Spoonwood Read Online Free Page B

mouth all my life,” he says. “The taste didn’t bother me before, don’t bother me now. Long as my driver’s license says Howard Elman, I’ll know who I am. Let’s have dessert.”
    â€œWell I think it’s promising,” my mother says.
    Birch makes a noise, not a cry, just a yelp, like he wants attention.
    â€œExcuse me, I’m on my way,” I say.
    â€œWhere are you going?” my mother asks. Her tone of concern fills me with self-loathing.
    â€œWhere does he always go?” my father says.
    â€œWhy do you have to talk about me as if I wasn’t in the room?” I want to hit him.
    â€œIn a manner of speaking you aren’t in this room,” he says. “You’re already in the bah. ”
    â€œYou’re not going to be seeing Tubby again, are you?” my mother asks, voice pained.
    â€œTubby is with Giselle. He’s a lot better since they’ve been going out,” I say.
    â€œDoes it have to be every night—do you have to go out every single night?” my mother says. “And what about him?” she points at Birch.
    â€œWell, what about him?”
    â€œYou haven’t brought him to a priest to be christened.”
    â€œAnd I won’t. I can’t believe what you believe,” I say.
    â€œOh, Lord, please forgive us,” she says to the Almighty.
    I tremble involuntarily.
    My mother suddenly softens. “I’m sorry,” she whispers, and her anguish angers me all the more. My father begins to pace, unable at the moment to deal with either son or wife. He makes hurrumph noises.
    Suddenly, there’s a loud, screeching sound, like a train braking at a crossing where a car is stuck on the tracks, or anyway that’s how the sound feels to me.
    â€œHe’s crying. Look what we’ve done,” my mother goes to Birch, then stops abruptly.
    I back away. “Now what?”
    â€œPick him up and love him,” my mother repeats yet again. “He needs you.”
    I picture myself accidentally breaking his neck. “I don’t know how,” I say. “I don’t know.” And I storm out before I do something I’ll regret.
    â€œWhat do you mean, do something you’ll regret? Think something original for a change,” says the voice inside me.
    I drive my pick-up ten miles to North Walpole, where I cross the bridge into Bellows Falls, Vermont. Growing up, my friend Tubby McCracken and I used to call Bellows Falls “Fellows Balls” or “Buffalo Balls.” It’s an exhausted railroad town with a perpetually downtrodden economy, but I like it. It has the Miss Bellows Falls Diner, Nick’s Restaurant, a Newberry’s for cheap shopping, and plenty of free parking. With my beard and long hair, I feel less combatively self-conscious in Bellows Falls thanin Darby or Keene. Tubby and I meet at our usual hang-out, Nick’s. Last night Tubby told me he had a “business proposition” to discuss.
    On the way in, Rubric Fritz at the bar hollers “Hey Freddie,” and I flash him the peace sign. You know you’re on the skids when the barflies recognize you as one of their own.
    I know what Tubby wants me to do, and I should be mulling it over, but I can’t concentrate on anything for more than a few minutes before useless thoughts fill my head. Just when I think I know who I am and where I’m at and what’s going on, I realize I’m looking back at an old me and Now has escaped me again. I’m like an artist trying to paint himself from a mirror image. He dips his brush and strokes the canvas. He looks up at the mirror, and a year has gone by. He paints another slash of color. Ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, sixty years pass, and no matter how well he paints he can’t capture the image in the mirror because it changes faster than he can work. He has to die in order to sit still, and perhaps then his ghost can paint his