Sweet Thursday by John Steinbeck Read Free Book Online

public service. She read horoscopes and continued, after hours at least, to transform the Bear Flag into a kind of finishing school for girls. She was named Flora, but one time in the Mission a gentleman bum finished his soup and said, “Flora, you seem more a fauna-type to me.”
    â€œSay, I like that,” she said. “Mind if I keep it?” And she did. She was Fauna ever afterward.
    Now all this was sad enough, but there was a greater sadness that Mack kept putting off. He didn’t want to get to it. And so he told Doc about Henri the painter.
    Mack kind of blamed himself for Henri. Henri had built a boat, a perfect little boat with a nice stateroom. But he’d built it up in the woods, because he was afraid of the ocean. His boat sat on concrete blocks and Henri was happy there. One time, when there wasn’t much else to do, Mack and the boys played a trick on him. They were bored. They went down to the sea rocks and chiseled off a sack of barnacles and took them up and glued them on the bottom of Henri’s boat with quick-drying cement. Henri was pretty upset, particularly since he couldn’t tell anybody about it. Doc could have reassured him, but Doc was in the Army. Henri scraped the bottom and painted it, but no sooner was the paint dry than the boys did it again, and stuck a little seaweed on too. They were terribly ashamed when they saw what happened. Henri sold his boat and left town within twenty-four hours. He could not shake the persistent and horrifying notion that the boat was going to sea while he was asleep.
    And Mack told how Hazel had been in the Army too, although you couldn’t get anybody to believe it. Hazel was in the Army long enough to qualify for the G.I. bill, and he enrolled at the University of California for training in astrophysics by making a check mark on an application. Three months later, when some of the confusion had died down, the college authorities discovered him. The Department of Psychology wanted to keep him, but it was against the law.
    Hazel often wondered what it was that he had gone to study. He intended to ask Doc, but by the time Doc got back it had slipped his mind.
    Doc poured out the last of the first bottle of Old Tennis Shoes, and he said, “You’ve talked about everything else. What happened to you, Mack?”
    Mack said, “I just kind of stayed around and kept things in order.”
    Well, Mack had kept things in order, and he had discussed war with everybody he’d met. He called his war the Big War. That was the first one. After the war the atom-bomb tests interested him, in a Fourth-of-July kind of way. The huge reward the government offered for the discovery of new uranium deposits set off a chain reaction in Mack, and he bought a second-hand Geiger counter.
    At the Monterey bus station the Geiger counter started buzzing and Mack went along with it—first to San Francisco, then to Marysville, Sacramento, Portland. Mack was so scientifically interested that he didn’t notice the girl on the same bus. That is, he didn’t notice her much. Well, one thing led to another, which was not unique in Mack’s experience. The girl was taking the long way to Jacksonville, Florida. Mack would have left her in Tacoma if his Geiger counter hadn’t throbbed him eastward. He got clear to Salina, Kansas, with the girl. On a hot muggy day the girl lunged at a fly on the bus and broke her watch, and only then did Mack discover that he had been following a radium dial. Romance alone was not enough for Mack at his age. He arrived back in Monterey on a flatcar, under a tarpaulin that covered a medium-sized tank destined for Fort Ord. Mack was very glad to get home. He had won a few dollars from a guard on the flatcar. He scrubbed out the Palace Flop house and planted a row of morning glories along the front, and he and Eddie got it ready for the returning heroes. They had quite a time when the heroes straggled