Interference & Other Stories Read Online Free PDF

it’s easier when people tell me the truth, when I know how things stand.” He gave Cal’s collarbone a single pat as if in amity or reassurance but let his thumb graze, lightly, the young man’s Adams apple.
    Cal squirmed. The paper-tagged key was in the ignition but when he tried to lean forward, Walter tensed his arm and kept him pinned to the back of the seat.
    â€œI was a young man once, a young husband, but not by any stretch a good one. I imagine you’ve heard that story.”
    â€œYes, yes I have.”
    â€œAll right. So here is what you need to know—you do with it what you want—you need to know that I remember what it’s like to have your rage twist up your way of seeing things, confuse you, twist you so you can’t tell friends from enemies. Do you know what I’m trying to say to you?”
    â€œI think so.”
    â€œGood. Because I never, ever, want a reason to feel that kind of rage again. We understand each other?” Walter felt Cal swallow.
    â€œYes, sir.”
    â€œWalter. Call me Walter, son.” He squeezed Cal’s shoulder and withdrew. His stiff knees cracked as he straightened himself up. “I’ll go call Nancy, tell her you’re on your way.”

HARVEY’S BIRTHDAY
    H arvey had the habit of running his hand over the bald top of his head when he was nervous. He knew that only drew attention to his baldness, and sometimes he would catch himself doing it and stop. He once thought he might buy a hairpiece, but he’d never seen one that looked real; even when they were the right color, they didn’t fit right. He knew a record producer who wore one, and the way it sat there on his head, Harvey half expected him to press a secret button in his pocket and make it whirl around like a slapstick comic’s.
    Harvey was ashamed of his belly too. Although he hadn’t gained a pound in years, his weight had shifted. Some mornings, before he’d eaten, his stomach flat, he’d stand in front of the mirror, running his hand over his crown again and again, thinking that he still looked pretty good when he pulled his shoulders back. But soon after breakfast he became bloated; most days he stayed that way all day, and he took to wearing loose clothing. Awful sounds, like cloth tearing or a chain run through a ring, came from his distended middle; or thunder, as if there were a storm inside the great inflated hollow of himself.
    Rick and Linda had invited him upstate from the city to celebrate his fortieth birthday, and walking through the woods to the river with them, Harvey thought how little they had changed in all the years he’d known them. He’d been best man at their wedding in, what was it, 1972? That hadn’t been his title, they hadn’t given him one, but he had been the one in charge of the rings. It had been an eccentric affair: Rick and Linda, twenty, maybe twenty-two years old, both in white robes, the minister in a paisley dashiki cut in a V down the front to show his clerical collar, dancers in tights attempting to demonstrate the idea of union without being lewd, and here and there a joint being passed around. Who were they then? Just barely adults, all of them, yet Rick and Linda seemed substantial even then, secure, a younger version of this couple he was walking with. Later they moved to L.A., then Vancouver, then Colorado, and now back east to upstate New York.
    Rick walked with a folded blanket under one arm, one hand on the bowl of his ever-present, ever-burning pipe, the other holding a book with his forefinger stuck in the pages for a bookmark. Rick was a psychotherapist, but it always seemed to Harvey that the rest of his life was an interruption of his reading.
    Linda carried a canvas bag that Harvey figured probably contained her voodoo stuff. He had always called it her voodoo stuff though he meant no disrespect. Although she made her living as a nurse, she had published articles on