Jolly Read Online Free PDF Page A

time. The day was overcast and chilly, and pools of water still stood on the pavement from a morning drizzle as Luke fish-tailed onto the Shaker Village Road.
    “Jeez, Luke. Won’t this thing go any slower?”
    “Sit tight, Joll. I think we’re gonna do ’er in about seven minutes this trip.”
    “Great. And there’ll be so many dead bodies all over the place they won’t know who to bury.”
    Jolly looked through the back window as Luke vaulted the tracks just in time to see a large basket of flowers shoot perpendicularly off the truck bed. It tilted, suspended in air for a moment, then bounced onto the roadway on its one wicker foot and began spreading gladiolas in a shower of white on the pavement like some flower girl gone berserk at a wedding.
    “Jesus Christ,” said Jolly, “there goes ‘Beloved Uncle.’”
    Luke whirled to see what that meant, which was decidedly (as George Meaders concurred later) the wrong thing to do. When he looked over his left shoulder, Luke pulled the steering wheel in that direction. The pick-up began a slow, classical skid that transgressed a hundred and fifty feet of highway and eight feet of mud shoulder before coughing to rest against the bank, facing the direction whence it had come, leaving an elongated semi-circle of brightly-colored blooms and ribbons across the highway.
    Jolly saw Luke’s face pale beneath his dark skin. He watched open-mouthed as Luke tromped on the starter. From the old pick-up there came not even a final gasp.
    “I’d say we’ve done it this time,” said Jolly.
    Cars began to line up along the highway in both directions. The people were reluctant to drive over the flowers that barred their way.
    “Goddam. Goddam! Shut up!” said Luke. “We gotta do somegoddamthing!”
    At that time a lady left her car in the line and came puffing up, wide-eyed, to the pick-up. “Anybody hurt?” she trembled.
    “Not nearly as much as they’re going to be,” muttered Jolly.
    “Hey, lady, is that your car?” asked Luke, pointing to her big sedan.
    “Why, yes. Yes,” she said.
    “Lady, we gotta use your car. Quick, open the trunk. Jolly, start gathering up these goddam—excuse me, lady—flowers.”
    In a moment the other bystanders who were close enough to see were swept up in the urgency of a situation they knew nothing about, and a maniacal harvest began on the Shaker Village Road. Bouquets and sprays were flung into the trunk, onto the back seat of the car, and hooked over the front fenders. At the very last an excited man came running from down the road with the traitorous white basket, cradling an armload of bespattered gladiolas. He heaved them onto the mass in the rear seat and stood back, panting and with frenzied eyes. All the while, the woman whose car had been usurped fluttered between the trunk and the front of the car. “Oh, my,” she repeated.
    “You ready, lady?” asked Luke.
    “Ready? For what?”
    “You ready to drive. You can drive, can’t you?”
    “Drive? Oh, my, yes. I can drive. Oh my, yes. Get in.” She flung herself indelicately behind the wheel and roared the engine and began honking the horn incessantly.
    “Jolly, you stay. Dad’ll crap when he drives by here in the hearse and sees this mess. You signal him it’s OK. OK?”
    Jolly leaned against the pick-up and watched the crowd disperse. As they drove by slowly, they gaped at him and the truck and scratched their heads, or shook them more in disbelief of the role they had just played in some inexplicable game than at the catastrophe of the maimed truck.
    Five minutes passed before the slow black cortege came into view over the railroad tracks. As the hearse drew abreast, with Luke’s father driving, Jolly managed what he hoped was a reassuring smile and formed a circle with his thumb and forefinger to show that everything was under control. Luke’s father touched his forehead in his secret sign and then faced the road ahead, ready to meet whatever further ruin the