Dreams from Bunker Hill by John Fante Read Free Book Online Page A

full-fledged woman of eight years. I did not understand the ecstasy that boiled up in me, the confusion of my cousin’s electric beauty pouring into me. I stood there and masturbated. I was five years old and the world had a new and staggering dimension.
    I was also a criminal. I felt like a criminal, a skulking, snot-nosed, freckle-faced, inscrutable criminal for four years thereafter, until sagging beneath the weight of my cross, I dragged myself into my first confession and told the priest the truth of my bestial life. He gave me absolution and I flung away the heavy cross and walked out into the sunlight, a free soul again.
    Our family moved to Boulder when I was seven and my two brothers and I attended Sacred Heart School. During the ensuing eight years I achieved high marks in baseball,basketball and football, and my life was not cluttered with books or scholarship.
    My father, a building contractor, prospered for a while in Boulder and sent me to a Jesuit high school. Most of the time I was miserable there. I got fair marks but chafed at the discipline. I hated boarding school and longed to be home, but my marks were fair and after four years I enrolled in the University of Colorado. During my second year at the university I fell in love with a girl who worked in a clothing store. Her name was Agnes, and I wanted to marry her. She moved to North Platte, Nebraska, for a better job, and I quit the university to be near her. I hitchhiked from Boulder to North Platte and arrived dusty and broke and triumphant at the rooming house where Agnes lived. We sat on the porch swing and she was not glad to see me.
    “I don’t want to marry you,” she said. “I don’t want to see you any more. That’s why I’m here, so we don’t see each other.”
    “I’ll get a job,” I insisted. “We’ll have a family.”
    “Oh for Christ’s sake.”
    “Don’t you want a family? Don’t you like kids?”
    She got quickly to her feet. “Go home, Arturo. Please go home. Don’t think about me any more. Go back to school. Learn something.” She was crying.
    “I can lay brick,” I said, moving to her. She threw her arms around me, and planted a wet kiss on my cheek, then pushed me away.
    “Go home, Arturo. Please.” She went inside and closed the door.
    I walked down to the railroad tracks and swung aboard a freight train bound for Denver. From there I took another freight to Boulder and home. The next day I went to the job where my father was laying brick.
    “I want to talk to you,” I said. He came down from the scaffold and we walked to a pile of lumber.
    “What’s the matter?” he said.
    “I quit school.”
    “Why?”
    “I’m not cut out for it.”
    His face twisted bitterly. “What are you going to do now?”
    “I don’t know. I haven’t figured it out.”
    “Jesus, you’re crazy.”
     
    I became a bum in my home town. I loafed around. I took a job pulling weeds, but it was hard and I quit. Another job, washing windows. I barely got through it. I looked all over Boulder for work, but the streets were full of young, unemployed men. The only job in town was delivering newspapers. It paid fifty cents a day. I turned it down. I leaned against walls in the pool halls. I stayed away from home. I was ashamed to eat the food my father and mother provided. I always waited until my father walked out. My mother tried to cheer me. She made me pecan pie and ravioli.
    “Don’t worry,” she said. “You wait and see. Something will happen. It’s in my prayers.”
    I went to the library. I looked at the magazines, at the pictures in them. One day I went to the bookshelves, and pulled out a book. It was Winesburg, Ohio . I sat at a long mahogany table and began to read. All at once my world turned over. The sky fell in. The book held me. The tears came. My heart beat fast. I read until my eyes burned. I took the book home. I read another Anderson. I read and I read, and I was heartsick and lonely and in love with a book,