All Fall Down by James Leo Herlihy

Author:James Leo Herlihy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: RosettaBooks
Published: 2018-03-15T04:00:00+00:00

I love you.

Now she’s on her way back to Toledo. She’s probably read it already. Maybe not though. Maybe she won’t see it till tomorrow morning on the way to work. I wonder if it was a stupid thing to do?

Annabel and Ralph asked her to come back next weekend. Echo said she’d love to, but didn’t want to “wear out her welcome mat.” Then Ralph and Annabel laid on a lot of palaver and she said next weekend for certain.

But maybe I’ve thrown in the monkey wrench with that note. Maybe she’ll never come back because of me being only sixteen and her being thirty-one, etc., which slays me because what’s that got to do with it anyway?

Tomorrow I’m going to get a job, maybe at a car-wash place. Otherwise I may go crazy. Besides, what have I got to lose? I was going to kill myself anyway, so from now on it’s all gravy.

I wonder why I didn’t sign the goddam thing? I wish somebody’d kick my ass for me.

The next morning, carrying out his plan, Clinton made the rounds of several big downtown car-washing establishments. He offered a smiling and cheerful countenance to the managers of these places, and before noon one of them had put him to work. The place, called Frankie’s Two-Minute Auto Wash, ran a car through its garage on a conveyer belt, where it was worked on simultaneously by a crew of six men. Clinton’s job was to jump into a car and wash the insides of its windows while the other men scrubbed its exterior. It was hard work and he liked it.

Annabel made sandwiches for him, and at noon he bought apples and Coca-Cola at a nearby fruitstand. Then he and the other men on the crew, three white men and two Negroes, all older than himself, would sit on stacks of tires behind the garage and eat their lunches together. These lunches were friendly affairs, and sometimes there were conversations that Clinton would write down while he rode home on the bus. The hard work seemed to add certain flavors to the sandwiches. When they had eaten, most of the men used the remaining few minutes of their half-hour for more talk, and smoking. Clinton found that these cigarettes, smoked after a workman’s lunch, had an especially good taste to them. And in the evenings when he was tired, he found that he enjoyed the tiredness; he was usually asleep by eleven o’clock.

Now on the Wednesday of this week, Annabel Williams, for no apparent reason, began to suffer from an unusual nervousness. Late in the evening, long after Clinton had gone to bed, and while Ralph napped in his easy chair in the basement, Annabel sat in the living room, alone as usual, watching a television comedian. It was during this time, on the Wednesday, that these demons of uneasiness crept into the room and stole into her mind. Their approach had been soft and stealthy and had taken place while her mind was partly occupied with the entertainment.

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