Hardscrabble Road Read Online Free

staring anywhere in the
     room but at Jig himself, which was how all their conversations ended these days. Jig couldn’t help himself. He really couldn’t.
     There were people who hated blacks and people who hated Jews and people who hated broccoli, but Jig Tyler hated stupidity.
     He hated it with the same passion with which Martin Luther had hated the Catholic Church and Mary Tudor had hated all Protestants.
     He hated it with a fine white fire that was so pure and so intense, it made the problems between the Israelis and the Palestinians
     look like a high school football rivalry. He hated it to the point where he sometimes thought that that hatred was all that
     was really left of him, the Jig Tyler who had shown up on the campus of the Taft School in 1956, thin and raw and intense,
     able to read the math textbook in forty minutes and understand it all, able to read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason in two
     days and understand it all, a searchlight on a campus full of dimmer bulbs, a legend in a week. He was still a legend. He
     just no longer knew what he was legendary for.
    “We’ll call Kate Daniel in the morning,” he said, suddenly wanting nothing more than to get Delmore Krantz out of that room
     and out of his sight. “We’ll see what she can do.”
    Delmore still wasn’t looking at him, but he knew a dismissal when he heard it. He mumbled something and made his way out,
     a thin flush of red creeping up his fat neck like vomit coming up a gullet at the end of a long night of drinking. Delmore
     was beginning to resent him, Jig knew that.
    No matter how worshipful they were in the beginning, they all resented him in the end.

3
    K ate Daniel was as cold as she’d ever been, cold enough so that she thought she could shatter her teeth by tapping them with a straw. The heater
     in the car wasn’t working right, or something. She didn’t want to think it was so cold that the heater in the car wasn’t up
     to the occasion. She kept getting bulletins on the oldies’ station she’d been listening to since she crossed the Pennsylvania
     border. She’d have listened to NPR if she could have, but she couldn’t find it no matter how many times she punched the scan
     button, and she was afraid it would put her to sleep. She was not, really, the right sort of person to be a liberal. She was
     not, really, convinced that it was possible for the temperature to get down to minus eleven degrees. The old joke about global
     warming kept running through her head. She fervently wished she had never quit smoking.
    Up at the far end of the street, a man in a long overcoat was waiting, leaning forward slightly to see if her car was the
     one he was looking for. That would be Mr. Whoever, from the Philadelphia Coalition for the Homeless, Kate thought. He’d look
     the car over and either approve of it (in which case she would hate him) or take it as a sign that she was one of those people
     who took every possible opportunity to burnish her credentials for revolutionary sainthood. The truth of it was that she truly
     hated buying cars. She wasn’t good at it. She never walked off the lot without feeling she’d been cheated. She spent the next
     six weeks unable to think about anything but the car negotiations and how she had failed them. It wasn’t worth it. The ’84
     Grand Prix was a good car. This one only had 250,000 miles on it.
    The man in the overcoat was nodding vigorously. Kate was close enough now to notice that he was very young. He waved her to
     the left and she saw that there was a small driveway going to the back of the buildings. In the dark, she couldn’t tell if
     it was as strewn with debris as the rest of the street. This was the kind of neighborhood where Coalitions for the Homeless
     hung out. It was supposed to be half-full of vacant lots and half-full of drug garbage. She hated the word “coalition.” She
     hated it more than she hated the word “committee.” She was already sick of this