Читать книгу The Book of Colors - Raymond Barfield - Страница 6

It didn’t take me much time to learn that Jimmy had four parts to his day. Working at the butcher shop. Sitting on the sofa. Loving my body. Working on his computer.

I had never used a computer and Jimmy eventually showed me all kinds of things, some good, some bad, some I can’t think about. He got the computer for nearly nothing through a help-the-poor shebang. Then he set up a plan to get a month free from the Internet service, then switched to another month free from someone else, and so on, then back to the first company.

Watching Jimmy in the daytime you’d never know the kinds of things he found on that computer in the nighttime. I’ve always been able to sit for a long time and not get bored or get fidgety. So I was still enough for him to forget me while he sat with all the lights out, glowing in the blue like baby Jesus in the manger.

Jimmy in front of the computer screen was like me in front of a magazine rack. I told him that once, but when he was watching the computer he hardly heard a thing.

He said the computer was how he was getting out. I didn’t ask him what he was getting out of because some things you get out of but you don’t have to move, like owing money. Other things I didn’t want to think about at the time.

There were all sorts of educational programs. When I first moved in he was mostly looking at meat-processing sites. They’d give him ideas about how to be a better butcher. I couldn’t hardly look at the stuff. All the details of animals strung up by their back feet or thrown into a crate by their legs in the case of chickens was better left to professionals, if you ask me. He agreed it took time to get a stomach for the work. And maybe not everyone can handle it. But if you can, it can become a favorite thing to do.

Well, let him have it. I’d find another job.

He claimed he could learn anything on the computer. Watching him, I believed it. But some things are best not known. I once saw him at the butcher counter in the store when he didn’t know I was watching. I was proud of him. He was very professional-looking and crisp in his cutting and the way he ripped the white paper to wrap up the meat then stuck on the price tag all in one motion. It was like he protected people from knowing how the meat got there. But he watched it all, every detail, on the computer.

Later on when I told him Rose was likely gonna die he got on the computer and started finding all sorts of sites to buy coffins. Then he got the idea that between his strong stomach and the knowledge he could get at on the computer he might just preserve her himself. Or cremate her, which was ridiculous because he’d have to do it in the yard and there are always people walking down the tracks and train conductors with their faces hanging out the window staring at everything passing by since they don’t have to steer. I said they were not likely to be happy with that. And he asked who They was. And I said the people that made the law, invented the Internet, wrote commercials, and prepared dead bodies for the ground.

He rolled his eyes and said that he had met plenty of Them in his time and They weren’t any better at coming up with rules that made sense than anybody else. Didn’t matter, I said, because if They can get you in trouble, that’s all you need to know. He rolled his eyes again and didn’t say anything either because he knew I was right or else because he thought you can’t argue with a girl, which is not true.

But he liked a mystery and another idea came to him and he found an Internet site where he could train as a private detective. That made some sense except that you don’t have a steady income so sometimes you might have no work at all and what are you gonna do then? But to tell the truth he also looked at being a spy and joining a foreign army and I didn’t say anything because it made me start to understand what he meant by the computer being the way he was getting out. I’m sorry but that’s just not the world I live in. Mine’s about fifty feet by thirty feet. With an occasional walk to the bridge or to church. Luckily he was not one to just up and quit his day job.

When I sat over against the wall it didn’t look like much. Just Jimmy glowing, moving his hand around slightly, clicking with his pointer finger. But what a world, what a world. I started to get scared for Jimmy. The problem was that if he was looking at coffin stores or at spy opportunities or international money schemes or church addresses, he looked the same—push and click, push and click, glowing like a streetlamp.

He had blankets hanging from the windows to keep anyone from looking in. And pretty soon he didn’t want me looking in either and that’s when I moved over with Rose, but by then somebody was growing inside me.

I already mentioned that he’d bring scraps from work, but he started thinking less and less about his butchering and more and more about his computer. I didn’t like it. Butchering is blood and meat and you get real money. The computer is pictures and electricity and you can’t eat anything on it. When he thought up a way to use Layla and her gift from God to make money he must have gotten very excited. He hadn’t paid Layla much mind I know of, but after his idea came to him everybody wondered why he was suddenly so interested in Layla.

Ho-Bo.com. Lord Jesus help us.