Homepage
Login
Profile
BookClubs
dmBox
Read Ebook: Charity Case by Harmon Jim Francis Dick Illustrator
Font size:
Background color:
Text color:
Add to tbrJar First Page Next Page Prev Page
Ebook has 280 lines and 12068 words, and 6 pages
"Your name?"
"William Hagle." No sense lying. I had been booked and printed before.
Partridge prodded me with his bony fingers as if making sure I was substantial. "Come. Let's sit down, if you can remove your fist from the money box."
I opened up my fingers and let the coins ring inside the box and I drew out my hand. The bill stuck to the sweat on my fingers and slid out along with the digits. A one, I decided. I had got into trouble for a grubby single. It wasn't any century. I had been kidding myself.
I unfolded the note. Sure enough, it wasn't a hundred-dollar bill, but it was a twenty, and that was almost the same thing to me. I creased it and put it back into the slot.
As long as it stalled off the cops, I'd talk to Partridge.
We took a couple of camp chairs and I told him the story of my life, or most of it. It was hard work on an empty stomach; I wished I'd had some of that turkey soup. Then again I was glad I hadn't. Something always happened to me when I thought back over my life. The same thing.
The men filed out of the kitchen, wiping their chins, and I went right on talking.
After some time Sister Partridge bustled in and snapped on the overhead lights and I kept talking. The brother still hadn't used the phone to call the cops.
"Punished for a sin? But, Brother, I've always had it like this, as long as I can remember. What kind of a sin could I have committed when I was fresh out of my crib?"
"William, all I can tell you is that time means nothing in Heaven. Do you deny the transmigration of souls?"
"Well," I said, "I've had no personal experience--"
"Of course you have, William! Say you don't remember. Say you don't want to remember. But don't say you have no personal experience!"
"And you think I'm being punished for something I did in a previous life?"
He looked at me in disbelief. "What else could it be?"
"William, if you atone for this sin, perhaps the horde of locusts will lift from you."
"I believe you," Partridge said, surprised at himself.
He ambled over to the money box on the wall. He tapped the bottom lightly and a box with no top slid out of the slightly larger box. He reached in, fished out the bill and presented it to me.
"Perhaps this will help in your atonement," he said.
I crumpled it into my pocket fast. Not meaning to sound ungrateful, I'm pretty sure he hadn't noticed it was a twenty.
And then the bill seemed to lie there, heavy, a lead weight. It would have been different if I had managed to get it out of the box myself. You know how it is.
Money you haven't earned doesn't seem real to you.
There was something I forgot to mention so far. During the year between when I got out of the reformatory and the one when I tried to steal Brother Partridge's money, I killed a man.
It was all an accident, but killing somebody is reason enough to get punished. It didn't have to be a sin in some previous life, you see.
I had gotten my first job in too long, stacking boxes at the freight door of Baysinger's. The drivers unloaded the stuff, but they just dumped it off the truck. An empty rear end was all they wanted. The freight boss told me to stack the boxes inside, neat and not too close together.
I stacked boxes the first day. I stacked more the second. The third day I went outside with my baloney and crackers. It was warm enough even for November.
Two of them, dressed like Harvard seniors, caps and striped duffer jackets, came up to the crate I was dining off.
"Work inside, Jack?" the taller one asked.
"Yeah," I said, chewing.
"What do you do, Jack?" the fatter one asked.
"Stack boxes."
"Got a union card?"
I shook my head.
"Application?"
"No," I said. "I'm just helping out during Christmas."
"You're a scab, buddy," Long-legs said. "Don't you read the papers?"
"I don't like comic strips," I said.
They sighed. I think they hated to do it, but I was bucking the system.
Fats hit me high. Long-legs hit me low. I blew cracker crumbs into their faces. After that, I just let them go. I know how to take a beating. That's one thing I knew.
I made it around a corner of brick and stood up, hurting my knee on a piece of brown-splotched pipe. There were noises on the other angle of the corner and so I tested if the pipe was loose and it was. I closed my eyes and brought the pipe up and then down.
It felt as if I connected, but I was so numb, I wasn't sure until I unscrewed my eyes.
The police figured it was part of some labor dispute, I guess, and they never got to me.
I suppose I was to blame anyway. If I hadn't been alive, if I hadn't been there to get beaten up, it wouldn't have happened. I could see the point in making me suffer for it. There was a lot to be said for looking at it like that. But there was nothing to be said for telling Brother Partridge about the accident, or murder, or whatever had happened that day.
Searching myself after I left Brother Partridge, I finally found a strip of gray adhesive tape on my side, out of the fuzzy area. Making the twenty the size of a thick postage stamp, I peeled back the tape and put the folded bill on the white skin and smoothed the tape back.
There was only one place for me to go now. I headed for the public library. It was only about twenty blocks, but not having had anything to eat since the day before, it enervated me.
The downstairs washroom was where I went first. There was nobody there but an old guy talking urgently to a kid with thick glasses, and somebody building a fix in one of the booths. I could see charred matches dropping down on the floor next to his tennis shoes, and even a few grains of white stuff. But he managed to hold still enough to keep from spilling more from the spoon.
I washed my hands and face, smoothed my hair down, combing it with my fingers. Going over my suit with damp toweling got off a lot of the dirt. I put my collar on the outside of my jacket and creased the wings with my thumbnail so it would look more like a sports shirt. It didn't really. I still looked like a bum, but sort of a neat, non-objectionable bum.
The librarian at the main desk looked sympathetically hostile, or hostilely sympathetic.
"I'd like to get into the stacks, miss," I said, "and see some of the old newspapers."
"Which newspapers?" the old girl asked stiffly.
I thought back. I couldn't remember the exact date. "Ones for the first week in November last year."
Add to tbrJar First Page Next Page Prev Page