Beggarman, Thief Read Online Free PDF

birth.
    “The one I’m worried about,” Dwyer said, “is Wesley.”
    Worried, not for himself, she thought, who saw no need for contracts, who just split up what was left over at the end of the year, who had no legal right, even, at this moment, to be standing on the scrubbed deck of the pretty boat on which he had earned his living for years. “Wesley will be all right,” she said. “Rudy’ll take care of him.”
    “He won’t want that,” Dwyer said, drinking. “Wesley. He wanted to be like his father. Sometimes it was funny, watching him, trying to move like his father, talk like his father, live up to his father.” He took a gulp of his drink, made a little grimace, looked thoughtfully at the glass in his hand as if trying to decide whether it contained a friend or an enemy. He sighed, uncertain, then went on. “They used to stand up in the pilothouse all hours of the night; at sea or in port, you could hear them talking below, Wesley asking a question, Tom taking his time answering, long answers. I asked Tom once what the hell they had to talk about so much. Tom laughed. ‘The kid asks me questions about my life and I tell him. I guess he wants to catch up on the years he missed. I guess he wants to know what his old man is all about. I was the same about my father, only he didn’t give me any answers, he gave me a kick in the ass.’ From what Tom let drop,” Dwyer said, careful, understated, “I guess there wasn’t no love lost between them, was there?”
    “No,” Gretchen said, “he wasn’t a lovable man, our father. There wasn’t much love in him. If there was, he reserved it for Rudolph.”
    Dwyer sighed. “Families,” he said.
    “Families,” Gretchen repeated.
    “I asked Tom what sort of questions Wesley asked him about him,” Dwyer went on. “‘The usual,’ Tom told me. ‘What I was like when I was a kid in school, what my brother and sister’—that’s you and Rudy—‘were like. How come I became a fighter, then a merchant seaman. When I had my first girl. What the other women I’d had were like, his goddamn mother.…’ I asked Tom if he told the kid the truth. ‘Nothing but,’ Tom said. ‘I’m a modern father. Tell the kids where babies come from, everything.’ He had his own kind of sense of humor, Tom.”
    “Those must have been some conversations,” Gretchen said.
    “‘Spare the truth and spoil the child,’ Tom said to me once. Every once in a while he sounded as though he’d picked up a little education here and there. Though he wasn’t big on education. Tom had a deep suspicion of education. Maybe I shouldn’t be saying this to you,” Dwyer said earnestly, swishing the last of the ice around in his glass, “but he used your brother Rudy as an example. He’d say, ‘Look at Rudy, he had all the education a man’s brain could stand and look where he wound up, dry as an old raisin, a laughingstock after what his drunk wife did in his hometown, out on his ass, sitting there wondering what he was going to do with the rest of his life.’”
    “I believe I could use another drink, Bunny,” Gretchen said.
    “Me, too,” Dwyer said. “I’m beginning to like the taste.” He took her glass and went aft and into the saloon.
    Gretchen reflected on what Dwyer had said. It told more about Dwyer than it told about either Tom or Wesley. Tom had been the center of Dwyer’s life, she realized; he probably could reproduce word for word everything that Tom had said to him from beginning to end. If Dwyer were a woman, you’d say he’d been in love with Tom. Even as a man … That girlish mouth, that little peculiarity in the way he used his hands.… Poor Dwyer, she thought, maybe he’s finally going to be the one who’s going to suffer most. She had no real fix on Wesley. He had seemed like a mannerly, healthy boy when they had first come aboard. After his father’s death, he had fallen silent, his face giving nothing away, avoiding them all. Rudy would take