Poorhouse Fair by John Updike Read Free Book Online

sun."
    "Whether it is or not, let me and one of the men move your table and chair underneath the trees." A shadow with the cooling quality of treeshade fell over them. He looked up while she studied him; the cloud obscuring the sun had a leaden center. In great vague arcs a haze was forming in the sky. Near the eclipsed sun a cirrus cloud like a twisted handkerchief was dyed chartreuse; the phenomenon seemed little less eerie for being explicable, as iridescence.
    "The chair's not mine; I borrowed it for a second, until the giddiness passed."
    He pressed, "It will take just a minute."
    She smiled absently, then said, girlishly direct and flirting her head, "If you think up there in the shade I'll take off my bonnet because I make this place look like a fool, I won't because when they come from in town they expect to find fools out here. Anyway I'm half bald."
    Vividly, comically conscious of his own thick hair, from the black roots of which the heat of a blush poured down over his face, Conner said, "You're nothing like a fool." In these words he committed his worst error with her. He felt in the air between them her patience with him snap. Previously she had been trying him, tentatively, testing him against her memory of Mendelssohn. The game lost, he spoke more in his own voice. Haughtiness showed. "You have free will. I'm not trying to steal your bonnet from you, or your usual place; I had only your welfare in mind. But we'll let things as they are."
    He continued down the alley of tables, obscurely obliged to speak to Hook. It was Hook, after all, who had compelled him to venture down into this unsafe area hours before he was needed. Self-denying by doctrine, he walked against the slope of his desire, which was for retreat into the buildings and up the narrow solacing stairs to his office.
    Yet the spot where Hook and Gregg had been standing was vacant, or seemed so until with a shock he saw the cat. A caramel torn, it held one useless foreleg crooked before its chest, and its face was mashed and infected. An eye was either gone or swollen shut. Three brown snaggle-teeth hung slantwise beneath a rigidly lifted lip.
    It looked like the work of an automobile. Another cat could not have produced that crushed effect. The modern cars, run by almost pure automation, became accustomed to the superhighways and sped even on decayed lanes like the one curving past the poorhouse. Conner wondered that the animal had lived. To judge from the advance of the infection the accident had occurred days ago. A disease seemed mingled with the wounds.
    It was uncanny, considering the smallness and inhumanity of the face, that there should be distinctly conveyed to Conner, through the hair and wounds, an impression of a request, polite, for mercy.
    Though he didn't move, the cat abruptly danced past him, bobbing like a cheap toy, keeping to the long grass near the wall. Conner wondered how he had gotten within the wall.
     
    HOOK'S BLOOD felt thick and dark with this hurrying and confusion. His eyesight seemed further impaired; he saw nothing, in the sense of focus, but received an impression of green as his eyes by habit searched the ground before his feet for obstacles. Gregg beside him was a malevolent busy force in whose power he had unaccountably been placed. Hook felt incapable of leaving the smaller man's orbit. It was better to remain with Gregg than to stay behind and risk association with the cat. Gregg had seen it wandering in the field beyond the wall and like a boy of twelve had scrambled over the wall and captured it. Hook wouldn't have thought he could have captured it, but the creature offered no resistance, merely limped a few yards and then waited. Gregg cradled it in his arms and dropped it over the wall, near Hook's feet; Hook saw that the animal was hopelessly out of order. What did Gregg want it for? To torment, no doubt. He recalled how some of his students, in the days of the smaller school, had beaten a flying squirrel