Ivory and the Horn Read Online Free PDF Page A

I’ll admit Tommy’s not all that bright by the way society reckons intelligence. I like to think of him as more basic than the rest of us. He’s open with his feelings, likes to smile, likes to laugh. He’s the happiest person I know, which is half the reason I love him the way I do. He may be mentally impaired, but sometimes I figure the world would be a better place if we all maintained some of that sweet innocence that makes him so endearing.
    I inherited Tommy the same way I did the rest of my family: I found him on the streets, abandoned. I worried some at first about keeping him with me, but when I started asking around about institutions, I realized he’d have something with me and the dogs that he couldn’t get anywhere else: a family. All a guy like Tommy needs is someone willing to put the time into loving him. You don’t get that in places like the Zeb, which is where he lived until they discharged him so that someone with more pressing problems, read money, could have his bed.
    One of the things I hate about the way my life’s going now is that I hardly ever see him anymore. Our landlady knows him better than I do these days and that’s depressing.
    The day after I talk to Shirley in the subway, I get off early from work. There’s a million things I should be doing—like the week’s grocery shopping and research for a history essay at the library—but I decide the hell with it. It’s a beautiful day, so I’m going to pack up a picnic lunch and take the family to the park.
    I find Tommy and Aunt Hilary in the backyard. She’s working on her garden, which for a postage-sized tenement lot is a work of art, a miniature farm and English garden all rolled into about a twenty by twenty foot yard of sunflowers, rosebushes, corn, peas, every kind of squash, tomatoes and flowerbeds aflame with color and scent. Tom’s playing with the paper people that I cut out of magazines and then stick onto cardboard backings for him. The dogs are sprawled all over the place, except for Rexy, who’s dogging Aunt Hilary’s heels. You don’t understand how apt an expression like that is until you see Rexy do his I-always-have-to-be-two-inches-away-from-you thing.
    Tommy looks up when he hears the dogs starting to yap,’ and suddenly I’m inundated with my family, everybody trying to get a piece of hello from me at the same time. But the best thing is seeing that kind of sad expression that Tommy’s wearing too much these days broaden into the sweetest, happiest smile you can imagine. I don’t figure I’ve ever done anything to deserve all this unadulterated love, but I accept it—on credit, I guess. It makes me try harder to be good to them, to be worthy of that love.
    I’ve got the trick down pat by now, ruffling the fur of six dogs and giving Tommy a hug without ever letting anybody feel left out. Aunt Hilary’s straightening up from her garden, hands at the small of her back as she stretches the kinks from her muscles. She’s smiling, too.
    “We had a visitor,” she tells me when the pandemonium settles down into simple chaos.
    Tommy’s leading me over to the big wooden tray on a patch of grass to show me what his paper people have been up to while I was gone this morning, and the dogs sort off mooch along beside us in an undulating wave.
    “Anybody I know?” I ask Aunt Hilary.
    “I suppose you must,” my landlady says, “but she didn’t leave a name. She just said she wanted to drop by to see how your family was making out—especially your son.”
    I blink with surprise at that. “You mean Tommy?”
    “Who else?”
    Well, I guess he is like my kid, I think.
    “What did she look like?” I ask, half-anticipating the answer.
    “A bit like a homeless person, if you want to know the truth,” Aunt Hilary says. “She must have been wearing three or four dresses under her overcoat.”
    “Was she black?”
    “Yes, how did you—”
    “Hair in dreadlocks with lots of buttons attached to