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

pictures, and in the darkness—for he could barely see in there except when a train was coming—he symmetrically spread them out. Then he took the flashlight and one at a time let the intense circle of yellow light spill onto them. Then he closed his eyes (in order to build the suspense) and reorganized them so that each of the eight pictures had a new place. He sat and concentrated—which card is in the middle? which card is at the bottom left?—and tried to let the feeling of each picture reveal itself. Then with the flashlight he’d check, and see the faces come looking up at him.

Next he laid out all of his things, the three favorite pictures in the middle. And counted them. Forty-seven, counting the two flashlight batteries, the lens and the bulb. There was shouting outside and the sound of a bottle breaking and he ran out to the front of his room to look, fearing he was in danger. But after the soundof fast-running footsteps and a single long wail, everything was back to normal. The train pulled away, and he went in again.

When he was ready for bed, he reloaded the gun and, like the night before, closed his hand tightly around it, pulled the blankets up around his shoulder and shut his eyes. Only then did he begin to worry about money. He remembered the potato chips, ate them and fell asleep.

The following day was a Thursday. He got a chance after the morning rush to get out unseen and climb up onto the platform. He had a glass of milk and a hamburger for breakfast, and ate slowly. It was sprinkling needles of rain outside. He went to the Army surplus store to see about getting a tarp. They were too expensive.

Walking back out of the store, he realized the deadly implications of his situation: the things he wanted—and he did want them—he couldn’t buy. In order to get them he’d have to steal them. His whole sense of himself reeled at the thought. A thief! He began walking aimlessly, thinking the matter out. He saw other children not much older than himself, most of them black, on the streets away from school and he wondered if they were thieves as well as shoeshiners. He already knew that some of them were beggars. In fact, he’d given one a dime the day before, but had resolved never to do it again because of the coldness with which it had been accepted—so cold that July had wondered for a second if he’d been asked at all, or if he’d simply taken out a dime and tried to force it on this little kid.

Then he began picturing himself as a thief, and everything he looked at he thought of carting away and taking back to below City Hall. It exhilarated him to a certain extent. He imagined that the eyes of the people he passed were looking at him and thinking in awe, There he goes, the thief. How brave he looks. Will the police catch him today? But whenever he thought of his parents he could not keep his mother from going to the kitchen to get the flyswatter, dragging him behind her, and as these thoughts kept returning, he found himselfmentally giving back all the things he’d stolen and put in his cement room. So, finally, everything was back where it belonged and the eyes said, There’s that wild kid, the one who could have been a thief but wasn’t, who stole cars and diamonds but took them back. He went into the library off Rittenhouse Square to use the bathroom.

He looked in the daily newspaper for a job. He knew about doing this because his father had told him stories of the Depression when maybe twenty men would gather at another man’s house to look in the want ads—there being only one paper among them all—and then, defeated, would go outside and play horseshoes all day—anything to be away from home for a while. He found nothing that sounded as if he could qualify for it. Most of the kinds of people advertised for he’d never heard of: trainees, lab techs, production-line operators. But he thought he could order books, so he asked the librarian if they needed help, but they didn’t.

That afternoon he got a job selling newspapers. A man in a drugstore said he’d give him all the papers he wanted for seven cents each and that he could sell them for ten. He bought twelve papers, withholding seven cents of his money for fear thirteen would be unlucky. He took them into the park and quickly began to learn how to say, “Hey, mister, want a paper?” both loud enough to be heard very clearly and at the same time so impersonally that it took no courage at all. It seemed as though he sold five right away, but couldn’t get rid of any more. Then two policemen told him to get out of the park, and made him follow them to the edge of it and look at a sign and listen to it read to him in the tone of a threat, where he learned that no soliciting meant you couldn’t sell newspapers there. The policeman who hadn’t said anything up until that time bought a paper.

The wire wastepaper baskets along the street made July nervous. He was trying to sell something that had already been thrown away hundreds of times. He went down to City Hall and sold three outside the landing of the L.

Someone grabbed him by the collar and turned him around, nearly lifting him off his feet. “Listen, kid, get the hell out a my area or I’ll kick the livin’ shit clean out a ya.” It was the fat, swollen-faced man he’d seen behind the stand a flight up. The man turned him around again and shoved him toward the exit. July dropped the remaining three papers and went back to pick