In the Land of the Living Read Online Free PDF

around sticking his fingers in kids’ ears.” Isidore wanted to lift up the manhole cover in the street and climb in.
    Ezer jerked his head toward Ellie and said, “Aroisgevorfene gelt.” A waste of money.
    Isidore was so tired his eyes burned, and his fingers were sore from wrestling the high-pressure hoses to keep them trained on the garbage trucks; his biceps ached, and he was so hungry and faint because he’d thrown his sandwich away that the ground seemed to be slowly rising like leavening dough.
    When he came back to the sunny drive of the house on Meadowbrook, his father was standing outside the house on the steaming asphalt with a hose, watering the grass with a limp stream. The sweat itched on Isidore’s neck and chafed between his legs, and the air smelled of hose water and dead grass uncovered by melted snow. Isidore figured he’d see if Dennis was home yet and maybe cash his paycheck and buy them dinner somewhere. But once he was on the drive, which was bleeding silver rivers from the coreopsis bush in front of the spigot, the words aroisgevorfene gelt, a waste of money, pulsed in his ears and he walked up to his father without saying anything and shoved him so hard that he tumbled onto the wet lawn and his glasses came flying off and landed in the grass. His father sat up and looked down slowly at the wet blades of grass stuck to his elbow and then looked slowly up at Isidore and then slowly back at his elbow.
    “Yeah, I’m terrible!” Isidore shouted. “That’s right, I’m terrible! I’m the monster! This, from the troll who lives under the bridge!”
    But at night he cried, thinking of his father without his glasses and with water stains on his pants—thinking even of the inimical stars over the cellar door in Jedwabne. He cried not because he loved his father, which he really didn’t, but because it could be, he thought, that he, too, was a monster. It could be that monstrosity was a family trait passed down from that old crocodile on the wall. He cried harder than he had since the day they arrived at the foster home in University Heights in the car with the bent antenna.
    “What’s the matter?” Dennis said.
    Burt just rolled over and said in a voice muddy with sleep, “I’ll break your knuckles, you consternummpin-fffffffff.”
    Isidore couldn’t even answer. All he could say was “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I’m sorry I woke you up. Go back to sleep, Denny. Go back to sleep. I’ll ruin your sleep.”
    And the next day, Isidore was late to school. He guessed he was late so he would get a demerit and have to apologize to somebody who wasn’t his father.
    “I’m sorry,” he said to Mr. Connelly, the homeroom teacher, who didn’t give him a demerit but looked him in the eye with priestly significance. He wished he hadn’t said he was sorry then and he sat down at his desk. It was a crude and bloody thing to be alive! But if he had to choose blood to be alive, then he chose blood. He watched Mr. Connelly, and said in a low voice, “Up yours, shit-for-brains.”
    His father didn’t forgive people and neither did he. After his Harvard interview, he’d begun to believe he could really get in, because he’d told how he quit his job with the butcher, who’d thumbed his scale and sold bad meat, and the interviewer had seemed to like that story quite a bit. When he got the envelope, a gigantic thing like a letter from a king, he was surprised anyway and very proud, not only because it was Harvard but because he’d been rewarded for years of corned beef soup and emptying garbage cans when it was too early to smell anything like that, and for years of collecting Coke bottles from the gutters of Warrensville Center Road, years of looking after his brothers when he himself was so new and small he had to push a kitchen chair up to the counter and climb on it just to get himself or Dennis a cup to drink out of. He had no interest in telling his father, but there was also no hiding the big,