All the Dead Yale Men by Craig Nova Read Free Book Online Page B

Frank, I think I’m going to take an early retirement.” He turned to a cop in uniform and said, “Well, what’s to look at. Get the fucking traffic moving.”
    My handkerchief got off some more of the guano.
    â€œI should have told you how slippery that stuff is. Like grease.”
    â€œWorse,” I said. “Grease doesn’t come out of an asshole.”
    â€œNo,” said Tim. “I guess not.”
    The wind was still constant, indifferent, but the birds funneled down on the place below.
    â€¢    •    •
    In Cambridge, I found a place to park in front of the Burger King, and I sat at the same table and same young woman came back, her hair a little sweatier than before, and when she did she brought a coffee.
    â€œI didn’t think you’d come back.”
    â€œWell,” I said. I shrugged.
    â€œYeah,” she said. “I know what you mean. What’s all that shit on your pants?”
    â€œA mistake,” I said.
    â€œWell, sure,” she said. “Sure. Who doesn’t make mistakes?”
    She took an index card out of the pocket of her uniform, where she kept her cell phone and a tube of lipstick. The front had a drawing of a nude woman who rode a spiral galaxy like a horse, and she shot thunder bolts, or maybe they were horse nebulae, from each hand. Hair in a ponytail. The waitress passed the card over.
    â€œHere,” she said. “The Raver brought that in just yesterday. That’s a twenty-celon note.”
    On the back, the Raver had written in his script: Be content to seem what you really are .
    â€œYou sure you don’t want it?”
    â€œOh, I’ve got a shitload at home. One whole wall is covered. The guy leaves tips in celons. Take it.”
    After an hour, the Raver came along, his coat covered with mirrors, each tinted a different color, and the effect was one of being scaled, like a new lizard. His skin was marked with acne scars and he wore his hair in a ponytail and he wore shoes made from tire treads, but he stopped a woman here and there, and said something that made them smile.
    When he came up to the window, he stopped and looked in and said, his voice making the glass vibrate, “Observe constantly that all things take place by change, and accustom thyself to consider that the nature of the universe loves nothing so much as to change the things which are and to make new things like them.” Then he picked out some french fries from the Burger King trash basket and had dinner. He came back and mouthed to me, through the glass, “You should be crying. Why can’t you do that?”
    â€œHabit,” I said.
    â€œIt will come,” he said. “Yes, my friend, it will come.”

[ CHAPTER FIVE ]
    THE BURGER KING at Harvard Square doesn’t seem to be the place to try to come to terms with memory, desire, and amazement, but then where is a good place for that?
    So, I considered my grandmother’s notebooks and what I had read years ago in the attic of her house. A sign of how much I missed my father was that I was almost attached to if not affectionate for his goofy spy routine and the fact that he was cheating me, but, with that guano still on my hands, and the risk of desire so obvious in Cal’s fall, spread-eagle, from the bridge, I thought of the first detail of my grandmother’s own longing. It was the desire of another age and of another sensibility in the buzzing of timers for the hamburgers and the appearance of junkies who came in to drool at the tables.
    I read this in my grandmother’s notebooks when I was trying to discover the details of my father’s financial arrangements. Ofcourse, it would have taken a court order for me to get the terms of the trust. That is one of the laws of families, at least those who deal with each other before going to court. But families have far larger secrets than the financial, the scale of these hidden items so