Dead Cat Bounce Read Online Free PDF Page B

to get dressed, afterward, she strolled naked into her kitchen for two more beers while he put on his clothes. She handed him one when she got back. “You can fix the water some other time,” she told him, and laughed her schoolgirl laugh. “Give me a couple of days to recover.”
    â€œAll right,” he said.
    â€œI’ll call you,” she said, walking him out to the front door. “I’ll let you know when to come back.”
    â€œOkay,” he said, wishing he could think of something else to say to her, but he could not. She let him out, closed the door behind him. All in all, a nice friendly fuck, he thought, waiting for the elevator. Still, he felt strangely unsettled. Are you crazy, he asked himself, what’s wrong with you? What more could anybody ask for? But it seemed like there ought to be more to it.
    Â 
    â€œIt ain’t like it’s a bad job or nothing.” Tuco and Stoney walked down the slate sidewalk, past the brownstones and carriage houses of Brooklyn Heights. Stoney looked thinner than Tuco remembered him, and his face was different, too, but he was still big, still intimidating. Tuco always thought of him as looking like a guy who had a toothache and was pissed off about it. Something is happening to him, he’s different now, Tuco thought. He’d known it for sure as soon as Stoney told him he preferred walking to sitting. “I mean, it ain’t any work to speak of, especially in the summer. Couple more months, there won’t be no boiler to run, half the people in the building will have went off to the Hamptons for the summer. It’s really nothing, all I gotta do is take the trash out, mop the hallway once in a while. And for that, I get a free place to live in a nice neighborhood. They even pay me a few bucks. I know I oughta be happy with that.”
    â€œSo? You bored?”
    â€œStoney, I keep thinking like there’s something else I’m supposed to be doing, and I don’t know what it is.”
    â€œYeah? What are you doing about it?”
    The question surprised him. I suppose, he thought, it is up to me. “Nothing,” he said.
    â€œWhy not?”
    â€œI don’t know what to do.”
    â€œWell, that’s a problem. Don’t feel bad, you ain’t alone. There’s a lot of people walking around, don’t know what they wanna be when they grow up. Lotta people die without ever figuring it out.”
    â€œSerious?”
    â€œYeah. Ain’t life a bitch?”
    â€œYou been a big help, you know that?”
    â€œLook, what are you, nineteen? You’re still just a kid. Lotta directions you could go in. All you gotta do is figure out what it is that you like, okay? Once you find something that winds your clock, then you find out what the process is, how you get from where you’re at to where you wanna go. You break that process down into steps, you start taking the steps one at a time. You don’t give up and you don’t die, sooner or later you’ll get there.”
    â€œYeah, but I got this other problem.”
    â€œWhat’s that?”
    â€œDyslexia. It makes it hard for me to read. I don’t see what everybody else sees when they look at a newspaper.”
    Stoney did not look surprised. “So?”
    Tuco’s stomach was churning. He knew better than to expect sympathy from Stoney, but he had expected compassion. “It makes things more hard. It means there’s a lot of stuff I can’t do.”
    â€œLook, kid, everybody’s got something. Everybody’s got some kinda monkey on his back. Look at it this way: this thing you got, at least you know what it is, right? It’s got a name, you could look it up in the dictionary.”
    â€œMaybe you could.”
    â€œWhatever. But it’s in there, ain’t it?”
    â€œSo what if it is?”
    â€œWell, if it’s in the dictionary already, then you ain’t the first