The Cage Keeper by André Dubus III Read Free Book Online Page B

that.”
    “Whatever.”
    “You asked me about my family. Why?”
    “I saw a picture when I was packing your things. When was it taken?”
    His weight shifts in the seat. I see him raise his beer and drink from it a long time before he lowers it. “Summer of ’sixty-six.” He belches and I think how in 1966 I was eight years old and still had a mother.
    “That was the last of the good years. Before the proverbial shit hit the fan, you could say.”
    “Where’s your wife?”
    “Living with a fat-ass car dealer in Gulfport, Mississippi.”
    “Oh.”
    He finishes his third beer and goes for his fourth. It’s gotten cold in the car. I can hear the wind whistling past my radio antenna outside. Dry snow swirls against the windshield then settles on the wipers.
    “Do you have a girl, Allen?”
    “No.”
    “Don’t you like girls?”
    I think of that porno magazine back in Elroy’s gear bag. “Nice ones.”
    “You ever been in love?”
    I shrug my shoulders in the dark.
    “Jimmy had a girl when he was your age. No. He was younger.”
    “Is he in Mississippi, too?”
    Elroy begins to burp but then covers his mouth. He is absolutely still and quiet. Then he rests his cupped hand on the steering wheel. “Jim had a girl named Maura. Boy she loved him, too. She’d come down to the house every time she got a letter from him and she’d read it to us. All but the personal parts.
Damn,
she loved him.”
    “What are you talking about?”
    “My boy Jimmy.” He bottoms up his beer, drops the empty onto the backseat, and opens another. “You see, Al, my eight-year experiment with self-sufficiency just did not pan out. Man, I went from herbs to corn to chickens and eggs, with part-time building jobs the whole time—most times all five. But all that work just wasn’t enough for those striped-tied motherfuckers down at the bank, nossir.” He stops talking and looks straight ahead at the thin layer of snow covering the windshield. He drinks again and I’m thinking how cold my body is and how I don’t give a shit about his failed farming ventures.
    “The week we lost everything was blisterin’ hot. I mean it was
hot.
It was June of 1970 and you would not believe the timing of it, Allen. It was the Lord’s blackest hour, I’m telling you.” He swallows more beer and I lay my head back against the seat and close my eye.
    “It was Monday and I was halfway through my morning chores when this young man from Rocky Mountain Bank came down to the house. He sat awhile and had coffee and pie, made small talk, you know. Then the sonuvabitch got up and politely left us a form letter on how to partially liquidate our property and avoid foreclosure by the bank. After he left, why Lorraine and I just stared at that piece of paper like it was a rattlesnake somebody’d dropped in our bed. That was Monday. Two days later my wife and I are finishing a fried-chicken lunch and that letter is still on the table where it was left. Then—and you are not goin’ to believe this, Allen—then, a knock came on the screen door in the front. I got up first, hoping it might be that young sonuvabitch come to say he left the papers at the wrong house. But it wasn’t. I knew what it was in seconds, though. I mean my world stopped when I saw that army captain with the chaplain’s cross pinned on him. He said that there’d been an unfortunate error in communications and my deepest condolences, sir, but your son’s body has been stateside for a week. He was down at Fort Carson.” Elroy stops talking. The wind is really pushing outside. I want to ask him to turn on the engine and the heat, but I don’t. I’m seeing that picture of his kid and wife in my head. I’m seeing the boy with the blond hair and Elroy’s Cro-Magnon forehead, his somewhat happy face.
    “Lorraine and I got in my pickup to go fetch him, and Lord, she was wailing. God, it was more than I could stand. We had the windows down the whole way, and do you know what I thought