Gypsy Davey Read Online Free PDF Page A

Löwenbräu sign, turning rigid with fear. She just never saw it. She’d lost the thread again.
    Victor leaned out over the bar, way over this time. He reached out and with his great big hand grabbed Jerome’s entire face. He squeezed that face like he was palming a softball as he talked.
    â€œIt’s not funny,” Victor growled before he pushed Jerome’s head straight back, sending him stumbling toward the dance floor. Lois took Jerome’s hand as he started pulling her along.Now she looked a bit concerned. “I’ll be right back, Davey,” she called. “Now, Vic, you take care of my boy while I’m gone. Anything he wants, understand. He’s the king.” And she was gone, bobbing in the small sea of gently rotating bodies.
    Victor put his hands flat on the bar and looked at Davey, sizing him up. Davey stared likewise back.
    â€œI like your mother, kid. She’s a good egg. Everybody likes her. But y’know, what’s not to like, right? She don’t make no trouble, she don’t drink too much, she’s sweet as pie to everybody else. She, y’know, she brightens up the place.”
    Davey didn’t say anything, didn’t nod, didn’t grunt. Just did the round-eye, exaggerated in the flashing and unflashing neon.
    â€œBut I don’t know really about who she’s gonna meet in here, y’know the politicians and doctors and all that. I mean, we got ’em, a course, but they ain’t what you’d call the grade-A kind if you know what I mean. Hacks, Flacks, and Quacks, is what I like to call ’em. Y’know, mostly just a batch of bulbous broke-downs that have been at what they been at for way on too long.” He paused for some kind of reaction from Davey that simply wasn’t forthcoming. “But good people. A course. All good people.”
    Victor was called to the other end of the bar by an enormous balding woman in a sweatsuit banging her glass on the bar repeatedly like a baby with a spoon. Davey turned totry to find his mother dancing. He scanned the crowd, mentally sorting through the men, so many of whom looked like Jerome but were not dancing with his mother. Davey shifted from one hip to the other, then back, craning his neck to pick her out, as one slow country ballad melted away in a cry of steel guitar and another rose up. But the bodies kept moving as one, everybody, it seemed, rubbing against each other, and rubbing and rubbing, and he couldn’t exactly pick Lois out of it. He thought he saw her whiter-than-the-rest face peek out, thought he saw the red light catch her burned permed hair. But maybe not.
    Victor threw a bag of potato chips on the bar, the crackle catching Davey’s attention. “But you don’t need to be bothered by none of all that, about what’s wrong with everybody who comes in here, now do ya?” He turned and ripped the cellophane off a six-inch pepperoni pizza, threw it like a Frisbee into a toaster oven, and slammed the door. “You’re just a kid, right?”
    Davey opened the bag of oily chips and bore down on it, finishing it off in about a minute.
    â€œWow,” Victor said, stepping back, folding his arms across the barrel chest, and nodding. The bell rang on the toaster oven. He turned and pulled the pizza out, flung it quickly, because it was sizzling hot, onto a plate that already had crumbs on it. He yelled, “Mimi,” then sailed the plate down the bar, where it was intercepted by the waitress who,with her black mop, skeletal face, and mole looked just like Abraham Lincoln.
    â€œWhat more should I give you now?” he said, half to himself since he wasn’t expecting answers from Davey at this point. He grabbed a bag of honey-roasted peanuts off the Eagle Snacks rack above the beer chest. “I’m sorry,” Victor said, and he meant it. “But I don’t know too much about no kids, kid. But you should like