The Advenstures of Joe Harper by Phong Nguyen

Author:Phong Nguyen
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781944853280
Publisher: Outpost19
Published: 2016-10-04T00:00:00+00:00

Once you ditch, and the train steams on yonder, it leaves a body feeling naked, or melancholy, or both—all a body knows is that he’s missing something important, like his rags, or his mama. Then as you pad the hoof around, things seem to stay stock-still even as you move. Whatever you see, it don’t change fast enough, and whatever you hear, it ain’t near loud enough.

I kep’ talking to Lee to relieve that feeling, chewing his ear with stories of how I’d nearly gained an Amish wife in the Lone Jack stables; and how I’d nearly abandoned the hobo road and my hermitage in a cave to shack up with a saloon-keeper and his family. Though I warn’t about to confess it, either fate seemed welcome to me now and then, especially now, with my joints sore and my head dizzy.

“Everywhere we go there’s bad roads,” I says. “Ain’t there a place somers where boes is welcomed, like at the temple of Zoos?”

“It’s a myth, Joe,” says Lee, with more acid than usual, which I reckoned was due to his being dis’llusioned on that score. “And a rotten lie of a myth too.”

Lee’s sinking mood ’most drowned mine ’long with it. “Maybe they’s just stretchers?” I says. “I judge nobody got turned to trees, but that don’t mean some poor folks never opened their home to strangers and built a temple somers to honor the god who came a-throwing his feet at their door.”

“Ain’t you just the gulliblest sumbitch the devil ever knew?” Lee says. I cain’t say I recognized his bitter tone. P’raps he got so used to being called the Airedale he reckoned that getting ditched by the shacks but once would ruin him. “You believe everything you hear, ain’t you? You think that Dutch gal Ruth keeps a candle lit for you, ain’t you? And you think Guy van der Loost was fixing to invite you to live on his charity for the rest of your natural life, ain’t you? I reckon you think gods is still walking the earth.”

“Warn’t it you, Lee, who believed gods was walking the earth?” I says.

“Least I can learn,” he says, “but your head’s too thick.”

There warn’t a lot of blowing in those days about feelings and such, but a body cain’t mistake such a silence for an absence. My nerves burned at the thought of Mama Sereny in the ground so that all I could stand was to dream about rotting in a cave and being left alone with my grief. I could see right as day that it was Lee expecting to be offered some kind of welcome from Van der Loost and his boys, but even a man known for his boundless charity wouldn’t welcome this Airedale into his saloon if he was a chinaman.

As for Ruth, I reckoned that I warn’t such a fool to think she kept a candle lit for me. Course, Ruth never said anything good about me, but in the moment we had together, she did talk rot about other men.

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