The Wild Boys Read Online Free Page B

dance of rooms and faces, murmur of many voices smell of human nights … St. Louis backdrop of redbrick houses, slate roofs, back yards and ash pits … As a child he had an English governess with references so impeccable that Audrey later suspected they had been forged by a Fleet Street hack in a shabby pub near Earl’s Court.
    “You can’t put in too many Lords and Lydies I always sy.”
    Listening back with a writer’s crystal set he picked up mutters of the servant underworld … the pimping blackmailing chauffeur … “You don’t get rid of me that easy Lord Brambletie.”
    Overdose of morphine in a Kensington nursing home … “She said that Mrs. Charrington was sleeping and could not be disturbed.”
    The governess left quite suddenly after receiving a letter from England.
    Then there was an old Irish crone who taught him to call the toads. She could go out into the back yard and croon a toad out from under a stone and Audrey learnedto do it too. He had his familiar toad that lived under a rock by the goldfish pool and came when he called it. And she taught him a curse to bring “the blinding worm” from rotten bread.
    Audrey went to a progressive grade school where the children were encouraged to express themselves, model in clay, beat out copper ash trays and make stone axes. A sensitive inspirational teacher is writing the school play out on the blackboard as the class makes suggestions:
    ACT 1
    SCENE ONE :
Two women at the water hole
.
    Woman 1
: “I hear the tiger ate Bast’s baby last night.”
    Woman 2
: “Yes. All they found was the child’s toy soldier.”
    Woman 1
: “One doesn’t feel safe with that tiger about.”
(She looks around nervously.)
“Its getting dark Sextet and I’m going home.”
    One of the truly great bores of St Louis was Colonel Greenfield. He had dinner jokes that took half an hour to tell during which no one was expected to eat. Audrey sits there watching his turkey go cold with half a mind to put the “blinding worm” on him. It seems this old black Jew has crashed the Palace Hotel in Palm Beach. At that very moment the night clerk, a new man just in from a Texas hotel school, withers in Major Brady’s cold glare.
    “Did you check in Mr. Rogers nee Kike?”
    “Why, yes sir, I did. He had a reservation.”
    “No, he didn’t. There was a mistake you dumb hick.
    Don’t you know a black Jew when you see one?”
    Meanwhile the old black Jew has called room service … “Will you please send up a little pepper.”
    “I’m sorry sir the kitchen is closed. Why it’s three in the morning.”
    “I don’t care is the kitchen closed. I don’t care is it three in the morning. I want a little pepper.”
    “I’m sorry sir.”
    “I vant to talk with the manager plis” … (The dialect gets heavier as the Colonel warms up.)
    Call from the night manager to Major Brady’s office …
    “That old black Jew in 23 wants pepper of all things at this hour.”
    “All right. We run a first-class hotel here. Open the kitchen and give him anything he wants … Brought his own carp most likely.”
    So the night manager calls the old black Jew. “All right sir what kind of pepper do you want? Red pepper? White pepper? Black pepper?”
    “I don’t vant red pepper. I don’t vant white pepper. I don’t vant black pepper. All I vant is a little toilet pepper.”
    eye in needle needle in eye
    The Colonel burned down St Louis. One day when Audrey reluctantly visited Colonel Greenfield’s house to deliver a message he found the Colonel telling his interminable anecdotes to the Negro butler.
    “Now on the old Greenfield plantation we had house niggers and field niggers and the field niggers never came into the house.”
    “No sir the field niggers never came into the house.”
    “The house niggers saw to that didn’t they George?”
    “Yes sir. The house niggers saw to that sir.”
    “Now wherever I go I always get out the telephonebook and look up anybody who bears the name