smoked, stairs I climbed, and the size of my
penis were things nobody was interested in. So, without losing sight of my own raison d’etre, I became very lonely.
* * *
Thanks to all that, I know that when I found out about her death Iwas smoking my six thousand, nine hundred and twenty-second cigarette.
24
That night, the Rat didn’t drink a drop of beer. It wasn’t a good sign. Instead, he drank five Jim Beams on the rocks in a row.
We drank in a dark corner of J’s Bar, killing time with the pinball machine. We fed who knows how much change to the machine to purchase this
slaughtered time; a perfect waste. However, the Rat was as earnest as ever, and because of that it was nearly a miracle that I managed to win two
of the six games we played.
“Hey, what happened?”
“Nothing,” said the Rat.
We went back to the counter and drank beer and Jim Beam.
Saying almost nothing, we listened absentmindedly to records playing one by one on the jukebox. Everyday People, Woodstock, Spirit in the Sky,
Hey There, LonelyGirl…
“I have a favor to ask you,” said the Rat.
“What is it?”
“There’s someone Iwant you to meet.”
“…a girl?”
Looking a little confused, the Rat finally nodded.
“Why me?”
“Who else is there?” he said quickly as he took the first sip of his sixth glass of whiskey.
“You have a suit and a necktie?”
“I do, but…”
“Tomorrow at two p.m.” the Rat said, “Hey, what the hell do you think girls eat to survive?”
“The soles of their shoes.”
“No way,” said the Rat.
25
The Rat’s favorite food was pancakes. He’d pile a bunch of them up on a deep plate and cut them neatly into four sections, then pour a bottle of
Coca Cola on top of them.
The first time I visited the Rat’s house, beneath the soft sunlight of May, he had them out on the table and was in the middle of shoveling that odd
concoction into his stomach.
“The great thing about this food is,” the Rat said,
“it’s food and drink rolled into one.”
The overgrown yard was full of trees, and birds of many shapes and colors were gathered there, eagerly pecking at the white popcorn scattered on
the grass. 26
I’ll tell you about the third girl I slept with. It’s really difficult to talk about dead people, but it’s even harder to talk about dead young women. It’s
because from the time they die, they’ll be young forever.
On the other hand, for us, the survivors, every year, every month, every day, we get older. Sometimes, I feel like I can feel myself aging from one
hour to the next. It’s a terrible thing, but that’s reality.
* * *
She wasn’t what anyone would call a beautiful girl. However, saying ‘she wasn’t a beauty’ probably isn’t a fair way to put it. ‘She wasn’t as beautiful
as she could have been’ seems like an accurate way to describe it, I think.
I have only one picture of her. The date is written on the back, August 1963. The year Kennedy was shot in the head. She’s sitting on a seawall, a
beach seemingly near some summer resort, smiling slightly uncomfortably. She’s wearing a short, Jean Seburgstyle hairdo (no matter what
anybody says, it reminds me of Auschwitz), wearing a long-edged gingham one-piece dress. She looks clumsy, beautiful. It’s a beauty that could
pierce the most delicate regions of the heart of the viewer.
Her thin lips pressed together, her tiny, upturned nose looking like a dainty insect’s antenna, her bangs looking as if she’d cut them herself, dangling
carelessly across her wide forehead, her slightly bulging cheeks, upon which tiny pockmarks, remnants of pimples can be seen.
When she was fourteen years old, that was the time in her twenty-one-year lifetime when she was the happiest. And then she disappeared so
suddenly, is all I can think. For what purpose, what reason such a thing could be possible, I have no idea. Nobody does.
* * *
She said once, seriously (I’m not joking), “I entered college to have a heavenly revelation.”
This was before four a.m., both of us naked in bed. I asked her what kind of heavenly revelation she was expecting.
“How should I know?” she said, but added a moment later, “Maybe something like angels’ feathers falling from the sky.”
I tried to imagine the spectacle of angels’ feathers falling onto the university’s courtyard, and from afar it looked much like tissue paper.
* * *
Nobody knows why she killed herself. I have a suspicion that maybe she herself may not have known.
27
Iwas having a bad dream.
I was a big black bird, flying west across the jungle. I had a deep wound, the black blood clinging to my wings. In the west I could see an ominous
black cloud beginning to stretch out, and from there I could smell rain.
It was a long time since I’d had a dream. It had been so long that it took me a while to realize it was a dream.
I got out of bed, washed the horrible sweat off my body, and then had toast and apple juice for breakfast. Thanks to the cigarettes and the beer, my
throat felt like it was full of old mothballs. After washing and putting away the dishes, I put on an olive green cotton jacket, a shirt I’d ironed as best I
could, chose a black tie, and with the tie still in my hand I sat in the air conditioned parlor.
The television news announcer proudly declared that it was likely to be the hottest day of the summer. I turned off the television and went into my
older brother’s room, picked a few books from his enormous pile of books, then took them back to the parlor where I plopped onto the sofa and
stared at the words printed within.
Two years before, my brother left his roomful of books and his girlfriend and took off to America without so much as a word. Sometimes she and I
ate together. She told me Iwas just like him.
“In what way?” I asked, surprised.
“In every way,” she said.
I probably was just like him. It was probably due to the ten-plus years of our polishing those shoes, I think.
The hour hand pointed to twelve, and after milling about and thinking about the heat outside I fastened my tie and put on my suit jacket.
I had lots of time to kill. I drove around town for a bit. The town was almost miserably long and narrow, starting at the sea and climbing into the
mountains. River, tennis court, golf course, rows of estates lined up, walls and more walls, some nice little restaurants, boutiques, an old library,
fields of primrose, the park with the monkey pen, the town was the same as ever.After driving around for a while on the road that wound its way into
the mountains, I drove along the river towards the ocean, then parked my car at the mouth of the river and dipped my legs in the water to cool them
off. There were two well-tanned girls on the tennis court, hitting the ball back and forth, wearing their white hats and sunglasses. The rays of the sun
bringing the afternoon suddenly increased in intensity, and as they swung their rackets, their sweat flew out onto the court.
After watching them for five minutes, I went back to my car, put down my seat, and closed my eyes and listened to the sound of the waves mixing
with the sound of the ball being hit.
The scent of the sea and the burning asphalt being carried on the southerly wind made me think of summers past. The warmth of a girl’s skin, old
rock n’ roll, button-down shirts right out of the wash, the smell of cigarettes smoked in the pool locker room, faint premonitions, everyone’s sweet,
limitless summer dreams. And then one year (when was it?), those dreams didn’t come back.
When I arrived at J’s Bar at exactly two o’ clock, the Rat was sitting on a guardrail reading Kazantzakis’ Christ Recrucified.
“Where’s the girl?” I asked.
He silently closed his book, got into his car, and put on his sunglasses and said, “She’s not coming.”
“Not coming?”
“Not coming.”
I sighed and loosened my necktie, pitched my jacket into the backseat, and lit a cigarette.
“So, where are we going?”
“The zoo.”
“Great,” I said.
28
Let me tell you about the town. The town were I was born, raised, and slept with my first girl. Ocean in front, mountains in back, and next to it is a
large port city. It’s a small town. Speeding back from the port city, you decide not to smoke, because by the time you light a match you’d blow right
by the town.
The population’s a little over seven thousand. This number has hardly changed after five years. Most of them live in two-story houses with yards,
own cars, and more than a few of them even have two cars. This number isn’t my vague recollection, it was the number published by the municipal
census bureau at the end of the fiscal year. It’s nice to live in a place with two-story houses.
The Rat lived in a three-story house which went to far as to have a hothouse on the roof. Set into the hillside was a garage, with his father’s Benz
and the Rat’s Triumph TR III lined up snugly inside. Strangely, the part of the Rat’s house that emanated the homelike atmosphere the most was this
garage. The garage was large enough that it seemed like a small airplane would fit right in it, and inside there was a collection of things that had
fallen into disuse or were replaced by newer things inside the house: televisions and refrigerators, a sofa, a table and chairs, a stereo system, a
sideboard; with all of these things arranged neatly in the garage, we had a lot of good times sitting out there drinking beer. As for the Rat’s father, I
know very little about him. I never met him. When I’d ask about him, ‘He’s a guy, and he’s much older than me,’ was the Rat’s answer.
According to rumor, the Rat’s father used to be incredibly poor. This was before the war. Just before the war started, he scraped together enough
money to acquire a chemical plant and sold insect-repelling ointment. There was some question as to its effectiveness, but as the front lines
expanded southward, it practically flew off the shelves. When the war ended, he put the ointment in a warehouse, and shortly after that he sold
dubious vitamin powder, which, after the Korean War ended, he repackaged as household detergent. Everyone seems to agree on this point. It
seems quite possible. Twenty-five years ago, the insect repelling ointment-slathered bodies of Japanese soldiers piled up like mountains in the
jungles of New Guinea, and now toilet cleaner stamped with the same insignia lies toppled in the bathrooms of houses everywhere. Thanks to that,
the Rat’s father was loaded. Of course, I also had friends who were poor. One kid, his dad was a bus driver for the town. There’re probably rich bus
drivers out there, but my friend’s dad wasn’t one of them. His parents were almost never home, so I hung out there quite a bit. His dad would be
driving the bus, or maybe at the racetrack, and his mom would be out all day at her part-time job.
He was in the same grade as me, but our friendship began with a chance occurrence. One day, on my lunch break, I was taking a piss and he
came over and stood next to me and unzipped his jeans. We pissed together in silence, then went to wash our hands when we were finished.
“I’ve got something you might wanna see,” he said as he wiped his hands on the ass of his jeans.
“Yeah?”
“You wanna see it?”
He pulled a picture from his wallet and handed it to me. It was a naked girl with her thighs completely spread out, a beer bottle jammed up inside.
“It’s great, yeah?”
“Sure thing.”
“If you come over to my house, there’s even better ones,” he said.
That’s how we became friends.
The town is home to many different kinds of people. In my eighteen years there, I learned lots of things. The town really took root in my heart, and
most of my memories are tied to it. However, when I left town to go to college, Iwas relieved from the bottom of my soul.
For summer vacation and spring break I go back there, but I usually just end up drinking too much beer.
29
In just one week, the Rat’s condition worsened. Partially due to the onset of autumn, probably also due to some girl. The Rat didn’t breathe a word
about any of it.
When the Rat wasn’t around, I grabbed J and tried to shake him down for a little information.
“Hey, what’s up with the Rat?”
“Well, you know as much as I do. It’s just because it’s the end of the summer.”
With the start of autumn, the Rat’s spirits always fell. He’d sit at the counter and stare at some book, holding up his end of our conversation only with
oneword answers. When the evening came and that cool wind blew, and the smell of fall could be felt, the Rat stopped drinking beer and started
gulping down bourbon, feeding limitless amounts of coins into the jukebox and kicking the pinball machine until the TILT light lit up and J got
flustered.
“He probably feels like he’s being left behind. You know how that feels,” said J.
“Yeah?”
“Everyone’s leaving. Going back to school, going back to work. Aren’t you headed back yourself?”
“Yeah.”
“So you know what Imean.”
I nodded. “And the girl?”
“It’s been awhile, so I don’t remember so well.”
“Did something happen between them?”
“Who knows?”
J mumbled something and went back to his work. I didn’t press the issue any further. Iwent over to the jukebox, put some change in it, picked a few
songs, then went back to the counter to drink beer. Ten minutes later, J came back over and stood in front of me.
“Hey, the Rat really didn’t say anything to you?”
“Nope.”
“Weird.”
“You think so?”
He kept polishing the glass in his hand as he thought it over.
“He really seemed like he wanted to talk to you about it.”
“So why didn’t he?”
“It’s hard for him. He feels like you’ll give him a hard time.”
“Iwouldn’t do that.”
“It just seems that way. He’s felt that way for a long time. He’s a real easy-going kid, but when it comes to you, there’s something there…I’m not
saying anything bad about you or anything.”
“I know that.”
“Anyway, I’ve got twenty years on you, and in that time I’ve seen quite a bit. ‘Cause of that, this is, well, it’s just…”
“You’re worried.”
“Yeah.”
I laughed and drank my beer.
“I’ll try and talk to him.”
“I think that’d be good.”
J put out his cigarette and went back to work. I got up from my seat and went to the washroom, washed my hands, and looked at my face lit up in
the mirror. Then Iwent back and spaced out as I drank another beer.
