The Last of the Lumbermen by Brian Fawcett Read Free Book Online

steer clear of that part of her life, she keeps her nose out of my business, and we both like it that way.
    Like I said, it wasn’t until I got her clothes off and saw the freckles that I realized who she was. I mean, really. There couldn’t be another set of freckles like that anywhere. Blurting out that I’d already slept with her didn’t seem like the sort of thing that would deepen the experience, so I kept my mouth shut. And since there was nothing I did (in bed or otherwise) that gave me away as the boy she’d had a late-night drunken grope with, she was none the wiser. I didn’t seem to have made much of an impression on Esther while I was Billy Menzies anyway. Within a year or so she’d married Leo Simons and was pregnant with Wendel.
    Trouble is, not telling her who I was saddled me with a permanently delicate problem. There doesn’t seem to be any civilized way I can tell her much of anything about my past, either the part of it she’d been in or the rest of it. I don’t want anyone to recognize me as an older Billy Menzies. Partly that’s because I’m somebody else now, and I want to be judged as Andy Bathgate. But there’s the practical side to it. I’m pretty sure there’s there’s still a warrant out for my arrest.
    â€œ ANDY,” SHE SAYS. “WAKE up. You’re making me think I should have taken you to the hospital last night.”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œYou’ve been acting like a zombie all morning.”
    â€œI’ve got some things on my mind, that’s all. It’s nothing.”
    â€œLike what have you got on your mind?”
    â€œI dunno. Like why Wendel dislikes me, maybe.”
    â€œThat’s no big mystery,” she says. “You’re sleeping with his mothe r. It’s an instinct. I’ve explained the Oedipus Complex to you. Stop taking it personally.”
    â€œWell, I do.”
    â€œWell, don’t. Grow up. And if you really wanted to get along with Wendel, you could try harder yourself.”
    â€œWhat do you mean, ‘try harder’? I do tr y. I just let him drive my car, didn’t I?”
    â€œOoh, my,” she answers, her voice dripping with sarcasm, “How gener ous of you. Why don’t you start listening to what he says, instead of teasing him all the time. He’d like you better if you acted as a parent instead of a competitor.”
    â€œI’m not his parent,” I say, “and he doesn’t want me to be.”
    The moment it’s out of my mouth I regret having said it. Esther’s eyes flash, and she crosses her arms. “Let’s get going,” she says, her voice suddenly tight and hard. “We’ve got errands to do.”
    IN LATE JANUARY MANTUA doesn’t remind anyone of April in Paris: mall parking lots filled with mud-splatte red pickup trucks and the discarded furniture and green garbage bags people kick off the backs of those pickups late at night, after the City’s privatized trucks don’t pick it up in front of their houses. Huge, dirty snowbanks line the streets, riddled with winter debris — road sand, discarded milk cartons, cigarette packages, candy bar wrappers, more green garbage bags.
    These days, the re’s a new kind of debris on the streets: surplus human beings. They’re unemployed loggers, most of them. They hang around waiting for the industry to go back into a boom, which it does regularly, but without hiring anyone back who got boosted out in the last downturn. The loggers hang around town drinking off their unemployment insurance cheques and, when those run out, their welfa re cheques. They aren’t street people like you see in bigger cities to the south, but that’s because anyone who tries to camp out in these streets will wind up as a human popsicle.
    This kind of poverty makes people struggle and straggle on, selling off the RVs and Ski-Doos they bought during the gravy