The Man Who Ate the 747 by Ben Sherwood Read Free Book Online Page A

ran his thick hands through the hot ore. It felt good to the touch, not too thick, not too thin, just right.
    He turned to Nate and said happily, “Time for lunch.”

    It wasn’t the easiest thing in the world, watching your best friend eat an airplane. Some days you suspected he wasn’t all there in the head. But then, on other days, he was the smartest, most insightful person you ever knew.
    “Confucius was a corn inspector until age 16,” Wally liked to say. “It’s in
The Farmer’s Almanac.
So, the sky’s the limit.”
    There was the time he wrote a letter to Cheerios announcing he had invented a new and improved super-glue. The inspiration for this claim had come from his daily struggle to wash dried-out cereal dregs from his bowl. This indestructible stuff—the kind he chipped away with a hammer and chisel—was far stronger than Elmer’s or Krazy Glue. To prove his point, he ground down a box of Cheerios, mixed the powder with water, and used the paste to build Arf’s doghouse without a single nail. It looked durable enough to him, but General Mills was unimpressed. The company didn’t even bother to write a proper rejection letter. Instead, it sent three coupons for free cereal.
    Nate sat in the kitchen watching Wally make lunch.
    “Rose dropped off some more articles for you,” Nate said. “Did you see the one about aluminum and Alzheimer’s?”
    “It’s no big deal, just like all the others.”
    “Rose sure worries about you. I see her every day after work when I go to the library. She’s alwayslooking for stuff on airplane eating—like seriously, how much is too much? Yesterday, she found an article in the
Journal of the American Medical Association.
Something about too much iron and heart attacks.”
    “Yeah, but Doc says I’m iron deficient, so I don’t worry,” Wally said, standing over the stove, frying hamburgers.
    Nate tossed the photocopies on the heap by the door. The pile of articles about the perils of ingesting metal had grown large over the years.
    “Here we go,” Wally said, bringing two plates to the table. “Cheeseburger, onion, heavy on the tomato for you. Cheeseburger, onion, heavy on the air brakes for me.”
    He picked up a bottle on the table filled with gray glop. “You sure you don’t want a little squirt today? Helps make you regular.”
    “I’m already regular,” Nate said.
    Wally examined his burger. He squeezed the bottle between bun and patty, and an ashen ooze seeped over the lettuce, onion, and tomato.
    “You got too much on there,” Nate said with alarm.
    “No way,” Wally said. “I never go too far with this stuff.”
    He bit into the burger. His front teeth and bicuspids were as square and solid as most folks’ molars. Good for grinding. He chewed, then swallowed, reached for his glass of milk with its noticeably gray foam, gulped some down. He took a Tater Tot fromhis plate with two pudgy fingers, dipped it in granular grayish ketchup.
    “Remember what Mama used to say,” Wally said. “Everything in moderation.”
    He chomped.
    7 For the record, the biggest watermelon weighed 262 pounds; the longest continuous clothesline measured 17,298 feet with newly washed laundry fluttering the entire length.

FOUR
    B ehind all the lavender and lace, the Victorian Inn was neither Victorian nor an Inn, just a roadside motel with romantic aspirations. J.J. asked for the largest room and wasted no time getting into the shower. All he wanted to do was get the grit off him. Just a few hours in the country and he already felt coated with topsoil. Scrubbing as well as he could, he cursed the tiny washcloth and miniature bar of soap. Who were these made for? What size human could actually use them? An infant, a five-year-old, but surely not the average man.
    He combed his wet hair and mapped out the mission in his mind. Suddenly the entire building shook. Then all was still. A fewmoments later the room shuddered again. It was a hazard of motor inns. Big-rig