Dancing Aztecs Read Online Free PDF Page B

also yelling about thieves and murderers while at the same time tugging at Pedro’s arm, whispering harshly to him, “Get out there! Get out there and yell! Shoot your pistol!”
    â€œMother of Mercy,” moaned Pedro, and the yelling Edwardo and José together shoved him out the door. “Help help help!” yelled Pedro, meaning every syllable of it, and grabbed his pistol and pulled the trigger. However, in his excitement he forgot to pull the pistol from the holster before shooting it, so that was when he shot his toe off.
    THE NEXT MORNING …
    Jerry Manelli carried his laundry down the private outside staircase and went into his parents’ part of the house through the kitchen door. “Whadaya say, Mom,” he said, and dumped the laundry on top of the washing machine.
    Mrs. Manelli stood at the stove, left hand on her hip, stirring the spaghetti sauce with a wooden spoon. It was her belief that somewhere there existed a perfect spaghetti sauce, somewhere within the reach of the human mind, and she was determined to find it. She experimented with ingredients, brand names, alternatives. She experimented with pots, with spoons, with higher and lower flame. She tried the same recipe on sunny days and on rainy days and on days with different barometric pressures. She was in her thirty-second year of research, and prepared to go on till the end of time, if necessary.
    â€œYou’re up early, that’s what I say,” she told her son, and stirred with the wooden spoon.
    â€œGotta hustle,” Jerry told her amiably, picked up the coffeepot from the back burner, and sniffed at the latest sauce. “Smells good.”
    â€œI think it’s congealing,” she said. “I mean, you’re early, considering how late you were out last night.”
    Myrna and her rosé had helped somewhat to ease his annoyance over the mixup with the box marked A . Jerry grinned and repeated, “Gotta hustle,” with slightly different emphasis. He put sugar and milk in his coffee, and said, “Where’s Pop?”
    â€œFlying a kite,” said his mother.
    â€œYou’re kidding.”
    â€œThat’s the latest. He’s over by Alley Pond Park with a kite. He made it himself, it looks like a ravioli.”
    Jerry’s father had retired two years ago from his job in a department store’s warehouse out on Long Island, and as soon as he became a senior citizen his name got onto more rotten mailing lists than you could shake your fist at. Everybody wants to hustle the old folks. A running theme in all this junk mail was that retired people ought to have a hobby, take up the slack from no longer having a job. The old man had never worked a day in his life—he’d spent most of his laboring years trying to figure a way to slip unnoticed out of the warehouse with a sofa—but he believed this hobby thing as though the Virgin herself had come down on a cloud to give him his instructions. “Man without a hobby shrivels up and dies,” he’d say. “A hobby keeps your mind active, your blood circulating, keeps you young. They’ve done studies, they got statistics, it’s a proven thing.”
    Unfortunately, though, the old man had never had a hobby in his life, didn’t really know what the hell a hobby was, and couldn’t keep up his interest in any hobby he tried. He’d been through stamp collecting, coin collecting, match-book collecting. He’d paid good money for a ham radio but he never used it, because, “I don’t have anything to say. I don’t even know those people.” He’d tried making a ship in a bottle, and within half an hour he’d busted the bottle on the radiator and stalked out of the house. He was going to build a St. Patrick’s Cathedral out of toothpicks, and got as far as the first step. He figured he’d become an expert on baseball statistics, but the last time he’d