People of the Dark Read Online Free

plumber's assistant. And all the while I told myself, and believed it, that I was doing it "for the sake of art." I did hundreds of paintings. Landscapes, mostly, and a few dozen portraits (when friends or relatives pleaded with me to do something with my painting that would get me some money ). I sold five of the landscapes in ten years (earning a total of $825.00 from them), and all of the portraits, because they were, in a sense, commissioned. And one morning, seven years ago, I sliced my face up while shaving with a razor blade that should have been replaced weeks earlier, but I literally did not have the money to replace it. I looked at myself in the mirror and whispered, "Enough! This has gone far enough!" A week later I had a position as an apprentice commercial artist with an ad agency in Elmira, New York.
    I was still working for that agency when Erika and I bought the farmhouse. The agency had moved to Syracuse, a good 125 miles from the house, but they trusted me to do much of my work at home, so it wasn't a matter of commuting that distance every day. Once or twice a week would do it.
    My work is fairly well known. I've done jobs for Coca-Cola, for Pampers, for IBM, and NIKON, and Burpee Seeds, plus several dozen others. No one knows that the work they're looking at is mine, although I've managed to slip my initials into a few ads (check the rectangular reflection of white light on the Coca-Cola ads that feature a koala bear). I've resigned myself to anonymity.
     
    J im Sandy never finished his trench. He came back to the house the day after he'd begun work and told me, "Sorry, Mr. Harris, but you gotta get yourself someone else to do this work."
    "Who, for instance?" I asked.
    He shrugged. "Beats me." Then he loaded up his backhoe and left. I think the cellar leaks to this day.
     
    L ife at the farmhouse was going to be rustic, I realized. We had no trash pickup, for instance. We got a permit from the town clerk that allowed us to use a sanitary landfill three miles east of the village. This weekly job started shortly after we moved to the house. We put a half-dozen plastic bags filled with trash and garbage into my Toyota and carted the whole stinking mess to the landfill, which, we found, was down a half-dozen narrow dirt roads. It gave us a chance to scout out the area, anyway, which Erika enjoyed. There were a lot of mobile homes, most of them with makeshift the roofs—I guessed that it was a town zoning ordinance—a trailer looked less like a trailer and was indeed more stationary and therefore a more permanent part of the tax base if it had an extra roof on it. There were also several small, crudely built houses, some with tarpaper roofs and windows covered with plastic—most apparently had fallen into years of disuse. A few were inhabited. We saw several scruffy children standing around, looking bored, their equally bored-looking mothers behind them; this bothered Erika a lot. She said that children who had to be so close to the earth should learn to enjoy it. I accused her of naïveté, and the subject was dropped.
    We saw a couple of joggers, too, which I didn't expect. I had assumed that jogging was an urban pastime and that rural people did enough hard work that jogging was unnecessary. "You're a snob," Erika said, and I agreed.
    "These people do seem to put more into it, though," I said. And it was true. One of the joggers, a man apparently in his late thirties, legs and arms and chest well-muscled, head bobbing, dark hair flying this way and that, looked wonderfully involved in what he was doing.
    "Now that man's serious about it, Erika," I said. "He's not just fooling around."
    "Of course he's not fooling around," she said. He obviously knows the value of what he's got."
    "The value of what he's got?" I asked.
    She nodded. "Yes. His body. He knows how precious it is." She gave me a quick once over, reached and patted my stomach. "You could use a little self-appreciation yourself, Jack."
    I