Ask the Dark by Henry Turner

Author:Henry Turner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

We dropped the washer at All Brand Appliances down at Twenty-Eight and Calvert, and Richie got forty dollars for it, which had me wishin’ I had three/four hundred old washing machines. Then we headed on back, him still in the same sort of pissed-off cocky mood he’d been in before, his face with that tight-grin look and wide-awake eyes like he expected shit to happen, and was maybe like one clock-tick away from making shit happen.

I didn’t see that going away, his mood, I mean, but I could see he was feelin’ a little more used to having been chucked in jail, and the main thing he did, now that he was back in the neighborhood, was look long at any neighbors when he passed’m on their lawns, and slow down going by them, giving them a kind of hard-starey eyeball, as if the whole neighborhood and not just one dumbass cop had accused him of bein’ a child killer.

That was his way and I didn’t say nothing, till I said, Richie, you gonna help me with something?

Yeah? he said.

I got twenty-three hundred dollars. ’S what I made this summer. I gotta make it make more. Buy something and sell it.

What you want to buy?

Don’t know yet, I said.

Having something other to think about sort of cooled him, I could tell. He thought a minute driving along, and then looked over at me.

Hmm. Buy and sell. Where at?

Downtown market. We’ll make a bundle.

Again he thought a minute, sometimes his face looking serious, other times grinning and laughing a little like he thinks what I’m saying is a joke.

Finally he says to me, Nah, I can’t do it right now. I got a big job. Hauling. And that’s something we gotta talk about.

What’s there to talk about? I say. ’Cause me, I’m thinking I really don’t want to spend a day with Richie hauling for chump change when I could start on making some big money.

I really need the money now, I say. For saving my daddy’s house! Won’t you help me? I can’t sign the permit myself!

Richie, he grins a little hearing ’bout the house, ’cause he already told me he don’t think I can make all that money. Then he says, Well, this gonna take just a day or two. And you won’t be hauling. I need you for something different. You don’t do it I gotta ask Skugger, and that boy don’t know how to work. Anyway it ain’t a problem for you. You already know the lady.

Who’s that?

Now he grins real wide. Miss Gurpy.

I couldn’t say nothing, just stare. He looked at how surprised I was and laughed right at me.

Now don’t go thinking I swiped the job from you! he says. You’re the one who told me ’bout clearin’ her gutters! So I went by and asked about her whole house. It’s filled up with forty years’ worth of junk! She gotta clear it ’cause she’ll get an injunction and get put in a nursing home,

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