Bomber's Law by George V. Higgins Read Free Book Online Page A

kid ourselves all we want,” he said.“It don’t change a goddamned thing. They all learn it from their mothers, and that’s how they get what they want.”
    â€œWhich is what?” Dell’Appa said.
    â€œWhat is ‘what’?” Brennan said.
    â€œÂ â€˜What they want’?” Dell’Appa said. “You took that turn kind of fast on me there. Sorta left me alone at the crossroad.”
    â€œWell,” Brennan said, “husbands, of course. Men. That’s how they get a man to agree to take care of them and support them and protect them, and help them make babies. They can make fun of us as much as they want, but unless they can get something from us—either we inject it with the tool that old Mother Nature gave us or else we lope our ponies into little plastic shot glasses, and then some doctor shoots it up into them with a big hypodermic needle like they knock the cows up with—it’s hopeless. Outta the question. They can’t make any babies. And after they’ve made the babies, or just plain-old
gotten
old, so they start to sag and so forth, and no man’ll look at them, and support them, and protect them in their old age, well, that’s when they’d better’ve played the cards right, done what their mothers trained them to do back when they were perky little virgins with their pointy little titties: grabbed back then what they need now by trading what we wanted then for what they were gonna need later. So they have to—that’s how they get those things. But they’re just foolish, silly, if they think they can pretend afterward, after they had those kids, that they still look the same’s they did when they were young. In bathing suits. No matter how much they want to. It isn’t gonna happen. Unless they have plastic surgery there—I don’t know anyone who did that, but I guess I wouldn’t know if I did, would I, if she got any kind of a job—it doesn’t matter at all. How much they want it to be. But that’s what Laura was doing, with the swimming thing, and it wasn’t happening. No way.
    â€œMy mother doesn’t think that Laura even noticed. That it’s dawned on her even now. Because the same exact thing happened with the pony rides, which’re supposed to be the way the kids ease into it, get used to riding horses. So when they get a little bigger, they won’t piss their pants and cry, maybe, they get put up on a horse.”
    â€œSounds like a pretty good idea to me,” Dell’Appa said.
    â€œOh, it is,” Brennan said. “I was growing up of course, and thesame with Doug and all the rest of us, and also the other kids we knew, hung around with after school: none of us, none of us had any trouble, learning to ride horses, not a bit. Because we didn’t. It was completely outta the question. What it cost back then, rent a horse an hour, it was half what my dad brought home.
    â€œHe was in charge of Produce there, down the A and P. Thirty-one years, until one day they just announce they’re gonna close the place, and then the big day comes, and a buncha guys in trucks drive up and boarded her right up. The good old A and P. The Great big Atlantic and Pacific, goddamned, no-good, double-crossin’, son-of-a-bitchin’, Tea Company.’ That was what he always called it after that, when he come home at night after he’d been out there all day onna street, like all the other days after his store shut down: lookin’ for another job. Not havin’ any luck.
    â€œIt wasn’t anything that complicated, so no one could understand it. He was too old. He knew it himself. No one was gonna hire a guy in his position then, not for the work he did. Almost sixty, a job in which you got no choice, you got to lift those crates? Fat chance. It wasn’t gonna happen. You couldn’t really blame those guys, the hiring guys, I mean. Men back