In the Land of the Living Read Online Free PDF Page A

he was about to push the meat thermometer into someone’s chest when the alarm clock rang. It was 4 A.M . and Burt lay sleeping on his back like a slain warrior with his mouth open and his Adam’s apple poking up unbeautifully. Izzy could hear the loud engine of their ride waiting on Meadowbrook, which looked like a road in a different world at this hour, a road through mist and purple darkness with curbs hard and cold as tombstones. They drove in woozy silence along that road. It led to the unholy terminus of the sanitation department, where a smell of ash and rotting food spoiled the dark air before the heat and light of the sun could begin to chasten it. They banged the trucks to scare off the crows and fired their hoses.
    When he’d returned from washing trucks, Isidore washed himself, twice from head to toe, and ironed his shirt on the dining room table and got himself dressed. A warm shirt made him think of his mother, and even if she was mostly an idea now, he still felt sniffly and foolish. He went on anyway sniffling a bit over his cereal and made himself a lunch. He made it with the only food in the house now that the meat loaf was gone, some stale bread from the Invermere bakery and an avocado that was turning black, and he put the sandwich in a bag and took it to school. At lunch they laughed at his black avocado sandwich and passed it around and said, “Oh my God, look at that!” And the sandwich went around the lunch table and Isidore waited for it to come back to him. When the sandwich came back he said, “It’s pretty ugly, huh, this sandwich?” and the kid who had first taken it said, “No, it’s beautiful,” and Isidore raised the sandwich to his lips like he was going to eat it but instead of biting it he flung it into the kid’s face.
    Before the next class he went and said hi to everybody he knew in the hallway. As he passed them at their lockers he touched them on the elbow or clapped his arm around their shoulders whether they liked it or not, even if he still smelled like garbage—he didn’t know and he didn’t care. And the guys said hey and the girls smiled; it was mostly a nice group there at Heights High and he was the president of his class, and it made him feel better about the black avocado and the broken plate.
    He walked home with a girl named Ellie who lived on Chelton Road. The week before at Bonsdorf’s ice cream shop, he’d bought Ellie a root beer float, with Mr. Bonsdorf watching them benignly from behind the glass.
    “He doesn’t realize we’re Jews,” Isidore said.
    He liked her because she’d said it wasn’t stupid at all that he was going to apply to Harvard even though he had no money. He’d said he was hoping to go to Miami of Ohio and that it looked so beautiful in the brochure, just like what college was supposed to be, a million miles away from the Old Country of his father, and she’d said she was applying there too, and they said they’d get another ice cream together when they were down in Oxford, since they wouldn’t know anybody.
    Isidore purposely avoided his own street, Meadowbrook, on the way home, but by some cosmicomic misfortune, they ran across Ezer anyway, pedaling up Tullamore Road on his green bicycle with knees rising and falling slowly, rising and falling, rising and falling, rising and falling, the heavy canvas bag balanced on his back and the toolbox strapped to his bike with the three-pronged canvas strap.
    Ezer squeezed the brake handles several times, and the old bike jerked, shuddered, and groaned to a stop. Ezer steadied the rickety machine and pulled his sweaty shirt from inside the waist of his pants as though he were proud of it. “You will come home now, please, and do the wash,” he said. “And you will eat on a newspaper like a dog.”
    “You know this guy?” Isidore said.
    “No,” Ellie said.
    “There is no plate for you,” Ezer said.
    “Never mind him. He’s the Crazy Old Man of Meadowbrook Boulevard. Goes