Joe Read Online Free PDF

strangely human in their expression of wistfulness. He spoke to the dog and went on in with his two sacks. The house felt empty now, always. Loud and hollow. He looked at the mud he was tracking over the carpet and sat down on the floor beside the door, unlacing his boots and standing them together beside the refrigerator. There was a pack of hot dogs and a bag of buns and a dozen eggs and two six-packs of Bud in one sack and he put it all in the icebox. He poured some Coke in a glass and dropped in three ice cubes and filled the rest of it with whiskey, then sat down at the table with a pencil andsome paper to do his figuring. Days and time and hours where he saw his profit coming through. Even with the bad weather he was making over two hundred dollars a day. He figured up what he would owe the hands if they didn’t work the next day and drew it all up into individual columns and figured their Social Security and subtracted it and wrote down all their names and the amounts he owed them and then he was through.
    There was a little watery stuff left in the glass, and he rattled the thin cubes around and drank it off. The rain was coming down hard on the roof and he thought about the dog in the mud, trying to find a dry spot in this sudden world of water. He got up and opened the back door and looked at the shed. The dog raised his head from his forepaws and regarded him solemnly from his bed of rotten quilts. Then he settled, whining slightly, watching the dripping trees and flattened grass with his eyes blinking once or twice before they closed.
     
    He closed the door and thought about making another drink, but then he went into the living room and turned on the television and sat on the couch. Somebody was giving the farm report. He got up and changed channels. News and weather. The soap operas hadn’t come on yet. There was a pale pink bedspread on the floor and he picked it up and pulled it over himself like a shroud and lay on his side watching the news. After a while he turned over on his back and adjusted his head on the pillow that stayed there. He closed his eyes and breathed in the stillness with his hands crossed on his chest like a man laid out in a coffin, his toes sticking out from under the edge of the bedspread. He thought about her and what she’d said that morning.
     
    She was on the front desk now and that was better because he could go in like anybody else and talk to her if he didn’t talk too long. He’d gotten at the end of the line and waited, watching her deal with other people, watching her smile. She looked better than he remembered, each time he saw her, as if leaving him had made her more beautiful.
     
    The line moved slowly and he didn’t know what he would buy. Stamps and more stamps, a drawer full of them at home already. Finally he stood before her, smiling slightly, averting his whiskey breath.
     
    “You lookin good today,” he said. “They keep you busy.”
     
    She kept her eyes on slips of paper in front of her, kept her hands busy with things on the counter. She looked up. Pain was marked in those eyes so deep it was like a color, old love unrequited, a glad sadness on seeing him this close.
     
    “Hi, Joe.” She didn’t smile, this thin girl with brown hair and skin like an Indian who’d born his children.
     
    “How you been gettin along? You all right?”
     
    “I’m okay. How are you?” She still didn’t smile, only folded her little hands together on the marble slab, her painted nails red as blood. He looked at her hands and then he looked at her face.
     
    “I’m all right. We got rained out today and I done took everbody back home. What time you get off for lunch?”
     
    “I don’t know today,” she said. Her eyes wandered, then came back to rest uneasily on him. “Jean’s sick and Sheila’s having her baby. I don’t know when I’ll get to go.”
     
    He coughed. He started to reach for a cigarette and then stayed his hand.
     
    “I thought I’d