Bleak History Read Online Free PDF Page B

not going to pick up the dog?” Cronin asked, in his faint German-Yiddish accent.
    “No, Cronin, you'll have to keep him a while longer, if you can,” Bleak said, holding his glass of beer up to the failing light.
    “Was not good, keeping a dog on a cabin-cruiser boat.”
    “He stayed with Donner part of the time. But I can't leave him over there—I have to move the boat. Or maybe abandon it.”
    “Abandon? That is your home, that boat!” He shook his head. “Ach. Gabriel, you are like a grasshopper with the jumping, your way of doing.”
    The beer had a strong, thoughtful aftertaste. Cronin had brewed it himself—Bleak sometimes called him Der Brewmeister, to which Cronin would only reply, “Your German, as ever, is atrocious.”
    “Just watch the dog for me, please, Cronin, I'll be back at some point. I don't think the feds know about you, but if they come, tell them anything they want to know, don't try to protect me.” The bowed planks of the porch steps overlooking the overgrown backyard creaked whenever they shifted their weight. They could hear kids shouting, throwing a baseball on the street; jays made raucous sounds in the maple tree at the back fence, as if they were replying to the creaking boards.
    “Too much jumping, Gabe. You talk like they're the Nazis, these people. This is not like that... you cannot know how bad that was.”
    “I know it's not that bad. Not yet. But...we did suspend a good many basic rights after the last attack.”
    The old man shrugged. “Not as bad. You must trust me when I say, not as bad.”
    “I do trust you. You're the only one I trust. That's why I'm leaving Muddy with you.”
    Muddy Waters was Bleak's middle-size, mottled mutt, his legs stubby, his body long; no one quite sure of the mixture. Maybe some dachshund, some Jack Russell terrier. Bleak could hear the dogs? snuffling around the side of the house.
    Cronin seemed thinner these days, to Bleak. He knew the old man would never admit being seriously ill. Old Cronin sat there in his T-shirt and oil-stained dun-colored trousers, a mason jar of ale between his two hands, gazing out over a maze of fenced-off backyards—he'd been trying to fix the lawn mower, in his leaning shed of a garage, when Bleak arrived.
    Bleak whistled and the dog came bounding around the corner, almost disappearing in the long grass of the yard, his snout visible as he poised to look quiveringly up at Bleak, whom he loved unreservedly. “Hey, dog—you stay with Cronin, he's gonna feed you more than I do.”
    “Probably that is so.” Cronin chuckled, scratching an age-spotted wrist. The same wrist that had the blue numbers on it from the concentration camp, tattooed on him when he was a small child.
    Cronin was the widower father of Lieutenant Isaac Preiss, who'd died on patrol with Bleak, in Afghanistan. Cronin was almost Gabriel's father too; and old enough to be his grandfather. They'd fallen into the roles, each a substitute for the other, quite easily, when Bleak had come to see him after his discharge. Come, ostensibly, to bring Cronin stories of his son's time in the Army Rangers.
    Bleak had thought about telling Cronin that he had seen Isaac Preiss—that he had seen him since Isaac's death. But there was too little comfort there because Isaac's spirit, dimly seen, as if it were calling from a long ways away, had been trying to tell him something. To warn him. But Bleak wasn't sure what the message was. Isaac had been conscious enough to move on to the next world—had gone beyond “the veil,” unlike the confused, muttering ghosts that haunted this world. Most spirits beyond the veil could rarely speak from their side to ours. Not easily. So-called mediums were such liars.
    And Cronin knew only a little about what Bleak could do. What he had been able to do since that day when the dead had initiated him, one October, many years ago, back in Oregon, at the age of thirteen.
    “I wish it was last summer again,” Bleak said