Rock Island Line by David Rhodes (most life changing books txt) 📗

understanding, she was always there with this and this and this that had to be done. “Now we must clean the living room.” “Now we must do the dishes.” “Now we must go to the store, bring the bottles.” “Now we must go for a walk.” “Now we must play Canasta.” “Now we must write letters—you too.”

But today she seemed tired. July picked up one of the sandwiches and opened it. Chicken salad. He put it back together and took a bite, but couldn’t swallow. Then the longer it stayed, half chewed, in his mouth, the more the nausea grew. He looked behind him for fear Aunt Becky was watching. She wasn’t. With his fingers he took out the mutilated piece and threw it to the other side of the porch. Then he began ripping the sandwich and putting it into his pants pocket. Even doing this, he was watchful for her. Later she came back out and took the tray inside, lookingat it with suspicion. He could tell she was worried today. But he didn’t care. She was irrelevant.

A blue car pulled up front. Three people got out. The man and the woman he recognized. They were his Aunt and Uncle Montgomery. The other man he’d never seen before. He wore a straw hat with a band around the bottom of the crown, and chewed an unlit cigar. His Uncle Sid talked intently to Aunt Franny as they came up the walk. The stranger lagged behind, looking at the house and lawn as though someone were trying to sell it to him and he didn’t want to look either impressed or completely disenchanted . . . skeptical. All three showed signs of having ridden a long way.

Uncle Sid and Aunt Franny introduced themselves with great solemnity and deliberation. Once again he felt the nagging question: How are you making it?—searching his face for signs of how he wasn’t making it at all, of how the horror had ruined him. The first time anyone tried to kill him . . . Everyone, it seemed, wanted to be able to be looking right at him just when he exploded. Then the stranger was introduced. Uncle Perry, Becky’s husband. He tipped his hat and took the unlit cigar out of his mouth for an instant as a gesture of his good will. Then went quickly back to surveying the house for structural flaws and other indications of its retail value. July said nothing to any of them. He was learning, among many other things, that he had an excuse to ignore people—an excuse that they accepted as well as he needed.

They went into the house and left him alone. From inside he could hear his Aunt Becky’s voice raised to an insidious, loud whisper. “You miserable wretch. The least you could have done would be to put on a coat. Get rid of that cigar....” He let the words pass through his hearing like the sounds of nature—meaningless and irrelevant. They had no more importance to him than the stupid birds on the birdbath: he cared nothing for them—nothing. He began rocking again, and pretended that a place in the screen where several strands of wire had been torn was a gunsight, and every time he came forward and the sightlined up in his vision with the bird-bath he would squeeze a soft, terrible trigger inside his stomach and blow them apart with tumbling lead slugs. By moving his head a little to one side, just at the time when the sight was lined up, he could get them all. Feathers and blood all over the yard. Then they flew away and the fear returned. I got out of bed. I put on my shirt. My red shirt. I went over to the window. I drew a hole with a dot in it. The hole disappeared first. Then the dot. I went over to my bed and sat down. I did not pull the string. I could hear . . .

An hour before the funeral Aunt Becky came and told him to get dressed. He went upstairs and found his suit laid out on the bed, clean socks, a white shirt, clean underwear, and even his shoes polished. The floor had been dusted with a dry mop. His box of junk was neatly put back in the drawer. He went over to his window and looked out. Footsteps in the hall. Someone came into his room and stood there. He did not turn around. At first he felt the presence staring at the back of his head, pushing his face against the window. Then he decided that there wouldn’t be anyone there—that as far as he was concerned he would be alone in his room—he would not only refuse to answer, he would not even hear the question. He felt a pleasant, restful sensation of this solitude filling him. He stood inside his bone sanctuary until he’d completely forgotten about no one else being in the room, and when he turned there was no one. As he put on his clothes he thought for an instant: Now, wait a minute—someone was in here, but he stopped. They were irrelevant. They had no importance. Then for the first time (though for only a fleeting second) he thought of his parents in such a way that he wasn’t frightened. He thought of them as being still alive somewhere, like just in the next room reading or talking inaudibly, thinking about him. But soon came the image of them riding in the car on some white road slick with frogs, black oil blood in the steaming radiator wreckage . . . and he wished he were dead. The first time anyone tried to kill him he was ten years old.

They all went together in one car to the funeral. No one talked. His new Uncle Perry had been drinking. It was hot. July made himself become part of the moving landscape.

The parking lot of