A Thousand Miles from Nowhere by John Gregory Brown Read Free Book Online

come by and shut things down, but a few months passed and no one appeared. Henry dragged his mattress to the office in back of the store, and the artists, worried about the safety of their work, set up a schedule for manning the cash register out front, a plastic children’s replica that played one of three tunes when the drawer slid open: “Mary Had a Little Lamb” and “Shoo Fly” and one that Henry didn’t recognize and that no one else seemed to know either. As the end of summer, when Henry was due to return to Benjamin Franklin High School, approached, Henry called the principal, Paul Kehoe, and told him he wouldn’t be back.
    “What’s going on?” Kehoe asked.
    “I’ve just got my hands full, Paul.”
    Kehoe didn’t even bother to ask what Henry meant. He’d probably heard something from Amy, or maybe he was just happy to no longer have a teacher like Henry to deal with, one who didn’t pay a moment’s attention to the prescribed curriculum, who simply taught whatever he felt like teaching even though it was supposed to be junior-year American lit and not, as Kehoe liked to say, the world according to Henry Garrett. The students, of course, loved Henry’s classes, loved him, mistaking his ineptitude for eccentricity, his disorder for improvisation, his indolence for rebellion. They called him HG instead of Mr. Garrett, and they congregated in the hall outside his office during their free periods so they could listen to the crazy music he always played inside—scratchy LPs of blues or jazz or of the great Amália Rodrigues bemoaning her sad fate or Inés Bacán shrieking through a siguiriya —though playing music was, as Kehoe repeatedly informed Henry, both contrary to policy and inconsiderate to others.
    In the store, as Henry talked to Kehoe, he had turned up the music, made sure Kehoe could hear it on his end of the line before he hung up the phone. And despite Henry’s innate predisposition for ineptitude, rather than floundering, the enterprise that was Endly’s somehow managed not merely to make ends meet but to flourish. The old books found faithful readers, the modest dresses acquired admiring ingénues, the more risqué fashions attracted a willing clientele, and the avant-garde artwork brought in adventurous investors, and thus the money—though it was not at all what Henry had intended—began to roll in, spilling out of the plastic cash register and then being stuffed into tins of empty Community Coffee cans that Henry aligned side by side on a back storeroom shelf.
    The money disappeared, though, almost as quickly as it appeared, especially during the last few days of the month, when the artists raided the coffee cans to pay their rent, and the homeless men concocted disjointed tales of wives and children needing medicine or of on-their-deathbeds mothers in Bogalusa or Grand Coteau whom they wanted to visit or of Chalmette mobsters threatening to break their thumbs or slice off their ring fingers if they didn’t pay some portion of their gambling debts. Henry gave them all what they asked for, as much as he had on hand. When Amy returned from Central America, Henry tried to give her some of the money as well, but she wouldn’t take it, wouldn’t even speak to him, really. Once, he spotted her outside staring in through the windows, her hand shielding her eyes against the glare. He went out there, tried to talk to her, but she crossed her arms and said, “You don’t have any idea how much you’ve hurt me, do you?”
    “I do,” he said. “I do, Amy. It’s just—”
    But she turned and walked away, left him there—helpless, perplexed, in agony. How, for the millionth time, had he been unable to explain what was going on inside his head? He missed her, he did. And he knew that by leaving her he’d lost more than he could ever calculate. And yet…and yet…
    He didn’t know. He couldn’t say. The clatter was ruining him, ruining every thought, slicing every moment into