Читать книгу Mourn The Living - Henry Perez - Страница 22

St. Louis, Missouri, 1975

The child sits in a cheap chair that lost its padding a long time ago. Its narrow, chipped legs are uneven, and the chair creaks beneath his frail body each time he moves.

He leans over a desk in the narrow room he sleeps in. Disgusted by the stains on the carpet beneath him, he tucks his feet up under his legs. The air is pungent with the smell of body odor and rotting food. The only other piece of furniture in the room is a thin mattress pressed against a paint-chipped wall that’s been badly cracked by time and violence.

The child spends hours at that desk, filling page after page of a dime store drawing pad with stick figures. He draws the figures into stories and makes them do terrible things to each other. Then, once he’s covered every page with drawings, he slips the pad under the mattress, alongside all the others, and waits for his mother to bring home a new one. That can take weeks, sometimes. But the child doesn’t mind. He spends the time thinking of all the things the people in his next set of drawings will do to one another.

But on this night, he still has more than half the pad to fill, and that brings as much joy to the child as he’s capable of feeling. He has so many good ideas tonight. So many important things that his stick figures must do to each other.

The pimp and drug dealer who lives with him and his mother and likes to be called Gilley, wanders in to see what the boy is doing. The child can hear his mother in the other room going at it with tonight’s second customer.

The child looks up for just a moment, then instinctively looks down at Gilley’s hands. He feels only a slight sense of relief when he sees they’re empty and unclenched. It’s a survival tactic the boy has learned without realizing he was learning it.

Gilley is not the child’s father, and he’s not the first man in his life. Just the latest, and the meanest, at least as far as the boy can remember. The child looks up at Gilley’s face, not always a good idea, and notices that his stringy blond hair is shorter than usual. He’s made an attempt to shave, apparently cutting himself in the process, a fact that pleases the boy.

“Hey little punk, those are some freaky people you drew there. Cool, though.”

Gilley smells like he’s been swimming in stale aftershave, and for a moment his odor threatens to overwhelm the general stench of the two-bedroom shanty in one of the city’s forgotten neighborhoods.

“Hey, maybe you’re an artist,” Gilley says and smacks the child on the arm, maybe a little harder than he meant to. Or maybe exactly as he wanted to.

The child says nothing, but his thoughts are running zigzag sprints through his mind. And the child wonders what this man, a stranger to him by any decent person’s standards, would say if he understood that he was the subject of the drawings.