This Side of Jordan by Monte Schulz Read Free Book Online Page B

climbed in behind the wheel. Before Alvin could get around to the passenger side, Chester stopped him. “You’re going to have to walk there. It’s only a few blocks or so. This is First Street. Follow it to Chapman, take a left, go to Sixth, take another left. You’ll see it on the corner by the town square. First Commerce Bank. You can’t miss it.” He checked his pocketwatch. “We’ll meet inside at a quarter till. Don’t be late.”
    Then Chester put the car into gear and drove off.
    The freckle-faced towhead inside the filling station watched through the plate glass. Alvin gave him the bad eye so he would mind his own business. He hated people staring at him. For half a year after Alvin had come back from the sanitarium, he’d felt like a sideshow freak, people looking at him wherever he went like they’d never seen someone return from the dead. When the towhead pulled a linen shade down against the sun, Alvin really felt alone, so he began walking down the sidewalk past the corner of the lunchroom and across the intersection into the next block of shade trees and modest lumber houses and smaller shanties of corrugated iron that looked more like fancy car garages. He took the stick of gum out of his shirt pocket and stuck it into his mouth. A couple of Fords rattled by. People across the street walked in and out of stores. He ignored them all, pretending like he walked down that sidewalk each day of his life and had every right in the world to be there. Don’t act like a hick that ain’t never been to town, he reminded himself. Folks notice that. They can tell when you’re somewhere you never been before and don’t belong. He chewed vigorously while he walked and held his head up so nobody would think he was timid. He smelled the blossoming home orchards behind the houses and spring flowers that grew beneath butterbean vine along picket fencelines in the shade where the dark earth was damp from recent rainshowers. The concrete sidewalk was cracked here and there, and tufts of grass grew in the fractures. Towering elm trees and poplars and cottonwoods arched overhead. More motorcars passed and the I.G.A. store across the street gave way at Williams Street to a neighborhood of elegantly fretted wood houses and gardens. Alvin heard hose nozzles hissing, piano scales from sunlit parlors, a hammerfall on steel echoing across the warm noon air. It ain’t so bad, he thought. Why, a fellow could get used to a new place like this in a hurry if he needed to. To hell with the farm and everybody treating him like an invalid. He’d thrown all of that over and was done with it. His confidence growing by the minute, the farm boy walked ahead with a fresh bounce in his step.
    Two blocks on, Alvin paused in front of a large two-story framehouse whose dry, ratty lawn covered most of the square lot. A lovely magnolia out front, a thick white oak in the side yard, and two black cherry trees toward the back fence provided shade for a lot where nearly everything had died from neglect. Even the paint on the fence pickets out front had peeled and vanished in a drier season, somebody’s initials carved into the wood. The place looked abandoned and it wasn’t only the lawn. Nearer the house, just under the shade of the magnolia, dozens of children’s toys lay broken and scattered in the scruffy weeds—alphabet building blocks, tin bugles, wooden soldiers, wingless aeroplanes. Back along the side of the house where coralberry grew beneath the window boxes, an old tire hung down from the branch of the oak tree on a short length of rope. When they were kids, Alvin and Frenchy would go twirling in a tire they had hung inside Uncle Henry’s barn. The stunt was to get as dizzy as possible, then play wirewalker along the tops of the stalls from one end of the barn to the other without falling off. Strolling out of the barn without stinking head to foot from horse