Crooked Read Online Free PDF Page B

that’s okay. You and Clara go ahead. I’ll probably just have something before I leave the store.” Instead of the usual exchange about missing him, she said a quick and wooden “Good night.” And then, before going back to her crossword, her mother set the phone down so carefully she might have been putting a china cup on display at the store.

4
    PRUSSIANS
    While Clara was making up her flyers, Amos was lounging around his basement reading a book and trying to ignore his buddy Bruce Crookshank. Amos was sprawled on one of the five old sofas that had collected against the concrete walls. Bruce stood in the middle of the big room, under a single bare lightbulb that hung down from an unpainted beam.
    Bruce was even taller than Amos, except he was already a little heavy in the middle, so that his body had a large, soft look to it. He wore a stretched-out sweatshirt, and his thick hair poked out at odd angles over his ears. Today Bruce was pretending, as he often did, to be pitching for the New York Yankees. He held a tennis ball in his mitt, stared at the imaginary catcher to get imaginary signals, then, winding up, went into the play-by-play. “Howe into his stretch...checks the runners...comes in with the
fastball...strike three called
! Oh, my! Did he paint the corner with that one, fans, and Molitor’s caught looking with the bases loaded.”
    â€œFat chance,” Amos muttered.
    â€œThat’s Molitor’s third straight K, fans, and hey, take a listen, the crowd is going wild!” Bruce made a muffled moaning sound of distant crowd noise.
    â€œMolitor’s hitting over .340 lifetime against Steve Howe,” Amos said matter-of-factly.
    â€œNot in this league,” Bruce said as he picked up a broomstick handle and took a couple of practice swings, then tapped at his shoe soles as if to knock mud from cleats. “Leading off the bottom of the ninth, the Yankee third baseman, Mike Pagliarulo, and let me tell ya, Pags is on a heckuva tear!” More crowd noise.
    Amos preferred the Blue Jays, and the fact that in Bruce’s imaginary league, the Yankees always came from behind to win in the bottom of the ninth got on his nerves.
    â€œA lazy fly ball to left,” Bruce was saying, “Carter settles under it and makes the ... no ... no ... I don’t believe it, fans, but I’m here to tell you! Carter drops the ball! The Yankees are still alive!”
    The book Amos was reading was called
Mademoiselle Fifi,
a worn paperback he’d seen with his father at Value Village and gone back alone to buy, along with two more innocent-looking books.
No other woman in France would have yielded to his caresses!
it said on the cover, just below the picture of a Prussian officer in black boots seated in a velvet chair with a beautiful, mostly undressed woman sitting in his lap. The writer was a Frenchman named Guy de Maupassant, but the book was pretty disappointing, as far as Amos was concerned. To begin with, it wasn’t a novel, it was a bunch of short stories. And although there was mention of an orgy, the author never said what exactly was going on at this orgy.
    Bruce, in a world of his own, said, “Ground ball sharply to second ... under Amaros’s glove! under Amaros’s glove! ... Oh, my! ... It went right through his legs, fans, and now the sacks are packed with pinstripes!”
    â€œHey, Crook,” Amos said.
    Bruce, swaggering like Jose Tartabull, the Yankees’ cleanup hitter, took a few practice swings with his broomstick.
    â€œHey, Crook, listen to this. C’mon.”
    â€œWe talking sex?” Bruce said, stepping back out of the imaginary batter’s box.
    Amos said, “Yeah. Well, sort of, anyway.” He explained the situation. The Prussians in
Mademoiselle Fifi
had invaded France, and as the Prussian officers at the orgy got drunker and drunker, they made more and more insulting remarks to the French girls, who had