If You Could See Me Now Read Online Free PDF Page B

weepy and hostile. It was a long time before he learned from them that she had never come home the night before—they blamed him, a Lutheran and a Norskie and a farmer, for the loss of their daughter. He ran up to her room and found everything gone: all her clothes, everything she had cared for. From there he raced down to the five-and-dime where she clerked and heard that she had told the supervisor that she wasn’t going to come in anymore. And from the store he went to the filling station to meet the boy whose existence had never exactly been confirmed. He too had disappeared: “Run off last night in that new Stude,” the owner said. “Musta been with your girl, I spoze.”
    Like a character in a parody of a Gothic novel, he had never spoken of the girl again, nor had he ever visited this terrible little house. It was never mentioned before him: he was pretending that his engagement had never happened. Four yearslater he met another girl, the daughter of a farmer in the next valley. He married her and had a child, but that too turned out badly for him.
    The absurd frame structure was leaning as though a giant had brushed against it, in a hurry to get somewhere else; even the window frames had become trapezoidal. I walked across the dust and into the thick high weeds and grass. Burrs and bits of fluff adhered to my trousers. I looked in through the two windows facing the rear of Andy’s store and the valley road. The room was, to be straightforward, a mess, a mess of desolation. The floorboards had warped and rotted so that weeds thrust up at various places into the room, and bird and animal droppings littered the floor—it looked like a filthy vacant coffin. One corner held a tangle of blankets from which radiated a semicircle of dead cigarette butts. On the walls I could distinguish the scrawls left by felt-tip pens. My spirits began to dwindle as I looked in at my cousin’s folly, and I turned away, snaring my left foot in a thick fist of weeds. It was as though that malignant dwarf of a house had snatched at me, and I kicked out with all my force. A thorn stabbed my ankle as decisively as a wasp. Swearing, suddenly cold, I walked away from Duane’s little house and went through the dust around to the front of Andy’s.
    This, the third of my landmarks, was much more comfortable, much more touched with the grace of normality. My family had always made a ritual stop at Andy’s before continuing on to the farm, and there we invariably loaded up with bottles of Dr Pepper for me and a case of beer for my father and Uncle Gilbert, Duane’s father. Andy’s was what people used to mean when they said general store, a place where you could buy almost anything, workshirts and trousers, caps, ax handles and heads, meal, clocks, soap, boots, candy, blankets, magazines,toys, suitcases, drills and punches, dog food, paper, hoes and rakes, chicken feed, gasoline cans, silage formula, flashlights, bread…all of this ranked and packed and piled into a long white wooden building raised up on thick stilts of brick. Before it, three white gas pumps faced the road. I reached the steps and went up through the screen door to the dark cool interior.
    It smelled as it always had, a wonderful composite odor of various newnesses. When the screen door banged behind me Andy’s wife (I could not remember her name) looked up at me from where she was sitting behind the counter, reading a newspaper. She frowned, glanced back at her paper, and when I began to thread my way through the aisles of things, turned her head and muttered something toward the rear of the store. She was a small dark haired aggressive-looking woman, and her appearance had become dryer and tougher with age. As she glanced suspiciously back, I remembered that we had never been friendly, and that I had given her reason for her dislike of me. Yet I did not think that she recognized me: I have changed greatly in appearance since my early youth. The chemistry of the moment