The Ragtime Fool by Larry Karp Read Free Book Online

laughed out loud. “Fair enough. I guess if my Martian thought the cops didn’t care about moon men, he’d go around and talk to the moon man’s neighbors. See if the moon man was having trouble with anyone. Or if a neighbor saw anything suspicious yesterday.”
    Brun clapped his hands. “Yes! I knew you could help me.” He paused, then added, “Scott Joplin was my friend, just like Roscoe.”
    Cal was going to ask what that had to do with the price of fish, but the look on Brun’s face persuaded him to keep his smart mouth shut except to finish his lunch.
    ***
    Forty endless minutes of math class stood between Alan Chandler and the afternoon dismissal bell. It had occurred to the boy to try shifting octaves in the third theme of “Maple Leaf Rag,” and he couldn’t wait to hear how it would sound. He also wanted to see what he could do with the three new pieces he’d bought from Mrs. Selvin during lunch hour. He moved his fingers over an imaginary keyboard on his desk. The teacher’s voice became a soft drone at the farthest reach of his awareness.
    The instant the bell rang, Alan was out of his seat, to his locker, and on his way home at a run. He charged through the back door, tossed his books onto the chair next to the telephone table in the hall, hustled into the living room, slid onto the piano bench, and began to play.
    He hadn’t gotten past the opening measures when his mother flew into the room, hands plastered to her temples. “Alan, if I hear that tune one minute longer, I am going to scream.”
    Without looking up, he muttered, “Ma, I’m trying—”
    She grabbed his wrists, pulled them away from the keys. He wrenched free, but before he could hit another note, she slammed down the fallboard, then sat on it and pointed toward the stairs. “Get up to your room…
now
. Get your homework done.”
    “Christ Almighty, Ma!” He grabbed at her shoulder, pulled with one hand, shoved with the other, but she gripped the edge of the piano, and held her position. “Take your hands off me,” she spat. “How dare you lay a hand on your mother?”
    “All right, I’m sorry. Ma, listen. I just need to try one thing, it’ll take less than two minutes. Then, I’ll—”
    “You’re not trying anything, not even for two seconds. I said get, now get. You’ll talk to your father later.”
    Alan grabbed his music, leaped off the bench. “You mean, I’ll listen to my father. He talks, everyone else listens.” The boy stomped toward the doorway.
    “You’ve got a wise mouth, Mister,” his mother shouted after him. “It’s going to get you into a lot of trouble.”
    ***
    As quickly as Alan sat at the dinner table and reached for a fork, his father fixed a smoldering eye on him. “I hear you’ve been disrespectful to your mother.”
    Alan’s throat tightened; he dropped the fork. “
She
was being disrespectful. All I wanted to do—”
    “It doesn’t matter what you wanted to do. When your mother tells you to do or not do something, you will obey her. You will not give her backtalk. Do you understand me?”
    Alan ground his teeth. Dr. Ronald Chandler, Professor and Chairman of Physics at Hobart State Teachers College, was a man whose every opinion was truth, universal and self-evident, as far beyond dispute as the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The Professor drew himself full upright in his chair, and glared down his nose at his son. “I don’t hear your answer.”
    Alan made a disgusted face. “Yes, I understand you fine. I just don’t agree with you.”
    His father’s face tightened. “There’s another matter. How much money have you spent the past two weeks on sheet music and phonograph records?”
    “Eighteen dollars and some change.”
    Dr. Chandler clapped a hand to his temple. “Eighteen dollars! Young man, there are people who work for seventy-five cents an hour. At eight hours a day, that’s three days’ wages you threw away on rubbish that doctors have proved to be damaging to