Mermaids on the Golf Course Read Online Free

in it.
    Sickening, Roland thought. One would think Jane was encouraging the idiot! The child , Roland corrected himself, and bent again over Schultz’s tax return.
    It was a tough time of the year, late April, when Roland habitually took work home, as did his two colleagues. The Internal Revenue Service had its deadlines. Fake it , Roland thought in regard to Schultz’s Time Deposit interest. He could estimate it in his head within a hundred dollars or so, but Roland Markow wasn’t that kind of man. By nature he was meticulous and honest. He was convinced that his tax clients came out better in the long run if he turned in meticulous and honest income tax return forms for them. He couldn’t phone Schultz and ask him to do it, because all Schultz’s papers were here in twelve envelopes, each labeled with the name of the month. He’d have to go through them himself. And it was almost midnight.
    “Goo- wurr -kah- wurr-r —kah!” screamed Bertie.
    Roland could stand it no longer and leapt up, went to the door, crossed the little hall, and knocked perfunctorily before he opened the door to Bertie’s room halfway.
    Jane was on the floor on her knees, sitting on her heels, smiling as if she were having a glorious time. Her eyes behind the black, round-rimmed glasses looked positively merry, and her hands on her thighs were relaxed.
    Bertie sat in a roundish heap before her, swimmy-eyed, thick tongue hanging out. The child had not even looked Roland’s way when the door opened.
    “How’s the work going, dear?” Jane asked. “Do you know it’s midnight?”
    “I know, can’t be helped. Does he have to keep saying this ‘Guh-wurka’ all the time? What is this?”
    Jane chuckled. “Nothing, dear. Just a game.—You’re tired, I know. Sorry if we were loud.”
    We . A crazy anger rose in Roland. Their child was a mongoloid, daft, hopelessly brainless. Did she have to say “we”? Roland tried to smile, pushed his straight dark hair back from his forehead, and felt a film of sweat, to his surprise. “Okay. Just sounded like Gurkha to me. You know, those Indian soldiers. Didn’t know what he was up to.”
    “G’wah-h,” said Bertie, and collapsed sideways on to the carpet. He wasn’t smiling. Though his slant eyes seemed to meet Roland’s for an instant, Roland knew they did not. Epicanthal folds was the term for this minor aberration.
    Roland knew all the terminology for children—organisms—who had Down’s syndrome. He had of course read up on it years ago, when Bertie had been born. The complicated information stuck, like some religious rote he had learned in childhood, and Roland hated all this information, because they could do nothing about Bertie, so what good was knowing the details?
    “You are tired, Rollie,” said Jane. “Mightn’t it be better to go to bed now and maybe get up an hour earlier?”
    Roland shook his head wearily. “Dunno. I’ll think about it.” He wanted to say, “Make him shut up !” but Roland knew Jane got a pleasure out of playing with Bertie in the evenings, and God knew it didn’t matter when Bertie got to sleep, because the longer he stayed up, the longer he might sleep and keep quiet the next morning. Bertie had his own room, this room, with a low bed, a couple of heavy chairs that he couldn’t tip over (he was amazingly strong), a low and heavy wooden table whose corners had been rounded and sanded by Roland, soft rubber toys on the floor, so that if Bertie threw them against the window, the glass wouldn’t break. Bertie had thin reddish hair, a small head that was flat on top and behind, a short flat nose, a mouth that was merely a pink hole, ever open, with his oversized tongue usually protruding. The tongue had ugly ridges down it. Bertie was always drooling, of course. The awful thing was that they were going to be stuck with him for the next ten or fifteen years, or however long he lived. Mongoloids often died of a heart condition in their teens or earlier,