Barking Man by Madison Smartt Bell Read Free Book Online

head.
    “I’m old,” he said. “I can feel it now sure enough. The days run right by me and I can’t get a hold on them. And you want to know what?”
    “What?” I said. Walked right into it like the sharp edge of a door.
    “It’s a relief,” Peter Jackson told me. “That’s what.”

CUSTOMS OF THE COUNTRY
    I DON’T KNOW HOW much I remember about that place anymore. It was nothing but somewhere I came to put in some pretty bad time, though that was not what I had planned on when I went there. I had it in mind to improve things, but I don’t think you could fairly claim that’s what I did. So that’s one reason I might just as soon forget about it. And I didn’t stay there all that long, not more than nine months or so, about the same time, come to think, that the child I’d come to try and get back had lived inside my body.
    It was a cluster-housing thing called Spring Valley, I wouldn’t know why, just over the Botetourt County line on the highway going north out of Roanoke. I suppose it must have been there ten or fifteen years, long enough to lose that raw look they have when they’re new built, but not too rundown yet, so long as you didn’t look close. There were five or six long two-story buildings running in rows back up the hillside. You got to the upstairs apartments by an outside balcony, like you would in a motel. The one I rented was in the lowest building down the hill, upstairs on the northwest corner. There was a patch of grass out front beyond the gravel of the parking lot, but the manager didn’t take much trouble over it. He kept it cut, but it was weedy, and a few yards past the buildings it began to go to brush. By my corner there was a young apple tree that never made anything but small sour green apples, knotted up like little fists. Apart from that there was nothing nearby that the eye would care to dwell on. But upstairs, out my front windows, I could look way out beyond the interstate to where the mountains were.
    You got there driving about two miles up a bumpy two-lane from the state road. It was mostly wooded land along the way, with a couple of pastures spotted in, and one little store. About halfway you crossed the railroad cut, and from the apartment I could hear the trains pulling north out of town, though it wasn’t near enough I could see them. I listened to them often enough, though, nights I couldn’t sleep, and bad times I might pull a chair out on the concrete slab of balcony so I could hear them better.
    The apartment was nothing more than the least I needed, some place that would look all right and yet cost little enough to leave me something to give the lawyer. Two rooms and a bath and a fair-sized kitchen. It would have been better if there’d been one more room for Davey but I couldn’t stretch my money far enough to cover that. It did have fresh paint on the walls and the trim in the kitchen and bathroom was in good enough shape. And it was real quiet mostly, except that the man next door would beat up his wife about two or three times a week. The place was close enough to soundproof I couldn’t usually hear talk but I could hear yelling plain as day, and when he got going good he would slam her bang into our common wall. If she hit in just the right spot it would send all my pots and pans flying off the pegboard where I’d hung them there above the stove.
    Not that it mattered to me that the pots fell down, except for the noise and the time it took to pick them up again. Living alone like I was I didn’t have heart to do much cooking, and if I did fix myself something I mostly used a plain old iron skillet that hung there on the same wall. The rest was a set of Revereware my family give me when Patrick and I got married. They had copper bottoms, and when I first moved in that apartment I polished them to where it practically hurt to look at them head on, but it was all for show.
    The whole apartment was done about the same way, made into something I