The Axman Cometh by John Farris Read Free Book Online

I have to get there in Flossie's car! The way she drives, I'd feel more secure throwing myself off a cliff!"
    Robert pauses to introduce himself to the sweaty Chap, and Allen Ray comes over to see if his sister's date is up to his expectations. "Who's this?" Ernestine says, looking at her daughter as she picks loose tobacco from her lower lip, already a little ulcerous from her long sun-filled hours in the vegetable garden. "Going roller-skating?" But Shannon isn't dressed for a night at the rink and doesn't have her skates with her. She just shrugs. Dab, sitting in one of a pair of chain-hung gliders, the top of his head gleaming like a pumpkin from the bug-repellant lights beside the door, looks at Robert over the top of his newspaper. Dab has a well-chewed matchstick, largely forgotten, in one corner of his mouth. Shannon does a quick side step toward the glider to pluck it away as Robert comes up the sagging steps.
    He's wearing sharply pressed chinos tonight, and a Chicago Cubs baseball cap. "Oh, a Cubs fan?" Dab says. He likes the KC A's, but has given up expecting miracles from them. Ernestine says, and Shannon wants instantly to disappear beneath the floorboards of the porch, "Kenilworth? That's kind of a fancy- dancy neighborhood, isn't it? I lived for a time in Blue Island when I was a girl. My stepfather was half owner of a beer parlor there; but for the most part it was just a front for a thriving policy operation." Laughing. "I expect that's all of my shady past you want to hear about."
    Her family's flaws and weaknesses are much too apparent to Shannon as she waits for a likely moment to steer Robert to the car and out of the neighborhood: Dab wheezes when he talks and clears his throat often, as if he is going on seventy instead of fifty, Ernestine has left her shoes somewhere else and hasn't given her wiry hair a lick with the comb for the last day or two: it tends to bunch up all on one side. "You'll never know," her mother says to Robert, "how close we came to naming her Ernestine, junior," as if this is a threat she still holds over Shannon's head. She guffaws, in that surprising way of hers— Ernestine, the neighbors say, has a laugh that can unclog a sink. The next few minutes are even more excruciating, but Robert seems genuinely to want to talk to them, to get acquainted, to make himself known as trustworthy and a fit companion for their daughter. He can't help noticing the four- masted schooner tattooed on Dab's left forearm, so they talk about that, and the Navy.
    "Just an old sailor man from Kansas,"
    Dab says, still amazed by the process that put him in the Pacific for three years. "I was on heavy cruisers—the Van Damm , the Sitka. Tassafaronga , there was a scrap to remember. Then Saipan, Iwo Jima, lobbing the big shells home. Soon as the weather cleared around Iwo, you could smell those bloody beaches two miles out to sea. Kamikaze finally took us—and me—out of the war. Those were the Nip suicide pilots, you know. They'd load up with munitions and dive straight for your ship. I've got a couple of scars the size of garter snakes criss -crossing my lower back."
    "Story time," Ernestine says softly and restively, picking more tobacco lint off her lip. She leans back in a rocking chair to hear Mrs. Drewery a little better.
    "I'm saying, Art and me was down at the county tax assessor's day before yesterday, and when the girl asks him his occupation, Art says, loud enough for the whole courthouse to hear, 'Retired sinner!'"
    "You wish," Ernestine says jovially.
    "We're not like this all the time," Shannon explains, her eyes a little stony.
    "What time do you need to be home?"
    "Oh—twelve-thirty," Shannon says, not consulting either of her parents.
    "No later, I hope," Ernestine says, raising an eyebrow slightly at Robert. "Just going to ride around, see the sights, take in a picture show? Last one at the Empress starts around nine-thirty."
    "Late show at the Twin Screens is at ten," Shannon