Inflating a Dog (The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy) by Eric Kraft (novels to read for beginners .txt) 📗

work at more or less the same time, assuming that all the jobs actually materialize, a situation that I sincerely desire, since these contract jobs are the way I keep the household in gin, our preferred analgesic against the anxieties of the workaday life of a hack writer who is four years shy of the day when he turns fifty-nine-and-a-half and can at last become a full-time memoirist and part-time flâneur. Do you wonder that I relish the hour or so that I am able to steal each morning for a return to that time when all my anxiety, guilt, and regret was centered on Arcinella, when the only thing I had to fear was the possibility that she might sink before morning, when my guilty feelings arose almost exclusively from the suspicion that her sinking was my fault for having rammed her into the bulkhead, and what I regretted most was my having been so foolish as not to have consulted the people I knew who could have told me before my mother bought her whether she was a boat still strong enough to withstand the rammings-into-bulkheads that she was likely to suffer at the hands of a very young captain with a lot to learn? Things were so much simpler then.)

I got out of bed, dressed in the dark, made my way down the stairs, avoiding the ones that creaked, and let myself out of the house. All of Babbington lay between me and the slip where Arcinella was asleep and sinking, but because Babbington was shrinking as I grew, and I had a better bicycle than I’d ever had before, I estimated that I could get to the boat in twelve minutes. Surely she would stay afloat that long. I went to the garage to get the bicycle, but the garage was locked. Why? Because my father had finally gotten around to installing doors on it. Having doors, he had thought that he ought to have locks. So he had bought and installed locks. Having locks, he thought he ought to use them. So he had locked the doors. All right. So be it. If I couldn’t ride, I would walk. That might take me half an hour, I imagined, starting out at a brisk pace.

The air was warm and soft and gentle. My feet scraped on the sidewalk, crunching in the mix of pebbles and sand at the roadside, or thudding softly on the tar of the blacktop lanes in the old part of town, striking smartly on the concrete sidewalks. The town was for the most part hushed and still. I heard cats sometimes; a dog now and then; a train whistle off in the distance, the train approaching Babbington, whistling at the crossing; and the church clock, which struck twelve not long after I had passed through the village, the clockwork switches in the boxes that controlled the traffic signals; the lapping of the water against the bulkhead along the Bolotomy. I sought the shadows, and now and then when I found a particularly good one, dense, the right size for me, I stopped within it for a while, and just waited and watched to see what would happen. Nothing much did happen, nothing that Babbington would be talking about in the morning, but I found that lights were burning in some of the houses, and when I stopped at the illuminated windows to look inside and see what I could see, my progress was impeded. I went on, walking in the dark, savoring the feeling that the night was mine, that in a sense all of Babbington was mine at this hour, when no one else was abroad. I was the night walker of Babbington, the mystery boy who walked the streets in the dark, slipping like a shadow from shadow to shadow. He might be looking in your window at any time. Stories would be told about me. Mothers would warn their daughters not to stand too near the window when they were undressing for bed, because the night walker might be out there, you never could tell, and here and there around the town one or another of those daughters, one of the ones who had begun to develop a certain yearning, not simply for sex, but for being recognized as growing up, as beginning to become someone who might figure in someone else’s dreams, would say “Yes, mother, I’ll be careful,” and go to her room and close the door and turn the light on and begin very slowly, standing in a carefully selected spot, to remove her clothes in a graceful dance, an improvisation that she would improve and polish from night to night, a dance performed for me, the night walker, the boy in the shadows of Babbington, watching.

Had my mother performed such a dance when she was a girl? If she had, it wouldn’t have been for my precursor as night walker of Babbington, since her window was on the second floor, and the night walker would have had to have used a ladder or climbed a tree to see her. I knew, from personal experience, that we night walkers didn’t bother with such things as ladders or trees, because they increased the likelihood of getting caught, and they slowed us down without increasing the odds of our actually seeing any nude girls. No, if my mother had done the undressing dance, it would have been for her next-door neighbor, Mr. Beaker, playing toward the fine view that he had into her bedroom from his study, as Patti had for me.

I made many detours as the night walker of Babbington, and I did actually see some people in their bedrooms, turning a light on to get a drink of water, waking from some unknown anxiety and propping the pillows to read themselves into some other place where the anxieties were not their own, but I saw no naked girls, no dancers. “My timing must be off,” I