Bereavements by Richard Lortz Read Free Book Online

perhaps. “Tomorrow?”
    “Yes.”
    “555-72-74.”
    “Yes. That’s easy.”
    “Then we’ll talk, and arrange . . . a visit.”
    “Yes.”
    Pause. “Well. . .” She didn’t want to hang up, desiring to hear a thousand yes’s. “Well then—I’ll be waiting . . .”
    Waiting . . .
    Like Bruno David Carlson-Wade.
    How few words there were for all the desperate, lonely people!

    Angel replaced the phone, stood silent, head bowed, his back to his father, listening to the ripping of cardboard from the six-pack of beer. Mixing with it—from the bedroom down the dark narrow hall where a door was ajar—came a light thin moaning to which neither father or son reacted in any way; they were so used to the sound they didn’t hear it, or, hearing, ignored it, as they did the multiple, incessant noise, human and traffic, rising from the street four floors below.
    “It ain’t cold enough, dummy,” came the barely audible complaint, more to himself than Angel. Then, loudly: “What was that all about? ‘yes, yes, yes.’ I din’ hear noth in’ like I tol’ you t’say.”
    “She didn’t want what you thought.”
    What?! What’s’at!” —Teasing him, prodding him, desiring to irritate, like a sharp, annoying elbow in the ribs. “Speak up, love. I can’t hear you; I can’t hear what y’sayin’!”
    “I said —She wanted something else. It wasn’t what you thought.”
    “Oh? She din’ see that spook-eye a’ yours? An’ that chop in y’head? Y’got hair missin’, didja know that? It mars y’beauty, spoils that spun-sugar hair-do we all love so well.” Pause. “An’ what’s ‘easy? What did that mean?”
    Angel turned and looked at his father: Aurelio Carlos Rivera, seeing him with the usual tinge of resentment, envy and love-hate, for the man was so many things that the boy, at fourteen was not, and maybe never would be: a full, totally-handsome six-feet-two, with the body of an athlete, stone-hard and strongly muscled from the heavy construction work he did. The head, closely crew-cropped, was a dark magnificent skull, and the olive skin so deeply tanned from constant exposure in all kinds of weather, but especially now at summer’s end, made him seem more like a Black in the half-light of the room than the full-blooded Spaniard he was.
    In the apartment, he sometimes, though not often, walked or lounged naked: big-balled and heavily-pricked, to Angel’s almost trembling rage whenever his infrequent eyes dared to find the man’s sex. At the moment, he wore a pair of white jockey shorts—occasionally the uniform of his beer-drinking evenings when he decided to say home. The briefs belonged to Angel but were wash-thin and stretched, one half the ass peppered with holes, much too big for the boy and too small for the man.
    Angel’s eyes tried to hold his father’s and not wander to look at all of him. “What do you mean? What’s easy?”
    “That’s what you tol’ that woman: somethin’s easy.”
    Angel: “Oh! I got homework. She wants it tomorrow. I’m a week late.”
    Aurelio staggered, pretending overwhelming shock. “Since when?! You kidding? I never seen you do no homework all your life.” A trickle of misplaced beer ran from his wet chin to the curled black hair on his chest, frothing a bit.
    “Well, I got a composition to write.”
    Aurelio pulled absently at a dark nipple the size of a quarter, teasing it until it was pointed and hard.
    “What’s a composition?”
    Angel laughed, genuinely pleased, with a sense of winning, as if they were at a game of checkers and he had just jumped his father’s last two kings.
    “You don’t know?! Boy! That’s what I call asshole dumb.”
    The man flushed, his anger always quick, and sometimes quickly deadly. He had once killed a man.
    He could see the boy was deliberately provoking him, black eyes snapping.
    “Look—I’ll break that other front tooth for you, then you’ll have a’ asshole up front, maybe where it