The Last Notebook of Leonardo by B.B. Wurge Read Free Book Online Page B

“UPERMARKET ” because the S had fallen off a while ago. Another corner of the crossroads had a diner with a striped canvass awning hanging over the front door. The awning was
mostly covered with snow and the diner was closed. I saw a dog walking through the town and sniffing everywhere. It looked at me suspiciously. I’m sure it knew I was a stranger. It probably knew every person in the town. It must have decided I was okay, because it wagged its tail at me and went on with its busy schedule of sniffing.
    All together about twenty houses marched back from the crossroads. They were miscellaneous, some of them very big with old-fashioned porches and wooden columns at the corners of the porch, and some of them more like shacks that had been put up with scrap wood. They all looked a little paint-peeled, but maybe the snow did that to them after a few years. A good half of the houses had Christmas lights out, and plastic reindeer and plastic Santas in their front yards, and I thought it must look fantastic in the dark when all the lights were turned on. I was sorry we hadn’t had time to look at it properly the night before.
    The snow was already melting, and the air was warm and the sun was hot, and I had to un-zipper my arctic coat and leave it open at the front or I would have sweated to death. I tucked my hat and mittens in my pockets and tried to avoid the mud puddles where the snow was turning to slush. Now and then I would hear a rushing sound like an avalanche and see
a great big sheet of snow slide off of somebody’s roof. One time such a large amount fell off, and made such a racket on a row of tin garbage cans lined up beside the house, that the town dog leaped in the air about three feet and ran off up the gravel road, looking back over his shoulder as if he thought it was my fault.
    A lot of people were outside shoveling off their front steps or shoveling out around their cars, which had gotten blocked in quite a bit from the snow-plows. It must have been a pleasure to shovel snow on a sunny day like that, with the warm air taking care of most of your work for you. A lot of people said hi to me, or waved, or smiled as I went past, and I said hi back to them, although I was surprised and had never heard of anything like it before. In the city, nobody says hello to you unless they know you. Strangers never say anything except, maybe, “Hey Kid, get out of there,” if they think you’re snooping around with no good reason. So there was some advantage to a small town.
    I went to the Upermarket and bought a breakfast bagel, the kind with buttery scrambled eggs and a nice greasy disk of sausage. I took it outside and sat on one of the cement blocks at the head of a parking space.
    While I was sitting and eating, I had a long think,
and decided that our way of camping out was just about right. It couldn’t be improved. We had plenty of tasty food; plenty of warmth in the tent, because it turns out that an orangutan is a furnace and generates a lot of heat; plenty of towns and people to meet. It was better than being a mountain climber. My dad had been telling me about the people who climb Mount Everest, and I was glad to be here in Stockton New York eating a delicious breakfast bagel instead of up on top of that mountain. Apparently they eat dried beans that have been soaked in snow water and heated up, if they can eat anything at all, especially since their fingers keep falling off and so I imagine it is hard to hold a spoon. They don’t have a lot of warmth to go around among them. And as to meeting people, my dad said that you meet a lot of people along the way up there, but they’re not very talkative, being dead and frozen up like mummies all along the main path. I think maybe they were so sick of eating dried beans in snow water that they just stopped eating all together and keeled over of starvation.
    When I was done with my bagel I walked to the Indian museum, even though